by Ellen Datlow
—
THERE WAS NO single sound that caught my attention as Chuck and Tyler were setting up their bizarre Rube Goldberg machine of jarred smells and pilfered antique kitchenware, clearly intending to bring the whole thing crashing down as soon as they had it stacked to their satisfaction. My role in this construction project was simple: I was the one who picked the locks on the china cabinets and eased open the ancient cupboards, keeping the boys safe from spiders.
For a couple of guys fixated on projecting their own version of aggressive, unrelenting masculinity, they sure were freaked out by spiders.
But something was different. Some small, indefinable quality of the air around us had changed between one breath and the next, becoming raw and wrong and unwelcoming. I turned away from the boys, frowning, trying to decide what was bothering me.
Tyler noticed, of course. Tyler paid too much attention to the wrong things, and always had. “What’s the matter, Emily?” he jeered. “You scared?”
“Suck my ass,” I replied genially. “Just because Elisa doesn’t want anything to do with you, that doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk to me.”
“Elisa doesn’t want anything to do with you either, dyke,” he said. There was a darkness in his tone that matched the darkness in the house.
“Don’t say that shit,” said Chuck.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Whatever,” Chuck said, and added another jar to his stack.
I turned to look back at the pair of them, frowning. These were my friends? These were the people, out of the entire school, who I had decided were worth impressing, worth spending time with?
Sometimes I think most relationships are nothing more than a matter of stumbling from loneliness to loneliness until we find someone whose company is better than being alone, and then putting up with their jackass associates until we realize it’s not worth it after all. Elisa was hot and funny and could even be sweet, when no one else was around to see her doing it. Sure, sometimes I’d wondered whether she was like that with all of us—gentle and kind in private, flirty and rude in public—but I’d never wanted to think about it too hard, because if I did, I would need to decide how I felt about it.
I wanted to have friends. I wanted to have people who’d have my back if things went south. But somehow, “having friends” always seemed to mean getting stuck with people who didn’t really like me, and who I didn’t really like either, while Elisa did her own thing and told us about how sick it was later.
“I’m going to check on Aiko,” I said.
“Dyke,” said Tyler again.
I whirled. “I will shove one of Chuck’s chemistry projects so far up your ass that you’ll be burping stink bomb until you turn thirty-five,” I snarled. “There are words you don’t use. They’re not yours.”
“Nobody owns a word,” said Tyler, looking at me coolly. “I’m just saying it like I see it.”
“You see it like an asshole.”
His laughter followed me out of the kitchen and back down the hall toward where we had left Aiko. She wasn’t my friend either, but at least she didn’t go out of her way to insult me. Actually, she didn’t go out of her way to do anything, good or bad, where I was concerned. Mostly, she looked at me like she was trying to figure out my deal, like once she understood me, she could decide what she wanted to do about me. There was nothing cruel in her gaze. Cold, sure, but not cruel.
Aiko’s bat was lying at the bottom of the stairs.
I stopped when I saw it, blinking, unable to quite process what I was seeing. Aiko carried that bat everywhere. She took it to class with her, and when new teachers objected, she’d go home and come back with a note from her parents explaining that her mental health was directly tied to her possession of the bat. Our school had a zero-tolerance policy for weapons, which meant if anyone came right out and said “but she could beat someone with that,” they ran the risk of doing away with the entire baseball team in the process. Aiko was clever. She knew where the cracks in the rules were, and she knew how to exploit them.
So why was her bat on the floor? Slowly I bent and picked it up. I’d never actually touched it before, and on some level, I was surprised when I was able to. It should have been like Thor’s hammer, too heavy for a mere mortal to lift. It should have burned my hand. Instead, it was just an ordinary bat, with an ordinary weight, worn smooth by Aiko’s skin.
“Aiko?” I asked, in a small voice.
There was no reply.
Step by step, I climbed the stairs, moving toward the stained glass window—which wasn’t broken, wasn’t smashed, wasn’t even cracked. It showed a vast field of stars, silver and gold against a background of blue, and must have turned this hall into an eternal twilight when the sun was up. There was something strange about the way the stars were placed, like they made some sort of picture I could almost but not quite see.
When I saw what was on the floor, I stopped looking at the window.
Aiko was crumpled there, folded in on herself like a discarded doll, her face hidden behind the careless tangle of her hair. I ran to her side, dropping to my knees and shaking her.
“Aiko? Aiko!”
She was utterly unresponsive, recalling and strengthening my first impression: that she was a child’s plaything that had somehow displeased and been cast aside, to be reclaimed later when the offense had faded. I rolled her onto her back. Her open eyes stared up at the ceiling, the black strands of her hair crossing her irises like cobwebs. I brushed them aside, unable to stand her fractured, unblinking gaze.
But she wasn’t dead. She was breathing shallowly, and her skin was soft and warm. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead. I had come here tonight looking for a little good, old-fashioned mayhem, the sort of Halloween pranks that would make us gods at school and maybe—just maybe—bridge the differences between us, making us the sort of gang that stuck together through thick and thin, and not only when it was easy and convenient. I wanted that. I wanted it so badly I could almost taste it, like sugar on my tongue.
