by Ellen Datlow
And then she said at last—“You fool. I am the devil; I have no soul!”
I had only a moment to experience this shock, and she had only a moment to witness and relish in my horror, before my own trick backfired upon me, and all at once the flame was quenched from her and rushed, instead, into me, for I did still have a soul, the only thing keeping me here on this earth. My soul ignited into flame, and I felt, then, the growing heat, and the wretched burn inside that cold and blasted hollow where my heart should be, and the flames growing within my ancient, creaking body as they charred my skeleton to ash. You cannot fathom the agony of being burned alive from the inside out, of feeling your soul devour the body you inhabit—oh, it is torture, a torture I have inflicted upon innumerable individuals! I opened my mouth to scream and knew the flames leaped out between my rotten teeth, and my vision danced and flickered with those flames so that the woman grinned at me as through a film of fire.
“I have been waiting a long, long time to seek my revenge on thee, Stingy Jack.”
As I watched, her face began to rot; her eyeballs bulged from swollen, putrid sockets; her lips turned black with gore; her flesh bubbled, contorted, turned green with putrefaction; thus did she transform into an awful, laughing corpse.
“The devil does not like to be tricked,” she said with glee.
My body crumbled as I was transformed into a flame.
The devil took this flame and placed it within that jack-o’-lantern that she had carved specially for me. I was a strange sort of formless consciousness within the orange gourd, and I wondered then, with mounting dread, whether the souls I took for my lantern remained somehow alive while I carried them in my lantern—if they were forced to experience all that I did, and live in anguish as a flame, alive, somehow, alive.
I did not have long to wonder upon this awful possibility, for the devil bent forward then and blew out my light.
And now, snuffed out but still existing, still existing, I am in a primeval and purgatorial darkness for all eternity—not dead, not alive, but a bodiless consciousness. Pity me, mortal souls, for though ye will die, and some will go to that wretched pit of despair that is known as hell, you will never face the terror and the endless madness of eternity as I will—I, Jack of the Lantern!
The Seventeen-Year Itch
Garth Nix
Six Weeks Before Halloween
“WHAT IS THIS?”
The new hospital administrator was peering through the peculiarly curved door, into the interior of the twelve-foot-diameter sphere of heavy steel that sat in the middle of the otherwise empty room. The curious object looked like a bathyscaphe or diving bell somehow lost far from the sea. Further compounding the mystery, the interior was completely lined with some sort of rubber or foamlike material, heavily impregnated with the stale smell of ancient piss and shit, hosed out but not forgotten.
“It says here ‘Special Restraint Sphere: Broward’ on the floor plan,” replied her assistant, a young man called Robert Kenneth, a failed MD who was hoping to make a new career in hospital administration. He’d only been at the place—an institution for restraining and forgetting the criminally insane—for two months longer than Dr. Orando, the administrator, who’d arrived the previous Friday and was now looking into every nook and cranny of the place, which had been built in three great surges, in 1887, 1952, and 1978.
“What does that mean?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” said Kenneth. “Um, we do have a patient called Broward. I think.”
“What can you tell me about this?” asked Orando, turning to the third member of their tour-of-inspection party. Templar McIndoe, senior orderly, was by far the oldest employee in the hospital, almost seventy and working on past retirement age by special permission and his own dire financial need. He knew everything there was to know about the hospital, though he didn’t always share this information.
“Stephen Broward,” said the old man. “They built this for him, special, back in forty-nine. That’s when he came here, after what he did.”
“Nineteen forty-nine? How old is this prisoner?”
“Oh, he’s old,” said McIndoe. “Older’n me. Must be ninety-five, ninety-seven, something like that. You’ve seen him, Mr. Kenneth. Guards call him Stubbsy.”
“Oh, him,” said Kenneth, trying and failing to contain a twist of his mouth, a visceral sign of distaste. “The one with no fingers or toes.”
“He’s got fingers, sort of,” said McIndoe stolidly. “He only cut ’em off from the middle knuckle. But you’re right about the toes.”
