Halloween

by Paula Guran

  Late in the winter of 1928, the submarine USS 0-10 was deployed to these waters, from the Boston Navy Yard. The one hundred and seventy-three foot vessel’s tubes were armed with a complement of twenty-nine torpedoes, all of which were discharged into an unexpectedly deep trench discovered just east of Devil Reef. The torpedoes detonated almost a mile down, devastating a target that has never been publicly disclosed. But the pilgrims know what it was, and that attack is to them no less a blasphemy than the destruction of synagogues and cathedrals during the firestorms of the two World Wars, no less a crime than the razing of Taoist temples by Chinese communists, or the devastation of the Aztec Templo Mayor by Spaniard conquistadores after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. And they remember the benthic mansions of Y’ha-nthlei and the grand altars and the beings murdered and survivors left dispossessed by those torpedoes. They remember the gods of that race, and the promises, and the rites, and so they come this night. They come to honor the Mother and the Father, and all those who died and who have survived, and all those who have yet to make the passage, but yet may. The old blood is not gone from the world.

  Two are chosen from among the others. A box carved from jet is presented, and two lots are drawn. On each lot is graven the true name of one of the supplicants, the names bestowed in dreamquests by Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. One male and one female, or two female, or two male. But always the number is two. Always only a single pair to enact the most holy rite of the Order. There is no greater honor than to be chosen, and all here desire it. But, too, there is trepidation, for one may not become an avatar of gods without the annihilation of self, to one degree or another. And becoming the avatars of the Mother and the Father means utter and complete annihilation. Not physical death. Something far more destructive to both body and mind than mere death. The jet box is held high and shaken once, and then the lots are drawn, and the names are called out loudly to the pilgrims and the night and the waters and the glaring, lidless eye of the moon.

  “The dyad has been determined,” declares the old man who drew the lots, and then he steps aside, making way for the two women who have been named. One of them hesitates a moment, but only a moment, and only for the most fleeting of moments. They have names, in the lives they have left behind, lives and families and careers and histories, but tonight all this will be stripped away, sloughed off, just as they now remove their heavy black cloaks to reveal naked, vulnerable bodies. They stand facing one another, and a priestess steps forward. She anoints their forehead, shoulders, bellies, and vaginas with a stinking paste made of ground angelica and mandrake root, the eyes and bowels of various fish, the aragonite cuttlebones of Sepiidae, foxglove, amber, frankincense, dried kelp and bladderwrack, the blood of a calf, and powdered molybdena. Then the women join hands, and each receives a wafer of dried human flesh, which the priestess carefully places beneath their tongues. Neither speaks. Even the priestess does not speak.

  Words will come soon enough.

  And now it is the turn of the Keeper of the Masks, and he steps forward. The relics he has been charged with protecting are swaddled each in yellow silk. He unwraps them, and now all the pilgrims may look upon the artifacts, shaped from an alloy of gold and far more precious metals, some still imperfectly known (or entirely unknown) to geologists and chemists, and some which have fallen to this world from the gulfs of space. To an infidel, the masks might seem hideous, monstrous things. They would miss the divinity of these divine objects, too distracted by forms they have been taught are grotesque and too be loathed, too unnerved by the almost inexplicable angles into which the alloy was shaped long, long ago, geometries that might seem “wrong” to intellects bound by conventional mathematics. Sometime in the early 1800s, these hallowed relics were brought to Innsmouth by the hand of Captain Obed Marsh himself, delivered from the Windward Islands of French Polynesia and ferried home aboard the barque Sumatra Queen.

  The Keeper of Masks makes the final choice, selecting the face of Father Dagon for one of the two women, and the face of Mother Hydra for the other. The women are permitted to look upon the other’s mortal countenance one last time. And then the Keeper hides their faces, fitting the golden masks and tying them tightly in place with cords woven from the tendons of blood sacrifices, hemp, and sisal. When it is certain that the masks are secure, only then does the Keeper step back into the his place among the others. And the two women kneel bare-kneed on stone worn sharp enough to slice leather.

