He moved to the next house, the next pumpkin. When he reached the end of the block, the cup was a quarter full. By the time he’d gone another block, the measuring cup was half full.
His life had been normal and boring until the witch had shown up. Then she had to go smell like smoke, and the sea, and cinnamon, and make him see that life was terrible, and unfair. And it was beautiful, too.
Because the house settled around the witch, and the clomp-clomp of her footsteps over the floorboards comforted him. He slept better with her in the house, and Spencer curled on his chest kept the nightmares at bay. And because the witch kept coming back, no matter how horrible her deaths. The force of life itself, or her will to try again, to live on her own terms, wouldn’t let her give up. It was undeniable, and inexorable. Like moonrise, and spaghetti on Tuesdays. Like witches and black cats. And that was something. That was magic.
The cup was full. Michael held it up, watching frost melt in the moonlight. Maybe, just this once, life could play along and pretend to be fair after all. If witches were real, wasn’t anything possible?
On Halloween, Michael brewed the ingredients from the witch’s list like tea. He poured them into a jam jar, and let them cool. The resulting liquid was reddish gold, the color of museum amber.
Michael held the jar. He expected it to hum with power, but it only sloshed as he turned it from side to side. The contents left legs on the glass, like good alcohol. He wanted to say he was sorry. He wanted her to come back, and tell him her name. He wanted her to explain herself, and he wanted the chance to do the same. And he missed Spencer.
Michael sniffed the potion. After all the things the witch smelled of, smoke and the ocean, wet rope, and crashed cars, the liquid in the jam jar smelled of nothing. Not the candy corn, or the soft, half-rotten apples. He screwed the lid on, and slipped the jar into his pocket.
Even though it was just past noon, Michael Remmington decided it was high time he got well and totally drunk.
Sometime after sun down, it began to rain.
Would there be any trick-or-treaters in this downpour? Instead of Spider-Man, they’d all be dressed as kid-in-raincoat. He snickered, but really, it was depressing. He pulled out the jam jar, watching the way the light slid through the liquid as he turned it round and round. He needed to find the witch. She needed to see him drink the potion. She needed to know he was sorry.
He pushed the chair away from the table. The front door was miles away, but he made it somehow, and stepped out into the pouring rain.
A jack-o’-lantern carved from a pumpkin he didn’t remember buying sat at the bottom of the porch steps. The lid had been knocked askew, and rain had drowned the candle. Along the street, other houses were similarly struggling.
“Crappy Halloween,” he said to no one.
He couldn’t even call the witch’s name. Liquid sloshed uncomfortably in his stomach and his pocket—the alcohol and the witch’s brew. A few brave parents with umbrellas ushered kids from house to house. No one looked happy.
Michael made his way toward the main road and the hum of cars. He could picture the witch walking past the library, and the grocery store; she’d come to the end of the sidewalk, but keep going. She wouldn’t be barefoot, but her suitcase would be clutched in her hand, and she wouldn’t have an umbrella. Spencer, wet and miserable, would be close at her heels.
He spotted her up ahead.
Michael stopped, blinking water out of his eyes. The witch looked just as he’d pictured her, which made him suspect wishful thinking. Or maybe the alcohol had gotten the better of him. He broke into a run.
A sudden gust of wind pulled leaves from the trees, and slicked them over the sidewalk. Water blew sideways. Michael slipped, nearly turning his ankle.
“Hey!” The downpour stole his voice.
The witch didn’t turn. Even over the rain, he could hear the steady clunk of her heels. She clutched her suitcase in both hands, and her black skirt clung to her legs, ink bleeding into her skin, bleeding into the sidewalk, bleeding into the dark.
If she reached the end of the sidewalk, she would be lost. Michael felt it as down-in-his-bones-true. Whatever rules governed witches made it so; those rules governed him now, too.
He kept going, half running and half limping. He reached for her shoulder. The witch whirled on him and shouted something, but it was torn away by the wind.
Tendrils of wet hair clung to the witch’s cheeks. She swung the suitcase like a weapon, and Michael ducked. He slipped again, scraping his palm.
The witch stepped off the sidewalk.
His heart lurched.
A black shape streaked past him. Spencer.
Headlights swept around a curve in the road, bearing down on the witch. Michael shot up, rain-blind, drunk.
He might have shouted as he plunged off the sidewalk, chasing the witch, chasing the cat. The witch turned, mouth open, but he couldn’t hear her. Headlights washed her out, and made her eyes the same color as the storm.
They collided in midair.
She pushed him out of the way, or he pushed her. Or they pushed each other. Brakes squealed, and over the noise, a sound like wings and all of October taking flight filled the air. Against all reason, he heard the jam jar as it slipped from his pocket and became tiny splinters of glass and a magic potion washed away by the rain.
A slew of water hit him in the face. Michael threw up an arm to shield his eyes, and the bumper of an ancient ’67 Oldsmobile stopped inches from his leg.
“Jesus, are you okay?” The woman, soaked the instant she stepped from the car, left the Olds askew in the center of the road, door hanging open.
