I asked the man if he was the owner of the bar and, when he hesitantly nodded, I launched into my journalism routine. I explained that I was a writer from Chicago and that I was writing a piece on Marrowvale and its unique Halloween rituals for an upcoming book. I said I needed to talk to people around town, to glean a sense of who they were, what they believed, why they did what they did. When you tell people you’re writing about them or their homes, most crack wide open like clams in a steamer, ready to regale you with embellished anecdotes and personal details that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to touch. But Mr. Schwartz didn’t spill his mind. He simply closed the Reader’s Digest and stared at me in much the same way the old man on the lawn mower had.
“So you want to see the museum, then?” he asked. I nodded and, trying another tactic, slid a twenty onto the bar.
He stared at the bill, eyes narrowed, then pushed it back toward me.
“Money doesn’t have much value here,” he said. “But let me show you what does.”
He hobbled out from his post and beckoned me to follow. I patted the switchblade in my pocket—a gift from my father on my fourteenth birthday and a precautionary tool I always carry when I’m in unfamiliar territory—and fell in behind Mr. Schwartz. I didn’t sense any menace from the barkeep, but I’ve read too many police blotters to simply accept invitations from strange men without reservation.
Mr. Schwartz led me up a flight of rickety stairs to a darkened hallway and, from there, shuffled into a small adjoining room lit by a single dingy lamp. Dust motes swirled in his wake like minuscule galaxies. I burst through them, into the room, and was instantly mesmerised by the assortment of objects laid out before me. On three long tables covered in white crushed velvet and set up in a “U” formation rested things for which I had no name. Here, a thing that looked like a leaf, but with a holographic sheen and a thickness closer to cardboard. There, a thing that resembled a butcher-knife but pulsed like a still-living heart. Here, a dull blue sphere cut in half, with hundreds of glittering, black needle-like shards protruding from its core. There, a metal square scoured with jagged lines similar to those etched upon the helmets in Kristina’s picture. Here, an inverted pyramid with drooping points that, defying gravity and physics, somehow stood upon its bottom vertex. There, a thing that mixed equal parts dollbaby and viral microbe, limbs contorting into spirals and wavy ropes.
The room was filled with craftsmanship and artistry, certainly, but it was craftsmanship and artistry of a completely unknown form. Each and every object in the room looked out of place, felt out of place, and caused my stomach to clench with an anxiety I’d never experienced in my entire life. It was like suddenly waking up in a room you’ve never been inside in a building you’ve never visited in a city inhabited only by the machinery of a long-forgotten people.
I stood gaping for several minutes, then finally asked, “What are these?”
Mr. Schwartz’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know? They’re treats from the meetings.”
“Treats, yes,” I said. “But what are each of them supposed to represent? What are they used for?”
Mr. Schwartz shrugged. “I try not to find out. It’s for the best.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“Because,” Mr. Schwartz said, fingers gently tracing the outline of one of the objects, “people who find out tend to end up in a bad way.”
“A bad way?” I pressed, though my imagination supplied plenty of horrifying imagery. I pictured my head locked inside one of the bizarre helmets from Kristina’s photo.
Mr. Schwartz nodded and tapped his forehead. “Up here.”
I murmured an assent and let the subject drop. I didn’t want to talk about the objects anymore, and I certainly didn’t want to be in the same room as them any longer. I was a journalist, a professional writer. I should have been overcome with curiosity. Yet, ridiculous though it may sound, I was beginning to feel disconnected from my own time and place, from my own thoughts and feelings. Terror rose up in my chest and I pinched the back of my hand to make sure I was still corporeal. I had a fleeting suspicion that somehow I might not be, even though I could feel the softness of my flesh twist in my fingers.
I hurriedly thanked Mr. Schwartz for the opportunity to view the collection and ran to my car. I sped away from Marrowvale and refused to glance in the rear-view mirror. Thirty miles and a separate world later, I parked at the shabby motel where I’d made a reservation. I checked in as quickly as possible and, forsaking my luggage, dashed inside my room. I bolted the door and collapsed on the bed—a bed that, while foreign and hard and tinged with the unmistakable scent of mildew, still reflected something crucially human, something that had been utterly absent in Mr. Schwartz’s “museum”.
Before long, sprawled on the bed, I fell into a deep slumber and dreamed.
In my dreams, I found myself in a stately edifice crammed full of glass display cases that housed two distinct types of artefacts: broken, twisted mirrors of ornate design and tiny human beings pinned to foam boards like so many insects. I wandered among those cases for the rest of the night, half-frightened to examine their contents but compelled to see the entire exhibit.
I also felt another presence in the edifice—a distant, ever-vigilant thing, like a night watchman at a bank of security cameras. I worried that I might be as broken and twisted as the mirrors, as pinned and skewered as the tiny people; I worried that the vigilant thing might see fit to include me in the displays. And so I tried to run from the edifice. I fled through thousands of rows of display cases, but encountered no end, no exit. I couldn’t escape the exhibit. I could examine the mirrors and take notes on the characteristics of the little people forever, but I could never leave. It appeared that I was inextricably trapped in my own curiosity. I threw myself to the floor, pounded the hard surface beneath me, and screamed myself into the morning.
