Halloween

by Paula Guran

  Abruptly I’m dropped onto a cot. My eyes snap open as I hear my cell door clang shut, hear the lock snap closed.

  No! They’ve put me back in the cell!

  I open my lips to scream but the inside of my mouth is dry and sticky. My howl emerges as a whimper. Footsteps echo away down the corridor and the overheads go out.

  I’m alone.

  For a while.

  And then I hear the sound I knew would come. The tile moves. A gentle rattle at first, then a long slow sliding rasp of tile upon tile. The stinking miasma from below insinuates its way into my cell, permeating my air, making it its own.

  Then a soft scraping sound, like a molting snake sliding between two rocks to divest itself of old skin. Followed by another sound, a hesitant, crippled shuffle, edging closer.

  I try to get away, to roll off the cot, but I can’t move. My body won’t respond.

  And then I see it. Or rather I see a faint outline, greater darkness against lesser darkness: slim, between four and five feet high. It leans over the bed and reaches out to me. Tiny fingers, cold, damp, ragged fingers, flutter over my face like blind spiders, searching. And then they pause, hovering over my mouth and nose. My God, I can’t stand the odor. I want to retch but the drug in my system won’t let me do even that.

  And then the fingers move. Quickly. Two of them slip wetly into my nostrils, clogging them, sealing them like corks in the necks of wine bottles. The other little hand darts past my gasping lips, forces its way between my teeth, and crawls down my throat.

  The unspeakable obscenity of the taste is swept away by the hunger for air. Air! I can’t breathe! I need air! My body begins to buck as my muscles spasm and cry for oxygen.

  It speaks then. In Marion’s little voice.

  Marion’s voice . . . yet changed, dried up and stiff like a fallen leaf blown by autumn gusts from bright October into lifeless November.

  “Daddy . . . ”

  TESSELLATIONS

  Gary Braunbeck

  Braunbeck’s novella is about a family and the ties that bind them together, even in death. Life and death are with us at all times, but it is only on Halloween that the barrier between the two is so permeable.

  The L. Frank Baum character mentioned in the story, Jack Pumpkinhead, first appeared in The Marvelous Land of Oz, the immediate sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1904. A boy, Tip, makes the pumpkin-headed scarecrow in hopes of frightening the witch Mombi. Mombi, however, brings Jack to life. Although he appears in many of the Oz books—frequently replacing his ever-rotting head with a fresh pumpkin—he is featured in the twenty-third (the ninth penned by Ruth Plumly Thompson): Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929). There’s no direct connection between Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead and Halloween, but similar figures have become firmly associated with the holiday. He may have inspired Tim Burton’s Jack Skellington, the “Pumpkin King” protagonist of the film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

  “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon,

  is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

  —Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man.”

  1

  Make certain that all the tools you’ll need for cutting materials for your patchwork quilt are properly sharpened so as to ensure each edge-cut is as clean as possible.

  There is a certain night when stories of the darkness and that which calls it home are commonplace, accompanied by a host of spirits who wait patiently for their chance to set foot upon soil where unknowing humankind shrugs off its fear with laughter and candy and the celebrating of an ancient ritual. The mouth of this night is the choice hour for the formless, nameless, restless dead as they drift in low-moaning winds, searching for something—an errant wish, an echo of joy or terror, a blind spot in someone’s peripheral vision—anything they can use to give themselves shape and dimension, however briefly. Many of them take joy in frightening the living out of the husk of their hearts; others wait quietly by the sides of those alone, a companion whose only wish is to bring a sense of friendship and comfort; still others are content to drift along, taking great pleasure in simply watching the bustle of humankind. The light that is shadowless, colorless, softer than moonglow shimmering over a snow-laden field, this light against which even the deepest darkness would appear bright as a star in supernova, this light is the place they call home.

  The Romans called this night the Feast of Pomona; the Druids named it All Souls Day; in Mexico it is known as el Dia de los Muertos.

  Most call it Hallowe’en.

