by Paula Guran
“Hello?” Bea’s voice said in Ezzie’s ear.
“Bea, I see them.”
There was a distinct hesitation. Then Bea said hello again . . . this time even more uncertain.
“Bea, it’s me. They’re moving away from your house.” Why the hell was she whispering? There was no way these things could hear her. Was there? As they shifted in and out of vision, there seemed to be a real determination to them. They reached the sidewalk—she counted four, five . . . seven of them, maybe even more. And yes, there was something about their heads, flapping open around the middle of their dark and featureless heads and then flapping closed again.
“I’m sorry, but if this is some kind of a Hallow—”
“Bea, it’s me. Ezzie.”
“Ezzie?”
Ezzie stepped back carefully from the window as the black shapes stepped off the opposite sidewalk and onto the road, fanning out to either side as they slid and crept, like shadows on a wall bathed in the sudden light from a passing car’s headlights . . . heading now across the road towards Ezzie’s house. She reached out and turned the key in the lock and then crouched down, her back against the door.
“Bea, listen carefully to me.”
“How do you know my name? Who are—”
“Bea! Shut up and listen. Your name is Beatrice Duke and we’ve—”
“I know who I am. Who are you?”
“My name is Elizabeth Rafaelson. We’ve been frie—”
“I don’t know anyone called Eliz—”
“Bea, shut the fuck up. We’ve been friends for almost fifty years now. I live across—”
“I’m hanging up now, whoever you are.”
“Bea! Bea! Don’t hang up. I’m telling you . . . please don’t hang up. I live just across the street from you—go to your window and-”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Bea, can’t you just do that one thing for me? Go to your window and look across at me—I’ll wave to you and—”
“There’s nothing across the street from me.”
“What?”
“I said there’s nothing across the street from me. Just spare ground.”
“What?”
“I’m going. Goodbye.”
“Bea!”
The line was dead.
And then, the telephone was no longer in Ezzie’s hand—her hand was just there in front of her, clawed, the fingers wrapped around empty space.
Ezzie lifted her head and watched the overhead light pop out of existence along with the ceiling and the upstairs rooms and even the roof. Now there were just stars above her.
Suddenly, she felt the full might of the October chill and everywhere went dark. Still crouched down, Ezzie turned and stared across the street. There was grass beneath her . . . damp grass, she realised. Her skirt was getting wet. Just next to her, a tall beech stood majestically, bare branches spread out above her head.
Across the street, Bea Duke stood at her window, her hand pressed against the glass as she surveyed the spare land where Ezzie had once lived.
And then the shapes moved forward as one, their darkness filling everything. And those mouths—Bea had been right. So big.
As one of them came down towards her, right where her front door had been, Ezzie started to say, “Poor Billy Westlow.” But she didn’t quite finish the last word.
ULALUME: A BALLAD
Edgar Allan Poe
As far as I know, Edgar Allan Poe never specifically used the word Halloween or any variation of it in his writing. But these lines seem to indicate the date: “For we knew not the month was October,/And we marked not the night of the year—/(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)” This is, of course, open to interpretation—the narrator may merely be referring to the anniversary of the burial of his lost love—but I think Poe meant All Hallows Eve. After all, it is the one night of the year when one might easily stroll ghoul-haunted woodlands, chat with ancient goddesses, and be tempted by a demon to visit a tomb?
I’ve kept the poem’s often omitted “secret” final stanza as originally published. Poe is known to have performed the poem complete with the verse at least once and included it in a consequent transcription. He must have felt it had meaning.
“Ulalume” was written with dramatic recitation in mind. Poe is known to have pronounced the title/name as you-la-lume. He probably derived it from the Latin ululare (to wail, lament, howl, shriek) and lumen (light). Try reading it aloud.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispèd and sere,
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through and alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
Our memories were treacherous and sere—
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year—
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber—
(Though once we had journeyed down here)—
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn—
As the star-dials hinted of morn—
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn—
Astarte’s bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said—“She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs—
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies—
To the Lethean peace of the skies—
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes—
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes.”
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: “Sadly this star I mistrust—
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must.”
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust—
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust—
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied—“This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight!—
See!—it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright—
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
/> Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.”
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb;
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: “What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied: “Ulalume—Ulalume—
’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere—
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: “It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—
That I brought a dread burden down here—
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—
This misty mid region of Weir—
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,—
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
Said we, then—the two, then—“Ah, can it
Have been that the woodlandish ghouls—
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—
To bar up our way and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds—
From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds—
Had drawn up the spectre of a planet
From the limbo of lunary souls—
This sinfully scintillant planet
From the Hell of the planetary souls?”
MASK GAME
John Shirley
John Shirley captures a truly modern American family—functioning in its dysfunctionality—struggling to keep Halloween a “family” tradition, but ultimately being forced to strip off the guises they have employed to obscure the truth. We don’t know the origination of associating masks with Halloween, but it probably lies in practices of mumming and pranking. And, like Halloween, masks are mysterious and magical in and of themselves. Masks have transformative power. In many cultures wearing a mask allowed a human to become or gain the power of that which the mask portrayed, or make contact with the spirit world. In Jungian terms, a mask functions as a mediator between archetypal powers of the collective unconscious and individual ego, connecting present to past and mundane to the supernatural. When wearing a mask, you are allowed to be something other than yourself, but it’s not a permanent transformation—you become yourself again once you take it off. And, as in this story, masks tend to reveal rather than conceal
“Neva has a new Halloween game she wants us to play at the party,” said Donny.
