Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  A small number of the locals commuted to the city—Utica in this case—and others stayed in town and dealt with the traveling New Englanders who came through during various times of the year; some just slumming, some heading down to Florida for a winter’s escape and taking their time to see the sights along the way.

  But really, this is a tale about the people of Beldam Woods, not the visitors who came to town. With perhaps a few small exceptions, like an old man coming home for the first time in a very long while.

  There are traditions that cover the world and some that are much, much smaller. Take for instance the twenty-odd year tradition in Beldam Woods, New York, of keeping alive a few old legends. Some of the old tales were told by children to other children for as long as there had been children in the area, like the story of the witch’s house and how it was haunted. The tale varied from year to year and from teller to teller, but the root of it remained the same. Inevitably, there was someone who could swear on a stack of bibles that someone they knew personally had a sibling or cousin who had actually seen the old house and gone in there. At least half the time said twice-removed acquaintance had seen or heard something. The other half had allegedly never been heard from again. If a third of the stories were true, the town would surely have been emptied of children decades ago.

  Those stories are not what were on Douglas Habersham’s mind, however, though there was a connection. Habersham had been the head librarian at the Beldam Woods Township Public Library for over two decades, and during that time he’d told his fair share of stories about the local hauntings and legends that hid in the darker corners of the town’s history. Those were the stories the children wanted to hear come October and the death of the year. What child doesn’t like a little scare? Remarkably few as far as Douglas could tell. So, year after year, he told the stories about Hattie and her children.

  Hattie, as the old legend said, was a witch. She was also an old favorite of the retired librarian. Retired, but hardly inactive. Though he no longer had the headaches of handling the budget or ordering new books and paying for them from whatever sources he could find, the notion of actually not working at the library was physically abhorrent to the man. He would sooner have dug his own grave than actually sit back and relax at home with little but his memories to keep him going. He had handed the reigns of running the old building over to his replacement, but he still dabbled in the events that took place there. There was no question in anyone’s mind as to whether or not he should be the one to tell the story of Hattie. Even Sue Baker, who now ran the place, was the first to look on his telling of the old story as a tradition. Hellfire and brimstone, he’d told the very same story to her when she was only seven years old. She’d listened to the tale with the same wide-eyed fear and anticipation as the children did every year and really, no one wanted to see a good thing brought to ruin.

  Every year, the weekend before Halloween, Douglas Habersham sat in one of the comfortable old chairs that were normally left near the magazine racks in the adult section of the library. These days someone other than him would take the deceptively heavy lounger to the children’s wing, but it always got there for him, nonetheless. And every year, he sat facing a half circle of children, some old enough that they normally wouldn’t be caught dead in the “kiddie library,” except on that one occasion. Some would hem and haw and fidget endlessly, at least until Douglas started speaking. As soon as he began, they practically froze in place.

  Douglas had a voice designed to enchant. His normal speaking voice dropped two octaves when he told his stories, and every child who heard him grew still, knowing that the words he said were meant for them alone. While he read, he looked to each child, found their eyes and spoke in that rich voice that, at least according to Missy Falmouth, sounded like Vincent Price in his heyday.

  Douglas always started the story the same way, with the same ominous warning, and it always got the attention of the little ones. “Listen carefully, children. What I tell you just might save your lives on Halloween night.” At least a handful of the kids would start looking around to see if anyone was smiling, maybe pulling their legs. Inevitably, they would find that almost everyone in the room was wearing an expression of mild dread mixed with excitement. “I need to tell you about Hattie, the witch, and why you should be especially careful on Halloween. You see, Hattie is looking for children just… like… YOU!” His finger would flash out, stabbing at a tyke, and in an instant that child was frozen, petrified. The old librarian’s face almost seemed to change when he chose his victim: his soft features became sharp and sinister for that instant, and most found it was all too easy to believe in witches…at least for that moment.

  Then, quick as a skipped heartbeat, he leaned back in his chair again and his face became the same, kindly face they all knew. But when he spoke, oh my, when he spoke it was to tell the story that they all came to anticipate and dread.

  “A long time ago, back when this place was little more than woods and a few cabins, there was an old woman who lived by herself just at the edge of the forest, where the marsh starts up and the hills begin to grow. Her name was Hatrice, but everyone in town called her Hattie.” If the issue had ever been pressed, and it had not, he would have admitted to making the name up. The old woman’s name was never mentioned in the old papers he’d found that told the story of the Beldam Woods witch.

  “Hattie was old, older than anyone in town could even guess. Her skin so thin you could just about see her skeleton hiding beneath the surface, like chicken bones wrapped once in a piece of tissue paper. She was small and bony and her face was deeply wrinkled. But don’t feel too sorry for her. As old and wrinkled as her body was, her heart was even worse.

  “You see, Hattie was a witch. She’d sold her soul to the Devil and turned her face away from God. As small and withered and old as she looked, she was never, ever helpless.” And here he would pause, his eyes looking slowly from one child to the next as a wicked little grin swept briefly over his face. “More than one unwary traveler found that out the hard way and wound up in her oven, as a roast for her and her children.

