HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  A pair of monks emerge from among the musicians, each bearing a guttering torch, and they turn the Junon’s bamboo cage into an inferno. Her robes, her hair, her skin, all drenched with oil, burn with flame as hungry as any of the Four, and her screams are added to those of the men.

  The ten daughters who were not fortunate enough to draw the crimson tiles turn to watch the slaughter of their brothers. All but two among them are young enough to have another opportunity for that honor next year.

  But nothing here is wasted.

  Nothing.

  After the four women have eaten, whatever is left of the men will be gathered by the monks, and—along with the Junon’s ashes—will be dispersed among the people of Balboa to fertilize gardens throughout the dome. The four women kneel, and their ten sisters repeat the Litany.

  Beneath every dome across the planet the ceremony is coming to a close, and beneath every dome the bells above temples ring out across an indebted populace.

  -4-

  The dead of Mars are not buried. In the living memory of all the inhabitants of all the domes and that of all those who live on the out farms, mines, and wellingsteads, have the dead been buried. Instead, carved stones are erected beneath the orange-blue sky, carved stones marking a birth, a life, and a death, but signifying the final resting place of no one. The deceased are not ever tossed aside, but composted and so resurrected—bone and sinew, blood and organs—to nourish those who will come after.

  Honor lies only in continuation, and the only immortality in repurposing.

  Almost a quarter mile beyond the dome’s west gates and locks and cargo hatches of Balboa, on a low rust-colored hill, is the vast field of monuments. Always, the wind blows between the stones, but on Phantom Night it blows with the voices of the dead. Even if few have heard these voices for themselves, few doubt the truth of the tales.

  One night each twenty-four months, the dead come awake. But not to haunt the living. One night a year the dead come awake to howl reassurance across the planum. To whistle and sing thin, papery songs. To be grateful that the heirs to their incarnations are faithful and have kept the covenant to insure the Seven and the Seven keep the Four at bay. This is how the dead celebrate.

  The dead sing.

  And the living tell tales of the ghost songs.

  The sun sets.

  On the boulevard, the March begins.

  -5-

  In their rooms three stories above the revelers, two women lie in bed. Earlier, they were among those visited Beáta Copper’s stall to buy their gourd, and they are the mothers of a girl child named Miranda. The women do not number themselves among the believers, not in the strictest sense. For them, this all the expression of metaphor. They might even use the word superstition, in the company of like-minded individuals. But they also do not doubt the value of ceremonies. Life is nothing easy, and whatever eases the passage is to be cherished, so long as it doesn’t encourage waste. Like the faithful, they find no greater wrong against humanity than waste. So, in their own ways they observe the night. For example, there are few greater affirmations of life than sex.

  Beryl sits up and gazes towards the open doors leading out onto their balcony. She’s a school teacher, and her partner is employed at the windworks. Together, they can afford a good room above the streets, and they can afford to raise a daughter. Beryl sits and watches the not-darkness of the evening outside. The revelers are chanting, laughing, cheering, and soon enough now the march will pass in front of their building. Miranda is down on the street with her friends, waiting to catch the sweets and baubles that will be tossed by the harlequins, and shudders at the towering marionettes.

  “We should go out now. It’s getting late,” Beryl says, and turns to smile at her lover. “We don’t want to miss the mummers.”

  “Are you very sure?” asks Aruna, whose skin is almost a dark as Beryl’s is pale. “It may be we could show greater devotion to the Ladies if we had another tumble.”

  “It might be you ought get dressed,” Beryl replies.

  Aruna kisses the small of her back, then lets one finger trail gently up the length of Beryl’s spine. “We can’t have ours the only dark veranda, now can we?” she whispers.

  “No, we can’t,” Beryl says, standing, pulling on a simple white shift with elbow-length sleeves. “It would be a poor example.”

