Halloween

by Paula Guran

  “Wouldn’t it be great?” said Peter. And then, unexpectedly, he grinned. He would never forget I was there, I realized. Couldn’t. I was all he had.

  He turned and walked straight across the grass. The Mack sisters and Mr. Andersz followed, all of them seeming to float in the long, wet green like seabirds skimming the surface of the ocean. I did not go with them. I had the feel of Jenny’s fingers in mine, and the sounds of flapping paper and whirling leaves in my ears, and Peter’s last, surprising smile floating in front of my eyes, and it was enough, too much, an astonishing Halloween.

  “This thing’s freezing,” I heard Peter say, while his father and the Macks fanned out around him, facing the house and me. He was facing away, toward the trees. “Feel this.” He held the tongue of the bell toward Kelly Mack, but she’d gone silent, now, watching him, and she shook her head.

  “Ready or not,” he said. Then he reared back and rammed the bell-tongue home.

  Instinctively, I flung my hands up to my ears, but the effect was disappointing, particularly to Peter. It sounded like a dinner bell, high, a little tinny, something that might call kids or a dog out of the water or the woods at bedtime. Peter slammed the tongue against the side of the bell one more time, dropped it, and the peal floated away over the Sound, dissipating into the salt air.

  For a few breaths, barely any time at all, we all stood where we were. Then Jenny Mack said, “Oh.” I saw her hand snake out, grab her sister’s, and her sister looked up, right at me, I thought. The two Macks stared at each other. Then they were gone, hurtling across the yard, straight across that wide-open white eye, flying toward the forest.

  Peter whirled, looked at me, and his mouth opened, a little. I couldn’t hear him, but I saw him murmur, “Wow,” and a new smile exploded, one I couldn’t even fathom, and he was gone, too, sprinting for the trees, passing the Macks as they all vanished into the shadows.

  “Uh,” said Mr. Andersz, backing, backing, and his expression confused me most of all. He was almost laughing. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “We didn’t realize . . . ” He turned and chased after his son. And still, somehow, I thought they’d all been looking at me, until I heard the single, sharp thud from the porch behind me. Wood hitting wood. Cane-into-wood.

  I didn’t turn around. Not then. What for? I knew what was behind me. Even so, I couldn’t get my legs to move, quite, not until I heard a second thud, closer this time, as though the thing on the porch had stepped fully out of the house, making its slow, steady way toward me. Stumbling, I kicked myself forward, put a hand down in the wet grass and the mud closed over it like a mouth. When I jerked it free, it made a disappointed, sucking sound, and I heard a sort of sigh behind me, another thud, and I ran, all the way to the woods.

  Hours later, we were still huddled together in the Andersz’ kitchen, wolfing down Ho Hos and hot chocolate. Jenny and Kelly and Peter kept laughing, erupting into cloudbursts of excited conversation, laughing some more. Mr. Andersz laughed, too, as he boiled more water and spooned marshmallows into our mugs and told us.

  The man the bell had called forth, he said, was Mr. Paars’ brother. He’d been coming for years, taking care of Mr. Paars after he got too sick to look after himself, because he refused to move into a rest-home or even his brother’s home.

  “The Lincoln,” Peter said, and Mr. Andersz nodded.

  “God, poor man. He must have been inside when you all got there. He must have thought you were coming to rob the place, or vandalize it, and he went out back.”

  “We must have scared the living shit out of him,” Peter said happily.

  “Almost as much as we did you,” said Kelly, and everyone was shouting, pointing, laughing again.

  “Mr. Paars had been dead for days when they found him,” Mr. Andersz told us. “The brother had to go away, and he left a nurse in charge, but the nurse got sick, I guess, or Mr. Paars wouldn’t let her in or something. Anyway, it was pretty awful when the brother came back. That’s why the windows were all open. It’ll take weeks, I bet, to air that place out.”