Something nudged Michael’s leg. He looked down. Spencer twined around his ankles, dragging his sodden tail over Michael’s pant leg. The witch was nowhere to be seen.
“My cat,” Michael said.
He bent and scooped Spencer into his arms. The wet bundle of fur purred louder than he’d ever heard her purr before.
“What?”
“She’s okay,” he said.
The woman stared. After a moment she nodded, looking more frightened than concerned. She climbed back into her car and shut the door. Michael held the cat, listening to her purr, listening to the woman’s engine purr. The rain slackened, still slanting through the headlights cutting the night. He realized he was standing in the middle of the road and limped back to the sidewalk. The woman, ghosted behind the car’s windows, shook her head in confusion as she pulled away.
A shape lay on the far side of the road, which might be the witch’s suitcase. He couldn’t be sure. But he didn’t see the witch. The car hadn’t hit her, or him, or Spencer. He squeezed the cat harder until she squirmed in protest; he unburied his face from her fur.
“Come on, let’s go home.”
The witch would be waiting for them with a cup of tea. Or she wouldn’t. But it was possible. And she hadn’t died. Just this once, life had decided to be fair. The witch could go on living on her own terms. Anything was possible on Halloween.
“Thank you,” Michael said to the night and the turning year.
Behind the rain and the dense clouds, he could sense the sliver of a crescent moon, waiting to break free. It felt like a smile.
A. C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex, and The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, among others. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits the online magazine Unlikely Story. You can find her online at www.acwise.net.
ANGELIC
Jay Caselberg
And so it begins . . .
Clouds roiled across the darkened sky, whipped as though with the breath of angels, though angels they were not.
A hint: the taste of stone upon the air; the flavor of old earth mixed with the spattering frozen drops, slashing against his back and loud in his ears through the hood cinched tight around his face. The wind gusted, splashing icy wat
er in his eyes. It dribbled in rivulets down his forehead and over his brow. Using the back of one hand, he tried to wipe it away, to clear his sight.
Storm water, storm watch, storm dreams. His hands were numb, his knuckles aching with the cold, yet still he stood, waiting, watching, resolute.
Behind, the old church, gray stone made white and black with age, the roof collapsed, slates tumbled, and the jagged teeth of burnt rafters mouthing at the wind-tossed sky. To one side lay the graveyard, headstones leaning, ancient stone crosses mottled with lichen. A mound, a sunken hollow, pooling water, and a confusion of weeds and grass gone wild. The fence, once solid, had rusted through in places, brown and encrusted with years. It had been hallowed ground once, a sacred place. Now it just cradled rotted memories of the dead. The dead stayed dead. It was simply what lived beyond them that did not. He knew the truth of that, knew it well, but he chose not to keep it foremost in his mind. It was the living that bore the deepest part of it, whether inherited or not. At least he thought that was so. From time to time, though, these days, he was no longer sure.
He stood there upon the hillside, waiting, watching the road. She would come, he knew it. She would come. She would be there for that special night but two days hence, the family celebration, the tradition. She always came.
Inside the remains of the old church, behind him, in darkness, a tortured Christ figure stared down upon a littered floor. Streams of leaf-stained water made brown tears upon its cheeks.
Martin watched the empty road for a while longer. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow. She would come. She would come: he knew it.
He had heard the voices. And so, he knew.
Step back. Consider.
The avenging angel with sharpened teeth.
We call it angel, because it makes it knowable, makes it familiar, though angel is only a word, not an explanation.
It swoops, confusing you with its lack of sexuality. It is man, it is woman, it is both and yet neither. It has eyes that pierce you, transfixing you. It will rend you, limb from limb and feast upon your flesh, though you lie there still and pale, untouched.
It does not laugh, for it is without amusement.
It merely rails against your living. Your heartbeat, your breath, the dampness of your eyes . . . all of these are an affront to it.
It does not understand remorse. It never will.
Consider it well.
It was ritual more than anything else, an old tradition that just happened to coincide with the other rituals. Halloween, All Hallows, Samhain, call it what you will—it just happened to be the time when the family got together and worked hard at not doing each other mortal injury during its passing.
Estella really didn’t know why it was that time of year rather than any of the other high feasts, secular or otherwise, that other “normal” families observed. Regardless, she liked the season, the chill, the damp, the winds scattering wet leaves and memory across the landscape. The feeling of huddling inside warm clothes, big coats, and scarves gave a sense of protectedness that she found comforting. There was something else about the time of year too, something lurking beneath the surface. Nothing expressly tangible, but perhaps that was why she was comforted by that sense of protection. Ever since she was a child, Estella had felt that otherness lurking at the shadow reaches of her subconscious, though it was more a knowing than the dreamlike essence of that which was not expressly conscious. She knew, she sensed, and she was aware of it, but she chose, rather, to ignore it, to put it from her mind. It was like the town. If you’d grown up and lived for any span of time within the boundaries of Sangerville, you knew things—things that nobody talked about. Estella’s family, the Hollings, had lived variously in Sangerville for five generations; long enough to accumulate and store those hidden memories in their own dark and secret places. There were family memories that . . .