“A self-mutilator?” asked Orando with clinical interest. “Why do we have him? And why has he been held so long?”
“Murder,” replied McIndoe laconically. “Multiple murders. Back in sixty-five he killed near everyone in the place he was at then, an asylum down at Wickshaw. Twenty, thirty people.”
“What?” asked Orando. She frowned. “He can’t have. I’d know about something like that. My second doctorate was on the psychology of mass murderers. I covered everyone who killed more than a dozen.”
“Just what I was told,” said McIndoe with what he hoped came across as an apologetic shrug. He already knew not to argue with this new administrator, and he needed to keep the job. Just for a few more years…
“And this sphere?”
“Somewhere to put him over Halloween,” said McIndoe. “That’s when he’s particularly…upset.”
“You put a patient in there?” asked Orando. She had drawn up to her full, impressive height and was looking at McIndoe like he was some sort of vicious animal.
“Nope,” said McIndoe. “He puts himself in there. Morning before Halloween, he asks nice as pie to go in his special room and to not be let out till after the following dawn. Every Halloween; though it’s the seventeenth he’s always particularly wound up about.”
“It looks airtight,” said Kenneth. “He’d asphyxiate if he was in any longer than overnight. And there’s no facilities…”
“Nothing to scratch with, neither,” said McIndoe softly.
“What was that?” asked Orando. “And what’s this seventeenth Halloween business?”
“He has this terrible itch,” explained McIndoe. “It builds up over time, and it’s always worse at Halloween, and it gets worse every year. The peak comes every seventeen years. After that, it ebbs away, builds up again slowly. Nothing to scratch himself on, inside that sphere.”
“That’s why he cut off his fingers and toes?” asked Kenneth, the twist in his mouth coming back, but fascination in his eyes.
“Reckon so,” said McIndoe. “Pulled all his teeth out, too. He hands over his false ones before he goes in.”
“What a ludicrous waste of space, not to mention the original investment to build this…this sphere,” said Orando with decision. “What were my predecessors thinking to pander to a patient’s delusion in such a way? Well. He’s not going in that sphere anymore. A ninety-year-old patient in such a restraint? Not in my hospital. We’ll sedate him if necessary, but it’s still six weeks to Halloween. A course of therapy—under my direction—should ameliorate or even remove the problem. You said something, McIndoe?”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied McIndoe. “This Halloween is a seventeenth year. Broward will be real, I mean real bad—”
“I’ve already mentioned pandering to delusions!” snapped Orando. “I trust I will not have to deal with psychoses from staff members as well as the patients?”
“No, ma’am,” said McIndoe. Already he was thinking ahead to be sure he was rostered off over Halloween. Him and the few friends he still had among the staff.
McIndoe had seen Broward in 2001, and seventeen years before that in 1984, and even seventeen years before that, when he’d first started at the hospital. On each of these three past occasions, he had been greatly relieved there was a sphere to put him in.
Ten Days Before Halloween
“HOW YA DOING, Mr. Broward?” asked McIndoe, stopping by the tall b
ut stooped old man who was slowly refilling his paper cup from the watercooler in the recreation room.
“Bad,” said Broward, grimacing. “That new doctor, the boss one, she keeps giving me different tablets, trying out stuff, and she talks to me during rest period. It’s called rest period! I want to sleep then, like I’m supposed to.”
“How’s the…how’s the itch?” asked McIndoe carefully.
Broward looked down at his chest and his stubby, shorn hands in their leather gloves began to close on his sternum before he visibly willed them back to his sides.
“It’s bad,” he said gloomily. “That doctor reckons she’s hypnotized me so I don’t want to scratch. But I do. Ten days to go…This is going to be a terrible one, I can tell. Even for the full seventeen.”
“Seventeen years,” whispered McIndoe, looking carefully around the room. He didn’t want any of the other staff reporting him as insane.
