Halloween

by Paula Guran

  The flame burned yellow, blazing eyes that tracked his movements as he stood back to inspect his work.

  Something shifted, the sound carrying across the silent room—an arm moving, a shoulder shrugging, a hand flexing. Then Katy tilted her new head from side to side, as if adjusting to the fit.

  Baxter walked around the table and stood beside her, just as he always had, hands by his sides, eyes wide and aching. He watched as she shook off the webs of her long sleep and slowly began to stand.

  Baxter stood his ground when she leaned forward to embrace him, fumbling her loose arms around his shoulders, that great carved head looming large in his vision, blotting out the rest of the room. She smelled sickly-sweet; her breath was tainted. Her long, thin fingers raked at his shoulder blades, seeking purchase, looking for the familiar gaps in his armor, the chinks and crevices she had so painstakingly crafted during the years they had spent together.

  When at last she pulled away, taking a short shuffling step back towards the chair, her mouth was agape. The candle burned within, lighting up the orange-dark interior of her new head. She vomited an orangery-pulp onto his chest, staining him. The pumpkin seeds followed—hundreds of them, rotten and oversized and surging from between her knife-cut lips to spatter on the floor in a long shiver of putrescence. And finally, there was blood. So much blood.

  When the stagnant cascade came to an end, he took her by the arm and led her to the door, guiding her outside and onto the wooden-decked porch, where he sat her in the ratty wicker chair she loved so much. He left her there, staring out into the silvery veil of the rain, breathing in the shadows and the things that hid within them. Was that a chuckle he heard, squeezing from her still-wet mouth?

  Maybe, for a moment, but then it was drowned out by the sound of trick or treaters sprinting past in the drizzly lane.

  He left the door ajar, so that he might keep an eye on her. Then, still shaking slightly, he opened the refrigerator door. On the middle shelf, sitting in a shallow bowl, were the other pumpkins, the smaller ones, each the size of a tennis ball. He took one in each hand, unconsciously weighing them, and headed for the hall, climbing the stairs at an even pace, his hands becoming steady once more.

  In the small room at the back of the house, on a chipboard cabinet beneath the shuttered window, there sat a large plastic dish. Standing over it, eyes cast downward and unable to lift his gaze to look inside, Baxter heard the faint rustle of polythene. He straightened and listened, his eyes glazed with tears not of sorrow but of loss, of grief, and so much more than he could even begin to fathom.

  Katy had died in childbirth. Now that she was back, the twins would want to join their mother, and the games they would play together promised to be spectacular.

  THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

  Charles de Lint

  There are innumerable Halloween tales, but Charles de Lint explains there’s a story in everything and everybody. Lots of stories. There’s the one that’s inside you and then all the other ones that get born when your story bangs up against somebody else’s story. Belinda and Jane—rather special folk themselves—collect these stories. One Hallows Eve, the one day when the dead can walk around wearing skin and bones like the living, they encounter the ghost of a soldier come to meet his true love as promised . . .

  “They’re gemmin,” the janitor told me when I asked. “Little mobile histories of a place. Kind of like fairies, if you think of them as the spirits of some particular area or space. They soak up stories and memories, and then one day they’re all full up and off they go.”

  “Where do they go?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I just know they go and they don’t come back. Not the same ones, anyway.”

  —from “Sweet Forget-Me-Not” by Ahmad Nasrallah

  “Excuse me,” the soldier said. “If it’s not too much trouble, could you tell me the best way for me to take get to the Lakefront Pier?”

  The two girls looked at one another and began to giggle.

  “Did you ever—”

  “Not me.”

  They spoke at the same time, stopped to let the other continue, then started to giggle again when neither did.

  The dark-haired soldier waited patiently for them to finish before repeating his question.

  “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” Belinda said.

  Jane nodded in agreement. “That’s what Charlotte says, and she should know. She’s older than us.”

  “By three days.”

  “Which still makes her older.”

  “But we do, anyway.”

  “Speak to strangers, that is.”

  “But only if they have kind eyes.”

  “Which you have, by the way.”

  Belinda nodded. “Kind, but haunted.”

  Belinda was the blonde, taller and far more buxom than the petite Jane, with her boyish figure and short dark hair. Jane wore a top hat, a pair of tight faded blue jeans, and a black jacket that was cropped on the front and sides, but had tuxedo tails at the back. Belinda was in a vintage pink tulle dress with a lace bodice and a full skirt that cascaded to her knees in a froth of white and pink with accents of fine black netting. They were both barefoot and could have been going to a prom, except today being Halloween, he assumed they were either on their way to an early costume party, or they simply liked dressing up.

  It was hard to tell their age because of their artfully applied make-up. The soldier put them at somewhere between fifteen and twenty. He had five sisters and knew that girlish giddiness wasn’t attributable to any particular age.