  “Iä!” cries the priestess, and then the Keeper of the Masks, and, finally, the man who drew the lots. Immediately, the pilgrims all reply, “Iä! Iä! Rh’típd! Cthulhu fhtagn!” And then the man who drew the lots, in a somber voice that barely is more than an awed whisper, adds “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Rh’típd qho’tlhai mal.” His words are lost on the wind, which greedily snatches away each syllable and strews them to the stars and sinks them to that immemorial city far below the waves, its spires broken and crystalline roofs splintered by naval munitions more than eighty years before this night.

  “You are become the Mother and the Father,” he says. “You are become the living incarnation of the eternal servants of R’lyeh. You are no more what you were. Those former lives are undone. You are become the face of the deep and the eyes of the heavens. You are on this night forever more wed.”

  The two kneeling women say nothing at all. But the wind has all at once ceased to blow, and around the reef the water has grown still and smooth as glass. The moon remains the same, though, and leers down upon the scene like a jackal waiting for its turn at someone else’s kill, or Herod Antipas lusting after dancing Salomé. But no one among the pilgrims looks away from the kneeling women. No one ever looks away, for to avert their eyes from the sacrament would be unspeakable offense. They watch, as the moon watches, with great anticipation, and some with envy, that their names were not chosen from the bag of lots.

  To the west—over the wooded hills beyond Essex Bay and the vast estuarine flats at the mouth of the Manuxet River—there are brilliant flashes of lighting, despite the cloudless sky. And, at this moment, as far away as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Wenham and Topsfield, Georgetown and Byfield, hounds have begun to bay. Cats only watch the sky in wonder and contemplation. The waking minds of men and women are suddenly, briefly, obscured by thoughts too wicked to ever share. If any are asleep and dreaming, their dreams turn to hurricane squalls and drownings and impossible beasts stranded on sands the color of a ripe cranberry bog. In this instant, the land and the ocean stand in perfect and immemorial opposition, and the kneeling women who wear the golden masks are counted as apostates, deserting the continent, defecting to brine and abyssal silt. The women are tilting the scales, however minutely, and on this night the sea will claim a victory, and the shore may do no more to protest their desertion than sulk and drive the tides much farther out than usual.

  No one on the reef turns away. And they don’t make a sound. There’s nothing left for the pilgrims but to bear silent witness to the transition of the anointed. And that change is not quick, nor is it in any way merciful; neither woman is spared the least bit of agony. But they don’t give voice to their pain, if only because their mouths have been so altered that they will nevermore be capable of speech or any other utterance audible to human ears. The masks have begun to glow with an almost imperceptible phosphorescence, and will shortly drop away, shed skins to be retrieved later by the Keeper.

  Wearing now the mercurial forms of Mother Hydra and Father Dagon, the lovers embrace. Their bodies coil tightly together until there’s almost no telling the one from the other, and the writhing knot of sinew and organs and rasping teeth glistens wetly in the bright moonlight. The two are all but fused into a single organism, reaffirming a marriage first made among the cyanobacterial mats of warm paleoarchaen lagoons, three and a half billion years before the coming of man. There is such violence that this coupling looks hardly any different from a battle, and terrible gaping wounds are torn open, o
nly to seal themselves shut again. The chosen strain and bend themselves towards inevitable climax, and the strata of the reef shudders repeatedly beneath the feet of the pilgrims. Several have to squat or kneel to avoid sliding from the rocks to be devoured by the insincere calm of the sea. In the days to come, none of them will mutter a word about what they’ve seen and heard and smelled in the hour of this holy copulation. This is a secret they guard with their lives and with their sanity.