“Yeah,” said Broward. “If old Doc Gutierrez hadn’t got me that sphere, I’d be really worried right now.”
His hands moved again, remnant fingers heading for his chest, stumps reaching to scratch whatever lay beneath his blue patient’s smock. Broward grimaced, baring his beautifully white false teeth as he forced his arms to his sides, his hands turned inward like claws.
“So…so all that talking and hypnotizing and the new drugs, they aren’t working?” asked McIndoe.
“Nope,” replied Broward. “It’s itching fierce. But I can hold It off, Mac. I can hold It off until Halloween. And in the sphere…nothing to scratch with. It’ll be okay. My great-great-granma, she carried It for more than a hundred years, I reckon. I’ve been okay more ’en fifty years, haven’t I?”
His voice was pleading, eyes wet.
“Yeah, yeah,” mumbled McIndoe. He gripped Broward’s shoulder, offering him support. There wasn’t much muscle there; it was all bone. The old man wasn’t much more than skin and bone.
“You’re a good man,” mumbled Broward. “Hell, you’re like family to me….”
His voice tapered off as he said that, and he suddenly looked at McIndoe as if seeing him in a new light.
“Family…,” he whispered.
“Yeah, we’ve known each other long enough,” said McIndoe. “Hell, I’ve known you longer than almost anyone.”
He tried to smile, but inside McIndoe felt cold, and old, and frightened. He’d already arranged to be rostered off over Halloween. There was nothing he could do. If he helped Broward get in the sphere, Dr. Orando would just let him out, and McIndoe would lose his job, and if he lost his job, he lost the house, and he was raising three grandchildren, still four years to get the youngest through high school. There was nothing he could do.
“Shit,” said McIndoe bitterly.
“What?” asked Broward. He’d rallied, was standing straighter, taking sips of his water. “Don’t worry about what I said….I can hold It off. I can. Don’t you worry, Mac. I’ll get in that sphere, hold It off another seventeen years! I’ll beat my great-great-granma yet!”
“Yeah,” said McIndoe. He tried to smile at the near centenarian being impossibly brave and failed. “Yeah. Keep up the good work.”
He walked away, leaving the old man sipping his water. While he waited for the orderly on the other side to open the door, McIndoe glanced back. Broward was holding the cup between the palms of his hands. The stubs of his fingers were twitching, curling and uncurling.
Making scratching motions in the air.
McIndoe fled, heart hammering, all the way back to his special refuge, the cleaning cupboard on level two of the oldest building. He took the Scotch from behind the loose bricks and took four swallows in quick succession, following it up with a gargle of mint-flavoured mouthwash, also from a bottle hidden behind the bricks.
The Day Before Halloween
“MR. KENNETH. I got to talk to you.”
“What is it, McIndoe?”
“Broward. He has got to go in the sphere tomorrow.”
Kenneth slid out from behind his desk and went to the door, looking to make sure Dr. Orando was not in sight. He shut the door and returned to his desk.
“You’ve got to help him get in the sphere,” repeated McIndoe.
Kenneth fumbled with a pencil, picked it up, drew some doodles on his desk blotter.
“The boss made it clear he’s not to go in that thing,” he said. “Broward is restrained in Ward Three, and heavily sedated.”
“He’s still trying to scratch, though, isn’t he?” asked McIndoe. “Should be out deeper than deep, and he’s still trying to scratch that itch, right?”
“Uh, yes,” said Kenneth. He swallowed several times. “Look…look, McIndoe, were you here in 1966?”
“Yep,” said McIndoe. “Nineteen years old, invalided out of the army—I took some shrapnel at Ia Drang—and looking for steady work. It was this or the Down’s bakery. I should’ve gone with the bakery.”
“Dr. Gutierrez, the old administrator…she left specific instructions for her successor, confirming what you said about Broward going into the sphere. Kind of odd…a personal letter, as well as the file instruction…she underlined a lot of it.”