  “Well, even witches get lonely sometimes. Hattie was old, and now and then she needed help around her little farm, so she cast a spell on herself to make everyone see her as young and beautiful. And she cast love spells on three different men to get them to help her make her servants.”

  And here he paused as he often did, waiting for the light of understanding to come into the children’s eyes. A few seemed to catch on to what he was saying. Most did not and that suited him just fine. Someone else was welcome to explain the mating rituals of the average human being to the children. He just wanted to tell them stories.

  “Each of these men helped Hattie to make a new child. They helped her gather the materials she needed and she used her dark sorcery to finish what each man started. Before she was done she had three children, but, like their mother, they were not human. Her children grew very fast, and before the fall had become the winter, her first child was large enough to be called a man, instead of a baby.”

  He watered that part of the old legend down, and heavily. The documents he’d discovered, old papers that had no known author and were buried amid vast drifts of old town papers, stated that “the witch did seduce three respected men and use them to seed her.” And that after each of these seductions, “she did fornicate with Lucifer, creating hideous offspring as never before seen by man.” Again, it wasn’t really his place to start a sex-education lecture, especially not during story time at the library.

  “The first of her helpers she named ‘Old Bones,’ and he was a sight to see; all bones and teeth, with no muscles or skin on his body. He looked just like a skeleton, but one that could walk and one that sometimes got hungry. Old Bones couldn’t eat like you and me. He was brittle; he had no way to protect his bones, so he had to take the bones of other people to add to his own whenever he chipped a toe bone or knocked a finger loose. And he was clumsy, so tha
t happened a lot. He walked through the woods all day and night, seeking new bones to add to his body.

  “The second of her helpers was called ‘Patches,’ and he wasn’t in much better shape than Old Bones. He wasn’t as clumsy, but Patches had all the skin that Old Bones didn’t, and not much to support that skin. So he couldn’t walk like you and me, but had to be happy with catching the wind and flying around like a kite. Well, how many of you have ever had a kite? How many times have you had a kite that got stuck in a tree? Just like a kite in a tree, he sometimes got torn, and when that happened he had to have new skin to mend what got done to him.”

  And here, Douglas would always pause, waiting for the children to get over their small giggling fits or to recover from the puzzled looks they sometimes got. It was asking a lot of the younger ones to gather the meaning of what he said. Sometimes it took them a few seconds, but mostly they caught on quickly. Now and then a few of the kids would bring him pictures they’d drawn of Patches, and almost always they drew him as a kite with a mean face. Though there were no descriptions of Old Bones, there were a few sentences about what Patches was supposed to have looked like. The children were closer than they knew to what those descriptions said. In full the statements read: “The Beast called Patches is a foul-smelling thing, a piecemeal mockery of what a man should be. It slides across the ground like a fat, flattened serpent, and moves in much the same fashion. How such an abomination could exist is unknown to me, but I have seen the demon with my own eyes and know that these words are true. And when the wind was strong, I saw the demon flying in the air, moving like a bat or a great sheet caught by the breeze.” The description was preposterous, of course, and Douglas couldn’t help but wonder what sort of spirits the man had been possessed by. He suspected whiskey was the culprit, and probably not very well distilled at that.

  “And where do you suppose Patches got the skin to fix himself?” Here Douglas inevitably looked at the children and scanned for the one who looked most doubtful of his yarn. It was always best to get the doubters involved, especially if they looked like they were going to start talking. “He got the skin from children he found out on the road, late at night when they should have been in bed. Children just like you.” He always spoke softly at that point, so that the children felt obligated to lean in closer and then when he had them within touching distance, he pointed to the doubter. To date, every one of the kids he’d singled out had damn near jumped out of his or her skin.

  The story was scary, and he was the very first to admit that, but then, Halloween was about a good scare and a laugh or two. Still, because he feared giving the children too many nightmares, he’d started using visual aids a few years back. In the illustrations he drew—which were not bad for a rank amateur, if he did say so himself—Old Bones had an oversized skull and goofy teeth, to take away a little of the sting from the story, and Patches sat on a log, sewing a patch onto his own belly. Patches had a cartoonish face and his tongue stuck out of his mouth in concentration. He looked about as terrifying as Casper the Friendly Ghost. That was okay. Even with the silly images to dilute the impact, most of the children were properly terrified by that point.

  “Her last son was called the ‘Pumpkin Man,’ or as some knew him, ‘Mister Sticks.’ He looked like a scarecrow, with a pumpkin head and bare tree branches for arms. Of all her children, he was the meanest.” And here he showed his Disney-esque picture of a ratty old scarecrow with a scowling jack-o-lantern head and beat up suspenders. As with the other pictures, he made the creature fairly comical.

  “Mister Sticks did not like many people and he hated little children, because when he was very young he was picked on by a few of the local boys at a nearby farm. Those boys called him names and chased after him whenever they saw him, because they knew he was a monster.” And nowhere at all in the writings was there any mention of any of the three children of the witch ever being young, nor of their being abused by the other children, but Douglas always felt a few morals were good for a story. “He grew up mean, and he grew up hating everyone, but most especially, he hated bullies.”

