The tape unthreaded as the final segment fed into the take-up reel. The reel continued to spin.
—
Sibley hadn’t intended to kill her, she didn’t think. His main goal had been to frighten.
At that, he’d succeeded admirably.
Even now, with the wind calm in her room, the curtains tight over locked doors, every electric light switched on…even now, she could barely shake the residue of an unfamiliar darkness.
She picked up her spiral notebook and checked each page. They were all blank.
Unfortunately, so was the interview file on her digital recorder. Feel free, Sibley had said, granting her permission. I’ve been recorded before. Those were the only words in the hour-long recording from that morning. Those words, and a hearty chuckle that she half remembered from their conversation—but the laughter appeared out of context, floating ominously amid stretches of silence.
Lacking the recorded conversation, it would be extremely difficult for her to write the article. She could barely recall the names of obscure literary stories he’d mentioned; many of his clever turns of phrase now eluded her.
Aside from a general feeling of unease, it was almost as if they’d never met.
She would write it, though. And she’d convince the Graysonville Register to print it in their October 31 edition.
There would be a hidden message in her story. A gift visible only to Dr. Bennet Sibley, chair of the English and Classical Literature Department at Graysonville University—a payback for the dark magic he’d chanted onto that archaic reel of magnetic tape.
The effect of the tape had been powerful but not as strong as Sibley must have hoped. She’d tricked him, deflecting some of his sorcery.
She’d withheld some of her truth.
For one thing, her name wasn’t Adeline.
—
On the morning of Halloween, the woman whose name wasn’t Adeline imagined Bennet Sibley in his university office. His domain. His sacred place.
He sits in the leather chair behind his massive, cluttered desk, unfolds his copy of the day’s Graysonville Register, and opens it to the features section.
A generic publicity photo appears in the top right corner, beside a large headline: local professor has seen his share of halloweens. Beneath, in smaller type, is the byline: adeline r———.
At first he is puzzled, thinking, I would have thought she wouldn’t dare…And he turns on that last word, his anger building: How dare she write this. How DARE she defy the wishes I transcribed onto tape…
Because he would know she listened to the reel-to-reel recording. Dark magic, once it reaches its target, rebounds to the caster: a signal saying Message Delivered but also a kind of invoice that insinuates payment terms.
She imagines that Sibley has already begun to plan his retaliation. But he would stop himself. He is not one to act rashly. Perhaps the article will not be as damaging as he fears.
He unpacks the headline, catches a backhanded insult about his age: He’s been around a long while, “seen his share of Halloweens.” The reference might suggest he’s seen more than he should, outstayed his welcome, lived beyond the ordinary lifespan…
No, no. He was falling for the English teacher’s curse: reading too much into too few words. It was an innocent, straightforward headline.
The rest of the story bears out this impression. Overall, the author presents a flattering view of the chair’s erudition. She lists many of the Halloween stories he mentioned (two of the titles contain mistakes but no matter). The few quotations, though not exact, are similar to things he would have said. Nothing embarrassing there.
The author even attempts to explain his paradox of the “Halloween Bleed”—a concept that the holiday’s reported mystical powers could expand to affect other days. She’d included only one-half of the paradox, however, which missed the point almost entirely. Disappointing but hardly enough to discredit him.
She describes his office, all the books on the shelves, and delivers a lovely, flattering phrase: “Listening to the professor’s powerful voice, hearing his vast command of academic knowledge, one can feel confident that he’s read all of these books cover to cover and has considered their contents deeply.”
Yes, that’s nicely put, he would be thinking. This woman was more perceptive than I realized. This…woman…
And his approving eyes drift up the page to revisit the name beneath the headline. The typeface blurs, and it no longer spells out Adeline.
