Well, yes, to me, it did. To Mother too, I knew, but she shook her head. “Where did you hear about this?” she asked.
“I hear things,” Millie said. “I make an effort to stay informed. And another,” she said, her gaze inching back toward me, “they take a large candle and they knead it and prod it until it becomes nine candles and then they light them all without touching a flame to them.”
“I don’t think you have that quite right,” murmured Mother.
“And there’s another one, where you look at yourself in the mirror and keep looking until you can see through your skin, and then you draw your own heart and send the drawing in a letter to someone else.”
“Why would you do that?” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.
“So that they can control you,” she said. “You are saying, ‘I do not want myself and so I am giving you the gift of me.’ Or something like that.”
“It’s very strange here,” I said.
“Yes,” said Millie. “Very strange. And another one where you dig up a tree in one place and then carry it to a different place and then plant it there. A sort of tree-stealing day.”
“It’s a tree-planting day,” said Mother. “And most of them around here don’t even know it’s a holiday. Almost nobody celebrates it.”
“But you have to get a tree from somewhere,” Millie insisted. “If you’re going to plant it, don’t you have to dig it up from somewhere first? It seems to me that it’s more a tree-stealing day than a tree-planting day.”
Mother shrugged.
“Can we at least steal a tree?” asked Millie.
“Absolutely not,” said Mother.
“Why not?” Millie whined. When Mother didn’t answer she sighed and went on.
“And then there’s the one where we put on a face not our own and go from one door to the next and take things, and—”
But Mother had reached out and grabbed her arm. “Where did you hear about this?”
“I,” said Millie. “The immature specimens down the street, I was listening to them as they walked to the instructional center. They were talking about it.”
“Did they see you?”
“No, of course not,” said Millie. “I would never—”
“And what did they say this day was called?”
“Halloween,” said Millie.
“Hallows’ Eve?”
Millie considered, shrugged. “Maybe.”
Mother let go of her arm. “Now that,” said Mother, “that is something we can celebrate. That’s not their holiday: it’s ours.”
That, for Millie, was permission enough. For the next several weeks Halloween was all she could speak about. Any moment she heard voices outside she was out there stalking them, hidden, listening. She was out there so much that people began to sense her. Not see her, exactly, but they began looking over their shoulders more often, increasingly sure they were missing something.
“Don’t get caught, Millie,” I warned her, “or you’ll end up like Aunt Agnes.”
“What happened to Aunt Agnes?” she asked, seemingly innocently. But when she saw my expression, she said, “Joking. Don’t worry. I won’t get caught.”
Millie was outside the house more often than not, gathering facts about the holiday, getting the local take on the thing. Father didn’t like it, and retreated more and more often to the liquor cabinet, which, perhaps because he had created it, proved surprisingly endless. Before long, he was spending so much time passed out on the floor that the walls of the house began to run and grow furzed around the edges. Mother had to kick him awake and walk him into semi-sobriety, or else we would have been off to the next place, or maybe to no place at all.
About two weeks in, Millie gathered the family together to report what she had learned. She had been, as it turned out, to an instructional center, and had benefited, from her vantage in the coat closet, from a series of short sermons related to the “true” nature of “Halloween.” These included the carving of pumpkins into the shapes of those rejected by both heaven and hell, the donning of costumes (by which she meant a sort of substitute skin affixed over the real skin, though in this locale they used an artificial rather than, as we were prone to do, an actual skin), and the “doorstep challenge.” This last one, she said, was accompanied by slapping the face of the respondent with a glove, and then saying something such as: “Shall you accept a trick from my hand, or shall you satisfy the aggression of that same hand by soothing it with a treat?”
“That was how it was phrased?” asked Mother.
Millie shrugged. “No, not exactly. I’m improving it.”
“And the glove slap?”
“Also an improvement,” she admitted.
But improving it, Mother told us, was not something we were meant to do with the holiday. If we were to practice this holiday, we should do our best to practice it exactly as it was done locally. We needed to fit in.
“Even the artificial skin?” asked Millie.
Mother hesitated. “You have a particular skin in mind?” she asked. “Other than the one you currently wear?”
“Oh yes,” said Millie, “very much so.”
Mother thought for a while. Then Father slurred from the adjacent room, “Hell, let the girls have their fun.” And so she shrugged and acquiesced.
The plan was for me to tie Millie’s current skin to a chair and then for her to tie mine to a chair, and then she would lead us to the new artificial skin she had in mind. “You’ll like it,” she said to me. “Once you’ve tried this new skin, you won’t want to come back.”
“But you will come back,” Mother warned.
“Of course,” said Millie. Though from the way she said it, I knew it would be reluctantly.
The tying down of Millie’s current skin went smoothly, particularly since she waited to extrude herself until the skin was firmly restrained. I watched her ooze out through the nostrils and become once again just Millie plain and simple. The skin was for a moment inert, and then it came to itself, beginning to scream, then screaming full throated until Mother gagged it.