  “Perhaps if I introduced myself first,” he tried. “Then you might discover that we’re not so much strangers as simply old friends meeting for the first time. My name’s Parker Paul. I know that’s confusing, having a first name for a surname and vice versa, but I assure you, the choice was entirely out of my hands.”

  “Why do you talk so funny?” Belinda asked.

  Parker raised his eyebrows. “Do you mean my accent?”

  “That, too. It’s just—”

  “You talk like someone in a movie,” Jane finished for her.

  Belinda nodded. “Yes, you’re very wordy.”

  “That comes from two years in an English boarding school, I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?” Belinda asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Jane cocked her head. “Why?”

  Parker smiled. He was used to this, too. Two of his sisters were considerably younger than him and delighted in pretending to take everything he said literally and then pestering him with questions. Time spent with them had obviously been a training ground for just this sort of situation.

  He looked from one girl to the other, his dark brown eyes solemn.

  “I suppose it all depends,” he said, “on the color of the spoon.”

  The girls clapped their hands.

  “Oh, very good,” Jane told him. “You really must be a long-lost friend.”

  “Oh, yes,” Belinda agreed. “Moon-wise and spinning very still.”

  “And since you’re an old friend . . . ”

  “ . . . we won’t tell you how to get to the Pier . . . ”

  “ . . . we’ll take you there, our very own selves.”

  With that they slipped up on either side of him and hooked their arms in his.

  “It’s this way, Mr. Paul,” Belinda said.

  They led him off down the sidewalk, deftly steering him through the crowd so that while it seemed as though they were forever about to run into this oncoming pedestrian or that one, they always managed to find some way to walk three abreast without bumping into anyone.

  “Are you of the Stanton Street Pauls?” Jane asked.

  He looked in her direction and nodded.

  “You know they don’t live there anymore, don’t you?” Belinda added.

  She had her head cocked prettily, the question repeated in the arch of her eyebrows.

  “No, I hadn’t heard,” he said. “It’s
been so long since I’ve been back and everything has changed.”

  “How long have you been away?”

  “It feels like a very long time. I’ve been . . . overseas.”

  Belinda nodded. “Is that where it happened?”

  “Where what happened?”

  “Where you died,” Jane said.

  Parker stopped and disengaged their arms from his. He looked from one guileless face to the other.

  “What a thing to say,” he told them.

  “I suppose it was rude,” Jane said, “just coming out with it like that.”

  “Though that doesn’t make it any less true,” Belinda added. “Does it?”

  “I . . . ”

  “You can’t pretend you don’t know,” Jane said.

  Belinda nodded. “Because if you didn’t, how would your ghost know to be waiting for the moon to rise at the very place of its death, on today, the one day when the dead can walk around wearing skin and bones like the living?”

  Parker studied her for a long moment, but all he said was, “You seem to know a lot about ghosts.”

  “Not really. Mostly they just drift around, all . . . ”

  She looked for the word.

  “Ghostly,” Jane said.

  Belinda nodded. “Exactly. We can hardly see them and they certainly aren’t able to have an actual conversation—at least not usually—never mind hold your hand or give you a kiss.”

  “I’m not giving you a kiss,” Parker said.

  “I know,” Belinda said. “Because you already have a sweetheart. Or you did, before you died. And you hope to see her on the Pier.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We might not know a lot about ghosts,” Jane told him, “but we do know about love.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Oh, don’t go all huffy,” Jane said. “We’re bringing you to the Pier, aren’t we? Or at least we were until you stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and became an immovable object.” She gave him a little poke with a finger. “See? You can’t be budged.”

  Belinda gave him a poke as well.

  “He’s like a lamppost,” she said. “Rooted to the pavement.”

  “Stop that,” Parker said as she went to poke him again.

  Jane looked at her wrist, though she wasn’t wearing a watch.

  “Time’s a-wasting,” she told the soldier. “If you want to make your rendezvous, we should keep walking.”

  “Unless you have money for a bus?” Belinda asked, her voice hopeful.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  Jane nodded. “Neither do we. We keep telling Charlotte that we should have money, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s necessary.”

  “Because she doesn’t have to walk all the way to the Pier,” Belinda said.

  “That’s twice you’ve mentioned someone named Charlotte,” the soldier said.

  “Is it? I wasn’t keeping count.”

  She looked at Belinda who shook her head.

  “I wasn’t either,” Belinda said.

  “It’s a good thing someone was,” Jane told the soldier.

  Parker sighed. “I only meant that as a preamble to asking you who she was.”

  “Not dead, that’s for sure,” Belinda said.

  “Who she is then.”

  “Ah.” Jane took his arm again. “She’s like our sister.”

  She slipped her arm in his and started to walk once more and the soldier let her lead him off. Belinda fell in step beside him and took his other arm.

  “But she’s not really your sister,” Parker said.

  “That depends,” Jane said. “Let’s say you have handful of seeds that all come from the same plant. When some of them sprout, are they siblings?”

  “I can’t even pretend to understand what that means,” Parker told her.