  Aruna makes an off-color joke, but she follows her partner’s example, gathering up her trousers and a gingham shirt, and they go together out onto the balcony. Beryl uses a pocket flint to light the tcandle set into the gourd, and then she hangs it from a hook on one of the doors. They sit together at the edge of the balcony, letting their legs dangle through the iron bars, as if they were as young as their daughter.

  On this night all are young, as all are as old.

  On this night all simply are.

  When she was twenty, Aruna drew a crimson tile, though she never talks about that dawn in the depths of the temple. She never brings up the subject, and Beryl never asks, though she’s known for years. Beryl secretly hopes Miranda will be so lucky, even if her mothers do not accept the Seven and the Seven and the Four as literal fact, and even if they have raised their child to believe likewise.

  “I can’t see her anywhere,” Aruna says, but that’s hardly a surprise. It would be almost impossible to spot Miranda in the throng lining the boulevard.

  “She’s fine. You shouldn’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You worry,” Beryl replies, and Aruna knows it is pointless to argue.

  Below them, there is the warm glow of hundreds of gourds, and the facades of every home and business are adorned with at least one—and sometimes several—soul lights. The sight of it makes Aruna sleepy, despite the noise, or it may be that she was sleepy before they stepped outside, and the glow is only making her sleepier. She lays her head on Beryl’s shoulder.

  “Stay awake,” Beryl says immediately.

  “I’m awake.”

  “You’re awake now. Doesn’t mean you’ll be awake in five minutes.”

  “Doesn’t mean I won’t be.”

  Beryl turns and lightly kisses the top of Aruna’s head. “I know you.”

  The drummers come first, escorted by the rows of temple monks, and for the time it takes them to pass, most of the onlookers fall silent. Beryl presses her face between the bars for a better view. After the monks will come the council and then retinue of priestesses. The women who were fortunate enough to draw the fourteen select tiles this year will follow after, still nude and four of them still wearing the dried gore of their feasts. The Four will be on their heels, in turn pursued by the Ladies. By then, the crowd will be a cacophony.

  But before the monks have passed, Aruna is dozing.

  Beryl doesn’t wake her, not even once the avatars have passed, the proxies of the Seven and the Seven, shadowed by the puppets.

  The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.

  FOR THE REMOVAL OF UNWANTED GUESTS

  A. C. Wise

  The witch arrived at precisely 11:59 p.m., just as September ticked over to October, on the day after Michael Remmington moved into the house on Washington Street. She knocked at exactly midnight.

  The house was all boxes, and Michael all ache from moving them. He’d been sitting on an air mattress—the bed wouldn’t be delivered for another week—st
aring at a crossword puzzle at least five years old. He’d found it in the back of the closet, yellow as bone, and peeled it from the floor—an unwitting gift from the previous tenant.

  Michael opened the door, only questioning the wisdom of it after it was done. It was midnight in a strange neighborhood; he wore a bathrobe and slippers, and he’d left his phone upstairs, so if it turned out to be an axe murderer at the door, he wouldn’t even be able to call 911.

  “Hello,” the witch said. “I’m moving in.”

  A suitcase sat on her left, and a black cat on her right. The cat’s tail coiled around its neatly placed feet. It blinked at Michael, its gaze as impassive as the witch’s.

  Michael couldn’t say how he knew she was a witch, but he did, deep down in his bones. The truth of it sat at his core, as inevitable as moonrise, or spaghetti for dinner on Tuesdays.

  “Okay,” he said, which was not what he’d meant to say at all.

  But he’d already stepped back, and the witch had already picked up her bag and crossed the threshold.

  “I mean—What?”

  The cat dragged a silken tail across Michael’s shins, following the witch. It felt like a mark of approval. A chill wind chased the cat, swirling fallen leaves; Michael closed the door. The witch set her bag down, turning a slow circle while remaining in place.

  “This house should have a witch.” When she stopped, she faced him.

  Her eyes were green, like pine boughs in winter, or the shadows between them.