“What do you suppose it remembers?” asked Millie, her voice papery and whisper thin beside me, a kind of light flutter against my eardrum. “Does it know how I’ve made use of it?”
“It must know something,” I said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be screaming.”
What we hadn’t considered was that now, out of her skin, Millie couldn’t tie my own skin to a chair. And I could hardly tie myself up. “Shall I go borrow a skin,” whispered Millie, “and bring it back to do the job?”
Mother sighed. “I’ll handle it,” she said.
She tied me tight—she had had the most practice—and also pushed a cloth deep into my mouth while I was still in the skin: easier that way. And then I wriggled about inside the flesh and slowly detached myself and, panting, dragged myself out.
Millie led me, a flitting form. Still panting, I tried to keep up. Mother was there at the door, arms crossed, watching us go. It felt good to be out, good to be able to stretch. Why even bother with a new skin? I wondered. But when I voiced this to Millie, she scolded me.
“This is important,” she said. “We’re getting to know them, seeing how they celebrate. Once we understand that, we’ll understand much more, and soon we won’t have to move so often and may even start to feel like we’re them.”
“Why would we want to feel like that?” I asked.
She ignored this. She led me to a telephone pole, one without climbing pegs on the side, and then sped up it. I followed. A moment later we were beside the wire, the buzzing loud, and louder of course because we were there. And then she slipped into the current and flowed away.
I followed. I could barely keep up, and nearly lost track of her in the flow. Too late, I saw her clamber out. I had to force myself back hard against the current and barely managed to reach the step-down. By the time I pulled myself out, Millie was already across a lawn and headed toward the porch of a house.
It wasn’t a true house, like ours was. You had the sense, even from a single glance, that it was made of nothing but brick and wood and mortar, not likely to last more than a few dozen years, and was rooted stolidly to one spot. What good, really, was a house like that? Why she was interested in it at all was impossible for me to say.
“Look,” she said.
And there it was: on the porch, half hidden behind the bushes, a mannequin of some kind, a black tattered dress, face made to look old, long white hair, a dark peaked hat, eyes like burning coals. We approached with care but something about it saw us in a way that the locals had not, and it began cackling at our approach, its eyes strobing.
“What is it?” I asked. “Some kind of moving statue?”
“You can get inside,” she said. “Go ahead, climb in.”
And so I did. Not climb so much as flow quickly in. It was a different sensation from the fleshy skins I usually occupied, and decidedly stiff. The arms moved just a little, constrained as they were. The head swiveled a few inches in either direction. The legs wouldn’t move much at all. A moment later my sister had forced her way in as well.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s tight in here.”
“Stop grumbling,” Millie said. “There’s plenty of room.”
She was right, mainly. But still, it was awkward with both of us operating the artificial skin from the inside. Slowly we got used to it. Working together, we could force the joints of the arms farther. We could make the fingers snap open and closed. Together, with effort, we could even make the legs creak and move.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, we wait,” she said.
We stayed there as night got deeper. A person resembling our father who was perhaps a father himself came out of the house that the porch was attached to and peered at us through thick glasses. He went and fiddled with the cord that was attached to our artificial skin, unplugging it from the wall and plugging it back in again.
“What do you suppose he wants?” I whispered.
“Hush,” my sister said.
Eventually, seeming to grow frustrated, he unplugged the cord and went back inside. Once she was sure he wasn’t coming back out, Millie said, “The skin must have been made to do something that it’s not doing now that we’re inside.”
“It was doing something when we arrived,” I said. “Eyes glowing, sounds of some sort. Cackling maybe, or screams.”
“Eyes glowing, cackling, screams,” said my sister. “I can manage that.” And she started rummaging around within the thing until the porch was bathed in a deep red glow and a sound box embedded within the artificial skin was making noises like a giant being strangled.
“Too loud,” I shouted. “Too much light!” She let it all go at once, the porch immediately dark and silent.
A moment later the man burst through the door and back onto the porch, looking frantically around. He regarded the unplugged cord a long moment and then, mumbling and shaking his head, went back inside.
“What was that all about?” Millie asked.
“How should I know?” I said.
We settled in. We waited until the lights inside the house went off, and then we waited as the stars whirled lazily above us. We were good at waiting. The night began to fade and still we waited.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked Millie.
“Shhh,” she said. “For the right day. For Halloween to start.”
The sun rose and it became warm inside the skin. I stretched and tangled with Millie, and then elbowed her until she gave me space. The day slowly crept by. A family came out of the house attached to our porch, first a father like the one we had seen last night, then two immature specimens, then what we guessed to be a mother. The sun rose and passed above us—not directly overhead but clinging more to one half of the sky. Eventually the family, bit by bit, returned. Or some family anyway—I couldn’t be exactly sure they were the same ones.
