It belched sickly green fire from its mouth and carved nostrils, flames shot from its eyes and glowed beneath the orange, uneven skin, casting shadows over its face as it cocked its head, regarding her. Its eyes stared at her, almost spinning. It began to slaver and drool, jagged rows of teeth flashing and slashing as it opened and closed its mouth like a mindless zombie. Licking its chops.
But it—he—was far from mindless. Cunning and hatred were etched clearly on his face as if someone had carved them there.
He lifted his arms from his sides as if mimicking being hung above the field. Blood dripped from their razor edges.
Blood, black in the green firelight, streamed from his mouth.
He threw back his head and whispered, “Happy Halloween.” Though the sound was a whisper, it echoed over the field.
“Off to see the Wizard,” Buffy muttered, and began to back up.
CHAPTER 9
As Buffy backed away from the hideous pumpkin-headed scarecrow, she found herself thinking simply, This is it. This is when the Slayer crashes and burns.
How else to explain the complete and total horror that had seized her and throttled her like the scarecrow’s blood-drenched hand around her throat? She couldn’t stop staring at him. She couldn’t turn her back on him and run, though all her Slayer’s training—and her own personal wish to keep living—told her that that was exactly what she must do. Some misfiring instinct for self-preservation insisted that she not take her gaze off him, not for a second. To look away was to die.
But if she didn’t get moving, that was exactly what was going to happen.
The pumpkins behind Buffy began to laugh.
Something nudged her boot. She kicked at it without looking.
It bit her through the leather.
“Ow!” she cried involuntarily.
The pumpkin-headed scarecrow looked down on her.
“Do you think that hurt?” he demanded. “That is nothing compared to the pain you will feel when I rip out your beating heart.”
Buffy swallowed hard. She wanted to say, “Samhain, I presume,” to sound smart and unafraid, but all that came out was his name. “Samhain.”
“Slayer.”
Samhain extended his arm toward her and beckoned for her to approach. It was not difficult to stand her ground. She was paralyzed.
Something else bit her, harder this time. By pure reflex, she kicked at it but did not dare take her eyes away from Samhain.
“Come to me now,” Samhain said. “Join the revel of all the fears of the timeless hours. Of witches and ghouls and demons, of death and pain and dying and the forever blackness you call the Dark Place. Lay your life at my feet and I will give you relief from the soul-killing terror that you feel.”
“I don’t feel anything,” she insisted weakly.
Samhain smiled, and his head was almost sliced in two by his own fanglike teeth. Blood streamed from his mouth and splattered on the ground.
“You feel everything,” he said. “Every fear you have ever had. Remember when you were very little, and the pile of clothes in the corner looked like the bogeyman? Remember how you were certain that your dolls were watching you? That they moved when you looked away? Remember your clothes closet, and how the door would open slowly in the night?” Samhain smiled. “Remember the nightmare helplessness you felt then?”
Cold dread washed over her. She did remember.
“My handiwork,” he said proudly. “A monster under your bed. Someone following you home. Someone waiting in the hallway with a knife. I command the fears of your kind. 1 conjure them up, I smother you with them like a pillow over your face. 1 make hearts stop. I make Slayers die.”
Buffy shook herself hard as buckets of fear splashed over her. She was trembling violently. She was so afraid. Afraid to move, to breathe.
Afraid to die.
“You will not stop me, girl,” Samhain crowed.
Buffy raised her chin. Those fears were no longer childhood nightmares. They were part of her daily life. There really were monsters lying in wait for her. In her reality, evil creatures did live inside dolls and creep under her bed and rise from the dead to wound her and kill her. As afraid of them as she had been, and still was, she faced them and fought them.
And defeated them.
She was the Slayer.
She looked at Samhain with narrowed eyes and said, “Oh, but I will stop you, Mr. Pumpkin Eater. You’re not the king of all fear, just of this one night. And frankly, you’re not that much of a king at all. I didn’t vote for you.”
