by Ellen Datlow
Lance hid the rock behind his back and walked right up to her and said, “Is that supposed to scare me?”
Seanna just stood there. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows under the hood. A tickling chill ran up his spine, but he forced it away and reached up to knock her hood back.
The hood fell. There was nothing under it.
Lance staggered back. Pale hands appeared from the sleeves of the robe. Bony fingers unfastened the cloak. As the flowing fabric pooled to the ground, he saw a neck. A bloodied, raw neck, the severed spine poking through.
He spun so fast he pitched forward but came out running, tearing down the passage. When a shadow filled the other end, he knew what it was. Knew and told himself he was wrong.
A trick. Just a trick.
The black sow curled back its lips, dagger-sharp tusks flashing. Lance wheeled, rock still in his hand, back to the wall, gaze swinging between the two, ready to bash whichever came at him first.
But they just stood there, one at either end of the passage, blocking his escape.
The headless woman.
The tailless black sow.
Silent.
Motionless.
Waiting.
—
SEANNA CROUCHED BEFORE the glowing embers of the bonfire. She’d found the place where she’d laid her stone. Empty now. She cursed Lance. Nasty tricks were fine, but this was outright cruelty.
She reached into her pocket for the stone. When she pulled out snips of ivy instead, her temper sparked anew. Goddamn him. When he’d shown up, she’d been cutting ivy for the rite of Eiddiorwg Dalen.
Snip ten pieces of ivy on Nos Galan Gaeaf, throw away nine, and sleep with the tenth under her pillow. That would grant Seanna the gift of prophetic dreams. The gift of the sight. Rose might claim that wasn’t how she got hers, but her aunt had to be lying. Trying to keep her gift all to herself.
Seanna threw the ivy aside. Too late now. She’d have to wait for next year. All because of Lance.
She returned her stone to its place and settled back on her haunches to survey the ring of rocks. She had to squint to make out names, and she was about to give up when the clouds veiling the moon thinned and its glow lit the street.
Another scan of the stones. Then a smile as her fingertips touched down on the one marked with Lance’s name.
To her left, she heard what sounded like a sudden gasp. She squinted toward the sound. It seemed to come from the walkway by the bank, but she couldn’t see anything.
She reached again for Lance’s stone. Her fingers wrapped around it. A shriek rent the air, and she stumbled, falling flat on her ass. Then a screech, this one cut short, the cry of some animal seized by a predator.
Seanna peered toward the walkway. She’d seen an owl earlier by the playground. As she caught the faint but sickening crunch of bone, she shuddered. Definitely the owl.
She rose, pocketing Lance’s stone. Then she set out for home, taking the long way around, letting the crunching of bone and ripping of flesh fade behind her.
We’re Never Inviting Amber Again
S. P. Miskowski
I STAND ON the lawn staring at the October night sky. I’m trying not to shiver from the damp and cold. Clouds are etched like a black-lace veil over the moonlight. The street is alive with shadows. And at this moment I’m certain of only one thing: all of this is Amber’s fault. My sister-in-law ruins everything. There’s something wrong with Amber, even if no one else wants to admit it. Tonight is a perfect example. We go out of our way to be nice to her, and this is how she repays us. So, that’s it. We’re never inviting Amber again, not after tonight, not ever.
I was wrong to let my wife invite her crazy sister. I only caved because it’s Halloween. I thought our friends—Meredith and Connor, Steven and Jeff—might get a kick out of Amber’s palm-reading mumbo jumbo and predictions. The way she stares with those raccoon eyes, or blanks in the middle of a sentence and has to be coaxed back into conversation. Or the way she tries to run a simple errand and winds up stranded in the middle of nowhere. It’s the kind of thing I’ve been describing to Meredith and Jeff, at the office, for ages.
“Guess where my sister-in-law called from, last night?” This would be a typical prompt of mine at lunch, followed by sly grins and guesses all around.
“Fiji?”
“Reykjavik?”
“Nope,” I would say. “Abu Dhabi.”
“How did she end up there?” my wide-eyed friends would ask. “No broomsticks involved?”
