The Halloween Moon

by Joseph Fink

  “What in the world?” muttered Mr. Gabler.

  “I don’t think this is our world,” said Esther.

  “Guys?” Sasha said, pointing.

  A woman had emerged from the front door, which was modern and painted bright red. She was wearing a black wool robe and had gray hair, although she didn’t seem much older than Mr. Gabler.

  “Welcome,” the woman said. “My name is Aileen. Come on inside.” She gave a beckoning wave and shuffled back into the bizarre house.

  “Couldn’t be any weirder than outside,” Agustín said, and headed in. Esther shrugged and followed. Sasha and Mr. Gabler hurried after.

  “I have a stew going,” the woman said, once they were inside. There was a fire pit with a huge open fire. Hanging from a thick hook over the fire was a black metal pot, full of bubbling thick stew. “It’s not going to be ready for a bit, I’m afraid. Let me microwave up a pizza.”

  The interior was as baffling as its exterior. The floor of the hut was dirt. About half of the walls were the same mud as the outside. The other half had floral-print wallpaper and a few electrical outlets. Tucked around the fire were rough straw mattresses, with modern sheets and pillows on them. Near the fire pit was a fridge, and a sink, and a microwave. The woman pulled a pizza out of the freezer and popped it into the microwave.

  “I know, I know,” she said, “you’re supposed to bake these, but it’s a little hard to do that on an open fire. Comes out too crispy. Also pretty ashy.” The woman gestured around the house and its jumble of ancient and new. “As you can see, things aren’t so linear around here.”

  “Where is here?” Esther said.

  “You,” Aileen said, “are in a Dream.”

  “We’re dreaming?” Sasha said.

  “No. You are completely awake. You are in the Dream of Halloween.”

  Mr. Gabler sat down on one of the straw mattresses. He folded his hands in his lap. “It really has been a weird night.”

  “I agree to go trick-or-treating once, and I end up stuck in my least favorite holiday,” muttered Agustín.

  The microwave beeped, and the woman pulled out a steaming pizza, setting it on the rough wooden table. Esther realized it had been a long time since she had eaten, and the sight of the food made all of that hunger come back to her. They all grabbed slices, stuffing them almost whole into their mouths.

  “Hungry lot,” Aileen said. “Look, I know it’s confusing. It’s because you’re not supposed to be here. A human crossing over like this isn’t something that is ever supposed to happen.”

  The woman sat on a stool by the table and watched them eat.

  “Here’s my best explanation,” she said. “The Dream of Halloween is its own world. Lived here my whole life. Lovely place. Cheap real estate. You wouldn’t believe what I got this property for. Fifteen hundred square feet, and it only cost two years of my laughter. Of course, those two years weren’t a picnic. Couldn’t watch comedies. It didn’t hurt when I tried to laugh. Just nothing happened and it spooked me good. Sorry, besides the point. Now, the Dream is connected to your world in a number of ways. Sleep, obviously. We’re tied pretty closely to how you sleep. But there is also a holiday you people set up to honor our connection.”

  “Labor Day,” Agustín said.

  “Funny kid,” Aileen said. “I don’t like funny kids. They remind me of the two years I couldn’t laugh. Anyway, during Halloween our worlds get close together. Sometimes they even touch.”

  “Is that how we ended up here?” Esther asked.

  “Maybe.” The woman frowned. “Under ordinary circumstances it should have been impossible for you to get here without knowing it exists. But it appears circumstances aren’t ordinary tonight. Someone very high up must have done something very wrong.” She looked out the window, as though making sure they weren’t being watched. “These days that could only mean the queen.”

  “The queen,” Esther said. “We saw a queen. We think. Mr. Nathaniel said she stopped time, but he wouldn’t tell us anything else.”

  Aileen got up from her stool and paced by the fire.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not something our queen can do. That’s far beyond her capabilities. No one could have done that except maybe—no, he wouldn’t. And anyway, he’s long gone.”