The next afternoon found me in a better state of mind. Although it had taken a morning’s worth of writing, two hot showers, and a perfectly grilled hamburger at a quaint roadside diner called The Country Kettle to expunge my previous night’s dreams, I was prepared to return to Marrowvale to witness its Halloween festivities. I’d arranged to meet Kristina Pittlebach and her family before the celebration began and to accompany them to the mysterious “meeting” that Kristina refused to discuss in any detail. In the course of our exchanges, Kristina had also promised to let me examine “the heads”—her term for the bizarre helmets in the old photograph—and to interview any member of her family if I so desired.
As I drove toward Marrowvale, enthusiasm leaped beneath my skin. Something about the chill in the air shouted promise. I felt close to a discovery of monumental proportion, even though I wasn’t quite sure what that discovery might be. By the time I reached the Pittlebach homestead, a ranch-style house missing half its siding, my heart was racing.
I parked in the Pittlebachs’ driveway, which was gravel stained black by used motor oils, and made my way to their door. Innumerable rusted yard tools and shards of broken lawn statuary littered the path between driveway and door. I had to step carefully so as to not trip and impale myself on an ancient blade or the point of an eroded jockey. When I finally arrived on the Pittlebachs’ doorstep, a short, preternaturally pale girl with fiery red hair was hanging out over the threshold. I thought perhaps I’d stumbled across a wayward fey princess.
“Ms. Halloran,” the girl said, voice surprisingly grave. “I’m Kristina. I’ve been waiting.” She ushered me inside and slammed the door behind me.
We exchanged pleasantries—the usual “Oh, it’s so good to finally meet yous”—and she introduced me to the rest of her family, none of whom seemed pleased at my visit. Her father, a wisp of a man with a long, straggly beard, stared at me without speaking. Her mother, a buxom lady with a pronounced harelip, smiled and nodded. Puffy red rings beneath her eyes told of either seasonal allergies or a story of recent sadness. Kristina’s grandmother, a squat woman with uncontrollable
tremors, was the only one to actually greet me with words.
“Hello,” the old woman said, “I hear you’re a writer. You know, writers have to be careful. Some things don’t want to be written. And some things simply can’t be written. You don’t want to end up lost forever, dear.”
Kristina pulled me away, clearly embarrassed, and whispered, “Everyone around here is like Grandma. Especially this time of year.” She hurried me into the basement—a space that looked as though a flea market had exploded within it—and drew my attention to a gun safe that stood against one wall. Kristina fiddled with its dial and, after a few spins, its door squeaked open. She stepped back to let me peer inside. There, setting on makeshift shelves, were four of the helmets I’d seen in Kristina’s photo. For no reason I could have possibly explained, my stomach twisted in knots.
Struggling to maintain my composure, I leaned in and examined the headpieces. None of them had any forging marks or soldered seams or any other signs of metallurgy. Instead, they seemed almost organic, like an insect’s carapace, only composed of a material more rigid than chitin. In colour, they were a shade I’d never seen, a hue that shifted from bronze to grey and grey to bronze depending on the angle at which it reflected light. I didn’t want to touch one, but I knew I had no choice. I ran a finger along the inscrutable etchings—which, up close, reminded me of seismograph readings or the ECGs of heart attack victims—and felt a bolt of panic crash through my chest.
I flinched away and, desperate to remain objective, asked Kristina what the helmets were supposed to represent.
She laughed. “They’re not supposed to represent anything.”
“Then why wear them?” I asked, breathing hard, pulse pounding.
She shrugged. “Because we have to.”
“Did you make them?”
Again she laughed, as if what I’d asked was the most infantile question ever uttered.
“Of course not.”
The room began to spin and sway. I stepped away from the helmets and asked if I could sit down.
Kristina nodded and led me back upstairs. Somehow, I managed to navigate my way to a chair, where I vomited and collapsed. Every nerve in my body twitched and screamed. Some atavistic code in my chromosomes told me to run, to hide. But from what? Some bizarre Halloween masks? I was too professional to allow primordial fears to erase a potential chapter in my book.
Kristina brought me a glass of water and patted my shoulder. “I guess trying one on is probably a bad idea, then,” she said. “Grandma said it would be.”
I shuddered at the thought of the helmet being placed upon my head, my every perception being encased in a device of such indescribable foreignness. What would the world look like from inside? I wondered. Would it even still be this world, or would it be some other place? Would the sun or the moon or the stars be recognisable inside those helmets or would they be radically contorted variations of themselves? I sat and stared at the Pittlebachs’ chipped wooden floors, contemplating both these questions and nothing at all.
After minutes, hours, or, perhaps at the very end of time itself, I shook myself from the fugue and asked Kristina, who was still sitting nearby, “When do we go to the meeting place?”
Kristina looked at me askance. “At dusk,” she said. “So pretty soon.”
I glanced at a window and was shocked to find the sky beginning to bruise. Had I really been inside my own head for that long?
“It’s about a mile up one of the hunting paths in the hills,” Kristina continued. “But are you sure you want to? I think you might be sick.”