Then I would smile and spend the next half hour reconstructing my wife, Cecily’s, story of her sister’s Uber ride to a downtown hair salon. The trip somehow morphed into a global adventure inspired by one of Amber’s “visions.” Along the way a suitcase was stolen, foreign currency was exchanged for precious gems, a tourist was suspected of launching a curse, and someone was stranded with a goat in New Zealand. None of it made sense. Probably all of it was invented. Of course I added a few details of my own, and this was part of the fun.
“Your sister-in-law is so crazy,” a coworker would say, after one of my stories. The way you might describe a reality-show star, or a pop singer who shaves her head and knocks out the windows on her husband’s car with a baseball bat.
“Crazy doesn’t begin to do her justice,” I would reply, and we would all laugh.
“I hate to tell you, but Amber doesn’t want to do palm readings tonight,” Cecily informed me after we’d finished lighting the jack-o’-lanterns along the patio in the backyard.
We were arranging the table in the dining room so our guests would have a pleasant view of the glowing pumpkins on the other side of the sliding glass door. My wife insisted on the jack-o’-lanterns because Amber said they kept something away—I honestly don’t remember what, maybe evil spirits, or bad karma, or misfortune.
Indoors we placed these tiny, spiderlike skeletons everywhere. On the table the skeletons leered with skulls tilted back, proffering toothpicks clutched in both hands. In the center of the table we set up platters with three kinds of cheese and deli meat, crackers, chips and dip.
“I don’t understand what she means by that,” I said.
“She doesn’t want to do it,” Cecily told me again. My sensuous wife with the long neck and amazing legs has a terrible weakness when it comes to her family.
“What does she want to do?” I asked more gruffly than I intended. The pre-guest whiskey was kicking in. “I mean, what does she feel like doing?” Consciously not grinding my teeth. Affecting the nonchalance my Cecily finds so appealing. Trying to adopt the easygoing manner she once mistook for my nature.
“I don’t know what she wants to do next, but she definitely quit telling fortunes. No palm reading, no tarot. Said she’s never going to do it again.”
All of this was news to me. It was typical of Cecily to keep quiet until the last minute, to avoid the “discussion” for as long as possible. It was typical of Amber to screw up our plans. I can’t count the number of times we’ve rescued her from a nightclub or a freeway ramp or a stranger’s apartment in the middle of the night. She couldn’t give us one evening of free entertainment in return?
“When?” I asked. “When did this happen?” Thinking maybe it was something Amber had dreamed up after she was invited.
“I’m not sure, but I think she said it was a couple of weeks ago,” Cecily explained.
“But why?” I asked, controlling my voice for my wife’s sake. “Why now? We invited her because she could do this one thing she’s done for years, and suddenly she’s quitting?” Prompting a thin sigh of indulgence, a sound I’ve come to dread.
“Drew, she didn’t quit because she wanted to ruin our party, if that’s what you’re implying. She said she scared herself.”
“Ooooooo…,” I said in what I hoped was a playfully teasing voice. “Did she accidentally see her own future as a parking lot attendant with an apartment full of rescue cats?”
Cecily pinched my arm gently
. She slid away from me, opened the mini-fridge we keep in the dining room, retrieved a chilled bottle of Chardonnay, and poured a glass.
“You know, we shouldn’t make fun of her,” she reminded me. “Not after all she’s been through. It isn’t fair, not really.”
Every conversation about my wife’s family leads eventually to Amber’s misfortunes. “All she’s been through” is a way of alluding to the stupid things she’s done, like flunking out of two colleges, accidentally setting a dorm room on fire, crashing her car and blaming it on a “vision” of dead people at a bus stop in the rain, or getting fired from her job as a receptionist after telling a client the advertising firm might be a portal to another dimension.
“You always defend her,” I said as calmly as possible. “I love your loyalty,” I lied. “But I reserve the right to point out that we’re discussing an adult—someone our own age—with no sense of accountability. Why did we ask her to come, if she won’t do one of her routines?”
“I told her we want to see her anyway, and we love her company.”