  The children here have a favorite story they like to tell one another as they pass down dark streets in search of houses whose porch lights bid welcome; it is a story that has been around as long as even many of the adults can remember, all about Grave-Hag and the Monster who lives with her, guarding her house from curiosity-seekers and passers-by until Hallowe’en arrives; then, say the tellers, and only then, do the two of them slip out of the house and into the night, skulking through shadows toward some hideous task . . . .

  And so it begins, this tale best told under a full autumn moon when the wind brings with it a chill that dances through the bones and the sounds from beyond the campfire grow ominously semi-human.

  A sad and damaged little town.

  In its center, an October-lonely cemetery.

  A lone figure holding two red roses stands near a pair of graves—one still quite fresh, the other settled, comfortable, long at home—listening to the echoing laughter of children dressed as beasties and hobgoblins.

  A trace of unease.

  The smoky scent of dried leaves burning in a distant, unseen yard.

  A pulsing of blood through the temples.

  And the unseen presence of regrets both new and old about to become flesh.

  2

  Sort your materials into separate stacks, double check to make certain all detailing accessories have also been gathered and properly assembled into groups that correlate with their respective patches.

  Marian knew that coming here first might be a mistake but, wanting to put off facing her brother, she came anyway. If the morbid tone of the phone call from Aunt Boots was any indication of what waited for her at the house, she wanted to avoid going there for as long as possible. After the paralyzing wreckage of the last few days she needed a quiet place to be alone, to find her bearings, to begin recovering from the awful thing that had happened and steel herself for whatever else was coming.

  A small group of ghosts moved in the distance, bags in one hand, flashlights in the other, each giddy with anticipation of the treasures waiting—the candied apples, the chocolate bars, the popcorn balls and licorice sticks. Marian found herself envying them. The one night of the year when everyone—young and old, adult and child—cast away their fear of the dark for the sake of enjoying some good old-fashioned scares, decorating their houses with multicolored corn strung across doorways, pumpkins, stacked sheaves of straw leaning against the porch railings, even monster-masked scarecrows waiting on the steps.

  The ghosts chanted: “Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly/Like witches on switches across the sky . . . ”

  Her smile widened as she remembered the path that ran next to the north side of the gate at Cedar Hill Cemetery, providing the trick or treaters with a shortcut through the gravestones. On many Hallowe’ens past she’d taken the shortcut herself, climbing the tiny embankment and following the path through this place of the resting dead until it emerged near North Tenth. Every town has that one special street where all the ghouls, withes, goblins, and their like head toward on Beggar’s Night, that special street where the people gave out the best goodies in town, and in the case of Cedar Hill, that street was North Tenth. At least, that’s the way it had been when Marian was a child. She wondered if that were still the case.

  On those Beggars’ Nights, so long ago, as she and Alan skulked their way past the tombstones and crypts and eter
nal flames, she would listen for the rhythmic thudding of the dead trying to beat their way out of their coffins—Let-us-OUT! Let us OUT!—all the while gripping her brother’s hand very tightly as he spooked her with stories of warlocks and demons and fog-shrouded moors where rotting hands suddenly shot up out of graves to snatch away innocent children and drag them down into the pits of darkness where some terrible, slobbering, hairy, starving, unspeakably grouchy Thing waited. God, what fun it had been!

  As the first group of ghosts disappeared into a thick patch of trees, another, smaller group of creatures emerged next to the gate and moved stealthily along; there were devils in this batch, werewolves and misshapen monstrosities followed by a princess or two who looked over their shoulders at a fast-approaching vampire brigade, who chanted around their plastic fangs: “Tonight is the night when pumpkins stare/Through sheaves and leaves everywhere . . . ”

  Not wanting to pull herself away from the sights and her memories, wishing there was some way she could avoid having to deal with any of this, Marian sighed, felt a small shudder snake down her spine, and, with a smooth deliberation she’d spent most of her adult and professional life perfecting, turned to the business at hand.