The letters refuse his attempts to bring them into focus. The byline chimes in his mind, becoming other names, recalling people he’d visited with dark punishments: a student who cheated on an exam, an administrator who attempted to curtail Sibley’s departmental power, a young academic whose theoretical approach grated against Sibley’s long-cherished beliefs about literature. And a judgment began to unfold in the spaces between letters, presided over by a jury of relatives or friends or loved ones of those he’d punished.
A jury. A coven.
Sibley now realizes how seriously he’d underestimated her. A pretty young woman pretending to be a reporter, appearing in his office. Visiting his domain, from which he oversees an academic department that employs few women. A department that celebrates the old ways, remaining unreceptive to fresh ideas.
She wasn’t a reporter, this woman. But she’d done her research.
The lines on the page continue to blur. Was this the punishment she’d selected for him—to take the meaning out of printed words, defy his efforts to interpret them?
And Sibley would concentrate now, trying to remember what he’d read. One detail from her article would flash into his mind.
After the mention of the vast numbers of books on his shelves, she’d included a quick mention of the curious memorabilia on display. She’d singled out three items as examples: an animal skull, a crystal pyramid, and an obsidian inkwell.
Three random items. But they were grouped together on the same shelf.
Now is when Sibley brushes the newspaper aside and leaps from his chair. He rushes to that specific shelf, to the undusted items he hasn’t touched since she visited his office weeks earlier.
He slides the pyramid aside, looks behind the inkwell.
Finds the small electronic device she’s hidden there. It’s the size of a five-stick pack of chewing gum. A technophobe like Sibley wouldn’t know how to operate it, but he also wouldn’t be able to resist examining it. There are no visible controls on the surface, but a few small holes appear in the hard plastic. He’s puzzled and can’t stop himself from speaking aloud, in that resonant, spell-casting voice of his: something like What in the…? or How could she…? And that’s enough.
His breath passes over the modern machine, the flutter of his warm syllables triggering it.
On the day known as All Hallows’ Eve.
Technology moves quickly. An onrush of information in zeroes and ones, scratches and shrieks of transmitted data, pulse through a tiny opening in the device. They speak a variation of the language he’d threatened her with on the analog tape: the language of dark influence.
And the woman whose name was not Adeline must feel satisfied now, as a new sound, barely perceptible, pierces like a needle into his ears. An awareness comes with it: I know you, Bennet Sibley. I know what you are. You have become too powerful. I won’t let you continue.
As he steps back, throwing the device on the floor, stomping on it, attempting to crush it into the carpet, the transmission ceases of its own accord. It was not an attempt to kill. Only to frighten. To warn.
He would struggle now to uncover her signature, to find her name within the strands of influence that linger in the air. Sibley cups his hand to one ear, as if to focus his attention on a faint echo. Instead, he feels a slight warmth. A slow trickle of blood pours out of his ear.
Despite himself, he finds himself admiring his unknown adversary.
Miles away, a wave of heat flushes over her face, tightens aro
und her throat, scratches at the inside of her stomach. Message delivered, it says.
Swing
Kevin Quigley
I’m in Los Angeles now, because this is where my soul is. I’ve come from back east: That’s where I hang my hat. It’s snowing there now. They’re going to get snow on Halloween. Imagine all those witches and demons and superheroes getting frostbite, reaching for a treat and getting a trick. Out here I can walk down Santa Monica Boulevard and there are palm trees every other foot, stretching like arms into the sky, their leaves like grasping fingers, seeking God. Maybe the palm trees know something I don’t.
I hear swing music in my mind and Jessica’s face swims up, imploring. When I close my eyes, I see her dancing. I never conjure her feet—just her face, stern and set, refusing to be transported by the music or the movement. She would dance everywhere, to any music; sometimes street singers in West Hollywood would moan R&B or spit rap, and she would dance to it all, under streetlights in full view of everyone. But it was her dance to swing music she saved for me. Don’t sit under the apple tree, she’d sing along, with anyone else but me. It was her death dance, somber in the face of all that jollity. Most thought she was dancing because she was free, but I knew the real Jessica. She danced because she was trapped.