  I sat, and I sipped my cocoa, and I watched my friends chatter and eat and laugh and wave their arms around, and it dawned on me, slowly, that none of them had seen. None of them had heard. Not really. I almost said something five different times, but I never quite did, I think because of the way we all were, just for that hour, that last, magical night: triumphant, and windswept, and defiant, and together. Like real friends. Almost.

  That was the last time, of course. The next summer, the Macks moved to Vancouver, although they’d slowly slipped away from Peter and me anyway by then. Mr. Andersz lost his job—there was an incident, apparently, he just stopped teaching and sat down on the floor in the front of his classroom and swallowed an entire box of chalk, stick by stick—and wound up working in the little caged-in accounting office at the used car lot in the wasteland down by the Ballard Bridge. And slowly, over a long period of time, it became more exciting, even for me, to talk about Peter than it was to be with him.

  Soon, I think, my mother is going to get sick of staring at the images repeating over and over on our TV screen, the live reports from the rubble of my school and the yearbook photo of Peter and the video of him being stuffed into a police car and the names streaming across the bottom of the screen like a tornado warning, except too late. For the fifteenth time, at least, I see Steve Rourke’s name go by. I should have told him, I thought, should have warned him. But he should have known. I wonder why my name isn’t up there, why Peter didn’t come after me. The answer, though, is obvious. He forgot I was there. Or he wants me to think he did.

  It doesn’t matter. Any minute, my mother’s going to get up and go to bed, and she’s going to tell me I should, too, and that we’ll leave here, get away and never come back.

  “Yes,” I’ll say. “Soon.”

  “All those children,” she’ll say. Again. “Sweet Jesus, I can’t believe it. Andrew.” She’ll drop her head on my shoulder and throw her arms around me and cry.

  But by then, I won’t be thinking about the streaming names, the people I knew who are people no longer, or what Peter might have been thinking tonight. I’ll be thinking, just as I am now, about Peter in the grass outside the Paars house, at the moment he realized what we’d done to him. The way he stood there, vibrating. We didn’t make him what he was. Not the Macks, not his dad, not me—none of us. But it’s like he said: God puts something shaped like that in the world, and then He expects us not to ring it.

  And now there’s only one thing left to do. As soon as my mom finally lets go, stops sobbing, and stumbles off to sleep, I’m going to sneak outside, and I’m going to go straight down the hill to the Paars house. I haven’t been there since that night. I have no idea if the sheds or the house or the bell even exists, anymore.

  But if they do, and if that eye in the grass or any of its power is still there . . . well, then. I’ll give a little ring. And then we’ll know, once and for all, whether I really did see two old men, with matching canes, on the porch of the Paars house when I glanced back right as I fled into the woods. Whether I really did hear rustling from all those sideways sheds as I flew past, as though, in each, something was sliding out of the ground. I wonder if the bell works only on the Paars family, or if it affects any recently deceased in the vicinity. Maybe the dead really can be called back for a while, like kids from recess.

  And if they do come back—and if they’re angry, and they go looking for Peter, and they find him—well. Let the poor, brilliant, fucked-up bastard get what he deserves.

  HALLOWE’EN IN A SUBURB

  H.P. Lovecraft

  H.P. Lovecraft is best known for his weird fiction, but he wrote quite a bit of poetry as well. Although this one could be termed “cosmic horror,” he did not confine himself only fantastic or horrific themes.

  One thing about this poem bothered me, however. In the last verse HPL refers to lemurs. He used the word in his story “The Horror at Red Hook” too. Why, in th
e name of Yog-Sothoth, would prosimians native to Madagascar be barking in the suburbs, even if the hounds of Time have done their rending?

  I believe Lovecraft meant the Latin lemurēs, a particularly nasty type of Roman ghost. Most appropriate—but the three syllables would not have fit rhythmically, so he used the two-syllable lemurs. Lovecraft may have been known lemurs as an Anglicized version of the word or from Goethe’s Faust. Goethe’s Lemuren were sometimes translated into English as Lemurs. For Goethe they were creatures of a “half-patched nature” (Geflickte Halbnature) with enough ligaments, tendons, and bones (Bändern, Sehnen, und Gebein) to dig graves for Mephistopheles.

