HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “Waste is the one evil in the world. All wrongdoing is waste, in one way or in another. We remember this against our undoing.”

  Thirty-two years on, Beáta still believes that, sure as she believes fertilizer stinks. But she pays as much respect to the scientists and laborers of the UPS, and never fails to pay her dues, even if it means the rent goes wanting.

  “ . . . or holl’er for the light.”

  A produce inspector makes his last obligatory rounds before the hymns that signal the march’s commencement, and when he stops at Beáta’s stall, she gives him a fat, uncarved gourd on the cuff, the pick of what she has left.

  “Now, Beá, you wouldn’t be trying to grease me, would you?” he asks, admiring her gift, turning it over and over in his thin hands.

  “Ain’t no need in that, sir, not seein’ as mine’s the cleanest on the street,” she assures him, spreading her arms wide to indicate every vegetable remaining at her stall. “Not a yea big speck of the phako or scourge anywhere to be seen.”

  “Then you’re as kindly and as responsible as ever,” he says, tossing the gourd up and catching it twice for luck, one for each of the Seven. “Clean bill, Beá, as usual. And all the blessings upon you.”

  “As on you, inspector.”

  He tips his cap and moves along to the next stall over, a fellow she knows from her own neighborhood. He sells neatly bound bouquets of collards and kale.

  Outside the dome, the sun sets, twilight spreading out and filling up the canyons of the Corprates to the west, washing over the plains and channels surrounding Balboa. Drowning the craters. Beáta is visited by and sells to a handful of stragglers, and all but five of her smallest gourds are purchased. She makes an offering, tossing them into the boulevard to be trampled beneath the feet of the mummers, then draws the awning, ties it down, and goes to find her place among the devout.

  -2-

  Before he switches off the electric, Jack carefully snaps the antique clip into the even more antique crank box and then presses the ON switch. The sound that leaks from the speakers isn’t exactly music. There might be music hidden somewhere in it, but it was recorded—decades ago—to mimic the wild voices of the goddesses, the wail of the global perihelion dust storms, the shudder of the dome against the gales. Once the lights are out, there’s only the flickering, dim glow from the peanut oil lantern. The darkness is heavy and warm and musty.

  Of course, he’s not alone in the attic. There must always be three and ideally no more than three. Miranda and Dope already sit cross-legged on the plastic floor, waiting for him. In their way, these three twelve-year-olds are enacting a ceremony as sacred and crucial to the community’s safe passage through Phantom Eve as the coming procession. Here, on the night before the March, all the children below the dome must gather in thrices to do their part, a duty that must be performed precisely and in all seriousness. Each of the three has already sliced the tip ends of their index fingers and squeezed blood into the lantern.

  Jack takes his place with Miranda on his left, Dope on his right, and he’s wishing two things: that he hadn’t drawn short this year, and that there was another boy in the attic with him. Isn’t having to assume the role of teller bad enough without also being the only XY?

  Miranda takes a deep breath and begins reciting the invocation to the Seven and the Seven, and when she’s finished, Dope murmurs the ward against the Four. Dope hardly ever raises her voice above a whisper, because she stutters sometimes. Jack waits patiently, his eyes on the lamp’s wick, his mind running over all the details of the tale he’s chosen.

  “Your turn,” Dope murmurs when she does, and Jack glares at her.

  “Don’t you think I know? Think I’m simple?”

  “Nuh-nuh-no,” she whispers.

  “Shit. Think I don’t know my part?”

  “I’m suh-suh-suh-”

  “Stop it, Jack,” Miranda scowls. “She didn’t mean nothing by it. She’s just nervous is all. Tell me you ain’t.”

  Jack shakes his head. “Might be nervous, but I know my part.”

  In the lantern light, Dope’s face is still pale as cheese, and Miranda’s is nearly the same red-brown as the desert. He wants to get up and shut off the crank. Not because he’s scared, but who wants to hear those noises? Who in his right mind? They’ve already worked their way beneath his skin and are coiling, cold and dense, down in his gut.