I groaned a little. I couldn’t stop myself.
“Cheer up, Drew. She promised to bring her Ouija board thing. Well, sort of promised.”
“Are you serious? I haven’t seen a Ouija board since college. Why don’t we just download spooky sound effects online?” I asked. “Creaking doors and cackling witches. I mean, if we want to put everybody to sleep.”
“Drew, if you’re mean when she gets here…”
“I won’t be,” I lied. “But really, honey, what were you thinking?”
“She said no more palm readings, never again. I couldn’t un-invite her. She seemed very upset. I guess she met this guy at a party—”
“Here we go.” At least I’d have another story to pass around.
“No, he was nice. He was this sweet, handsome guy named Hamish, and he said he really liked her.”
“Hamish?” I said.
A cheer went up in a backyard down the street. More parties for grouchy grown-ups like us, I imagined. Drunks bobbing for apples and flirting, neighbors in black corsets and fishnet stockings, all the people who hate their jobs or their spouses or both drowning their blues and acting like horny teenagers. I wished I could join them.
This is a quiet neighborhood. People keep to themselves, even on Halloween. We’ve lived on the same street for six years, three blocks from an elementary school, yet we’ve never seen one actual child trick-or-treating. Every year Cecily and I come up with a new explanation—alien abduction, urban coyotes…This year we finally chalked it up to the abnormal fears of fretful young parents. “Ninnies with babies,” we call them. Every time we say it we toast our fortuitous lack of children. Lately I’ve noticed a hint of something besides mirth in my beautiful wife’s hazel eyes.
“Okay, tell me what happened with this Hamish guy,” I said. Not riveted by Amber’s problems but trying to convince my wife otherwise.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. Her slender fingers held the wineglass beneath her gaze like a Magic 8 Ball with an answer she was trying to decipher. Behind her, beyond the sliding glass door, the sky was dark as slate.
“You mean she took him home and he didn’t call her again?”
Cecily shook her head.
“Come on. What?” I asked. “Did he go all psycho on her?”
“No. It wasn’t like that.”
“Did he hit her?” I asked, maybe with too much excitement.
“No,” she said. “It was nothing like that. He was wonderful. They spent the night together. And he died.”
This took a moment to sink in. I didn’t like any of the images it conjured.
“With Amber?” I asked. “At her place, like, in bed?”
Cecily shook her head again and sipped her Chardonnay. I studied the delicate curve of her scarlet lips. Add to my frayed nerves the fetching little set of leopard ears she wore as casually as barrettes. While we talked I was making after-party plans for my feline Cecily. It had been a while.
“No, he wasn’t with her,” my wife said. “It happened the following night, on his way home.”
“Did he wreck his car?”
“Not a traffic accident,” she said. “The details didn’t seem clear to me, but she said he was attacked.”
“Attacked?”
“Yes, in his car. He was driving. Well, he was waiting at a red light. I guess he’d left the doors unlocked, and he was attacked and killed.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and helped myself to a Corona from the mini-fridge because another whiskey would have taken me over the line. To the place my wife calls Drewville, where she stops talking and averts her eyes, and her magnificent red lips freeze in a pinch of disapproval. I was determined not to go to Drewville, not again.
“Is this what she predicted,” I said, “when she read the guy’s palm, or told his fortune or whatever?”
“I guess so.”
“Then why didn’t she, you know, do something? Didn’t she tell the guy to watch out for red lights, or lock his car, or anything?”
“She wanted to,” said Cecily. “But she was trying not to scare him away.”
“So, you see,” I pointed out. “She just uses this stuff to get attention. If she believed in it, she would have warned the guy. Right?”
“I don’t know, Drew.”
“Do you see what I mean? Right? You get what I’m saying, right?”
The doorbell interrupted. Playing good host and hostess, we put on our best smiles and made our way to the front door.
Steven slouched on our doorstep in his usual costume, the wool slacks and gray pullover of a civil servant off the clock. Beside him, Jeff wore jeans with a black T-shirt and a werewolf mask.