Jessica found me the way everyone I love finds me: Beyond anything else she loved, Jessica was in love with dying. We met in a small coffee shop in Culver City in late October, and from the moment my eyes locked with hers, I knew she was going to die, and I knew I was going to let her. They say love at first sight is a foolish myth, but I’ve been in love too often to know that the idea that it’s a myth is the myth. Jessica’s skin was so pale, freckles spraying out across the ivory swell of her nose, her cornsilk hair sun-bleached and falling in cascades over her shoulders. She grabbed my order, even though the barista said my name, and simply stood there by the counter, holding it hostage until I could come and claim it. My mouth dry, my brain haywire. I’d been in love with too many corpses, even beautiful ones. Why did I approach her? Because something about her was irresistible, magnetic. I could no longer have stopped myself than I could have stopped her that night at the pier.
“I believe you have my drink,” I said, trying and failing to sound suave. My mouth was a desert. My heart was tell-tale, pounding at my chest like a maddened bird in a sunless cage. Even in that first moment, I knew her whole story. Our whole story. And still I engaged. I had to. Not doing so was madness.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, and it was said so lightly, so effortlessly. Did she know then? That’s the question that haunts me, because there aren’t answers. Nothing conclusive. She handed me my drink and she took hers, stirring in milk and sugar with fingers so long and delicate it was as if the dance had already begun. Only this wasn’t her death dance—not yet. She was attempting to seduce me, not knowing that I was already seduced.
There’s a light rail in Culver City now. It takes you all the way to Santa Monica Pier. She told me she wanted to ride the roller coaster out there, and that she wouldn’t mind a little company. I let myself be dragged into her orbit because I was helpless against it. It’s moments like this one, bustling onto the light rail and standing too close and holding the pole so that the sides of our hands were touching, that I wonder the hardest about free will. Who has it, who doesn’t, and why. Were we fated to meet each other in that coffee shop? Or, having seen each other, were we automatically locked into our merged destiny? Could I have demurred and gone down to the Valley and looked in shopfront windows and wondered what might have been? Maybe. Maybe I have more say over things. But this thing in me, I don’t know how it works. Terrible magic, maybe, or science I don’t understand. So many hours I’ve spent staring out of windows or wandering down Santa Monica, wondering whether I draw people to me who want to die or if, by my presence, I make them want to die. Am I a dowsing rod or an agent of destruction? That’s the big question. My awful nature, and how it works.
If only I could stop being their friend. If only I could stop falling in love. Maybe that’s part of my nature, too. When I fell in love with Jessica, I fell hard, and then I mourned. These things happened in the space of seconds. I suffered grief over her loss before I ever kissed her, before I ever followed her home and slept beside her. Before I ever woke up and watched her lightly snoring, her hair spread across the pillow and her breasts rising and falling with the life bellowsing inside her.
We clambered aboard the roller coaster on the pier, surrendering our crumpled dollars as the sun dipped below the horizon. The night was colder than it ought to have been at the crest of the rise, and we could look out on the Pacific and wonder at its glorious, terrible vastness. The waves crashed onto the shore like cars against bricks, spraying foam instead of glass and chrome and life. We swooped and dipped and fell and rose, and she was quiet when her hand found mine and grabbed it tightly. Who was I to her then? An angel of death or the last desperate grasp at life? Maybe it didn’t matter. I kissed her that night before we both found our way back on the light rail and zoomed out of Santa Monica. Before she disappeared into the crowds in the larger world, she tapped her number into my phone and stood on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek. Then, almost inaudible in the din of passengers, she whispered my name and told me she loved me. Then she whispered my name again and was gone.
Jessica, I tried to call. Jessica, don’t love me. Jessica, you deserve more in this world than the only gift I can offer you. But the doors were closed then, and when I looked down at my screen, she had already messaged me. Two emoji hearts, mine and hers. Linked then, linked forever.