There was a sound from the kitchen, short and sharp, the beginning and ending of screams compressed into a space too small to hold them. I didn’t move. I closed my eyes, and cradled Aiko close, and wished I were strong enough to lift her up and carry her out of here, away from whatever haunted this place where the gutters never clogged and the floors never mildewed. Something was wrong with the Holston house. Something had always been wrong with the Holston house.
For the first time, it occurred to me that there was a name for something shiny and untouched and perfect: lure. Or trap. Either would do. The adults we trusted, who were supposed to take care of and protect us, they’d sent us here, hadn’t they? They’d talked about what a wonderful target this house was, how no one cared about it, how we could wreak whatever havoc we wanted without getting into trouble. They’d set the bait and we had snapped it up like animals, rushing out without stopping to wonder why generations of teens hadn’t gotten here before us.
There was a footstep behind me.
—
THE LAST TRICK-OR-TREATER had found one of her friends and was holding her, rocking her, the way Mama used to rock Mary, before Mama had to go away. Mary paused. She didn’t like remembering Mama, not really. Mama had gone outside the house before things…before things changed, and when they’d changed, Mama hadn’t been able to find a way back in. Cook said it was because Mama had been outside the gates, and outside the gates was a different world.
Mr. Evans said it hadn’t always been that way.
Mr. Blake said Mama had Done Something when she realized things were going to change one way or the other, and that whatever she had Done was the biggest trick and the biggest treat ever, because it was why they were able to stay here, Halloween after Halloween, no matter how much the world changed outside the gates. The Holston house would stand forever, because Mama had known her little girl was dying, and Mama had wanted to give Mary a house to haunt.
“It’
s Halloween,” said Mary finally, to the last trick-or-treater.
The girl raised her head and turned, spitting words over her shoulder like an angry cat. “So do whatever you’re going to do. Get it over with.”
Mary cocked her head to the side.
This trick-or-treater didn’t have anything that she could use to hurt the house or break things. She’d opened the doors, but she had done it gently, kindly, doing no damage, leaving no mark behind. It was Halloween. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have an invitation. What mattered was that she had come, and Mary had been so very lonely.
“It’s Halloween,” she said again. “Do you want a trick, or do you want a treat?”
The girl looked at her and said nothing, but there was hope in her eyes. Mary smiled.
Mary took it.
—
SHE SAYS SHE’S my sister now, and I guess she’s going to keep saying it until I forget it isn’t true. This is the Holston house, after all. There’s nothing here but time.
We stood by the bay window, watching as the people who’d been my friends walked toward the gate where the girl who’d been Elisa was waiting. They looked small and strangely naked without the paraphernalia of their mock wickedness. The house had swallowed it entire, along with whatever it had taken from them. Less, according to Mary, than it would have taken if I hadn’t agreed to stay; more than it would have taken if they’d listened to the things no one was saying and chosen to stay away.
They would be good now. Good like the older teens, the ones we’d always been puzzled by, the ones who should have destroyed the Holston house long before we’d had the chance to go there. The ones who’d met Mary, who’d become her treats when she saw the tricks they were trying to play.
Maybe this is the last time. Maybe next year, when Halloween comes, I’ll be able to warn the naughty ones away, be able to tell them to go and throw eggs at some other, lesser house, one that’s a little less protected, a little less…aware. Maybe I can save them.
Or maybe they’ll find my body, the only thing allowed to decay in this haunted, hallowed place, dissolving into dust at the top of the stairs. Maybe they’ll meet Mary, enjoying the holiday highlight of her year, trading tricks for treats for the whole town to enjoy.
Holston, Oregon, is a nice place to live. Its founders—what remains of them—make sure of that.
“It’s Halloween,” whispered Mary, and she slipped her insubstantial hand into mine, and held me tight.
She says she’s my sister now. Give us enough time, and it will be true.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” I didn’t mean to ask the question. I asked it anyway.
She looked up at me and smiled. “With graveyard weeds and wolfsbane seeds, and empty graves all in a row,” she said. “It’s Halloween.”
“Yes,” I said, and the night went on around us, and the night would never end.
Dirtmouth
Stephen Graham Jones
FIRST YOU NEED TO KNOW that my children, Zoe and Keithan, the only memory of their mother they ever had a chance at, it was through that television movie. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? All of Colorado tuned in that night, for the story they already had from the news: “Woman Battling Postpartum Depression Attempts ‘Mountain Cure.’ ” It’s a tragedy any way you look at it. A success as well, yes, a “triumph of the human will,” all that clickbait, but, for us, more than a year ago already, a tragedy. I don’t blame Marion for it, though, Officer—Detective, sorry—and neither could I blame her depression or, of course, the twins. Especially not Zoe and Keithan. If there are to be victims here, then it’s them.
The second thing you need to know, probably, is that it was Halloween. So it’s been two weeks, I know. If I could have hiked down, braved the chest-high drifts, I would have, believe me. And please also believe me that I was beating the drifts those first few days. Just, not downhill from the cabin, so much.