  “Sorry, Dope,” he says, even if he isn’t, and then he begins the tale.

  The crank sings its wordless, disharmonious song.

  “Was back at the start of the Seven Sol War, see, and it isn’t a coincidence that the Seven and the Seven took offense when Sagan turned on its sister. The Seven knew to the final hour how long the fighting would go on, see. They knew, and that pissed them off just about as bad as they ever get pissed off, because they saw how it would make the Four even stronger than they were already.”

  He pauses, watching the lantern, wondering if there’s anything he can leave out without breaking the rule. There isn’t, but that doesn’t stop him from wondering, or from wishing there were.

  “But they waited,” he continues. “They waited until the cannons had done their worst, and the Saganites had breach the containment gates to loot what was left of Barsukov, even if that wasn’t much. That was the irony. Most of what they came to steal they destroyed in the war, by their own hands.

  “And there were the Four, slitherin’ about the skin of Barsukov and getting in the souls of the invaders. Waste, you see, that’s the only evil in all the world, just like they say at temple mass. And the militia from Sagan, what had they done but waste pretty much all of a larder that was meager before they showed up?”

  “Even if that wasn’t their intent,” chimes in Miranda, because her family is descended from Saganite refugees, and she can get defensive. “It was desper—”

  “Did you draw,” sighs Jack. “I sure don’t remember you drawing, but maybe I’m mistaken.”

  The crank box roars and titters from across the attic, and Jack wishes he’d turned the volume down a bit.

  Miranda apologizes.

  “So,” Jack says, “regardless of their intent, the militia did the worst thing possible when, as it was, there was so little to go around. Before they got inside, they scorched the ground. They burst cisterns, fouled reservoirs, even burned crops and grain silos. Hell, by the time the looting started, hardly a rat’s squat left in there to loot. This made them angry, those men and women from the north, and so they killed even more, so it wasn’t only the battles that killed.”

  “I don’t like this puh-part,” murmurs Dope, but Jack ignores her.

  “And that’s when the Seven and the Seven swept down from their towers at the poles, and up from the wells, too. They’d foreseen it all along, how the invaders would do themselves more harm than good—though, even if they hadn’t, the Seven would have come upon them anyhow. Waste is waste, if it’s a human life or a stalk of wheat.

  “Now, back on Earth, in the old days, there used to be these big snakes. Not like any old rock viper or hedge green. No, sir. These snakes, they were so big could stretch from one side of a dome to the other with space left over past the end of their noses. Got hungry, they’d squeeze anything to death they wanted. Anything. Can’t recall what they were called, those snakes, but that’s what they’d do.”

  “Boads and ambakandees,” says Miranda.

  “Pythons,” adds Dope. “Them, also.”

  Jack just glares at them, then goes of with the tale.

  “And that last night of the war, the Seven and the Seven came down and settled over Barsukov, and they wrapped themselves as tight around the dome as those big Earth snakes would have done. The Four, who’d been busy and distracted, what with feeding on the dead and dying and the bloodthirsty, saw too late the fate rushing over them. They didn’t have a chance to flee before the goddesses began to squeeze in. That’s when the dome busted. That’s when the worst of the dyin’ started.”r />
  There’s a clacking noise from the crank, and Dope jumps, which sort of makes Jack feel better.

  “After all, when the people under siege saw how they were going to lose, some of them burned their own terraces and ponics, poisoned their own water, just so the Saganites wouldn’t get at it. And waste is waste, right, no matter who commits it. So, the Seven and the Seven, they went and squeezed like them giant Earth snakes, and the dome started coming apart. So ferocious was their anger, that of the goddesses, that the Four fled back to their caverns down deep below Arsia Mons, leaving the conquerors and the conquered to their fates. Was almost a full week before rescuers from the south reached Barsukov, and most those people who didn’t die the day the dome came down, they’d already perished by the time help arrived. Only a hundred or so got into the bunkers, a few dozen more air-locked and radsafe in private shelters. Some of the wealth-off, in-clover folk, those few were.