  She stopped pacing and spoke quite urgently. Esther tried to look as studious and attentive as she could, given that she had a glob of cheese hanging off her lip and sauce smeared on her cheeks.

  “Living in the Dream of Halloween has its drawbacks,” Aileen said. “It’s a powerful place, and bad people tend to get drawn to powerful places. We’ve had a number of evil and corrupt rulers, going back to our first one. But our current queen is . . . well, she’s no worse than the rest, I suppose. Which is to say she’s pretty terrible.”

  “If she’s the one we’ve met, then she’s not very pleasant, no,” Mr. Gabler said, from his place on the floor. He was the only one who hadn’t gone for the pizza. He looked tired and worried. Esther remembered that his wife was lying in their bed at home, asleep, like everyone else was asleep. Unwakeable.

  “She’s very powerful, our queen,” the woman said. “But her power is tied to a lot of things beyond her control. For instance, the closer your world gets to Halloween, the more her power grows. Then it wanes again as the year moves away from Halloween.

  “But even more than the holiday, her power is tied to the moon,” she continued. “When there is a full moon on Halloween, which only happens once every couple of decades, that is when she is most powerful. It’s a dangerous time for anyone else to be out. Most citizens of the Dream of Halloween are locked tight in their houses tonight.”

  “So that would explain why she would want to freeze time,” Esther said. “If this is when she is most powerful, and she froze time tonight . . .”

  “Then she would stay that powerful forever, yes, in theory,” Aileen said. “But even the queen isn’t powerful enough to stop time. The source of her power is itself the movement of time. It would be like trying to stop a waterwheel with more water. It’s impossible.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough about things being impossible for tonight,” Mr. Gabler said, lying back and putting his fingers on his temples. “None of it is impossible if it has already happened.”

  “’Sa good point,” Agustín managed through a big bite of pizza. Sasha had her mouth full as well, but she nodded.

  “Not impossible then,” Aileen said. “But she couldn’t have done it alone. She must have found someone, or something, that gave her more power than she would have on her own.”

  “What kind of thing could do that?” asked Esther.

  “I genuinely have no idea.” Aileen shook her head. “If she truly has gained power, then that is terrible news for us all.”

  She took the empty pizza box and tossed it into a plastic garbage bin.

  “You were all so hungry,” she said. “I would guess you are also quite tired. You can sleep. You’ll be safe here from whatever is affecting your neighborhood. We’ll talk more when you’re rested.”

  Esther was about to protest and then realized that the woman was right. She was exhausted to the core.

  “Grab any mattress,” Aileen said. “Bathroom’s through there if you’d like to wash up. Although I’m afraid I should warn you that the toilet is one of the medieval parts of the house.”

  Agustín opened the door she indicated. He made a face and closed it again.

  “I think I can hold it,” he said, and lay down on one of the mattresses.

  ESTHER WOKE UP TO the smell of pancakes. The woman in the black robe was pouring batter into a cast-iron pan on a grate over the fire.

  “Thought you might like breakfast, even if it’s not really morning,” she said.

  “Breakfast?” Agustín said, already rolling off the mattress. Esther sat up, her back stiff. She hadn’t slept well. Straw mattresses were, as it turns out, not comfortable.

  “Glad you’re all a
wake,” Aileen said, banging the pan around to make sure they were all definitely awake. “I’ve been sitting up this whole time. Trying to figure it out.” She nodded at the window. “Should be morning by now, but it’s still the same foggy night. Seems you’re right. She’s frozen time, both in your world and in our Dream. I thought I knew everything she could do, but I guess I was wrong.” She tapped her fingers nervously on her hip. “We could all be in a great deal of danger.”

  “You seem to know a lot about her,” Esther said. She didn’t mean it suspiciously, necessarily, but she didn’t mean it not suspiciously either.

  Aileen nodded. “I know the queen very, very well,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, just put the pancakes on plates and passed them out to her hungry guests.

  Mr. Gabler stretched his ankle experimentally. “Seems better,” he said. “I think sleep helped.”

