Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  “Why did they choose Halloween night? Well, remember, not everyone in those days even believed in Halloween, or what it really means. Some of them didn’t understand that the dead come back to see the living on that one special night, or that goblins can roam around and cause mischief. They just picked that night because they thought Hattie would not expect them. They took their time and snuck up the old dirt road that led to her shack, most of them carrying lanterns and a few of them carrying dried wood and ropes. You see, they knew she was a witch, so all they had to do was go about getting rid of her the best way they could think of. Most people agreed the best thing to do was to burn her at the stake.”

  And again he’d pause, letting them think about what that meant. Most every child there had probably gotten burned a time or two, though hopefully none who’d been hurt too badly. The only time he’d ever changed the story was the year Tommy Wilkinson had been there. Tommy had, indeed, been burned rather severely once upon a time, and had the scars to prove it. The idea was to make the kids a little scared, not to leave them psychologically traumatized. The kid had gone through enough already.

  “What they didn’t count on was that Hattie was expecting them. They thought they’d been clever and that she’d be unprepared, but Hattie was a witch, and that meant she had special powers. She listened to the wind and it told her what the people had planned for her.”

  Inevitably, one of the kids who was a little older would ask how anyone could listen to the wind, and he would explain. “Have you ever heard the whistle of the wind between the trees on a cold, autumn night? The way the leaves seem almost to sigh as they roll down the street?” When they nodded, he’d smile. “That’s the way the wind talks, and being a witch, Hattie knew how to listen.” It was, as with most of his stories, complete fabrication. But it made enough sense to shut up the doubters and let him move to the finish of the story.

  “Hattie thought she had the men who came for her that night. She sent her servants out to catch them all, and figured she wouldn’t have to go hungry for a long, long time with that many people to bake in her oven.”

  The children normally leaned closer, and a few of them even held their breath, waiting to find out what happened. “But she was in for a surprise. The men knew all about her servants, and what they did was wait until all three of the monsters had left the old shack in the woods; hiding themselves until Old Bones, Patches, and Mister Sticks were gone before they grabbed Hattie.

  “Oh, Hattie screamed and cried and begged them to leave her alone. She swore that she was a God-fearing woman and tried her best to make those men believe her. But they were smarter than she thought, and they took her from her shack and burned that old building clean to the ground. Well, the witch showed her true colors then, because that old place was where she kept all of her magical fixings; eye of newt and toadstools, even her broom.

  “When her house caught fire she started cursing those men left and right and they learned just how mean a witch she was. One of the men fell to the ground, screaming and trying his best to get away, but she caught him with one of her simpler spells and he turned into a wild pig right then and there. His clothes fell off him, everything except his socks, and he ran away into the woods of Witch’s Hollow, never to be seen again. Another man had the gumption to try catching her hands so she couldn’t make any more magic, but she turned him into a tree right where he stood. Any of you who’ve ever been out to the Witch’s Hollow might have seen that tree. It’s black as night and covered with little red, spotted mushrooms. I don’t know of anyone who ever saw another tree like it.

  “Well, those men were scared, but they knew what they had to do. The men grabbed parts of the old witch’s shack that were still burning and chased after Hattie, because everyone knows that witches can’t abide fire. She tried to get away from them by running deeper into the swamp and throwing her hexes at all the other men chasing her. Some of them were changed by her magic—one turned into a snake as long as a school bus and another turned to stone and sank in the waters, but she made a mistake and fell into a spot filled with quicksand. All of the men watched as she sank into that deep mucky mess, and they waited for almost an hour after she’d gone down before they finally left the place.”

  And here he’d pause again, waiting for the kids to calm down a little and waiting to administer the real fear of the story. Some of the children would breathe a sigh of relief, glad to find the worst of the story was over, but those few were the ones who hadn’t been paying attention to the details.

  When Douglas Habersham spoke again, his voice was always little more than a deep whisper, and the children who listened could practically hear the fear in his voice. “The witch was dead, but her three servants were never found. They weren’t people. They were monsters. Some say they’re still out there, in the Witch’s Hollow, waiting for the right time to bring their creator back from the grave. But it may be that they aren’t waiting so much as planning. They could be almost anywhere at all, and now, with Halloween almost here, they might be coming into this very town looking for fresh, tender morsels to take home and cook up as dinner.

  “So watch yourselves, children. Be prepared and stay away from strangers. None of the monsters are very bright, but just in case, you should listen to the rules your folks make for you. Don’t stay out after dark, and never, ever go into the woods without a grown up. And remember most of all, on Halloween, that the monsters are out there, and they are real.”

  That was enough. It was foolishness, most of what he said was little more than a lie based on the odd papers he’d found, but it was enough to make the children scared and wary, which was exactly what he aimed for. Cautious children didn’t run in front of cars in the darkness, and they almost never wandered off alone on a cold, October night. Douglas Habersham loved kids, had always loved them. He wanted them safe on the one night of the year when they wanted nothing more than to go absolutely crazy with their costumes and the candy they received.