  “They say, and it’s gospel, when the rescuers were still coming the Hydaspis, they actually saw all the Ladies, still swirling about the crumpled mess left of Barsukov, and they looked a thousand times more terrible than the Four. Rescuers almost damned turned back then and forgot the distress signals, ’cause sure the people must have had coming to ’em what they got, if the Ladies were so riled.

  “They had to decide, weighing the lives of whoever—if anybody—might have survived against the will of the Seven and the Seven. We’d have done the same.”

  The clip and crank box squeals loudly enough that Jack has to pause until he can once more be heard over the cacophony. You can buy new clips, the sound clean and adjusted—same as you can buy new playbacks, instead of relying on half-century old cranks that should have gone to the reprocess plant before he was born. But Jack’s family grows potatoes and cabbages, and there’s never money for luxuries.

  “Respect the grace of the Ladies,” his mother says, “and be glad for what we have. Don’t mope for what we don’t.”

  And he tries.

  “The captain of the team, he went so far as to halt the rescuers then and there, and was gonna be a vote, to go on or turn back. That’s when the birds came flying overhead, those huge black birds died out long, long ago, and all we have are pictures. Ravens, so they were called on Earth. Shouldn’t have been able to fly here in the thin air, naturally, and sure shouldn’t have been able to breathe or—shit, you both know—but, still, there they were. And not ghost birds, neither. Genuine ravens, their ebon feathers shining in the sun. The rescuers figured had to be a sign, but was it a sign to turn back, or was it a sign to finish what they came to do.”

  “I’d huh-have turned back, you bet,” murmurs Dope.

  “Fine thing then you weren’t the priestess who read the significance of those ravens. She met with the captain in this dragger, and she told him that—even in their fury—the Seven and the Seven were not without mercy, and by their hands had the miracle of the birds been sent from the past of Earth and the memory of man to beckon him and his team on despite the terror of the sight before them. He listened. ’Course he listened, because that’s what we do when a priestess talks.”

  In the dark attic, Jack finishes the sacred duty imparted upon him by drawing short. He tells of the heroism and the pardoning of the surviving Saganites by vote of the dome councils. He tells of how the ruins were abandoned to winds and dune, and of the survivors of the war who didn’t live to see the brassy foil shimmer of Balboa’s skin.

  “So it was the Ladies did show us how even in the most sour crannies of our hearts is there something worth salvation. But to this day, to this very day, prospectors and surveyors and the like who have cause to pass by those ruins, they can hear the bombs, and the crash of the broken Barsukov comin’ down. Worst of all, they tell of the shrieks of the dying swept too and fro across the flats.”

  He knows that maybe that last part’s true, and maybe it isn’t. But he also knows that Phantom Night is more than a celebration of the life that will return beyond the long Martian winter. It’s reverence of the dead, and it’s time to send a few shivers through the soul, as well. Fear is the twin of Determination, that they dance always locked arm in arm, and there will not ever be the one without the other. When his tale is done, the three children bow their heads, and once the clip has run out an the crank automatically shut off, they recite the janazah, the specific fardth al-kaifāya demanded on that night to insure the community will see another year and to beseech another ten score years farther along. It is the task of the young to pray for the future. When Jack and Miranda and Dope are finished, they quietly exit the attic, and Jack pulls the trapdoor shut behind them and locks it. The clip is in his pocket, and he’ll place it beneath his bed, where it will rest undisturbed until the conclusion of the March and the festivities.

  -3-

  In the strictest sense, the temple wasn’t built. Rather, it was found, and then made the cradle for an elaborate construction. At least, as elaborate as the dome could manage, post-cutoff. The temple began as a cavern, discovered beneath the northwestern perimeter of Balboa during the digging of a basement vault for a genetic repository by the local office of the Provision Syndicate. Unlike the caverns on the flanks of Arsia Mons, this one is not an ancient lava tube, but was carved through sedimentary rock by an underground river long before the first multicellular life evolved on Earth.