Samhain shook with fury. The flames shot out of his eyes and mouth and a horrible growl rumbled in his chest, making the earth shake.
“Enough!” he shouted.
Samhain threw open his arms. The skies cracked open and rain poured down.
There was intense, incredible pain at her ankles.
She glanced down. The pumpkins had advanced on her. They were slicing through her boots with jack-o’-lantern teeth. Buffy tried to shake them off, then looked up to see Samhain spring at her like a huge wolf.
Buffy shouted and dropped to the ground. Samhain arced over her head. She whirled around and fell into a battle stance, then smashed her right foot into his midsection as hard as she could.
It was like kicking iron. She fell onto her back, the wind knocked out of her, sheer terror knocked into her. It had been a mistake to touch him. He was evil in solid form. He was the power of fear incarnate.
She had never been more afraid in her life.
As he flung himself at her, she skirted around him and began flying down the hill. She had to get out of here, get away. There was no way to kill fear. And even if there were, she was not going to be the one to do it.
Her Slaying days were over. She had just resigned.
She wanted to live.
The rain came down in torrents. She slid and fell a dozen times in the pitch black, her only light the glowing head of Samhain as he bolted after her. Her hands were bleeding and slick with mud, which the rain sluiced off as she ran for all she was worth.
To her right was the graveyard; she saw some flickering lights and wondered if that was Giles, Willow, and Xander with her Slayer’s equipment. She wondered if she would ever see them again.
“You cannot outrun me. You cannot outfight me,” Samhain growled after her. She felt icy breath on her neck and ran until she thought her heart might burst.
I make hearts stop, he had said. He had not lied.
Incredibly, huge pumpkins flung themselves at her, pummeling her. Though she realized it must be Samhain’s power somehow, it still seemed as though the pumpkins had an evil of their own and moved by their own will. But that couldn’t be. It just couldn’t!
Within seconds she was bruised and aching and soaked to the bone. Unable to see the pumpkins, she raised her arms to protect her face and continued her run.
She ran into the rows of trees, and thought at first that pumpkins were leaping from them. But they were apple trees, and she was hitting the apples as she ran.
“You cannot defeat me,” Samhain added.
“I know, I know, I get it, okay? Class dismissed,” Buffy whispered, and kept going.
The ground leveled off; she realized she was at the bottom of the valley. There’d been a building down there. As she stared wildly into the blackness, terrified that at any moment he would catch her, the lightning flashed again.
Dead ahead was the building. It was a barn.
For a moment, her hopes were raised as she instinctively ran toward shelter. Then she realized that he was herding her into it. Once inside, she would be trapped.
She liked to think he would be trapped, too.
But at the last moment, she veered off and ran to the side of the barn. By then the lightning burst had faded, and she was running in torrential rain and utter darkness again.
Behind her, Samhain said, “I can see you, Slayer. I see every move you make. There’s nowhere to hide from the Dark King of Sa
mhuinn.”
Something whipped her knees. After about a minute, she was wading through a field of tall vegetation that brushed around her hips. She glanced over her shoulder.
The glowing ball of Samhain’s head was perhaps twenty yards away.
She wondered if he really could see her.
“Help me, someone, please,” she whispered, and dropped to her stomach in the tall plants. She lay as still as death and clenched her jaw. The scent of grass rose around her.
And then the scent of the grave, as his heavy footfalls smashed into the tall grass.
“Sssslayer,” he called. “I’m coming for you now.”
She remained unmoving as the rain washed over her. Her mind raced. She had to figure out how to stay alive until morning, or destroy Samhain, or both.
His footsteps shook the ground.
A small furry something with tiny paws and a very long tail crawled over the backs of her hands. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move a muscle.
He came closer.
And closer.
Without breathing, she waited.
“I will destroy you tonight,” he said.