“Where’s your getup, Steven?” Cecily asked.
“We’re before and after,” Jeff mumbled beneath the layer of latex and fur.
“Before and after what?” she asked. “You’re not even wearing matching outfits.”
“It doesn’t work,” I told them. “No treats. Fuck you both. Good night.”
Jeff pulled off the mask and threw it away, across the lawn. Steven shook his head in mock disgust. “I told him it wasn’t a costume party, but he never listens. Let us inside, it’s getting frosty out here.”
We had barely settled into a round of drinks when Meredith and Connor arrived. No masks for the Harrisons. “Were we supposed to wear costumes?” Meredith asked, delicately pinching one of Cecily’s leopard ears. “It just occurred to me, this minute!”
“God, no,” I said. “Jeff wore some half-assed thing, but we made him take it off.”
“Give me another cocktail before you talk about me, you office drone,” said Jeff.
The volume of chatter increased to a ridiculous degree now that there were six of us. We gathered around the dining table, and our guests made polite “ooh” and “aah” sounds of appreciation at the sight of the glowing jack-o’-lanterns on the other side of the glass. I noticed a few seemed to be sputtering but decided to ignore it.
We ate and shared stories about the traffic, the perilous construction downtown, the gradual loss of all our favorite shops and cafés, and our baseball team’s rotten record. We smoked a joint and drank another round before Amber’s name came up in conversation.
“She might not even show up.” I hoped this was true. I considered Cecily’s mood and said, more lightly, “You never know with Amber.”
This elicited a few chuckles and nods. I refreshed all the drinks, hoping no one would repeat one of my sister-in-law stories in front of my wife. Fortunately, Connor announced his and Meredith’s plan to move to a larger house, and the conversation turned to real estate.
Cecily heard the knock first. She lifted her chin and adopted a listening expression. “Do you think that’s Amber?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s our first trick-or-treater in six years,” I said, and then checked my tone. “Don’t get up, honey. I’ll let her in.” The others resumed conv
ersation while I answered the door.
How do I explain the effect Amber has? Every time I see the woman it’s a shock to the senses. Not the way it hit me all those years ago at a nightclub near campus, a wild strain of animal desire mixed with alcohol and revulsion. The uncanny shiver she induces nowadays isn’t entirely due to her lack of grooming and maintenance. It’s the underlying, ever fading, yet vaguely familiar resemblance to my wife.
In college, for a very brief time, they almost looked like twins. When Cecily began her freshman year, Amber moved out of the dorm. They shared an apartment near campus and swapped clothing, makeup, and (in our case, for a strange semester) boyfriends. Then I broke up with Amber and the drift began. She moved back to the dorm, pretended to study, but then flunked most of her exams.
Cecily and I graduated early, with honors, and married soon after. Amber changed her major for the seventh or eighth time, failed at a second university, hinted at travel plans, and was fired from a series of jobs. This is when I recognized Amber’s inability to stay on track without her younger sister’s constant advice and attention. Honestly, she must have called us ten times a day until I gave her a warning.
“Well, there you are,” I said, standing in the doorframe, unable to summon a more enthusiastic greeting.
I motioned for her to come in. As I closed the door I saw an Uber car pulling away from the curb. No trick-or-treaters in sight, of course. Only a couple of adult vampires heading toward another party down the block, velvet capes gently swaying as they walked.
“Hey, Drew,” said Amber, her voice husky from smoking. “Thanks for letting me come over. I mean, thanks for inviting me.”
Even her breath and the voluminous dress she wore reeked of candles and spice. When she put her arms around my neck and pulled me close for a mushy kiss on the side of my face, I felt the mass of her body trying to surround and envelop me.
“No problem,” I said, gritting my teeth and disengaging myself from her awful embrace. I noted the circles under her eyes and the nocturnal heaviness of her mascara, wondering for the millionth time what I had once seen in her. I chalk it up to youthful ignorance. She was a sample, a trial relationship, before I gave myself over to Cecily, sanity, the suburbs, and investment portfolios. My wife appreciates these things, and she’s willing to work for them. So am I.