  No longer sane, the lovers twist, unwind, and part. The Father has already bestowed his gift, and now it is the Mother’s turn. A bulging membrane bursts, a protuberance no larger than the first of a child, and she weeps blood and ichor and a single black pearl. It is not a pearl, but by way of the roughest sort of analogy or approximation. One may as well call it a pearl as not. The true name for the Mother’s gift is forbidden. It drops from her and lies quivering in a sticky puddle, to be claimed as the masks will be claimed. And then they drag themselves off the steep eastern lip of the reef, slithering from view and sinking into the ocean as the waves and wind return. They will spend the long night spiraling down and down, descending into that same trench the O-10 torpedoed eighty-two Januaries ago. And by the time the sun rises, and Devil Reef is once more submerged, they will have found the many-columned vestiges of the city of Y’ha-nthlei, where they will be watched over by beings that are neither fish nor men nor any amphibious species cataloged by science.

  By then, the cars parked above the ghost town will have gone away, carrying the pilgrims back to the drab, unremarkable lives they will live until the end of April and the next gathering. And they will all dream their dreams, and await the night they may wear the golden masks.

  THE STICKS

  Charlee Jacob

  Charlee Jacob’s story is set in the Deep South—one so deep it seems located closer to some strange dark world than to the rest of the North American continent. And, on this one night of the year when other worlds and uncanny beings converge on our usual reality, The Sticks is not a place you’d care to be. In The Sticks, a swamp-surrounded backwater town, Halloween is not a celebration. The children don’t don costumes, go to parties, or trick or treat. They stay home—alone behind locked doors—put on pajamas, robes, and slippers, say their prayers in case they don’t get the chance later, and prepare for a long, terrifying vigil which will take them past midnight . . . they hope.

  Shshsh, he thought. Shshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  His face mimed the sound even if he didn’t make it out loud. His lips pursed just so, his teeth couldn’t chatter.

  The sun was setting as twelve-year-old Greenboy turned on the porch light. His six year-old sister, Early, toured the house with a book of matches, lighting candles in every room—even in the bathrooms and down the hall. It was the same thing all through their neighborhood: kids getting ready for Halloween. They put on pajamas, robes, and slippers, saying prayers in case they didn’t get the chance later, preparing for a long vigil which would take them—hopefully—past midnight.

  Was this how children celebrated in other towns? They knew it wasn’t. Hell, these kids watched television—an occupation they shared with the rest of America. They knew that in other parts of the country youngsters donned costumes, took up bags, and entered the darkness crying TRICK OR TREAT! for a deliciously good time. They went door to door, begging candy, making empty threats good naturedly, bringing home sacks of miniature candy bars and peanut butter taffies, popcorn balls and skull-shaped gum. Doing this as red and gold leaves drifted off tree branches and as frost nipped at eager faces.

  It wasn’t how things were done in this little backwater town. Not in The Sticks, what some city founder more than a hundred years ago had named the place. It wasn’t much better than saying you were from The Boons or Podunk or Bugtussle. This was deep south, so south if you went any farther you ended up out of the swamps and in salt water swimming for the equator, black gators sending messages for the sharks to head you off at the pass.

  The Sticks was a place positively sodden with history. In 1812 men toting empty muskets lured invading British Redcoats into tangles of cottonmouth snakes. In 1831 slaves led rebellions, put down by mosquitoes and fever. Sherman’s Union galloped through in 1864 with torches to turn everything to ash. History was all about mortality. The kind written down in books came from the living, but the sort the land imprinted came from the dead.

  Each year on October 29 everyone woke up to the occasion of white-mouthed water moccasins wriggling through the streets. These deadly S’s had crawled a couple of miles from the belly of the swamp, writhing and knotting, going from one end of The Sticks to the other. There was no school that day. Nobody went to work either. They stayed in their houses, shut up tight—even if steaming hot with late Indian summer, sticky as a vat of rotten peaches. Night would come for the 29th and they’d hear those snakes slide past their doors, gliding over windows, across rooftops. Sometimes a few managed to locate a passage down a chimney. Folks scrambled with pokers, machetes and guns to kill them soon as they landed—spitting, hissing, snapping—in the hearth.