Buffy swallowed hard. Tears streamed down her face. She was afraid, deathly afraid. She couldn’t even think, she was so terrified.
As soon as she could no longer hear his footsteps, she got up and blindly ran back toward the orchard. She had no plan, no thought, except to get away from him.
* * *
In the cemetery, in the pouring rain, the zombies had surrounded Xander, Willow, and Giles. Xander looked at Willow, who was doing a much better Slayerette job of pounding them than he would have expected, she being, er, a non-guy. But that was so sexist of him.
“Giles, plan C would be good now,” he said anxiously as he kicked a zombie in the shins and pushed it hard. It tottered backwards and fell into the mud. But it would be back. Oh, it would be back. These things took a licking and kept on ticking.
Flashlight in hand, Giles had been trying for some time to get one of his books out of his canvas sack to look for a spell or something to re-dead the undead. But the zombies kept coming too fast for him to complete the mission. He, Willow, and Xander could do only so much damage to the opposition.
Could anyone around here spell Alamo?
“Look!” Willow cried, pointing. “There’s a little space between them. If we can get to the top of that crypt—”
Xander glanced in the direction of her outstretched finger and pushed her to the side as a zombie tried to chomp down on it. He smacked the zombie in the face with the crossbow. It slipped on the wet grass and crashed to the earth.
“Thanks,” Willow said. “Look, see how we’ve mowed down a path?”
He did see. Somehow, the three of them had thinned the zombies in a fairly clear line from where they stood now to a standing crypt, which Giles had once told him was also called a vault. If they could vault onto it, maybe Giles would have enough time to save the day.
That is, if Giles could find the secret ingredients in his magickal recipe file.
“Should we go for it?” Xander asked Giles, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
“Yes,” Giles said. He turned off the flashlight and put it in his sack. The weak moonlight made his face look as gray as a zombie’s, a majorly upsetting visual. “Willow, take Buffy’s Slayer’s bag. I’ll carry my sack. Xander, get the crossbow.”
Xander put the crossbow under his arm. Then he bent low and cried, “One, two, three, hike!” He barreled in front of Willow and began knocking zombies over like a linebacker. He was afraid of falling, but he was more afraid of being dinner.
“We’re right behind you, Xander,” Willow said.
Xander got to the vault, kicking a zombie out of his way as Willow joined him. Giles brought up the rear. He threw his sack onto the top of the vault. Xander and Willow did the same.
Then Giles laced his fingers together and stooped. His hair was plastered to his head. He said, “Willow, go first.”
She put her foot into his interlaced fingers. Xander held her around the waist. She turned her head and seemed about to say something to him, then looked at him through the buckets of rain for a few seconds and sighed.
She said, “Go.”
Giles and Xander hoisted her up. She grabbed on to the stone overhang of the vault’s roof and shinnied the rest of the way up and onto the top.
“Xander, go next,” Giles ordered.
“No, you go,” Xander insisted. When Giles hesitated, Xander said, “You’re the only one who can stop these guys permanently.”
“Xander, do not argue with me. I’m your school librarian,” Giles said, as if that carried any weight.
“Oooh, the voice of authority speaks,” Xander said.
Giles rolled his eyes. “As the Watcher, then.”
The zombies began to close in. Xander knew it was a waste of time—in more ways than one—to argue with the man. He smacked a zombie in a nice green dress, then realized the shimmering green color of the dress was slime. He put his foot in Giles’s handhold, and pushed himself to the top of the vault. Then he rolled onto his stomach and held out his hands for Giles.
A zombie dressed in a policeman’s uniform grabbed Giles around the neck. Willow shouted, “No!”
Xander found a broken stone angel resting on its side and wound up for the pitch. He hurled it at the zombie formerly known as cop, connecting with its head. The zombie collapsed to the ground, and Giles climbed up the slippery side of the vault, until Willow and Xander grabbed his hands.
“Heave, heave!” Xander shouted.
“Xander, how can you keep joking at a time like this?” Willow demanded.
