Part Five
Halloween
Chapter Forty-One
The banner had been taken down over City Hall, and the tent was gone from Rainer Park. The grandstand had been dismantled along Main Street. There were no more fireworks, or pumpkin pie eating contests, or parades, or pumpkin rolling contests, or music. The votes for Pumpkin Queen had been tallied, the winner crowned and feted and sent home.
Pumpkin Days were long over.
But the orange-painted stripe down the middle of Main Street remained, and so did the lights and the decorations and, of course, the pumpkins.
There was still the matter of Halloween.
October 31st dawned damp and cold, but by nine in the morning the misty rain had dissipated, and blue sky broke through. By eleven the sun had dried the leaves to crisp colors, and the world smelled of apples and burning wood smoke and candles and pumpkin innards.
As if by magic, the pumpkins of Orangefield, which had gone to bed the night before as faceless fruit, had reappeared in the morning as guardians and monsters. Not real monsters but carved ones, with distinct faces — evil or friendly grins, toothless or toothsome, some with ears, some with triangles for noses, or circles, or rough diamond shapes or no noses at all. There was the work of artists and the work of amateurs and tots.
Orangefield was over-populated by a race of orange faces.
The sun got high but never hot. As the day wore on the sky became bluer, colder; and the wind, a Halloween wind, began to whip the leaves into leaf tornados, and whistle through the pumpkins and make them sing. The store shelves were empty of candy. It was Friday, and after the schools let out for the week there was much unboxing and pinning and cutting as costumes were unpacked or made, sheets became instant ghosts, children grew wax fangs or became suddenly vampires or bats or space invaders. The children of Orangefield disappeared, replaced by one-of-everything-monstrous, waiting for dark.
In the Orangefield Library, Kathy Marks thought of nothing but Annabeth Turner. There was a place in her that turned to ice whenever the image of the tall young girl rose into her mind, and there were roiling memories that tried again and again to climb up from Kathy’s forgotten past but refused to become real.
She was sure the girl was in some sort of danger.
She had hoped Annabeth would return to the library to talk to her, but it hadn’t happened. Kathy had even stopped by the girl’s house again, but, this time, no one had come to the door. The librarian had taken to calling the house on the telephone at intervals over the last few days, but to no avail.
For the fourth time that day, she called Annabeth’s house, but there was still no answer.
Outside, the wind moaned across the windows. The streets were beginning to fill up with costumed trick-or-treaters.
Soon the trickle would turn into a torrent.
At five o’clock, in a half hour, Kathy would close the library early for the holiday. She had already turned away a few hopeful costumed children, explaining patiently that it was library policy not to serve candy, and that she would be happy to accommodate them when they visited her house later.
Stroking her left forearm lightly with her fingers, she stared at the clock, and then reached once more for the phone.
Chapter Forty-Two
Annabeth sat up, blinked and said, “What day is it?”
Don’t you know, Wizard? It’s our day. It’s Halloween.
Halloween?
Could it really be Halloween?
Yes, Wizard, the voice said, soothing. Finally. The day I show you what I promised. After you do one thing for me.
Annabeth stretched, sat up in her desk chair. It felt as if she had been sitting for days. She probably had been. She knew she had stopped going to school, and hadn’t eaten much lately, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d bathed. She looked down at herself, and couldn’t remember the last time she had changed her clothes.
But none of that matters, Wizard. What matters is that you’ll see where your father is.
“Yes,” she said, and suddenly the strange feelings melted away, replaced by a kind of peace. “I’ll see where my father is.”
She looked down at the open manuscript pages on her desk, the proof pages of T.R. Reynolds’s Occult Practices in Orangefield and Chicawa County, New York, Volume Two. The pages she had last turned to were crumpled and stained — she had fallen asleep on them.
But they seemed to glow with truth.
The phone next to her bed rang — she seemed to remember it ringing on and off for some time. She pushed herself away from the desk and reached to answer it.
Don’t.
Her hand froze above the phone, and it suddenly stopped ringing.
Almost immediately it began to ring again, and without thinking she snatched the receiver up to her ear.
“Hello?” Her own voice sounded strange, unused.
The voice on the other end sounded frantic. “Annabeth Turner?”
“Yes, but my name now is Wiz—” she began to say.
“This T.R. Reynolds, Annabeth. I… feel terrible, what I’ve done to you. I want you to listen to me very carefully. The manuscript I gave you — I want you to destroy it immediately.”
“I can’t do that.”
Reynolds was wheezing, his breath coming in a ragged, uneven rhythm. He tried to speak once but left off in a hacking dusty fit of coughing. “Anna… beth…”
“I can’t destroy your book,” Annabeth said. “It’s told me everything I need to know.”
“What it’s told you is a lie.” Reynolds shot out the words, and then lapsed into a long wheezing fight for breath.
Suddenly Annabeth felt her own throat close, as if in sympathy. The voice fighting to speak to her on the other end of the line became very faint. Her vision constricted to a whirl of images and she began to fight for breath—
Asthma attack.
