HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “That’s up to you.” The disappointment in the witch’s eyes turned to something else, something deeper and sadder that made Michael’s skin crawl.

  An apology rose, and he clamped it down. Nothing about the witch made sense. He pressed his lips tight. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard her sigh. It reminded him of leaves pulled from branches by the October wind, of shortening days, and snow piling up behind the clouds.

  “What do you want?”

  Michael didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until the witch smiled, brief as a moth’s wing. But the sadness hadn’t left her eyes. She held up a hand and ticked off points.

  “I want to live in this house. I want tea every morning at seven, with toast on Wednesdays. I want not to die until I’m good and ready.” She lowered her hand. “The rest I’m still figuring out.”

  Ink threaded the gold of her eyes; Michael fought the urge to shiver.

  He wished the witch would stop looking at him. But when her gaze moved away, going to the window, he felt lost and unanchored.

  The witch’s eyes were green again. They reminded him of a toad he’d caught by accident in third grade. He’d given it to his teacher, who’d explained patiently that toads were much happier living outside than in classrooms, and would he please release it back into the wild.

  “You should unpack now,” the witch said.

  Her voice was very quiet, but it still made Michael flinch. He stared at her for a moment before realizing the words were a dismissal. Since he couldn’t think of a good retort, he obeyed.

  Michael didn’t know where the witch went during the day, and he didn’t ask. He could picture her flying around the neighborhood on a broom, or transforming into a flock of birds. He could just as easily see her curling up in the attic reading books on economic theory.

  He still didn’t know her name. He didn’t know anything about her really, and sometimes he amused himself by making up little stories about what she was doing at the exact moment it occurred to him to wonder—horseback riding, bowling, waltzing with the Zombie King of Austria on a floor made of crystal teeth. It annoyed him when he caught himself doing this. He constantly had to remind himself that the witch was an unwelcome intruder in his house. He couldn’t let himself get used to her. He couldn’t let her settle in and simply take over his life. Things just didn’t work that way in the real world.

  In college, he’d tried to picture what his life would be like after graduation. He’d long since given up on the high school fantasies of being a rock star, or an astronaut. He was tone deaf, and he’d barely passed intro to calculus. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but nowhere had his life plans included living with a witch. Magic was for fairy tales. Real life was bills and deadlines, not spells and potions.

  Yet, the witch stayed, and life went on as though she’d always been there, an inevitable fact as much as the bills and deadlines. He gave the witch’s cat the name Spencer, one of several dozen secret names he imagined the cat had accumulated over its lifetimes, as cats do. Michael only ever saw the witch at seven in the morning, and then again after dusk, as though she ceased to exist in-between, which he knew was as just as likely or improbable as every other scenario he’d dreamed for her.

  On a Thursday afternoon, Michael found himself at the foot of the attic stairs, listening intently. He didn’t know what he was listening for, but it never came, so he climbed the stairs. The witch’s door stood open. It was just past three.

  Afternoon sunlight, already burning to deep gold, slanted through a window set angle-wise in the slope of the roof. What the light illuminated was certainly nothing that had been in the attic before. Either the witch had snuck things in without making a sound, or magicked them into being from dust bunnies and dead spiders.

  A rocking chair sat tucked under the angle of the roof, next to a white-painted dresser holding a single, season-incongruous daffodil in a slender vase. A braided rug lay on the floor between the dresser and the bed, and the bed was covered with a neat, white duvet. There was a dress-form in one corner, a carousel horse in the other, an empty birdcage hanging from the ceiling, a cello leaning against one wall, and seven identical pairs of shoes lined up beneath the second window. A sea chest footed the bed, and Spencer sat on it, tail twitching impatiently in response to Michael’s wonder.

  From the cat’s perspective, Michael imagined, it was all so obvious. A chandelier hung, unlit, near the birdcage. The crystals caught the afternoon light, casting rainbows, and tinkled softly. The only thing Michael didn’t see in the room was the witch’s suitcase.

  If he came back tomorrow, he truth-in-his-bones-knew the room would be different—there would be an easel, a fish tank, a music box, an accordion, and a plethora of bookshelves. Spencer jumped lightly from the chest, and wound around Michael’s ankles. Where the cat had been sitting there was a leather bound book, swollen slightly, as though the pages had been wet and dried in crinkled waves.

  The cat slid past Michael, leaving him alone in a room that suddenly seemed to contain less air than it had a moment before. He shouldn’t, he knew he shouldn’t, and he still watched himself reach out, his hand hovering just above the leather cover. His fingers touched down. He’d been expecting an electric shock, but nothing happened. The cover was soft, like worn velvet; the book was just a book.

  He let out a breath. Still knowing he shouldn’t, he flicked the cover aside. The book fell open near the middle, as though its spine had been broken there again and again. The pages were handwritten, the script thin and spidery, the ink brown.

  For the Removal of Unwanted Guests

  Midnight frost, one cup, melted

  Trametes Versicolor, one handful

  One each: tail feather of raven, crow, and owl

  Six windfall apples

  Soil from beneath a ripe pumpkin

  Candy Corn, the proper kind

  Michael’s breath caught. If he didn’t know better, he might think the witch had left the spell, the recipe, whatever it was, there for him to find. It was a trick, a trap, it had to be. He glanced around, expecting to find the witch in the doorway, her eyes the color of steel. But he was alone. And that was almost worse somehow.

  With his pulse racing, Michael slipped his phone out of his pocket, and snapped a picture of the page. Then he slammed the book closed, turned, and fled down the stairs.