  The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,

  And the trees have a silver glare;

  Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,

  And the harpies of upper air,

  That flutter and laugh and stare.

  For the village dead to the moon outspread

  Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,

  But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep

  Where the rivers of madness stream

  Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

  A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves

  In the meadows that shimmer pale,

  And comes to twine where the headstones shine

  And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

  For harvests that fly and fail.

  Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change

  That tore from the past its own

  Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power

  Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne,

  And looses the vast unknown.

  So here again stretch the vale and plain

  That moons long-forgotten saw,

  And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,

  Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw

  To shake all the world with awe.

  And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,

  The ugliness and the pest

  Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,

  Shall some day be with the rest,

  And brood with the shades unblest.

  Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,

  And the leprous spires ascend;

  For new and old alike in the fold

  Of horror and death are penned,

  For the hounds of Time to rend.

  ON THE REEF

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Halloween’s ancient beginnings are obscured by time, so it should come as no surprise that there would be a connection between this powerful time of year and the worship of the Elder Gods. Some fret about Satanic connections to Halloween; if you really want to worry, consider the so-called fictional mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and ceremonies such as the one portrayed here by Caitlín Kiernan. Rites so potent the waking minds of men and women are suddenly, briefly, obscured by thoughts too wicked to ever share and, if asleep and dreaming, their dreams are turned to hurricane squalls and drownings and impossible beasts stranded on sands the color of a ripe cranberry bog.

  Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

  —Oscar Wilde (1891)

  There are rites that do not die. There are ceremonies and sacraments that thrive even after the most vicious oppressions. Indeed, some may grow stronger under such duress, stronger and more determined, so that even though devotees are scattered and holy ground defiled, the rituals will find a way. The people will find a way back, down long decades and even centuries, to stand where strange beings were summoned—call them gods or demons or numina; call them what you will, as all words only signify and may not ever define or constrain the nature of these entities. Temples are burned and rebuilt. Sacred groves are felled, but new trees take root and flourish.

  And so it is with this ragged granite skerry a mile and a half out from the ruins of a Massachusetts harbor town that drew its final, hitching breaths in the winter of 1928. Cartographers rarely take note of it, and when they do, it’s only to mark the location for this or that volume of local hauntings or guides for legend trippers. Even the teenagers from Rowley and Ipswich have largely left it alone, and the crumbling concrete walls are almost entirely free of the spray-painted graffiti that nowadays marks their comings and goings.

  Beyond the lower falls of the Castle Neck (which the Wampanoag tribes named Manuxet), where the river takes an abrupt southeastern turn before emptying into the Essex Bay, lies the shattered waste that once was Innsmouth. More than half buried now by the tall advancing dunes sprawls this tumbledown wreck of planks weathered gray as oysters, a disarray of cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks, the stubs of chimneys, and rows of warehouses and docks rusted away to almost nothing. But the North Shore wasteland doesn’t end at the shore, for the bay is filled with sunken trawlers and purse seiners, a graveyard of lobster pots and steel hulls, jute rope and oaken staves, where sea robins and flounder and spiny blue crabs have had the final word.

  However, the subject at hand is not the fall of Innsmouth town, nor what little remains of its avenues and storefronts. The subject at hand is the dogged persistence of ritual, and its tendency to triumph over adversity and prejudice. The difficulty of forever erasing belief from the mind of man. We may glimpse the ruins, as a point of reference, but are soon enough drawn back around to the black granite reef, its rough spine exposed only at low tide. Now, it’s one hour after sundown on a Halloween night, and a fat Harvest Moon as fiery orange as molten iron has just cleared the horizon. You’d think the sea would steam from the light of such a moon, but the water’s too cold and far too deep.