Still clutching the phone with one hand, hearing T.R. Reynolds’s strained voice from far away — “…I was… made to write… those… things… there’s nothing… true in… there…” — Annabeth searched frantically with her other hand for her inhaler. It should be in the right hand pocket of her jeans — but it wasn’t there. She dug frantically, clawing at loose change, her house keys, but it was gone.
Still hearing Reynolds’s voice — “lies… everything lies… he…” — she dug into her other pockets, but came up empty. Her jacket was on the floor next to the desk and she reached frantically down to it, patting its pockets as her breathing became even more ragged, her throat closing — “Anna… beth… are you all… right?” — and suddenly she was on all fours, on the carpet, the phone dropped next to her, trying desperately to pull in air—
—and then her hand fell on the respirator, it must have fallen out of her pocket onto the floor. She yanked it up and put it to her mouth, breathing… breathing…
She rolled over onto her back, as precious oxygen flowed into her lungs again, and her constricted throat began to open.
She closed her eyes and breathed normally, now hearing the phone — a ragged, broken chatter was coming from it. She opened her eyes and saw the receiver nearby, and pulled it to her ear. She got up slowly and sat back at her desk.
“Anna… beth… can you… hear… me…?”
“Yes, Mr. Reynolds, I’m all right.”
“I’m… not…” His voice sounded very strained. There was a long pause filled with the same sounds she had just made and then suddenly Reynolds’s voice caught and he said, very clearly, “Oh, God.”
“Mr. Reynolds?”
“My God, my hands, my hands, even older—”
“Mr. Reyn—”
“Annabeth, listen to me!” His voice was rising in pitch, becoming at once more frantic and weaker. “The flesh… is aging before me, on my arms, my hands, I can see my own bones—”
There suddenly came a high, unearthly, rasping scream which went on and on and then suddenly stopped.
Annabeth
heard what sounded like a pile of something clacking, falling to the floor.
“Mr. Reynolds?” she said, fearfully.
There was hissing silence on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Reynolds?”
He can’t hear you, Wizard.
“Oh, no…”
Don’t worry about him, Wizard. There are no lies in his book. Hang up the phone.
Slowly, she replaced the phone in its cradle.
“But he—”
We won’t think about that. It’s not important now. What’s important is what you’ve learned. And what it’s going to show you.
“Yes…”
Look at the manuscript again, Wizard.
Annabeth looked down at the open manuscript pages on the desk before her. She smoothed the crumpled edges, pulled at a crease that went through the middle of the left hand page. On it was the chapter title Eleven: the Bizarre Sightings of 1981.
For perhaps the hundredth time in the last few days, she began to read:
In 1981 there occurred what remain to this day the strangest Sam sightings of them all. What made them even stranger was there seeming connection to a group of deaths which occurred on and around Halloween of that year.
The first paragraph was ended with an asterisk, which led to a note at the bottom of the page:
(It should be noted before we proceed any further that the police department of Orangefield never considered the deaths of the Halloween season of 1981 to be anything other than coincidence, and no criminal or any other kind of proceedings were ever initiated. As police captain at the time, Owen Cassidy, stated: “Deaths sometimes cluster at certain times of the year. Because three of these were homicides, with the perpetrator dead himself, I would merely count myself lucky as far as paperwork goes. As for the rest of them, nothing but chance is involved, or maybe the influence of a full moon — or maybe Halloween.”
Reynolds then, in the main body of the text, got to the heart of the matter:
Here are the facts as they’re known from records: between the first of October, 1981, and the last day of the month, five deaths from unnatural causes were recorded in Orangefield. In the previous year, there had been no homicides, and, indeed, in the previous five years there had been three homicides in toto recorded.
At the same time, during the 1981 Halloween season, there were forty-one separate Sam sightings, up from three the previous year and ten total for the previous five year period.
The first deaths, homicides, occurred on October 2nd, when a local pumpkin farmer, Bedel Mayes, hacked his wife and infant son to death with a machete. Mayes had, the week before, reported a Sam sighting in his own field, which was corroborated by his field hand, Derrick Johnson.
Johnson himself was killed by Mayes when he discovered the bodies of the first two murder victims in the barn the next day. All three victims were later found laid out in a row, rotting in the same barn; some of the farm’s stock, including several pigs which had gotten loose, were reported to have eaten part of the corpses.
Mayes then spent the rest of October going about his business and tending his pumpkins, until he killed himself on Halloween. He was found in the barn with his victims. He had attempted to decapitate himself with the same machete he had used on his family and Derrick Johnson.
A bizarre phrase (which will be discussed later, see note below) was found carved in the barn’s door.
There were two other victims with ties to Sam sightings that Halloween. One, Mabel Genes, was a successful suicide who left a short note regarding not only her encounters with Sam, but the promises he had made to her. The other was an attempted suicide, a girl of eleven whose name was protected by the police and her family, but who, according to the local newspaper, the Herald, had also seen Sam and been influenced by him. She had carved a phrase into her left forearm with the pried-open end of a paperclip, which tied her to the two successful suicides (this phrase will be discussed later; again, see note below) but, after her suicide failed, she apparently had no further contact with Samhain. In fact, according to sources in the police department, the girl remembered nothing of her encounter with Sam or her attempted suicide, and the matter was kept secret. According to one reliable source, she grew up in Orangefield and lives there to this day, unaware of her participation in the events of 1981.
