HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “Sure.” He tried getting comfortable. “I’ll just sit here. Get into character.”

  “The suit’s the character, Glenn. You’re in it. That’s enough for now. No need to go Stanislavsky on me yet” She turned, headed for the door. “Just stay in the chair.”

  Then she was gone, leaving him alone with all the things he knew he should have said to her, all the things he would have said if she had only given him the proper cues. Life, like acting, was about reacting . . . but she had given him nothing to play off of, only business, as if the past hadn’t happened. He wondered about that. A minute went by. Then another. He wondered what she was doing, if she was up to something other than checking relays. It was as if—

  “Glenn? You there?”

  He straightened up. “Yeah.”

  “Do . . . me . . . okay?”

  “You’re breaking up.”

  “How about now?”

  “Yes. That’s better.”

  “I’m in the booth. Think I’ve found the problem. Lauren’s out back checking the router. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Is she online with us now?”

  “No. Just me and you. But listen, there’s a chance your video might go dark again. If it does—” Her voice cut out, then returned. “Sorry. That was me. I bumped a switch. Easy to do up here. We need a bigger space.”

  “Listen, Elle. There’s something—”

  “How’s that head. Not too heavy?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You can stand and stretch if you need to. I know I said to stay in the chair, but—”

  His video went dark.

  “There go my eyes.”

  “Video go out?”

  “Just like you said it might.”

  “Hang tight.”

  He waited.

  Hang tight.

  “Elle, listen. There’re things . . . I feel there’re things we’re avoiding. Things about us.” He expected her to interrupt again, but this time she seemed ready to let him go. All right. Go on! Tell her! “There are things I should have said when you called. About the accident, about the way I left town without you. That was wrong. I’m sorry.” He wanted to stop there. That was enough. But something about the darkness took him back to their nights together, back to his flat where the only window faced a brick wall and the only light had come from their charging phones. They’d done a lot of talking then, sharing dreams, making promises that he wished he had been able to keep. “I guess I forgot myself. I always seem to do that . . . even when I’m not acting. And when I am? Well, you know about that.” He was rambling now, but so what? It felt good. He kept going. “We never should have been cast as Iago and Emilia. Those roles . . . all that rage . . . it was like—” He was crying now. Not audibly. But enough to overflow his eyes, wet his cheeks and lips. Salty tears. And he couldn’t wipe them. What a mess. But it felt good. The weight lifting even as the headpiece bore down on his shoulders. “What I mean . . . what I’m saying is . . . I’m sorry. Okay? Can you forgive me?” He paused, giving her space to reply. But something was wrong. “Elle?”

  The video flickered. Came on a moment. Went dark again.

  “Are you there?”

  Silence.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  Had she heard any of it?

  The darkness closed in.

  She puts me in this thing. Then she leaves.

  It didn’t feel right. Or maybe . . . it fell too right. Almost staged.

  What if she’s paying me back? Getting even!

  It was an irrational thought, but there it was, and in the darkness . . . in the silence . . . it had the resonance of truth.

  What if the whole thing was a setup, a get-even scenario devised the moment she’d heard he was back in town? Was there even a Total Immersion Theatre? He hadn’t heard or read anything about it until Elle had called with her proposition. “Look, Glenn. I know this is last minute, but I’ve started my own company, and if you’re looking for work, we might be able to use you.”

  Use me!

  Why hadn’t he noticed the edge in her voice?

  “I’ve started my own company.”

  But had she? Had she really? How much effort would it take to furnish an old church with a barebones lobby and dressing room? No need for a stage or control booth. All she had to do was mention those.

  “ . . . stage is through there . . . booth’s upstairs . . . ”

  Was he thinking rationally? Would these thoughts have occurred to him if he weren’t locked up in a padded headpiece, sensory deprived, stewing in guilt and regret?

  The video flashed.

  “Elle?”

  The room came back into view. Same as before. Just him and Pumpkin Head’s shadow staining the floor in front of him: elongated body, giant head.