The sun was just beginning to set when I realized there was someone else inside the skin with us, someone of such presence that she was pushing me up against the walls of the skin, making me start to ooze through.
“Hi Mom,” I managed.
“I tell you girls that you can celebrate one holiday and you think that gives you permission to stay out all night.”
“No,” I said, “I’m just … Sorry, Mom.”
“Not even a note,” she said. “What have I done to deserve this?”
“We weren’t doing any harm,” said Millie. “We hadn’t even gone far.”
Mom turned to her. “And you: do you want to end up like Aunt Agnes?” she asked.
“No, Mother,” she managed.
For a long time she was silent. I thought she was going to drag us home, that the holiday would be over for us before it even began. And then she sighed. “We’ll deal with this tomorrow. Home by midnight,” she said, “and straight from here to the wires and then home. No stops!”
“Yes, Mom,” I said.
“Millie?”
“Yes, Mom,” she said.
“Good,” said Mother, and as abruptly as she had arrived, she was gone.
It was barely dark, the streetlights buzzing on, when they began to come. Small groups of them, two or three, wearing peculiar false skins tightened over their own skins. They were immature specimens, a dozen years along or less. Invariably, they were accompanied by one or two mature local adults who did not wear false skins but instead stood with folded arms at the sidewalk’s end, far away from the porch.
“Are they not allowed to come onto the porch unless they are wearing a false skin?” I wondered.
“I don’t know,” whispered Millie. “If that’s the case, why would they come at all if they didn’t have one?”
Of the young specimens that came onto the porch, there were those that wore skins resembling animals and those that wore skins resembling the dead. Others chose skins that resembled nothing I had ever seen—strange shining figures with bug-like eyes, figures with veiled faces with symbols emblazoned on their chests. There were even a few that adapted the terrifying species designated the clown.
“They don’t all take the same sorts of skins?” I asked.
“No,” said Millie. “Apparently not. They take skins of all kinds.”
“What good is that?” I asked. To this she had no answer.
They stepped onto the porch, walked past us, and approached the door. They rang the doorbell. When the door was open, they cried out the ritual phrase Trick or treat. But yet, there was no trick to be had, only the rapid distribution of fistfuls of sweets followed by the shooing of these double-skinned creatures away.
“So, if they don’t produce the sweets rapidly enough, that’s when the trick comes?” I asked.
“That’s my understanding,” said Millie. “Then they will soap a window, or throw rotten fruit at a façade, or kill the primary member of the household.”
It seemed to me that there was a large gap between the first two tricks she had mentioned and the third. Surely, I suggested, there must be some tricks in between. Such as the severing of a finger, say, or the slow torture of one of the secondary members of the household—an immature specimen, say, or a pet. Even killing someone other than the primary member of the household struck me as a viable intermediary step.
But my sister claimed to have her information from a combination of overheard talk and television viewed through the window of the local bar and grill, two sources of authority that, taken in tandem, were difficult to dispute.
Nevertheless, we might have continued to argue had we not both simultaneously become aware that one of the doubly skinned specimens on the porch was regarding not the man with the bowl of sweets at the door, but us.
“Hush,” said my sister to me.
But the specimen came closer, then closer still, peering quizzically at the fabric and metal and rubber armature that contained us. The specimen’s false skin was colored all orange and black. It sported black boots and an o
range skirt. It had a tall black hat, floppy and crimped, impractical in every respect, and carried a black broom. Meant to represent some sort of ancient and inefficient cleaning woman, perhaps.
It came very close indeed, looking right into the eyes of the armature, and then its vision slid down and to one side. I could see that it was looking through the armature and right at my sister.
“What are you doing in there?” it said to her.
In retrospect, I think my sister, so long undetected, so long unseen, was not prepared to be seen. Before I could stop her, she’d taken control of the armature’s hands and locked them around the small creature’s neck.
There was a commotion on the porch, someone was screaming. The bowl of sweets dropped and shattered and the man who had been holding it was prying at the artificial hand, trying to free the child.
I had a choice. Either I could save the child or I could support my sister. I could add my will to her own and between the two of us we could easily snap the creature’s neck. Or else I could loosen her fingers.
In the end I did nothing. Instead, I fled. In just a moment, I was out of the artificial skin and had flowed back down the sidewalk and up the pole and into the wire. A moment later I was back at home, coming conscious within the skin I had occupied before.
Mother was standing there, patiently waiting, wearing her traveling clothes. When she saw I was back, she cut the ropes, quickly freeing me.
“Where’s your sister?” she asked.
“She was seen,” I said.
She just nodded, her skin’s lips a thin line. I got up and massaged my wrists. My father was standing there beside her, an ice pack pressed to his head. “She may still come back,” he said.
I sat there, nervously waiting. In the end, yes, she did come, with a deep gasping breath, and in a state of panic. She looked at me with fury.
“You left me,” she accused.
Song for the Unraveling of the World Page 6