  “Well,” Belinda said, “you know how, for a ghost to be born, someone has to die first? It’s like that, except totally different.”

  “Totally,” Jane agreed. “But otherwise, just like that.”

  Parker decided that to press for clarification would only make him more confused, but he still found himself asking, “And that would make Charlotte?”

  “Definitely the oldest,” Belinda said.

  “Of the three of you.”

  “Five, actually,” Jane said. “You can’t forget Gina and Kathy.”

  Belinda nodded. “Well, you could, but it wouldn’t be very polite.”

  “So there are five of you.”

  “Yes,” Jane agreed. “There are five of us in our little pod.”

  Belinda shook her head. “Pod doesn’t sound right. Maybe we should say flock.”

  “But we’re not birds. How about gang?”

  “Tribe.”

  “Clan.”

  “Posse.”

  “Which do you like best?” Belinda asked the soldier.

  “I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion,” he said.

  “Oh, pooh. Everybody has opinions.”

  “I meant an informed opinion,” he told her. Then for lack of anything better to say, he added, “I have five sisters.”

  “Sisters!” Jane said. “That’s perfect. Sisters. As in ‘sisters in crime,’ or ‘sisters of the heart.’ I like it.”

  “It is perfect,” Belinda agreed. “You’re a clever soldier.”

  “Do you miss your sisters?” Jane asked the soldier.

  Parker nodded. “I think of them often.”

  “Then how could you just leave them behind to go off and fight in some silly old war?”

  “Not to mention your true love,” Belinda added.

  “It was my duty,” he told them. “When I serve and protect my country, I serve and protect them as well.”

  “So you volunteered?”

  He nodded. “My father didn’t want me to go. He told me that soldiering was for poor people who didn’t have any other options for their future, not for bright young men with the whole of the world waiting for them. But I disagreed. If our country was going to war, it was the duty of all of us to defend our freedoms and rights. We argued. A lot. But I signed up anyway.”

  “And then you died,” Jane said.

  Parker’s brow furrowed. “It was a car bombing . . . this time . . . ”

  “What do you mean this time?” Belinda asked.

  The soldier brought them all to a stop once more. He again disengaged his arms from theirs and rubbed his brow. He looked up into the sky but his gaze was turned inwards.

  “I . . . I seem to remember dying more than once . . . ” he told them.

  “You sound like us,” Jane told him. “We sort of die all the time, but then we come back. Or some part of us comes back—enough so that it might as well be us.”

  “Except it’s not,” Belinda said.

  Jane nodded. “No, not at all. But it all feels familiar because we know what to do and where to go and what stories to collect.”

  “I don’t understand,” the soldier said.

  “Well, you know how everybody—”

  “Everything,” Belinda interrupted.

  “Everything,” Jane agreed. “There’s a story in everything and everybody. Lots of stories. There’s the one that’s inside them and then all the other ones that get born when they bang up against somebody else’s story.”

  The solider gave a slow nod.

  “Well, we’re the ones who collect those stories,” Belinda said.

  Parker wasn’t quite sure what they were telling him.

  “What do you do with them?” he finally asked.

  “They fill us up and then we go away and other girls come along to collect more stories.”

  “Go where?”

  Belinda gave a breezy wave with her hand. “Oh, you know. Away. Back into the bigger story of the world.”

  “You mean you die?”

  Jane giggled. “Oh, no no no. How can we die when we were never born?”

  “Are you telling me you’re not
human?”

  Jane looked at Belinda. “Says the ghost of a dead soldier.”

  “But I was human.”

  “Oh, like ever having been human’s such a big deal.”

  The soldier shook his head. “What are you?”

  The girls shrugged. “What are you?”

  “Apparently, the ghost of a dead soldier. One who’s died more than once. I . . . if I let myself think about it too much, I can’t count all the battlefields . . . the times I’ve died . . . ”

  “It sounds like reincarnation,” Jane said.

  “I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

  Belinda laughed. “If something exists, it doesn’t matter if you believe in something or not. It still is.”

  “Is that what happens to you?”

  “We’re not sure,” Jane said.

  Belinda nodded. “And besides that, it’s not important.”

  “Our stories aren’t important.”

  “Just the ones we collect.”

  “I would think,” the soldier said, “that every story is as important as another. Otherwise it means that hierarchies and caste systems and however else we divide ourselves are real.”

  Belinda cocked her head. “That’s probably right.” She turned to Jane. “After all, we’re carrying around our own stories, too. We just don’t have to collect them.”

  “Because we live them,” Jane said.

  Belinda nodded. “Which means they’ll come with us whether we want them to or not.”

  “But they’re not as interesting to us,” Jane told the soldier. “We’d much rather hear other people’s stories. And we especially want to hear your stories.”

  “Why would that be?” Parker asked.

  “Because normally ghosts don’t talk. Normally we can’t even see them.”

  “And when we do,” Belinda added, “they’re all drifty and focused on what they can’t have.”