When I fall in love, I wander. Los Angeles is the best place to do it. Some nights I’ll get a car from the Valley and have it drop me off on Santa Monica at dusk. As the sky grows dark, I’ll make my way up into the Hills, past mission-style homes where the rich people live. Spanish street names fade away and the direction becomes more scenic, more romantic. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard. North Crescent Heights. Woods Drive. These names, seemingly carved out of the past and left for me to discover in the inky quiet of the Hills. Hollywood is artificial, people say, but there is beauty in that artifice. Reality in it. I’ll walk up in those Hills and there are people in mansions who have never considered suicide, who have never questioned their worth so deeply that they’ve decided it doesn’t matter. When I’m alone up there, I find no one to love because no one is accessible. I find myself looking down at the lights of L.A. and wondering who I might love next. The last time I was there alone was the day after I met Jessica. Even up here, in the scant glow of mansion lights, I could smell that huckleberry perfume of hers, so unusual, so distinct. She was up here somewhere, in this quixotic place, this place whose past is present and whose present is eternal. It’s no wonder I love Los Angeles. In Hollywood, people don’t really die. In Hollywood, everyone lives forever.
—
Jessica first told me she loved me the second time we met. We’d gone out to a used bookstore because she was looking for something silly and romantic she could while nights away with. I wondered about that. How many nights did she think she was going to have? Would she make sure she finished at least one of the books she bought before doing what we both know she was going to do? How many pages would be left unread? The idea made me shudder.
The store was one of those unique Los Angeles places; there was a tunnel made of books in the middle of it, and the place was quiet enough and empty enough for us to steal away and find a moment in each other’s mouths. Then her lips danced near my ear and she whispered to me.
“Will you hurt me?” she asked and stepped back. In the ambient light at the end of the tunnel, her eyes implored me. From far above, the bookstore’s sound system was playing swing music, her favorite. Serendipity or coincidence, I couldn’t tell.
“No,” I told her, unable to explain the rules, unable to articulate that there were rules, and that I knew them instinctually, and that I was never able to break them.
>
“Okay,” she said, then kissed me again. When I opened my eyes, I saw she had produced a sewing-kit needle, and it glinted in the muted glow. Whatever you’re thinking about doing, Jessica, please don’t. Maybe my eyes were imploring her now, but I doubted it. If I could have seen my face, it would have been implacable, unmoving. I was going to watch, and I was not going to interfere.
She held the tip of the needle up to her eyeball and refused to blink. “Will you stop me?”
God, yes. “No.”
“No matter how much pain I’m in?”
“No.” I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream.
She dragged the tip of the needle down from her lower eyelid to the ridge of her cheekbone and slid it into her flesh. At once, blood welled up, then began flowing in a thin trickle. It cascaded down her cheek like a dark tear. Still, she kept pushing the needle in, deeper, and I wondered in my extremity of horror if it would poke through the other side and enter her mouth, and spear the delicate silk of her tongue.
Then she let go and stared at me, the blood flowing freely now, and tears flowing along with them. They mixed and grew watery and what splattered to her blouse looked like watercolor paint. I wanted to ask her why she wanted to hurt. I wanted to ask her why she wanted to die. She would have answered me then, already. She would have spilled it all out because she wanted to, because she needed a confessor to help cleanse the hurt out before she did what she did. But I’ve never been anyone’s sympathy ear. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear her reasons; I just didn’t want to. In the way Los Angeles is ever-present, that was the way I wanted Jessica. I think, after consideration, that was the way she wanted herself.
“I love you,” she told me, the needle still jutting out of her cheek and blood still dribbling from the wound. “I love you, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Jessica. So much.” And I did. And I do. Her lips found mine again and we kissed in that amazing tunnel of books, and eventually she removed the needle, and eventually she stopped bleeding. We kissed more on the street and in the car to her house, where we found time to kiss some more. Love is strange, and death is an aphrodisiac.
Halloween Carnival, Volume 5 Page 7