  Besides, it was fun to tell a spooky story now and then.

  A few things had changed over the course of the years. The story was the same but these days he had better props. Instead of a few crude pictures to illustrate the tale, he had puppets, wooden effigies carved by Lenny Maguire, a man who made high quality, custom-designed furniture and remembered his stories fondly. Last year they’d added a soundtrack of special effects noises and moody seasonal music.

  He was looking forward to telling his tale again this year, and still pondering what he could add to make it more of an event for the kids, when the knock came at the front door of his little home.

  Douglas’s house was small and neat. Being a librarian had never made him rich, but he’d always managed comfortable without too much effort. Had he ever bothered with marriage or children that might have been a different story, but neither possibility had ever appealed to him.

  He tilted his head slightly and frowned, having no idea who might want to visit him this late at night. The hallway was only a few strides from where he had the carved figures of the witch and her servants, but he’d only made half the distance before the knocking started again, louder this time.

  “Hold on, I’m almost there.” The greeting was called out softly, but with just a hint of impatience. Douglas had never been fond of noise. That was one of the reasons he’d chosen a career as a librarian.

  He reached the door and pulled it open as he brought himself to a halt. The world outside of his comfy, warm house was well chilled and darker than he’d expected. Daylight Savings had just ended the prior weekend, and he was still adjusting to the shift. It took him a second to actually notice the figure standing out on his darkened porch. His porch shouldn’t have been dark. He’d replaced the bulb on the outside lamp only a few weeks ago. The figure, short, thin, and male if he was right in his judgment of the barely seen shadow, stepped forward slightly as he noticed him.

  Douglas Habersham let out a small noise of surprise as the shadow stepped t
oward him. His mind had been on rather ghastly stuff, and he supposed his nerves were a bit more distressed than he’d originally thought.

  “Mister Habersham?” The voice sounded old, decrepit. Next to whoever was standing out on his porch, he seemed positively adolescent, at least judging by the voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve traveled a long way to see you, sir. I’ve heard a few rumors, and I wanted to confirm them with you.”

  “Rumors?”

  “Oh, yes. Rumors.” The voice rasped, drawing in breaths that seemed to take an effort. The figure stepped forward a bit and Habersham felt a sudden need to step back, almost as if the man in front of him were hot enough to sear him, though that wasn’t the reason. No, there was just something about the man moving toward him that made his skin crawl.

  “I’m sorry, mister…?” The man didn’t respond immediately and Douglas Habersham pushed on. “I’m sorry. Rumors about what?”

  “I’ve heard tales that you are spreading stories about my family.” He stepped forward again, until he was only a few inches from Douglas’s face. He was still blacked out by the shadows, but Habersham started getting a hint of what he might look like and felt a fine flurry of ice spill into his stomach at the thought of seeing the stranger any better. Something about the way that withered silhouette moved seemed positively sinister.

  “I assure you, I don’t make it a habit to tell stories about anyone living in this town or anywhere else.” Douglas did his best to sound offended, but his voice shook just the slightest bit.

  “Oh, I hope that’s true. I really, really do. I’d hate to think of anyone telling tales about my mother.” The figure stepped forward again, and was revealed in the light spilling past the threshold into Douglas’s house. The face the light showed him was ancient indeed, with skin weathered to a nearly leathery finish, tightly drawn over a skull that seemed too large for his frame and eyes that seemed almost sunken into the sockets around them. The expression he wore on his withered face was one of amusement, which was not exactly what Douglas had expected.

  “Who are you?”

  The stranger’s suit was a few decades out of fashion and all in black wool. He dusted an infinitesimal fleck of debris from the left sleeve before he answered. “You already know the answer to that, Mister Habersham.” The eyes looked at him with shrewd, cruel intelligence. He pushed through the doorway, and though Douglas tried to stop him, the old man brushed him aside with enough force to stagger the librarian. The old man should have been able to, maybe, push a curtain out of his way, but Habersham was practically knocked to the ground.

  “See here! Where do you get off barging into my house?” The words were harsh, but the tone was fearful.

  “I find I have little tolerance for rumor mongers, Mister Habersham. If my manners are lacking it is merely because of the stories I’ve heard of you telling.” He looked over his shoulder as he spoke, walking slowly but steadily into Douglas’s study. The room was cluttered with his notes and the documentation from dozens of pet projects that had been aborted long before they could have borne fruit. A fascination with the town’s history had never led to any of the numerous papers he’d meant to add to the local library’s documents, but had instead lead to mountainous piles of photocopies and a few dozen notebooks filled with the retired librarian’s precise, tight scrawl.

  The study also had his props for the Halloween stories. Habersham followed the old man as he wandered into the room and started looking around. Long, thin fingers, deceptively frail-looking beneath withered, dry flesh, touched this and that, looking at odd pieces of paper and documents of every variety. “What is this? Research?” The old man’s voice rasped the words out into the air with a hiss. “A little study on the history of this fine little burg?”