  “Here,” Esther said, handing a plate to Sasha.

  “Thanks,” Sasha mumbled, without meeting her eyes.

  “Now,” Aileen continued, “given what’s happened, I think at least one mystery’s been solved. I know how you got into the Dream.”

  “Lay it on us, Columbo,” Mr. Gabler said. Esther, Agustín, and Sasha stared at him blankly. “Columbo?” he said. “Guy on TV? Detective? No? God, I’m old.” He glumly took a bite of pancake.

  “The queen,” Aileen said, ignoring the dejected dentist, “has created a small bubble of frozen time in your world. She couldn’t stop time for an entire universe, or even an entire planet. Even with whatever new power she has gained, there simply is no way that any creature could manage that. So she froze time in one single small place. Your neighborhood.”

  “Great, another reason living in our town sucks,” Sasha said.

  “With that much power in such a small place,” Aileen continued, apparently having decided to ignore the frequent interruptions and plow through her explanation, “the two worlds have been drawn closer together. The boundary between them is gossamer thin, especially at the edges of the bubble. You approached that edge and began to see elements of the Dream poking through into your reality.”

  “The river,” Agustín said. “With the cyclops guys and the logs.”

  “Oh, you saw the Loggers of the Screaming Woods? Huh, they might have helped you if you could have communicated to them what was going on. But then, I’m not sure you would have liked the way they communicate.” She grimaced. “Their language is based on smell rather than sound. Oh well. Doesn’t matter. As you poked at the edge of the bubble of frozen time, you accidentally slipped through into the Dream, and then made your way to this house.”

  “A cat led us,” Esther said. “A black cat.”

  “I doubt that,” the woman said, frowning.

  “It did!” Esther felt herself go red.

  “Mmm,” the woman said. She tucked her hands into the sleeves of her robe. “In any case, it’s lucky you found me. There are dangerous things in the Dream. Dangerous even for me, let alone some humans who have never been here before. Not all of the Dream is as cozy as this.”

  They looked around at the mud walls and the door to the toilet they had avoided using, to their great discomfort.

  “But she didn’t just stop time,” Sasha said. “She also put everyone to sleep.”

  “If she didn’t need the people for her plan, she could have pushed them into the Dream to get them out of the way. Putting them to sleep would have been the easiest way to do that.”

  “So they’re somewhere around here?” Esther said hopefully.

  “No, the Dream is not one continuous place. It has been fought over so many times by so many different powerful rulers that it has been shattered into pieces. Not all the pieces are as . . . logical as this. She could have simply pushed them into some isolated fragment of the Dream, one with no entrance or exit except the one she created and then locked shut. To the people, your friends and your family, it would feel like they were asleep and dreaming, except, of course, it would never end.”

  “I’ve got to rescue my mom,” said Agustín. “I’m not just going to leave her up there. She would do anything to rescue me if I were trapped.”

  “And what about the children?” Esther said. “They took my sister and Sasha’s—”

  “They took my brother, and I want him back,” Sasha said. “I don’t even really like him, but I don’t want him kidnapped by the queen.”

  Aileen looked sharply at her. “She has taken children again? That is . . . well it’s not good.”

  “Oh, it’s not?” Esther said, trying to put as much sarcasm into the three words as she possibly could.

  “Scholars in the Dream have never been able to verify this, but there are stories that the queen has an army of children. Children that she captured from your world and took to the Dream with her. Children she raised, acting as a kind of mother. Trust me, you don’t want the queen as your mother. Having spent so long in the Dream of Halloween, they lost their humanity and turned into beings of pure Dream, held together by her power, keeping only the vestiges of the children they once were.”

  “I think . . . I think we saw some of those,” Esther said, remembering with a shudder trick-or-treaters buzzing and clicking like insects. “Is that what she’s doing to Sharon?”

  “Impossible to say for sure,” Aileen said. “Certainly she hasn’t had time to do anything yet.”