Juno looked across the room at her younger brother. “Say what, scrubster?”
Donny was barely thirteen. He surprised everyone in the family room by chiming in about the Halloween party, because he didn’t seem to be paying attention to them at all; he was staring so fixedly into the video game he seemed in another room, another world: his fingers clicking the controller, his hands jabbed it in the air, his shoulders wrenched this way and that—as if these contortions could help his Killflyer safely pass the ice spikes hurtled by the enraged Living Mountains.
Juno, Donny’s older sister, sat with the others at the breakfast table on the tile floor beyond the stained carpet of the game-dominated family room. On wicker chairs around the kitchen table were Donny’s wearily obese mom, Juno and her best friend Linda, and Linda’s always-smiling dad, Mr. Carpenter. According to Linda, Mr. Carpenter was “a heavily medicated soccer Dad.”
Juno looked at her brother, saw him flying, in his mind and on-screen, into the box of the videogame—
One of those sickening feelings of unwanted scale came into Juno’s mind again: she seemed to see Donny in the box of the TV screen, and the box was like a little puppet theatre in which he zipped around in a toy spaceship, shooting things; and that box was inside the box of the family room, next to the box of the kitchen, both in the box of the split-level house, which was in a grid of such house-boxes, in the Southerton suburb of Sacramento, in the middle of California, on the coast of North America—in her mind, she could see it all from space, the planet a ball in space: the boxes stuck to the big ball, the big ball itself hanging, in her imagination, in some vast transparent box that astronomers had failed to discover because they weren’t supposed to, because . . .
Stop.
Dizzy, Juno pulled her mind back, and focused on the kitchen table; the crumbs of breakfast, the bowl of chips, the homely, comfortingly ordinary faces of her family and her friend Linda.
Donny was muttering something again about masks for the Halloween party. Focus on that.
“So you’re, like, in on this Halloween party committee all of a sudden, scrubster?” Juno asked, fishing in the bowl for a taco chip that hadn’t gotten limp by sitting out all night. “Ugh. Mom these chips are, like, blue food.”
“Then throw them in the trash and put out some fresh, Juno,” Mom said, distractedly looking at Donny.
Mr. Carpenter nodded his head in silent agreement at that. He was smiling but something in his expression said, Spoiled kids.
Donny was still staring into the screen, jerking his body around in a burlesque of his Killflyer’s trajectory. He made it past the beetling visages of the Living Mountains, muttering, “Aw riiiiight,” and flew on into the Jurassic Swamplands, where he began to systematically strafe the Village of the Swamp People.
“You have to kill people in some village, in that game?” Mom asked, frowning. “They look like, you know, innocent bystanders . . . ”
Juno thought: Like you’d do anything about it even if he had to torture them to death for points.
“You get more points,” Donny said, “if the people in the village have weapons. But yeah you kill everybody, if you want enough points to get the Annihilator. You can’t really win unless you get the Annihilator . . . Yeah, uh Neva, anyway, said—shit . . . flew too low . . . ”
“Neva said ‘shit’?” Juno asked, pretending innocence. Linda giggled.
“You two watch your language,” Mom said. Grunting, she heaved herself up, out of her chair: a big woman, she’d lost enough weight so that she didn’t have to use a cane anymore, but she still breathed through her mouth when she moved. She looked at her watch—a tiny silver strip of watch on a big pink slab of arm—and decided it was close enough to lunchtime; she got her Slimfast from the fridge and drank it down hungrily.
“Neva said that uh, she . . . shit! Every time I come to this swamp part, their stupid trained dino-gator’s vomiting those acid bombs. He always—whoa, got ’em! . . . Neva said she had a game she wanted to play with the kids at the party and she . . . she had prepared for it, for, like, months, and made special masks for everyone. Everyone’s got their own mask. Kinda weird but that’s what she said . . . . Dang little kid keeps escaping into the woods. Now I’ve gotta use my nuker on the woods to kill him . . . ”
“She made the masks by hand?” Mr. Carpenter asked. He snapped his fingers in admiration. “Gee, that’s great, I’d love to see them.” He was a chiropractor who’d retired after losing a lawsuit with a patient. Something about spinal adjustments causing strokes. Mr. Carpenter’s receding blond hair was going gray, but he still had a little ponytail, tied in the back. His head seemed slightly too long and narrow for his wide shoulders.
“She worked on it for months?” Juno asked. “The girl’s, like, obsessed!”
“Rully,” Linda said. “That’s like so . . . ” Her voice trailed off.
Linda was stocky like her dad, with that same long chin. Not as pretty as Juno; not as brave about expressing herself.
“Oh I think spending that long perfecting a craft to get it right, that’s marvelous,” said Linda’s dad, as both Jun
o and Linda had known he would. “The masks must be great.”
“That’s right,” Mom said. “I don’t know how we all lost touch with craftsmanship and caring about doing things right. I’m not saying I’m much better. I guess, when we were younger we were having too much fun to think about getting some skills that mattered. Me, I mean—not you, Frank.”
Mr. Carpenter nodded pleasantly.
Juno thought: Mom’s always saying things are screwed up, and then saying she’s no better. But she starts out judging everything anyway—then she judges herself.
Breathing through her mouth, Mom labored around the kitchen, dumping out the old chips, putting new chips in the big earthenware bowl. “Mo-om,” said Juno, as soon as she was sure her mom had already done it. “I would’ve got those. I was going to.”