Estella shook her head and peered through the spattering drops at the road ahead. On an afternoon like this, it was better to concentrate on driving than random musings. Not that there was much traffic around Sangerville, apart from the townsfolk themselves and there were few enough of those. There’d been a decline over the last few years, with the younger generations seeking their own fortunes further afield more and more as the opportunities in the town itself dwindled. The old derelict church at the top of the hill was testament to that. Not even enough of a congregation to support it, though Old Martin did his best to maintain some sort of order in the grounds. Some of the townsfolk said that Martin was not quite all there, a little slow, but he was harmless enough. Everyone called him Old Martin, though he was not that old, really. It just seemed as if he had been with the town forever and he was there as a fixture in Estella’s memory ever since she’d been a child. Someone had to be paying for the upkeep of the grounds, but thinking about it now, Estella realized that she had no idea who that might be.
She pulled into the small main street, wipers slapping the large drops away from in front of her. There were other reasons for her trepidation and the closer she got to the old family home the tension wound tighter. Bill and Linda Holling. They were a classic small town couple, bound up in the minutiae of the day to day that comes with living in an environment like Sangerville. One of the reasons she escaped, really. And then, coming back each visit, each family event, it was no different. The problem was that she really didn’t care about what they seemed to care about, but she had to show that animated interest that proved she was paying attention, that she was being a dutiful daughter. It was almost enough to make her eyes glaze over. Sure Dad, that’s really interesting.
Estella took a left, barely missing one of the local residents decked out in gray rain slicker and hat, fading conveniently into the washed out background and making him barely able to be seen. Well, she assumed it was a him. In the pouring rain and underneath the amorphous weather gear, she had no way of knowing. She sighed, shook her head and drove the last couple of blocks to her own street, tree-lined, but skeletal in these months, with the empty branches clawing at the clouded sky. And there, at last, stood the family home. It was funny how her family never invested either the time or the money in Halloween paraphernalia. No grinning faces or colors. The house stood as it always stood. No one came out to meet her, not that she had expected they would. Perhaps they didn’t realize she was here yet.
She took a few seconds listening to the wipers beat back and forth, breathing slowly and deeply, till she killed the engine, and taking one last deep breath, opened the car door.
Martin stooped, and with one hand wiped away some old brown leaves that were adhering to a nearby gravestone. The rain had eased a little now, but already the light was starting to fade. She was here now. The cycle was almost complete. He straightened, turning slowly to gaze out over the town, avoiding the crumbling walls off to one side of where he stood. He didn’t need to see them. Below, one or two lights were already painting dark shapes with yellowish glow against gray. Down there, down in the heart of the little community, people moved, breathed, got on with their lives. Some of them knew. Some of them understood, but they kept that understanding to themselves. It was something you didn’t talk about. Not that anyone really ever talked to Martin apart from the civil good morning and the silent nod of the head. He was as much a familiar presence as he wandered the streets as the hulking hill that he stood upon now—a fixture in their memories, something that you acknowledged and with that acknowledgement, fulfilled your obligations.
He crouched down in front of the headstone, peering at the lettering, the carefully incised names and words, the once sharp edges softened with age, crumbling a little here and there, bruised with the moss marks and lichen. He reached out and traced the name with one finger. He had known this one many years ago. He looked back over towards the town. That was where she had lived. Over there. Dupan Street. Now one of her children lived there, with children of his own.
He nodded slowly to himself, and pulled back his hand to wipe the wetness from his fa
ce.
They were not greedy. They only took what they needed.
Slowly, he got to his feet. It would not be too long now. He could feel their restlessness. It echoed his own, but she was here now.
Her mother was fussing about in the kitchen, busy with her preparations, already starting on the feast that would accompany the tradition of that family dinner, leaving Estella sitting at the dining-room table looking across at her father and waiting for the next pause in conversation to be punctuated by yet another Sangerville observation or other words that were simply there to fill the silence that habitually lay between them. The funny thing was, if she didn’t come, didn’t observe the ritual, her world would be filled with words. She had tried it once and had heard about it for weeks afterwards. How could she be so insensitive? Didn’t she know how much it meant to them?
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Bill finally. “I hope Johnny isn’t too late.”
There it was—the subtle backhand implication that maybe Estella didn’t rate as much as her older brother. Or maybe she was just imagining it, her expectations getting the better of her.
“Oh, don’t worry. He’ll be here soon enough.” Her mother stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a tea towel, a strand of hair falling down over her face. She blew it out of the way, gave Estella a brief smile, and then disappeared back into the kitchen.
Her father was watching her, nodding slowly. It seemed that he had aged significantly over the last year. She tracked the lines in his face, the sallowness of his skin, the faint cloudiness to his gaze. His eyes were watery, tinged with red, as though not too long ago he had been weeping, but she knew that he had not. She looked back down into her tea, and lifted the mug slowly to fill more of the space, taking a sip.
“Well,” she said, placing the mug down again. “I may as well go up and sort my things out.”
As she stood, her father simply looked at her.
“Right,” she said.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 22