  Scaffolding, catwalks, and stairwells—mostly built from bamboo and adobe—wind downwards from the surface, as well as forming various levels. On the uppermost are the plazas for public prayer and the classrooms. The monks and priestesses have their spartan dwellings on the mid-levels. And at the very bottom is the series of interlinked ceremonial chambers. As Phantom Night is the most important of the year, the central chamber is the largest and the one with which the greatest care has been taken. But it isn’t ostentatious, as waste is the one evil in all the cosmos. In accordance with the holy writ of the Seven and the Seven, it is functional, sufficient to its purpose and no more.

  As is the custom, this year’s avatars have been chosen by the drawing of lots from men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. They are the ones who much enact the most critical of all the observances of Phantom Night. They are the ones who will tread the line between waste and sacrifice, a hairline that exists only in the heart of humanity.

  Beneath the sandstone roof of the cavern, at dawn on the day of the March, the drums sound like an old clip recording of thunder and cannon fire. Their rhythmic tattoo bruises the air and batters the bodies of the avatars. Seven plus Seven daughters for the polar Ladies, and four men to represent the Four. Within a central ring, the men stand on pedestals that have been placed at north, south, east, and west. Upon a low dais of polished basalt, placed precisely at the center of the circle, the women stand hand-in-hand, a ring with their backs to the men.

  In a bamboo cage suspended ten feet above the dais is a single priestess, the highest appointed of that year, the Junon. Unlike the avatars, she isn’t nude, but wears a heavy robe of the coarsest jute and a cap of thistle vine.

  Flutes and strings join the drums, and the braziers are lit. The chamber quickly smells of sage, coriander, clove, and burning stalks of wheat. The smoke is drawn upwards through the natural chimney of the temple. Those who live nearby are blessed with the scent before the scrubbers remove it from the air. The avatars chosen to represent the Seven and the Seven turn to face the avatars chosen to stand in for the Four. In unison, the women recite the Litany of Preservation, and then the men jeer and curse them. Now the hands of the Seven and the Seven hang at their sides.

  Overhead, the Junon dips her left hand into a gourd and sprinkles water upon the heads on the women. Then, with her right, she scoops up a mixture of fine dust from dunes near the poles and ground human bone, and this, too, she sprinkles on the heads of the daughters. She gazes down at the avatars, and her face is both solemn and angry.

  “Until the coming of the fleets, the Four held sway over the world, an
d during the days of darkness did they bring upon us the full force of their wickedness and destruction.

  “Until the coming of the fleets, the Seven and the Seven slept in their towers of ice, for there was no need of them. But we came from the stars, and we brought need. We came, it seemed, only to destroy ourselves, as we had done on Earth, and the Four gathered to feast upon us. But the Seven and the Seven were awakened by the cries of the righteous and the just, by those who cherished life above all else.

  “They awoke and did do war against the Four, and drove them deep below, and bound them there.”

  Each of the women steps off the dais, taking one step towards the outer ring, four of them taking a step towards the men. The women bow their heads, and the men continue with their carefully rehearsed insults.

  “Having delivered us,” the priestess says, shouting now above the rising music, “but this covenant can last only so long as we remain true and show our respect, and squander nothing which is precious! And as all things are precious, we squander nothing, or surely the Four will be once more released to ravage the world!”

  The women take another step forward, wait, and then take five more. Now four of them are very near the heckling men who stand at the rocks arranged at the Four Quarters. At the feet of those four women are daggers planted in the hard-packed dirt, blades of black volcanic glass and iron hilts forged in the temple furnaces. The women stoop and draw the blades from the floor, and the men fall silent.

  “Here, in this sacred place and on this morning, we remember the battle the Ladies bravely and selflessly fought on our behalf. In this hour, we offer our gratitude. We do this with no hesitation and with no regret.”

  The Junon falls silent then, her part done. And the four women descend upon the avatars of the Four with the scalpel-sharp daggers. The only resistance offered by the men is pantomime, but their pain and screams are real. Their wails rise, as the smoke from the incense rises, though few above will hear them, so deep is the cavern.