  “A witch needs to live here,” she said, sniffing the air. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Michael sniffed, smelling only the witch herself. She smelled of cinnamon and fresh-cut cedar. She didn’t look like a witch, except that she did. Not that Michael knew what witches looked like. People, he guessed. Mostly.

  She wore black, a loose-fitting sweater over a long skirt that seemed to have layers. It reminded him of petals, like a flower, hung upside down. Her shoes clicked when she walked.

  Michael couldn’t begin to guess the witch’s age. When he closed just his left eye, she might be around forty, but when switched and closed just his right eye, she seemed closer to fifty. Either way, her skin was smooth, except for a few crow’s feet around her eyes, and a few lines at the corners of her mouth. Her hair hung half-way down her back, dark brown like thick molasses, threaded with strands of honey, rather than gray, and she wore a lot of jewelry—most of it chunky, most of it silver.

  “Okay,” he said again, then, “why?” after he thought about it.

  “The windows are in upside down.” The witch pointed.

  Michael couldn’t see anything unusual, but considered he wouldn’t know an upside down window from a right-side-up one.

  “The board for that step,” the witch indicated a tread halfway up the staircase, “comes from a pirate ship that wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod, near Wellfleet.”

  She paced three steps forward. The floorboards clonked hollow under her shoes.

  “There’s a black cat buried in the leftmost corner of the basement. Sorry.” She addressed the last to the cat at her feet, not Michael.

  “So, a witch should live here. I’ll take the attic.”

  “But it’s my house,” Michael said. “I have papers and everything. You can’t just . . . ”

  The witch lifted her suitcase: a small thing, battered at the edges, and held closed with two brass catches. She gathered her skirt, and Michael found himself following her up the stairs.

  “I haven’t even unpacked yet,” Michael said.

  “I’ll help you in the morning. I get up at seven. Tea with honey.” She rounded on him so suddenly Michael nearly tripped on his heels.

  They’d come to the foot of the second set of stairs, leading to the attic. Close up, the witch’s eyes were flecked with gold, like bits of mica in stone. Michael stepped back a pace, but was annoyed when he did. He could follow her up the stairs if he wanted. Couldn’t he?

  “Hoop,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s the answer to 47 across.” She flicked the crossword puzzle, and Michael realized he still held the yellowed paper in his hand.

  “All around, Robin’s backward friend. Four letters. It’s Pooh spelled backward. As in Winnie the. Sixteen down is Marilyn Monroe. That should give you enough to get started.”

  “Oh.” Michael didn’t know what else to say.

  “You’ll find the mugs in the third box from the left in the kitchen. For the tea. I’ll see you in the morning.” Halfway up the steps, she paused, and turned again. Her eyes were luminous in the dark.

  “You’ll want to shut the windows. It’s going to rain.”

  Michael stared until the door at the top of the stairs closed. He listened to the witch’s shoes clomp over the floorboards, and wondered where she would sleep. There was nothing in the attic except dust and dead spiders. Maybe she’d hang herself from the ceiling like a bat. Maybe witches didn’t sleep at all.

  “Okay. Goodnight. I guess,” he said to the silence.

  Michael went back to his room. He closed the door, and after a moment’s consideration, closed the window, too. The witch’s cat had taken up residence in the middle of his pillow. It opened one eye, defying Michael to displace it. He sat gingerly and when the cat didn’t leave, he risked petting it. The cat rewarded him with a faint purr.

  As if on cue, rain tapped light fingers against the glass. The house creaked, settling it bones around them. No, not around them, around the witch. A few moments later, the downpour began in earnest.

  The witch came down the stairs precisely at seven, the cat at her heels. She seemed to be wearing the same clothes as the night before, only in the dust-laden light slanting through the kitchen windows they looked deep green, or blue, rather than black. Michael wondered if he simply hadn’t noticed the subtleties of shading last night. He handed the witch a mug of tea.