  What’s she planning? What’s her next move?

  He reached for the micro clasps about his neck.

  Got to get out of this thing.

  He tried detaching the headpiece. No good. It was just like she’d told him. His hands were useless, couldn’t even move his fingers.

  Trapped!

  He got up, stumbled to the closet, got out his clothes. His phone was in the jacket. He clawed at it, ripping the pocket. The phone toppled out, landed on the floor.

  Now what?

  He doubted he could pick the thing up let alone work the touch screen with his tree-branch hands. And even if he placed a call, what then? Hold the phone to Pumpkin Head’s mouth and scream like a horny cat?

  Just go. Get out of here before she gets back.

  He wasn’t thinking clearly. Part of him knew that, but the panic was winning.

  Get out. Now!

  He grabbed his clothes, crossed the room, and threw himself against the door. It shuddered in its frame, thin and flimsy, plywood over a hollow center: the kind used to dress a set. He backed up and rammed it with his thirty-pound head, smashed it to hell and stumbled into the hall.

  The lobby stairs rose to the right, but an exit sign marked a closer flight to his left. He went that way, ascending until he reached a fire door. He kicked the panic bar and lurched out into a city neighborhood: working-class homes, narrow sidewalk, parked cars, open-air restaurant across the way. It was cold for alfresco dining, but the patio had pole-mounted heaters, basking the diners in an orange glow. They were all looking right at him.

  Trick-or-treaters approached to his left: a ghost, vampire, wicked witch, and a pair of zombies—all led by a rock-n-roll queen with a blue mane of electric hair.

  He dropped to his knees, grabbed his head, gesturing. This head. Help me get it off!

  The kids stopped.

  The girl leaned forward. She seemed to understand.

  Her friends watched.

  He gestured again, more frantic this time . . . maybe too frantic.

  The girl backed away.

  “No! Please!” He reached for her. “Help me!”

  Bags of candy hit the pavement. The kids took off, tripping over each other until they reached a home a few doors away. The porch was decorated with orange lights, polyester cobwebs, electric jack-o’-lanterns. The kids careened up the stairs. Porch light came on, front door opened, a woman looked out. Then a man.

  Meanwhile, the people in the café were stepping back from their tables, raising their phones, taking pictures, placing calls.

  In the distance, sirens wailed, coming closer.

  The theatre’s fire door had closed behind him. No exterior latch. No way back in from this side of the building. And where were his clothes? His wallet? Phone? Had he dropped them?

  His video pixelated as he looked around, finally focusing on a man coming toward him from the decorated porch. He carried a baseball bat, smacking it against his hand. . . .

  Glenn turned and ran, around to the front of the building and up the stairs to the lobby. He didn’t try working the latches. He just used his head to smash through. The first time didn’t work. The sec
ond time Elle’s voice came back on line, screaming in his ears: “Glenn. Glenn!”

  He rammed once more.

  The door flew open.

  He entered the lobby, stumbled through the hanging posters, and passed through the partition door to find himself in the back of a small performance space: no chairs, just a stage dressed with the backdrop of a burning city.

  People streamed in through the partition door. Some carried guns, a neighborhood militia of hunting and assault rifles. The people from the café came next, then the trick-or-treaters. But were they the same kids? They seemed younger, with the rock-’n’-roll queen looking almost like a fairy-tale princess. He noticed that for an instant. Then the girl was gone, blocked by the advancing militia.

  A light came on behind him, tossing his shadow against the floor: slender body, giant head. And that’s when it happened. Something turned inside him, the darkness that was always there. Sometimes he controlled it. Other times it took over, when a character’s rage became his rage, when the walls came down between the man he was and characters he portrayed. No boundaries then. Total immersion!

  He crouched.

  The militia stopped.

  “Glenn!” This time it was Lauren, the stage manager. “Glenn. Back away! Head for the stage. Elle’s coming!”