  “Well, you two,” she whispered, “looks like you can meet the rest of the family now.” Then she chuckled, albeit a bit morbidly, under her breath. There was as much truth as there was displaced irony in that statement.

  In the early days of Cedar Hill when the Welsh, Scotch, and Irish immigrants worked alongside the Delaware and Hopewell Indians to establish safe shipping lanes through places such as Black Hand Gorge, the Narrows, and Buckeye Lake, a devastating epidemic of cholera swept through the county. People died so fast and in such great numbers that corpses had to be collected in express wagons every eight hours. People were dying faster than healthy men could be found to bury them. But the “ . . . plague” (as it was referred to in the journals of the time) passed, the town began to rebuild its citizenship (many widows and widowers moving beyond the barriers of their “own clans and communities” to marry and procreate), and later, in 1803, Cedar Hill Cemetery was established by the town’s remaining founders as a place to permanently inter those who had died during the epidemic. Even though bodies were scattered for nearly seventy-five miles in all directions, groups of volunteers were assembled whose duty it was to locate and identify as many of the dead as possible, bring them back to Cedar Hill, and ensure each was given a “ . . . burial befitting one of a good Christian community.” Since most of the bodies had been buried with some sort of marker, locating them wasn’t too difficult, nor, surprisingly, was identifying them, despite the ravages of time and disease on the bodies; every “ . . . Hill citizen of Anglo descent” had been buried with a small Bible whose inside cover bore the name of its possessor, as well as those of his or her immediate family. Once found and returned, the bodies were placed in the cemetery according to family or clan, and over the decades it remained that way, albeit by unspoken agreement; members of families directly descended from Cedar Hill’s founding fathers were buried in or as near as possible to the plats where their ancestors slept. But such were the ways of nearly two hundred years ago that a majority of people in Cedar Hill (both the cemetery and the town) were now related by ancestral blood; some within three or less generations, others quite distantly.

  The graves of Marian’s parents were located in front of a small abandoned church on the cemetery grounds. The long-forgotten architect who’d designed the church had, like Marian’s dad, been an admirer of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. She thought of Gaudi now because he’d been something of a hero to her father, a man who laid bricks, cut lumber, and balanced beams for a living. Her parents had married on Hallowe’en nearly forty years ago (hence that day being the Big Celebration Day in the Quinlan household), then honeymooned in Barcelona where her father was awestruck by Gaudi’s masterpiece: She could still recall the wonder in his face whenever he spoke of the experience, shaking his head in amazement that the plans for the cathedral’s construction were so vast, complex, and precise it would take hundreds of years to complete.

  “I wish I had that kind of talent,” he’d said. “To be able to create something like that, something that you don’t just build, but something your soul goes into, something that will go on being created hundreds of years after you’re gone, so you’ll never be forgotten.”

  “You know,” said Mom, “in that pamphlet they were giving out, it said that Gaudi was partly inspired by a quilt his mother had made when he was a child. I always wanted to get back to that quilt I was working on.”

  Dad laughed. “Well, then; you got your dream project and I got mine.”

  A soft rustling of leaves somewhere behind told Marian that yet another band of demons and wizards and ghoulies was making its way through, but she did not turn to look; her gaze was still fixed on the crumbling church before her. Dad had always been fascinated by the church’s obvious, though less extravagant, Gaudi influence, disregarding that the structure was merely the echo of another man’s genius; from the blue marble inlay to the ominous gargoyles to the reproduction of the Virgin Mary over the rotting and sealed oak doors, the building seemed to apologize for what it wasn’t rather than boast of its own virtues. Over the years sections of the front and side walls had collapsed, revealing parts of the interior. From where Marian stood she see exposed portions of both the belfry and the organ loft. Her dad once put in a bid to renovate this church, seeing it as his one and only chance to leave behind something to equal the glory of the Sagrada Familia—a wild and improbable dream, to be sure, but one that he’d nurtured for over half his life. It helped him to pass the long nights when his back pain kept him awake and the bills outweighed the bank balance—both conditions being part and parcel of an independent contractor’s chosen occupation. The city later decided that renovating the church wasn’t as important as building a new shopping mall and so dropped the project. Still, her father had kept the family gravesites near the structure; if he couldn’t rest near his greatest triumph, he would rest near the symbol of what might have been.