  On this night, there’s a peculiar procession of headlights along the lonely Argilla Road, a solemn motorcade passing all but unnoticed between forests and fallow fields, nameless streams and wide swaths of salt marsh and estuary mudflat. This night, because this night is one of two every year when the faithful are drawn back to worship at their desecrated cathedral. The black reef may have no arcade, gallery, or clerestory, no flying buttresses or papal altar, but it is a cathedral, nonetheless. Function, not form, makes of it a cathedral. The cars file down to the ghost town, the town which is filled only with ghosts. They park where the ground is firm, and the drivers and passengers make their way by moonlight, over abandoned railroad tracks and fallen telegraph poles, skirting the pitfalls of old wells and barbed-wire tangles. They walk silently down to this long stretch of beach, south of Plum Island and west of the mouth of the Annisquam River and Cape Ann.

  Some have come from as far away as San Francisco and Seattle, while others are locals, haling from Boston and Providence and Manhattan. Few are dwellers in landlocked cities.

  Each man and each woman wears identical sturdy cloaks lined sewn from cotton velveteen and lined with silk, cloth black as raven feathers. Most have pulled the hoods up over their heads, hiding their eyes and half hiding their faces from view. On the left breast of each cape is an embroidered symbol, which bears some faint resemblance to the ikhthus, secret sign of early Christian sects, and before that, denoting worshipers at the shrines of Aphrodite, Isis, Atargatis, Ephesus, Pelagia, and Delphine. Here, it carries other connotations.

  There are thirteen boats waiting for them, a tiny flotilla of slab-sided Gloucester dories that, hours earlier, were rowed from Halibut Point, six miles to the east. The launching of the boats is a ceremony in its own right, presided over by a priest and priestess who are never permitted to venture to the reef out beyond the ruins of Innsmouth.

  As the boats are filled, there’s more conversation than during the walk down to the beach; greetings are exchanged between friends and more casual acquaintances who’ve not spoken to one another since the last gathering, on the thirtieth of April. News of deaths and births is passed from one pilgrim to another. Affections are traded like childhood Valentines. These pleasantries are permitted, but only briefly, only until the dories are less than a m
ile out from the reef, and then all fall silent in unison and all eyes watch the low red moon or the dark waves lapping at the boats. Their ears are filled now with the wind, wild and cold off the Atlantic and with the rhythmic slap of the oars.

  There is a single oil lantern hung upon a hook mounted on the prow of each dory, but no other light is tolerated during the crossing from the beach to the reef. It would be an insult to the moon and to the darkness the moon pushes aside. In the boats, the pilgrims remove their shoes.

  By the time the boats have gained the rickety pier—water-logged and slicked with algae, its pilings and boards riddled by the boring of shipworms and scabbed with barnacles—there is an almost tangible air of anticipation among these men and women. It hangs about them like a thick and obscuring cowl, heavy as the smell of salt in the air. There’s an attendant waiting on the pier to help each pilgrim up the slippery ladder. He was blinded years ago, his eyes put out, that he would never glimpse the faces of those he serves; it was a mutilation he suffered gladly. It was a small enough price to pay, he told the surgeon.

  Those who have come from so far, and from not so far, are led from the boats and the rotting pier out onto the reef. Each must be mindful of his or her footing. The rocks are slippery, and those who fall into the sea will be counted as offerings. No one is ever pulled out, if they should fall. Over many thousands of years, since the glaciers retreated and the seas rose to flood the land, this raw spit of granite has been shaped by the waves. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, and the early decades of the nineteenth—before the epidemic of 1846 decimated the port—the reef was known as Cachalot Ledge, and also Jonah’s Folly, and even now it bears a strong resembles to the vertebrae and vaulted ribs of an enormous sperm whale, flayed of skin and muscle and blubber. But after the plague, and the riots that followed, as outsiders began to steer clear of Innsmouth and its harbor, and as the heyday of New England whaling drew to a close, the rocks were rechristened Devil Reef. There were odd tales whispered by the crews of passing ships, of nightmarish figures they claimed to have seen clambering out of the sea and onto those rocks, and this new name stuck and stuck fast.