  She breathed in steam, be-ringed hands wrapped around the mug, which he’d found exactly where she said it would be. He’d found the tea and kettle there, too, and other kitchen things, which remained in the box, largely untouched. Michael sipped from a mug that had been chipped in the moving process; to his annoyance, he’d saved the good mug for the witch.

  “You can’t stay here,” Michael said.

  He’d rehearsed the words in the pre-dawn light, lying in bed before coming downstairs to make the witch her tea. In his mind, the witch had accepted them, and everything had been perfectly reasonable. Normal. In the bright sunlight, with the witch looking at him over her mug, he wavered.

  “Look, you don’t even know anything about me. I could be an axe murderer!”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, no, but . . . ”

  The witch’s cat leapt onto the counter, a stream of black ink defying gravity. It twitched its tail, smug. Michael wanted to ask how long the witch planned to stay, and what her name was. Would she split the mortgage payment? Did she have a job? Did she expect him to take turns cleaning out the kitty litter? But the witch’s even gaze dismissed all his questions before he could voice them. Maybe a witch should live here.

  If last night was any indication, the witch mostly kept to herself. He’d certainly slept much better, as in sleeping at all, once she’d arrived. It was as if the house had been holding its breath, waiting for her, and when it finally relaxed, he could, too.

  “Is there a problem, Michael Remmington?” the witch asked.

  The question came so suddenly, Michael choked on his tea. He was certain he’d never told her his name. This morning, her eyes were amber. She no longer smelled of cinnamon, but of salt; it made him think of storms and shipwrecks.

  “No. Yes. I mean . . . Look, I don’t want a roommate. Or a cat. I just want to live a normal, quiet, happy life. In my house.” He left unspoken the word alone.

  The witch narrowed her eyes, as if she’d heard the part he hadn’t said. The cat pushed its head against Michael’s hand. Instead of shooing it away, he
scratched it behind the ears. This time, there was no mistaking the purr.

  A stray leaf, snatched by the wind, smacked into the window, making Michael jump. He had no reason to feel guilty. His name was on all the legal documents for the house. The witch had crashed into his life, invited herself in. He didn’t owe her a thing.

  “Look . . . ” Michael said.

  “Thank you for the tea.” The witch set her cup down.

  Her eyes had shifted color again, taking on the hue of burnt wood. Michael could almost smell smoke in the air.

  “Give me your hand.” The witch held out her hand, palm up. Her bracelets rattled.

  She looked younger this morning, no more than thirty-five, at a guess, but Michael was tired of guessing.

  “What? Why?”

  “So I can be sure you’re not an axe murderer,” the witch said. Her smile suggested she might be laughing at him.

  He gave the witch his hand. She traced the lines, and her eyes turned pale violet, inexplicably making Michael think of dragons. The witch pursed her lips. She said, “Hmmm.” He couldn’t tell whether it was a good thing, or a bad thing.

  A line of concentration appeared about a third of the way across the witch’s lip, like an old scar. Like a sudden flash of lightning in the dark, Michael knew things about her—all true down in his bones.

  The witch had drowned in 1717, and burned to death in 1691. In the 1800s, she’d died with a rope around her neck. In 1957, she’d been murdered—a kitchen knife to the gut, and blunt force trauma to the head combined.

  Michael sucked in a sharp breath.

  “It’s all true,” the witch said, without looking up.

  Could she feel him in her head? Or was it like a broadcast, and he just happened to be tuned into her frequency?

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, and then, “I’ll be staying until at least Halloween.”

  “What happens on Halloween?”

  She let go of Michael’s hand, blinking eyes gone the color of pumpkins. There was a flicker of disappointment in her gaze, as though she couldn’t understand why he regularly failed to keep up. The connection broke, taking the witch’s deaths, spooling away from her, with it. Which was just as well, because Michael knew somehow they’d been headed for a knife made of stone, and a blood-covered altar, and he suspected there were things in that death in particular he didn’t want to see.