  Marian stared at the decaying church and sighed. Even in death her parents had to settle for second best. Their tombstones were side by side, with a third spot reserved—at his own request—for Alan.

  There was no space for Marian; they’d always known she’d be the one to break away completely, to build a new life far away from this sad and tired little town that liked to call itself a city.

  She hoped that her dad knew how hard she’d tried (but not all that hard, said something in the back of her mind) to get here in time.

  Tried and failed.

  As the beggars’ retreating footsteps crunched through the dried leaves, Marian knelt down and placed one rose on each of her parents’ graves, whispering a prayer taught to her by her mother at a time when the Mass was still spoken in Latin, the language of worship Mom had always preferred:

  “Intra tua vulnera aescode me,” she said, hoping she was remembering it correctly.

  She heard the approaching footsteps but paid them no mind.

  “Ne permittas me separari a te. Ab hoste maligno defende me. In hora mortis meae voca me; Et jub me venire ad te, Ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem—”

  She saw a shadow slowly rise up behind her to stretch over the graves.

  Spindly, almost twig-like arms and hands; a slender, tubular trunk; and a large, rounded head with its stem jutting upward.

  She smiled and felt a tear slip from her eye.

  For a moment, kneeling there under the entwined shadows, she was six years old again, listening as Mom read to her from L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, describing how Tip came to build Jack Pumpkinhead who would be his partner as they went in search of the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow. Jack Pumpkinhead, with his round eyes, three-cornered nose, and mouth like a crescent moon, living under the watchful gaze of Mombi the Sorceress. Jack had been Marian’s imaginary friend
through most of her childhood, always next to her during math tests at school, sitting by her bed at night after the Friday chiller movies to guard against the creatures she feared were waiting under the bed or crouching in the closet. Only she could see him then.

  Just like now.

  She was so pleased to have him with her again she almost couldn’t finish the prayer.

  “In sa . . . sa . . . ”

  “In saecula saeculorum,” said Jack Pumpkinhead behind her. “Amen.”

  “Amen,” echoed Marian.

  Something brushed against her shoulder, then rested there.

  A soft whisper, full of October melancholy: “Let’s sing our special song.”

  She reached up and, not turning to look, touched the twig-fingers of Jack’s hand. She knew his being here was just a bit of childhood whimsy she had never been able to discard (after all, a good actress was supposed to be able to recall feelings and experiences to enrich her performances), but, still, it amazed her how easily she was able to slip back into the Marian of childhood and find she still fit.

  The shadow softly sang: “Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead lived on a vine/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead thought it was fine . . . ”

  She thought there was something different about his voice, but not wanting to ruin this wonderful surprise by analyzing it to death, she answered in song, just as she always had: “First he was small and green, then big and yellow/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead is a very fine fellow.”

  She rose to her feet and turned to embrace him, dearest Jack who’d come back one last time to protect her from the grief and guilt she couldn’t face.

  His eyes glowed a sickly orange-red, casting diseased beams through the early evening mist. He was hunched and shuddering, a soul-sick animal.

  “I thought you had forgotten about me,” he said, and it was then that Marian knew what was different about his voice; it was no longer the light, happy tenor that she’d given him, it was the sound of an empty house when the door was opened, an empty bed in the middle of the night, or an empty crib that never knew an occupant; dead leaves skittering dryly across a cold autumn sidewalk; the low, mournful whistling of the wind as it passed through the branches of bare trees; it was a sound so completely, totally, irrevocably alone that hearing it just in a whisper’s instant made her long for the warmth and safety of home and hearth: even if her company there was now superfluous, at least she wouldn’t be alone as that sound.