I’ll get to that.
The reason I mention it was Halloween is that, sure, it’s like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day and Christmas and the rest, commercialized to the point of death. But, unlike those other holidays, there’s still something we instinctually respond to with that holiday, something more than the stimulus-response we’ve had conditioned into us by an avalanche of marketing.
Halloween’s always been the night where the rules don’t hold, hasn’t it? It’s like the world’s night off. And we still kind of can get glimpses of that in the masks some of the older kids wear. In the movies that get recycled in October. Taken singly, it’s all harmless, but considered en masse…I think it congeals into something darker, Detective. I think the impulse we feel to lower our face into a mask for that one night of the year, it’s our instinctual need to hide the true self we feel might surface, on accident.
But, to get back to the cabin. It’s two weeks ago now, and I’m taking my own version of the mountain cure, I suppose. What I’ve got planned is a whole month in Marion’s parents’ cabin with the kids, just me and them for once, with promises from her parents and sisters that there’ll be minimal contact. You maybe have a handle on this kind of thing already, doing what you do and all, but after a mom dies, her whole family is right there every time you turn a corner. Casseroles and babysitting, that’s pretty much what it comes down to. Because no way could any guy keep himself and his kids fed and washed and safe, right?
Those first couple weeks after the funeral, okay, this was maybe the case. Not because I’m male, just because I’m human. I was down, I was despondent, I was pulling my hair. I was looking ahead to the next seventeen years. I was seeing Zoe and Keithan walking the stage of their graduation, me out in the crowd carrying Marion’s framed portrait or something.
I know, I know, realistically I’d probably be remarried by then, but, too, I think it’s kind of natural to key on the most painful image we can conjure and then just stare at it until there’s nothing else in the world.
But, I finally managed to tear my eyes away from that, to take it a day at a time like all the books and sites and groups say, and, now, two weeks ago, I’d made the announcement to Marion’s sisters and to her parents that I wanted some alone time with the kids. To get to know them again. To start over.
The keys to the cabin were already hanging by our fridge. They were Marion’s parents’ wedding gift to all their daughters, kind of a family time-share we don’t have to pay into, just schedule.
I scheduled most of November, right up until Thanksgiving—on the laughing provision to Marion’s mom that, yes, I would dress the kids up, then video-call so the grandparents could see their cute costumes. What kind of cabin has a satellite with enough of an uplink for video? The answer is: any kind of cabin Marion’s dad, the retired-but-still-consulting CFO, would build.
It was a deal. I stopped on the way out of town to stock up on the kids’ favorite crackers, on milk and eggs and microwave waffles, and I bought two all-in-one costumes for them: an inchworm and a happy devil. If you knew Zoe and Keithan, I wouldn’t have to tell you which was which.
They fell asleep on the drive up the mountain, of course, which I was so grateful for. Since they’d never been up that winding road—up to ten thousand feet—I didn’t know if one or both of them would get carsick or not. And, single-parenting it, I had zero clue what I’d do with two puking kids in the backseat, facing the other way from me.
Anyway, I bundled them one at a time into the cabin, started the fire crackling, ate a cold waffle—I should tell you the why of that, I guess. It’s Marion. The whole time we were dating, probably a third of our dates were in tents. And she always brought a single waffle in a hard plastic bin there was never any actual space for in her pack. It was her prize, kind of. For pushing up this slope, for weathering that storm, for wearing wet socks all day.
When she went up for the last time, she had a waffle with her, even though every ounce counts when you’re on a rock face like she was.
As for where s
he got the idea that pushing herself like that would battle the hormones left over from pregnancy—or coming on just then—that was completely her. No guru, no mystic, no books. Like her dad, she was fiercely self-sufficient. Had a book said that the best thing to battle postpartum depression with was life-risking physical exertion, she probably would have joined a knitting circle instead.
But it was her idea, and she prepped for it the right way, got back in climbing shape ahead of what the doctors said she could do, then she buddied up with Sheila from the rock gym, and, just like the movie says, one day they drove up that twisting road to conquer a mountain, one toehold at a time. And only one of them came home.
That last image of Marion—of the actor playing her—is from that split instant after her fingerhold crumbles, when she’s floating back into all that open space behind her, when you think that the mist from the creek, in full-on spring-melt mode, can maybe cushion her, catch her, deliver her safely to the ground.
Instead, as all of Colorado knows, it just did what nature does, what the mountain’s been doing for the whole history of our species: it swallowed her.
Worse?
Though bodies lost to the creek up in the canyon usually wash up down in Boulder, to great dismay and consternation, this time the waters didn’t surrender what they held.
But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The search continues, all that.
I don’t keep track anymore, honestly.
And after Halloween night, well—I guess this is where you’re going to start doubting me. Where you’re going to start thinking that there are paternal or spousal grief hormones that can pull a left-behind dad down as well.
I’ll agree with you, too. At least that far.
And I appreciate the…I guess we can call it irony? Of this not happening until I ventured back up into the mountain that ate my wife? And I guess that must have been lodged somewhere in my head?