“Because if I don’t, I’ll be visiting Screamland,” he confessed, and they hoisted Giles the rest of the way.
“I shall never understand the humor of the American adolescent. Or the American adult, for that matter,” Giles said, scrabbling to grab his sack. He pulled out the journal of Timothy Cassidy and began paging, hunching over to shelter the book from the rain.
“Um, Giles, shouldn’t you look through Magickal Realms for an anti-zombie reversomatic spell?” Willow queried, looking nervously at Xander. Xander nodded at her.
“Will’s right,” he said. “Isn’t she?”
“Here’s my thinking,” Giles said as he searched through the book. “Samhain is considered the spirit of Halloween, the king of the dead souls who haunt the land of the living. What are zombies but dead souls? His minions? His slaves?”
“One man’s perspective,” Xander said slowly. “And the correct thing to do with that input is?”
“Mr. Cassidy has written down a spell to deny the power of Samhain over the dead.” He kept paging. “Ah, yes, here it is. He calls it the ‘Hymn of Orpheus.’ ” Giles paused and cocked his head. “I rather like that. Orpheus, of course, being the man who—”
“Please, Giles, just do it!” Xander said.
“Yes, yes, of course.” Giles cleared his throat and read:
“ ‘King of the Dead, your sway over these forsaken ones is now ended. Begone, animating spirit which moveth limbs most justly frozen!’ ”
He made a strange sign in the air.
Xander whispered, “Behold the mark of Zorro!”
Willow smacked his arm.
“ ‘Begone, animating demon which setteth upon these souls hungers most unnatural.’ ”
The zombies began to gasp.
“ ‘Release them from their torment and return their souls to God!’ ”
They stopped moving.
They stared at one another with eyes that blinked once, twice . . .
Xander distinctly heard one of them murmur, “Glenn, my brother.”
And then they fell to the ground and crumbled into dust.
Xander blinked and leaned over the edge of the vault. Willow joined him. Xander put his arm around Giles. “Strong work, Englishman,” he murmured.
Giles didn’t answer.
“There areth,” Xander said. He picked up Buffy’s bag and rummaged through it. “Behold, that which lighteth.”
“Giles, what are you doing?” Willow asked.
“Right,” Giles said, as Xander found the matches and tossed them to him. “Here.”
He handed each of them a bulb of garlic and a few plant leaves. “These are garlic and angelica. Garlic I know you’re familiar with. Angelica’s quite another matter. It’s also called henbane, insane root, fetid nightshade, even poison tobacco, which I find to be a redundant term if there ever was one.”
“Yeah, okay, and it’s repetitive too,” Xander said, trying to hurry Giles up.
“Highly poisonous,” Giles went on. “Extremely. It’s said the Egyptians used it to assassinate unpopular pharaohs.”
Xander looked uncertainly down at his hand. ‘And we are doing what with it?”
Giles gestured to the four sticks. “Smear it and the garlic over the tip of the yew ward.”
“Smear? Ward? Um, this looks like a stick,” Xander said.
“A ward is something that protects you from evil,” Willow said quietly, as she took the supplies from Giles.
Xander caught Willow’s wrist. “I thought that was a warden. And I thought you just told us this stuff will kill us in fifteen minutes.”
“No, we’re fine,” Giles said distractedly. “Xander, please, just do as I ask this one time.”
Miffed, Xander took the garlic and angelica as well and, imitating Giles, began to rub them all over the sticks. “And we are doing this why?”
“According to Cassidy,” Giles said, tapping the journal, “we need to light these on fire with candle wax to illuminate our dark way, and then we need the juice of an apple to remind us of the sins of mankind, to preserve our relationship with good,” Giles went on, as if he were reciting a grocery list. “These will protect us from Samhain. I hope,” he added under his breath. “It worked for Timothy Cassidy.”
“The juice from an apple?” Willow said slowly.
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