“She was the best person I ever knew,” said McIndoe. “She worked out what would help people, made it happen. Not someone you expect to find in charge, well, you know what we got here. No one wants to know what happens to the people who come here. They get written off, whether they’re murderers or just plain don’t fit in.”
“But Broward is a murderer,” said Kenneth. “Isn’t he? His file isn’t clear on that point. He was committed for something to that place in Wickshaw, but its records went when it burned down in forty-nine. A lot of people died in the fire, and he was implicated in those deaths. Murder by arson. But was he already a murderer?”
“They burned it themselves,” said McIndoe. He was staring over Kenneth’s shoulder, looking back, seeing something long past. “Broward said they thought he was inside; that’s why they did it. But he’d already got out.”
“Who burned it?” asked Kenneth. He was doodling faster now, strange, grinning faces with lots of teeth, which he hastily drew over, scribbling heavy, thick lines.
“The staff who were left,” said McIndoe. “Least, that’s what Broward told me. I looked it up too, you know. Back in the day. They blamed him for the fire, but he didn’t do that.”
“What did he do?”
“He scratched an itch,” said McIndoe. “And you can’t let him. He has to go in the sphere.”
Kenneth drew a straight line on the paper, then underlined it, three times.
“We can’t,” he said slowly. “Orando will be here. She wants to observe him. But…”
He hesitated, pencil stabbing down in a sharp, black dot.
“But, you know…tonight, maybe. He’s an old man. He might die…with a little bit of—”
“No!” exclaimed McIndoe. “No! Don’t you think anyone thought of that before? He’s thought of it before. We can’t kill him. He can’t kill himself. And I think…I think he can’t even die.”
“Why…why not?”
McIndoe didn’t answer at once. Kenneth stared at the older man, the pencil broken in his hand. He hadn’t even noticed his hands clenching, snapping it in two.
“He wants to scratch that itch….He needs to scratch it,” said McIndoe. “There’s something inside him. Something that grows real slow, irritating the flesh, getting itchier and itchier. And when it gets to seventeen years old, it’s just unbearable and he’s got to scratch away and on Halloween it’s…I don’t know…ripe….”
“What?” asked Kenneth. “What?”
“He has to scratch that itch, he has to scratch all the way through skin and all,” whispered McIndoe. “So it can come out.”
Kenneth stared, still not understanding.
“But he must be able to die, and if we—”
“You don’t get it!” snapped McIndoe. “If he dies, where does whatever is inside him go?�
��
The two men sat in silence for a long, long minute. Finally Kenneth stood up and dropped the broken halves of the pencil in the trash bin by his desk.
“I…I can’t go against Orando,” said Kenneth. “I need this job.”
“Yeah, so do I,” said McIndoe. “But you’re young, you can get another—”
“I didn’t just fail my medical degree,” interrupted Kenneth. “I was struck off. Stealing drugs. I’m lucky not to be in jail. Orando’s a friend of my dad’s; she said she’d give me a chance.”
“If we don’t do anything…people will die.”
“Yeah, well, not me,” said Kenneth. He wiped his eyes. “I’m calling in sick. You do whatever you got to do, old man. I’m not going to be here.”
“I’m not working tomorrow,” said McIndoe. “None of the old crew are. And I reckon some of the young ones too, they’ve felt the vibe. Lot of people’ll be sick tomorrow.”
“What about the ones that come in?”
“Shit, I don’t know!” exploded McIndoe. “Some of the staff at Wickshaw survived. Some of them. I mean, they’ll have a chance. The inmates in the newer buildings, they might be all right.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” said Kenneth. “We’re just scaring ourselves. Projection. Lot of crazy people here, right?”
“Sure,” said McIndoe bitterly. “But I’m not working tomorrow, and I bet you’re still calling in sick.”
“Yeah,” said Kenneth. “I am sick. I got to go home now.”
Halloween
“THIS IS REALLY very interesting,” said Dr. Orando. “I’ve never seen anything like it. There is nothing in his records to indicate how he could be so resistant to anaesthesia.”