I assured Kristina that I’d be fine. I told her I occasionally experienced panic attacks—not a lie, actually—and that it just took me a while to regain my composure after I’d suffered one. I knew very well that what had happened to me in the basement couldn’t be chalked up to misfiring neurons or chemical imbalances, though. Like the objects in Dale Schwartz’s “museum”, the helmets radiated an uncanny otherness so powerful that it warped the fabric of thought. These were not simple Halloween masks. They were something else entirely.
Before long, Kristina’s father descended into the basement with a large, empty velvet sack and returned with it bulging full. As he passed, I could sense the “heads” in the bag, gazing at me with their pointed eyes.
“Time to go,” Kristina’s grandmother called out, spurring us into action. Mr. Pittlebach led the way and was already out the door, traipsing up a gentle, forested hill behind the Pittlebachs’ house. Kristina and I followed, with her mother and grandmother lagging behind.
While we walked, Kristina asked me about my last book, about the death rituals I’d witnessed. She wanted to know if there really were places where corpses served as bird food, where people danced with the deceased, where the bereaved amputated their own fingers to more physically approximate the loss of a loved one. I said yes, and that I’d even watched a young boy raised from his grave.
Kristina nodded. “I saw something like that once, when I was really little. A kid forgot his mask.”
“And what happened to him?” I asked.
Kristina shrugged. I wasn’t sure whether she didn’t remember, didn’t know, or didn’t want to tell me. We walked on, in silence.
With Kristina ensconced in quiet contemplation, I sensed an opening.
“So what are the heads?” I asked. “The masks?”
Kristina stopped and turned to look for her mother and grandmother. Softly, in the near darkness, she said, “Depends on what you’re willing to believe, I guess.”
“What do you believe?”
Softer yet, “That in the right time and place anything is possible, though most things are inconceivable due to the complexity and magnitude of their horror.”
I smiled, but I doubted that Kristina could have seen me. She’d quoted from my book. I’d been referring to the varied and innumerable ways we could die. I didn’t think she’d meant it in quite the same way.
“Why did you ask me to come here?” I pressed. “I don’t get the sense that your fellow townsfolk are too eager to share their traditions.”
Kristina shrugged again. Such a teenager.
“I think someone like you should see it. I think someone like you might understand. People think nothing happens here. People think this is one of America’s many buttholes. But it’s so much stranger than that. I think everyone should know.”
Hometown pride. Who would’ve guessed?
I reached out and squeezed Kristina’s arm. She jumped away, as though shocked.
Huffing, her mother and grandmother caught up to us and we continued stumbling onward.
After close to half an hour of hiking under night’s silken fabric, I saw a bright light flickering within the dense forest.
“We’re meeting the rest of the citizens of Marrowvale out here?” I asked. “Sort of a town festival with a bonfire and hotdogs? Something like that?”
Kristina’s voice dropped into a deeper register. “Yeah,” she breathed. “Something like that.”
We broke through a copse of trees and entered a field strewn with boulders the size and shape of which I’d never experienced. Each boulder stood twenty or thirty feet high and had been chiselled into complex star-shapes that resembled Goliath anemones and sea urchins. Near the centre of the cluster of boulders raged a fire and around the fire gathered the people of Marrowvale, all of whom had already donned their “heads”. Everyone stood silent and motionless and I shuddered at the spectacle.
Kristina motioned to an alcove in one of the megaliths. “You should probably wait here,” she whispered. “Try to stay out of sight. Some of our neighbours don’t know that I invited you to the meeting place and they might not like it.”
My throat tightened. “I’m a shadow,” I said, probably even less convincing to Kristina than to myself. I crawled into the alcove and gave Kristina a thumbs-up. Satisfied, she strode to the circled townsfolk and received a helmet from a person I assumed was her father. When her
mother and grandmother passed by, the older lady paused for a moment. She glanced at my hiding spot and said, very casually, “If I were you, I’d sneak off now. They’ll know you’re here, and they won’t allow it. They don’t have a head for you and yours isn’t going to be good enough.” Then away she puttered.
I crouched between the star-megalith’s legs and waited, fearful in the way of a child hopelessly lost in a department store. More people arrived. The air gained a serrated chill. I counted the number congregated before me. Thirty-three. The exact population of Marrowvale.
And so it began.
When the last straggler arrived and slid a “head” over his own, the townspeople aligned themselves into a large triangle, with each side comprised of eleven individuals. Then they did nothing. They stood in the field, their fire roaring without purpose, and did nothing.
But something was happening all the same.
The air in the field suddenly grew indescribably cold and sharp. It tore at my lungs and shredded my nostrils as I breathed in. Even having lived through a handful of tornado touchdowns, I’d never felt air so hostile, so bent on eradicating me from the inside out. I brought a hand to my face and found blood leaking from my nose. At the same time the air was gaining malicious sentience, a wide dark line appeared, floating, behind the triangulated people of Marrowvale, as though a strip of reality itself had been cleanly sheared away with a razor.
I stared at the dark line, blood now flowing freely from my nose, and began to seriously consider Kristina’s grandmother’s advice. This wasn’t a place I should be. This wasn’t a place anyone but the people of Marrowvale should be—and perhaps not even them.
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