  But Glenn was no longer in the suit. He was Pumpkin Head now. And the Pumpkin was pissed!

  The guns swung toward him, taking aim.

  He charged.

  The guns fired.

  The first shot struck his shoulder. The others ripped into his chest and torso. He lost balance, slipping first on blood, then on a trail of ropy things that spilled across his loins. He dropped to his knees, body in shock. He raised his arms once more, released a bellowing roar, and toppled backward. And now, at last, the micro clasps opened. The headpiece shifted, someone pulled it free. A moment of darkness as the rubber padding slid past his eyes, and then there she was, leaning over him. “My, god, Glenn!” It was Elle. She helped him to his knees.

  The room rang with applause.

  “Amazing,” Elle said. “Just amazing!”

  The guts dangling from his suit were rubber, inflated and released in sync with the gunshots. And the guns? They weren’t real. One of the vigilantes stood close by, leaning with his hand over the barrel, grinning like an ingénue.

  “I knew you’d surprise us!” Elle leaned closer, indifferent to the smears of blood. “You missed a couple marks, but we hadn’t gone over those. We’ll hit those next time—after we’ve put you back together!”

  Part of him wanted to feel relieved. But his head was on fire now, swelling from within. He didn’t need to be put back together. He was right where he needed to be.

  “Come on, Glenn. Take your bow!”

  He looked at his gloves. So heavy. So sharp. But they weren’t gloves any longer. They were part of him.

  Elle’s walkthrough might be over.

  But Pumpkin Head’s escape was just beginning.

  Lawrence C. Connolly’s books include the novels Veins (2008) and Vipers (2010), which together form the first two books of the Veins Cycle. Vortex, the third book in the series, is due out in late 2013. His collections, which include Visions (2009), This Way to Egress (2010), and Voices (2011), collect all of his stories from venues such as Amazing Stories, Cemetery Dance, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Twilight Zone, and Year’s Best Horror. Voices was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. He teaches writing at Sewickley Academy and serves twice a year as one of the residency writers at Seton Hill University’s graduate program in Writing Popular Fiction.

  WHILST THE NIGHT REJOICES PROFOUND AND STILL

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Remember thee!

  Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

  In this distracted globe. ~ Hamlet

  -1-

  Of course, the first colonists brought their own sacred days and traditions with them. When their Bussard ramjets and shimmer sails descended from the black into the orange Martian atmosphere, they carried with them the religions and celebrations of Earth. But Mars is not Earth, and beliefs erode as surely as anything. One or another belief adapts to the needs of those who need them, or the belief dies off altogether, to be supplanted by a new, more useful, more appropriate weltanschauung. So it was with the colonist’s children’s children’s children and with the generations that followed after. Worlds turned—one hundred years for earth, hence two hundred for Mars—and the old ways were duly supplanted. Meanwhile, across the void, the cradle of mankind rotted away under the weight of half-recollected calamities, and the supply freighters ceased their comings and goings. No one was left to remind the colonists, who were now Martians, of the world their ancestors had forsaken hoping for better lives so far away. The elaborate terraforming schemes of corporations and governments were only ever half-implemented, at best, and outside the sanctuary of the domes, the planet stayed more or less as it had been for three and a half billion years.

  Beáta is thinking none of these thoughts as she sits at her gourd stall halfway down the dusty boulevard. She is thinking only that it has been a good year for the farms and the foundries, and that the people of Balboa have coin to spend on the march, which means they have money to spend on her gourds and candles and wards. It will be a proper Phantom March, which is never a guarantee. Beáta is always prepared for the lean times.

  The boulevard smells of incense, sweeting cooling in candy molds, the leafy hydroponic wares of the greens merchants, modest cauldrons of precious, bubbling sugar. And the starchy meat of her gourds, two of which she’s split long ways so that customers may see for themselves she is offering the best on the row.