  “We need to get them back right now,” Sasha said.

  Aileen bit her lip. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  “How do we go back?” Mr. Gabler said.

  “If your town is still touching the Dream, then you should be able to just walk from one world to the other if you know where to go. Follow me.”

  She led them out of her house and around to the back. Behind her house the woods sloped down into a steep hill. There was a stone staircase leading down the hill.

  “These stairs will take you to the edge of this fragment of the Dream. Once you reach that edge, you will go . . . somewhere else. My hope is it will be somewhere back in your neighborhood.”

  “Your hope?” Esther said.

  “Dreams are unpredictable. They don’t work by the rules of your world. Good luck, Esther Gold.”

  “I never told you my name.”

  “No, you did not.”

  “How do you know so much about the queen?”

  Aileen crouched down and whispered to her.

  “The queen is a cruel and terrible ruler. There was a resistance against her in the Dream. We fought her for years. We spied on her, sabotaged her, worked at every turn to bring her down. We were known as the Black Cats.”

  “But there was a black cat . . . ,” Esther said.

  “The queen hated us. She started quite a lot of rumors and superstitions about black cats, in an attempt to eradicate us from both the Dream and your world. And it worked. Our revolution failed. I hid here, in this quiet corner of the Dream. If the queen truly has gained power, it is time for you to flee, and for you to hide. If you keep poking at the edges of the bubble, you might be able to find your way back to the rest of your world.”

  “We can’t do that,” Esther said uncertainly.

  “If you face the queen, she will beat you. She will win. Run away, Esther Gold.”

  Esther tilted her head, looked into Aileen’s eyes, trying to find something there, unsure what she was even looking for.

  “You were the black cat. You were the little cat that led us through the woods to your house.”

  Aileen smiled.

  “That seems like a ridiculous idea.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I doubt it. Esther Gold, it was good to meet you.” The woman held out her hand. She had long and sharp nails. Esther gripped carefully around them to shake her hand. “I am Aileen, leader of the Black Cats. Please remember what I said. It’s not too late for you to get away.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Esther said. She turned, and the four of them started
carefully picking their way down the steps. After a few steps she looked back, but Aileen wasn’t there. Esther thought she could hear the patter of tiny feet running away, but it didn’t seem all that likely.

  THE STAIRS LED DOWN AND DOWN, along the gentle slope of a hillside, which gradually became a steep slope with spines of rock emerging from the mossy earth, and then finally the four of them were on their butts, scooting down shallow steps carved directly into a sheer cliff. Each step was only a couple feet wide, and the drop on one side went into a foggy nothing.

  “This is not where I saw my night going,” Mr. Gabler said, as he gingerly navigated where the steps switched back, cutting the opposite way down the cliff face.

  “Weird,” Agustín said. “This is exactly what I expected.”

  They all tried to feel okay about what was happening, tried to ignore the dread that had settled on them all. Was Aileen right? Was trying to resist a helpless fight?

  “Let’s stop dwelling on what we can’t do,” Esther said. “Let’s talk instead about what we can do.”

  “If we tried to run, the only place to go would be this Dream of Halloween, which I’d rather not come back to,” Mr. Gabler said.

  “We can’t get to the hospital or anywhere outside of the neighborhood, and everyone inside the neighborhood is asleep,” Sasha said.

  Esther thought for a second that she saw something green and solid through the mist below them. A sign that they were at least reaching the end of this Dream.

  “Hide forever in a bubble of stopped time?” Agustín said.

  “Do plants grow when time is stopped?” Sasha said. “Could we even grow food if we needed to?”

  “Do we age?” Mr. Gabler said.

  “Whoa, so, if we restart time, do we end up dying at an earlier date than otherwise because we spent some time aging in this bubble of stopped time?” Agustín said.

  “Either that or you all stay thirteen forever,” Mr. Gabler said. “And trust me, you don’t want to be thirteen any longer than you have to be.”

  “Hey!” Sasha said. Then she shrugged. “I mean, you’re right.”