  “Look. I’m about ten seconds away from calling the police. You have four of those seconds to explain yourself.” Enough was enough. He’d served in the Army and done his tour of duty in some of the worst places in Asia. Douglas was getting old, true, but the man in front of him was older by at least a few decades. Senility was no excuse for rudely walking into his house uninvited.

  Hands reached out, grabbing one of the carved figures from his story. Old Bones’ wooden body rattled as it was lifted, and the round, animated eyes set into the comical skull face wobbled in their sockets. “This is supposed to be Bones?”

  The wooden skeleton flew across the room, narrowly missing Douglas’s face as he ducked the missile. Painted wood and metal joints exploded in every direction from the point of impact. What might have been one of Old Bones’ fingers slapped Douglas in the chest before bouncing to the ground. “Be glad he’s not here himself. He’d take that personally. My brother has never been known for his sense of humor.”

  “Your brother? What are you talking about?” The old man was addled, he had to be. There was no other explanation that made any sense. Surely he didn’t think the puppet was supposed to represent his real brother, not unless he thought he was…

  Douglas stepped back again, his eyes widening. “That’s it. Get out. I’m calling the police and you’d best be long gone by the time they show up.”

  The old man smiled again. It was the sort of smile that said nothing at all about being a friendly person. He reached into the right front pocket of his jacket as he once again walked toward Douglas. This time that feeling of dread in the librarian was strong enough to make him gasp. He’d been afraid more than a few times in Korea. He’d been scared on several occasions when his father came home drunk and decided it was time to teach his son how to be a man. This was worse. His skin pulled into gooseflesh as the old man started changing before his eyes, growing taller and thinning out even more as he rose to his full height.

  The hand that was in his coat pocket slowly came back into view, looking much different than it had before. The fingers were almost impossibly long, and trapped within their confines was a light that seared Douglas’s eyes. The glow was at least as bright as the noonday sun, and if it wasn’t for the hand around the source of the illumination, Douglas was certain he’d have actually been burned.

  The figure moved closer, loomed over the elderly librarian and smiled in a way that was decidedly unpleasant. “I think, Mister Habersham, that our conversation is now at an end.”

  II

  Jeremy Koslowski was not expecting to find anything strange on the way home from school, but then, few things that are found by accident are ever expected. What he found was most decidedly one of a kind and he didn’t think he really found it by accident. Spotting the white thing seemed to feel almost like it was destiny.

  Jeremy was thirteen and finally allowed to walk home himself, despite his mother’s fears that he would wind up dead in a gutter inside of a week. The fact that no one had been murdered in Beldam Woods in the last fifteen years didn’t matter. It was just the way his mother was. Oh, she would never have gone on about it in front of Jeremy. Not in a million years. But she had no hesitation to speak to his father about her worries, and the walls were thin.

  His dad was the one who had decided that Jeremy was old enough to walk home by himself. The family was a bit old-fashioned and so his mother agreed, whether she liked the idea or not. That was the way things were done in the Koslowski family. He was walking home, reveling in the cool, autumn weather, dry and crisp and seasoned with the scents of burning leaves and apples from the Wiesmuller farm. For Jeremy the change in weather was a promise of Halloween and an escape from the heat of a home without air-conditioning, and he savored it as surely as the freedom to walk instead of taking the bus.

  What he found that day did not follow the normal rules. What he found was a strange and wondrous thing, and alive, if just barely. He saw the thing only because it made a sound, a weak little mewling noise, not at all unlike a kitten might make if it were injured. Jeremy looked toward the sound and saw the thing as it moved weakly, trying to drag itself away from the roadside and toward the woods.

  An
y boy or girl over the age of seven and living in the more rural areas knows that an injured animal can be a dangerous animal. They might take a bit longer to catch on to that fact in the city, where most of the animals they run across are on leashes or in cages but even there they learn to know the dangers a wounded rat or dog can present. Jeremy was smart enough not to merely reach out and grab the poor thing; teeth and claws didn’t have to be large to make wounds. He picked up a stick and weighed it carefully, testing the strength. Now, a good number of thirteen-year-old boys would use that very stick to play rather unpleasant games with a wounded animal. It seems to come with the territory of being an adolescent. Just ask any kid who’s found out what it’s like to be an outsider and said teenager can tell you horror stories. Jeremy was not a victim in most cases, but neither was he a bully. He took the stick to keep the animal from biting or clawing if it decided that its pain should be shared.

  From a distance he had trouble deciding what it might be, aside from in pain and alive. Up close, he wasn’t quite so certain about the latter. It moved, that was for certain, and it made noise, but he’d never in all of his years—which, remember, seemed pretty long to him at least—seen anything that pale or thin that was capable of motion and noise. The body was short, the ribcage obvious with every bone clearly defined under thin and leathery looking flesh. The limbs—there were four and Jeremy assumed they were legs—were long and delicate in appearance. The head looked too large for the body and almost too heavy for the thin neck to support. The dead grass it moved through looked stronger.