  Inevitably, Douglas Habersham would look around the room and find at least a few of the bigger children looking a little more sheepish than the rest. The thing about children is that most of them haven’t mastered the art of deception, no matter how well they might think they have. He made a point of marking those children on his mental to-be-watched checklist. There wasn’t much he could do about their behavior away from the library, but he made a point of keeping an eye on them around the smaller children from that moment on. That lasted all the way through to his retirement, and even after that. If he noticed anything, he let Sue Baker know about it.

  “So the three children of the witch—Old Bones, Patches, and the Pumpkin Man—did things for Hattie. They built her a shack to live in and hunted down food for her to eat. Unfortunately for the people around the area, what she liked to eat most were little children, right around your ages.” And did the children gasp to hear THAT little morsel of information? Oh yes, indeed they did. “Old Bones used to hide himself in the woods, near the birch trees, and wait for little children late at night. And sometimes, he would lure them out of their houses with promises of candy and other treats. Any he caught were as good as cooked in a stew pot, and it wasn’t long before the children started listening to their parents’ warnings to stay inside after the sun set.

  “When Old Bones failed to get the children, it was up to his brother, Patches, to do the witch’s dirty work. Patches could hide better than anyone else ever could; he could fold himself up and make himself look like a blanket or a nice leather coat. Any children who were careless found out the hard way that he was as fast as a snake. Patches’ favorite trick was to make himself look like a nice new coat, just the right size for a child, and then wait in a place where a coat didn’t belong. The smart children left the unexpected prize alone, but a few got careless and they too were taken away to old Hattie’s stewing pot. After a while, the children started listening when their folks told them not to touch what wasn’t theirs, and that made things better for a time.

  “But Hattie had one servant left, and he was the most cunning of all. He waited in the woods—and remember, back then there were woods all around the town and in between the houses, too—and he waited patiently. Now, some of you might have heard the story of Jack of the Lantern. He’s the reason we carve pumpkins every year at Halloween. Well, the Pumpkin Man had heard that story too, and he made a lantern for himself and lit it late in the night and waited for foolish children. I don’t know that there was ever a child who could resist trying to find a shortcut.” Here, again, Douglas always paused, his eyes looking over the children and looking for that little start of guilt. Most all of them twitched at least a little. “With a good shortcut, you can stay out a few minutes later than you should and still be home in time for supper or bed. Well, Mister Sticks, the Pumpkin Man, he knew all about staying out late, and he had done it a few times himself. So he knew just where to wait for the children who didn’t want to stay on the paths and thought for sure they could find their way home in the dark. All he had to do was wait for the children to come to him, and they followed him and his lantern all the way to Hattie’s house, desperate to find safety from the darkness.”

  He let the kids think about that one for a few minutes, knowing that at least a few of them gave it a lot of thought before it was all said and done. It wasn’t all that hard to believe that a kid might follow a stranger in the dead of night if that kid was properly lost in the woods.

  “Mister Sticks was patient. He waited for them until they came to him and asked for his help. The only children who were safe from him where the ones that stayed on the paths and made sure they got home when their folks told them to be home; those that didn’t listen were never seen again.”

  He let that one sink in for a while, normally giving the children a good half-minute or more to think about it. He liked morals in his stories.r />
  “Well, what can I tell you about Hattie? She was a mean one, by all accounts, and evil as could be. There are stories I’ve heard passed down about how she put curses on some of her neighbors, from Milifred Todd—who she made grow old overnight—to Winston Harrow, who said rude things to her and lost his tongue for his troubles. His tongue just fell out of his mouth after she looked at him and made a sign in the air in front of her. She was a mean old witch if ever there was one.

  “For a while almost everyone in town was too scared of her to even think about punishing her for being so mean. There’s a story of one man she turned into a dog, and how she turned his wife into a cat, just because they looked at her and then whispered something she thought might have been an insult. People around here hated her and they wanted her to leave the area, but more importantly they feared her. Witches like Hattie were few and far between, thank goodness, but when you ran across one, it was hard to know what to do.”

  He could see the questions on their young faces, and if he were feeling particularly expansive, Douglas would answer a few of them. Normally they wanted to know what other horrid things Hattie had done, and he would make a few up as he went along. What few descriptions he could find of the things she’d allegedly done were a little too grim for children. One account had her boiling a man in his own blood, from the inside out. Not really the sort of fare young minds should have a part of. At least not as far as Douglas Habersham was concerned. Children were to be protected from the worst things. They would have time later to deal with the darker aspects of life.

  “Well, late one Halloween night, when the moon was full and the sky was clear, they decided to deal with wicked old Hattie, and her servants, too. Oh, the people in the town were scared, but they were angry about what she’d done to their children, so they got as many of the braver folks together as they could, and they went out to the Witch’s Hollow—yes, that’s right, out in the marshes just east of us—and set about getting rid of Hattie.