  “Buy’em dry, buy’em raw,” she calls out over the clamor. “Fresh for stew or holl’er for the light. Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

  If all goes well in the scant hours remaining before the march, she’ll have sufficient roll to cover both rent on her stall and on her one-room coop five blocks over in the genny district, where the hundred plus wind turbines raised above the dome’s roof run day and night, night and day, twenty-four months a year. She’ll still owe some back rent, but who in the genny district doesn’t? The landlords know well enough to tolerate a modicum of tardiness or watch the empty coops pile up, empty and even less profitable than tenants who only pay when they can.

  “Buy’em dry, buy’em raw . . . ”

  The customers come and go, glittering and painted in their march finery, and Beáta happily watches as her stock of gourds diminish. At this rate, the lot will be gone an hour before the march. Which means she’ll be able to close shop and climb onto one of the balconies, or squeeze into the press filling up the bleachers. As a gourd seller, she has a certain status among the citizens of Balboa, and respectful folks wouldn’t begrudge her that much.

  Two women stop and carefully survey her wares, then she sells them a pair of yellow-brown gourds, dried, hollowed, already fitted by beeswax tcandles, already fitted at their tops with jute loops. The two women immediately attach the gourds to their rosaries of olivine and hematite beads strung on strands of transgen hagfish silk. The women have likely inherited the rosaries from their mothers, who inherited them from their mothers before them, and so on. New strings can be purchased at stalls along the boulevard, but the oldest are the most prized, and Beáta can tell by the cut of their clothes that these are women of tradition. They do not even haggle over her asking price, and they tip. For Beáta, tips are rare as blue turnips are to sugar-beet farmers, as they say. The women thank her, offer well wishes from the Seven Ladies of the Poles and the Seven of the Wells, and then vanish once more into the crowd. Beáta grins, which she rarely does, because she’s ashamed of the teeth she’s missing right up front and all the rest going lickity split. But even a gourd merchant hasn’t the cachet to land a health patron, not in times like these, so she makes do with teeth she has left, and only smiles when
she can’t help herself.

  “Fresh for stew or holl’er for the light. Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

  Beáta Copper’s first Phantom March—well, the first she can recall—she was five years old, and her mothers took turns holding her up on their shoulders so she could watch the mummers over the heads and hats of the other celebrants. To her eyes, the boulevard seemed to have caught fire, all those lanterns swinging side to side, twirling roundabout, the gourd lanterns in the march and those scattered in amongst the crowd. It was not so simple to put her at ease when the rods came along, but then they were meant to frighten the children. The worst of the four was Famine, three stories tall, it’s many-jointed limbs and its toothsome jaws worked by twenty puppeteers. Famine, its hungry gaze blacker and colder than a winter’s night on the Niliacus. Not even Old Man Thirst could trump Madam Famine. Beáta wanted to look away, but her mothers wouldn’t permit it. Yes, the march is celebration and reverence, but it is also a grim reminder of the gifts and of the frailty of day-to-day existence in this and any dome.

  “Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

  At her Phantom Eve tuition in the week before, she’d been taught of the famines that had gripped Mars in the long seasons after contact with Earth was lost. How half the planet’s population had died before the ’culturists and water miners had managed to establish the United Provision Syndicate as a functional and effective body. She watched tapes of the complete ruin of Paros and Sagan, of the refugee camps, little terror shows of light and shadow flickering across the temple screen. The pictures from Sagan were the worst, because that dome had been so big and had needed so much to survive. The albino priestess had talked about the seven sol war, when Sagan had raided nearby Barsukov is a desperate attempt to save itself by stealing from another failing dome. In the end, the skins of both craters had been breached, and almost everyone had died one sort of death or another, most quickly from suffocation and decompression. She had been taught that honoring the Seven and the Seven was the only way to insure that those dark seasons never, ever came again.

  “The goddesses smile on us, and they hold the Four at bay,” said the white-haired priestess, “but only through our worship and only through our conservation of their bounty, which we wring from soil, earth, and sky.