This section ended in another asterisk, which led to another footnote:
(The strange note of Mabel Genes, as well as the phrase from it which tied together the two suicides as well as the attempted suicide, will be discussed in detail in Chapter Fourteen: Who is Sam?)
Annabeth quickly turned ahead to the place she had marked in Chapter Fourteen. She sat staring at a photograph of a middle-aged, slightly dumpy woman with a lopsided smile and kind, moist eyes. She felt she knew those eyes. The caption under the photograph read: Mabel Genes.
Go ahead, Wizard, finish it. Read it again. Read the secret. It’s all true.
Annabeth’s eyes rested on the well-read section under the photograph; she took deep breath and read:
And now we come to the strangest item in all the modern canon of Sam sightings, the suicide note of Mabel Genes. By all accounts (and this includes newspaper articles, eyewitness reports, medical records, as well as the testimony of the present author, who knew Ms. Genes and was, in fact, a pupil in her first grade class at Orangefield Elementary at the time) Ms. Genes was gregarious, happy, happily married and well adjusted. Before Halloween of 1981 she showed absolutely no tendency toward depression or self destruction. She was a Presbyterian, and devoutly religious.
But something happened in the second week of October of 1981 to change her personality utterly. Her husband said later that she almost appeared obsessed. (As a sidebar, and perhaps an irrelevant or even comical one, it should be remembered that the novel and movie “The Exorcist” had been released within the previous decade.) During that week, after school, Ms. Genes made her annual visit to Froelich farms to pick pumpkins for her classroom and home. She had been doing this for twenty-two years. While in the field, alone and at the end of the day, she reportedly had an encounter with Samhain — later she told her husband that he had risen up out of the ground like a ‘black whirlpool’ and spoken to her.
The incident was forgotten, except that Ms. Genes began to have strange dreams (again, as told to her husband) and exhibit increasingly bizarre behavior. This behavior — which included night walking and what appeared to be periodic trances as well as talking when no one was there, abruptly ceased the week before Halloween, just when Mr. Genes was about to schedule her for a doctor’s visit. The next week Mrs. Genes, according to her husband and others (including the present author, who had noticed the change in his teacher and then recalled her sudden return to normal — she was known for her wonderful in-class Halloween party, and this party proceeded as planned, two days before the holiday) returned to normal and the matter of medical attention was dropped.
Then, early on the morning of Halloween, which was on a Friday that year, Mabel Genes, was found hanging naked from the family’s apple tree in the back yard.
The incident would have faded in memory if not for the bizarre suicide note that was found nailed to the tree. It was not its length (which was brief) but its enigmatic nature that have made it special in the history of Sam literature. For it opens to discussion the entire question of not only who Sam is, but what he represents. The note read, to begin with:
SAM PROMISES LIFE.
If, indeed, Sam is Samhain, the Celtic Lord of Death, what can this part of the note mean? Was Mabel Genes promised, by Samhain, life after death? Would Samhain have this power? If so, who gives it to him? Who does he serve?
There followed a three page discussion of religious and philosophical issues, which Annabeth had read with interest the first time and then discarded as irrelevent. For there was only one more section in the whole volume which held any interest for her. It was the phrase which Sam had drawn her attention to when she first st
udied the page proofs of Occult Practices in Orangefield and Chcawa Country, New York, Volume Two.
Annabeth turned to it now.
Do you believe me, Wizard?
Annabeth looked up from the page, looked out the window over her desk down into her backyard, with its own tall elm tree with a sturdy rope ending in a ready noose hanging ready from its strongest limb.
“Yes, I believe you.”
Then nothing else matters, does it?
“No.”
Good, Wizard. You will do well. And you will get what you want.
“I want to see where he is. Where they all are.”
It’s what I promised Mabel Genes, Wizard. She lost a child which no one, not even her husband, knew about. Just like you lost your father. And you shall see it soon. Read, Wizard. Read the rest of it.
Annabeth looked down at the page proofs:
And now we come to the rest of Mabel Genes’s suicide note, and the strangest part of all. For in it she states:
THREE WILL SHOW THE WAY.
These were precisely the words that were found etched by machete into Bedel Mayes’s barn door, and the same words the eleven-year-old attempted suicide had carved into her arm with the end of a paperclip.
Annabeth briefly studied her own left forearm, where crusted-over scabs covered the same words she had recently carved there with an open pair of scissors. Then she returned to the page proofs:
It is obvious that ‘The Three’ refers to the three suicides.
But what will they show the way for?
Or who?
Chapter Forty-Three
It won’t be long. You should be ready.
I hope so. If I were you I’d still be worried about the girl.
The girl will be no problem. I’ve told you that.
If not the girl, then interference with her.
It won’t happen. And I’ve turned any possible interference to our advantage.
Was this the ‘insurance’ you spoke of?
Yes. I’m sure it will work.
You said that the last time. And look what happened.
The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus Page 18