  By October 30 the snakes were always vanished yet mosquitoes descended in thick swarms, a fog loud as a buzzsaw full of them. Nobody went out then either. Rarely the town might get lucky and the air would be cool. But usually the heat was intolerable, no way around keeping a blaze in the fireplace, in case tendrils of that fog infiltrated the chimney. They sat with even the keyholes stuffed, wondering why they endured this like the plagues sent to Egypt, sweating out the end of the 30th. Simply the idea of those skeeters outside made their flesh itch until they had to scratch, scratching until they bled, leaving furrows on flesh like ancient ritual tattoos stained a pagan red.

  One might’ve thought it fair that these people would leave. Surely they’d move to the next town, go to Atlanta or New Orleans or even Biloxi. Evacuating to somewhere which had kept up with the times. But people will remain in their homes on the slopes of active volcanoes, won’t they? They’ll live on a flood plain. They’ll persevere on coastline regularly blown to pieces by hurricanes. It might be because they’re stubborn, believing humanity is justification enough, refusing dictation by nature. Or it may be they can’t—or won’t—recognize a curse as old as a stain carried by original settlers, hair still reeking with the smoke of those their ancestors or they themselves had persecuted and burned or hanged. Sins of the fathers . . . and mothers.

  Just for the sake of stating a “for instance”: say that back in the old country a group practicing Samhain rites for the Old Religion was attacked in the woods. Suppose Majesty had attended this functional soiree, fragrant incense curling up through tree branches, stars bright as jagged flint, wine catching and holding an image of the moon. Then a posse of torch-bearing Christians descended to wipe them out for no particular reason. To the gods, a couple hundred years is nothing to wait. A thousand years may be a reasonable amount of time to fester. Further exposition might not be necessary.

  But it all boiled down to the people in The Sticks waking up on October 31 to find the mosquitoes gone. Autumn had taken a sudden turn. It wasn’t one of bronze and scarlet hues, or a gentle drifting of leaves to golding grass. The leaves and grass had turned black as if burned to ash. Heavy smoke tainted the air in clouds wafting about like the swarms of mosquitoes had the day before. There were smears of charcoal in runes upon the whitewashed walls of houses, sifting from the impaling points on picket fences, creating leering jack o’ lantern faces in bold negative on windows. Still people stayed home, kids studying for when they returned to school, playing at tossing bones and dice or using the bones as skeletal erector sets to build little faerie castles and tiny old Roman forts. Their elders worked on costumes for the evening’s festivities, scissors snapping like cottonmouth jaws, threaded needles sharp as the mosquito’s bite.

  Parents dressed up: faces painted green or gray, eyes and mouths outlined in lipstick. Hair teased to stand up in tufts as if rolling over in graves might’ve been responsi
ble for tousling it—or slicked down and dripping joke-shop bottled slime to portray decomposed bodies risen from the swamp. Impromptu gowns with elaborate trains and winding cerement clothes dragged in tatters, fabric across the floor going Shshshhhhhhhhhh. Greenboy and Early heard the crowd down the street, crunching on gravel driveways, shaking bags full of teeth and bells. No hush now. The crowd called out, walking up and down for hours, frisky with theatrical noise, going from one front porch to the next, or turning around, going back the way they’d come. They didn’t knock, not yet. They just tramped door to door.

  “Where you think they’re goin’ to end up?” Early asked her brother, mindful of keeping her voice down, hard for someone her age. She stared at how the candlelight flickered in the windows and how it reflected in the glass.

  He shrugged, then replied softly. “Don’t do no good to try and guess.”

  He bit his lip, glancing at the large barrel his father had set near the door. He heard movement in there and it made him feel queasy. He wanted to rub his stomach but he didn’t want Early to see how it made him sick. His sister didn’t look at it at all but turned her head as she made a wide path around it. She put her palm up to shield her eyes so she didn’t have to take note of it.