  On Sunday, he went apple picking. The place he chose also had pick-your-own pumpkins, which made at least two items on list from the witch’s book easy. On the way home, he planned to stop at the store and buy candy corn. That was half the items right there. And that frightened him.

  Driving home, jumpy and unsettled, Michael couldn’t keep his eyes off the rearview mirror. He expected the witch to come bearing down on him at any moment, all blood and fire and vengeance. He pictured her in a storm cloud, lightning in her hair, her eyes the color of rain. He almost went off the road twice, and when he finally pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, his hands were shaking so badly he could barely pull the keys from the ignition.

  What was he doing? The witch wasn’t bothering him; he barely ever saw her. Why should he want to get rid of her? And what made him think a spell from a water-logged book would banish her? Fight fire with fire, and magic with magic.

  Even if he could gather all the items, what was he supposed to do with them? Brew them up in the witch’s tea like a potion, and trick her into drinking it? And if he did, what then? What if he chased her out and she died again? She had drowned and burned and hanged already. All she wanted was tea, to live in his house quietly, and not to die again. Was that so wrong?

  He carried the items upstairs, and hid them under his bed. His heart wouldn’t stop racing, and he couldn’t get his breathing under control.

  When he came back downstairs, he found the witch organizing the utensils in the kitchen drawers. Under the butter-warm light, her black clothes looked like an incredibly deep, dark red. The honey s
trands in her hair stood out. He couldn’t even imagine what color her eyes must be. Spencer brushed against Michael’s leg, and he nearly screamed.

  After a moment, he scooped up the cat. Spencer purred, rubbing Michael’s neck with its head.

  “You’re lucky,” the witch said without turning. “She never lets anyone pick her up.”

  So, Spencer was a she.

  “She’s the one that found this place, you know.” The witch’s tone was conversational, but there was a hint of melancholy underneath it, wistful. “I could smell it, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. She led me right here. She’s got a better nose.”

  “Where . . . were you before?”

  The witch paused, the knives, forks, and spoons stilling in her hands. Michael wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.

  “A long way away.” The witch’s shoulders stiffened.

  Her words smelled of bonfires. They felt like dirt, filling his mouth. They tasted like Halloween.

  His mind clicking over to her frequency again, Michael saw the witch walking barefoot along the side of a road, headlights sweeping over her through a heavy rain. Broken glass from a car accident cut her soles, but she didn’t seem to care. She either walked to, or from, her most recent death, and it clung to her like a shadow. Whatever her death had been, or would be, it wasn’t pleasant. Not that any death was ever pleasant, Michael supposed, except for perhaps dying quietly in your sleep.

  “Witches don’t die that way,” the witch said, so softly he could barely hear her. He flinched, and Spencer squirmed out of his arms.

  He should go upstairs right now and throw away the apples, the dirt, and the candy corn, pretend he’d never seen the list or been in the witch’s room. But if he did that, he’d be admitting she could stay. Even if he never said it out loud, he’d be inviting her into his life, and nothing would ever be normal again. Magic would be real, and witches, too. A woman could drown and hang and burn and still be in his kitchen organizing his spoons.

  Cutlery rattled softly in the witch’s hands. Michael stared at her back. If she turned around, the witch’s eyes would be the color of smoke, the ghost of a thousand violent deaths drifting in the black at center of them. Could he live with all that death crowded behind her eyes? Could he live with all her impossibility? Michael was glad she kept her back to him. While the witch counted spoons, he turned silently, and slipped from the room.

  It snowed the day before Halloween. The last time Michael remembered that happening, he’d been about nine years old. His parents had bundled him off on a Boy Scout trip, up in the mountains. It snowed on October 30, and the Scout leaders cut the trip short after one night because it was too cold. They all came back on the bus with flakes still falling, and white dusting the ground. Michael’s mother made him go trick-or-treating in a bulky snowsuit, so no one could tell he was supposed to be Spider-Man that year.

  Michael stood in the open front door, coffee in hand, Spencer at his feet, watching the flakes fall. Carved pumpkins all along the street wore caps of white lace. It was peaceful, beautiful even, but Michael couldn’t shake his deep unease.

  He’d spent yesterday at a nature preserve, where he’d found the mushrooms and the feathers from the witch’s list. At least half an hour of the excursion had been Michael sitting in the car with the heater going full blast, comparing mushrooms and feathers to Google image searches on his phone.

  He still hadn’t decided what he was going to do. He told himself to think of it as insurance. Just because he gathered the ingredients didn’t mean he had to use them.

  “You’re letting out all the warm air.” The witch’s voice snapped Michael’s spine straight, and he wheeled guiltily, accidentally stepping on Spencer’s tail.

  The cat yowled, and shot away; the witch glared. Her eyes reminded him of sea-wet stones, slammed by endless waves.

  “It’s my heating bill.” The words came more sharply than he intended.

  The witch pressed her lips into an even thinner line, breathing through her nose. She’d snapped at him last night, too, when he’d suggested tacos for dinner. Spencer had hissed indiscriminately, taking in both their bristled postures without choosing sides, and stalked out the door when Michael had opened it to gather the mail.

  Did she know he’d found the book? And if she did, why didn’t she come out and say something, or cast a hex on him? Or whatever it was witches did when they were angry. She could turn him into a toad, and the house would be all hers. She wouldn’t even have to share. Maybe it was the same for witches as vampires, and he had to invite her in, or she couldn’t stay. He had no idea what the rules were, if there were any.

  The witch shifted without moving, strain showing in her clenched jaw. Now, more than sea-wet stones, her eyes reminded him of lightning trapped beneath a skin of dark clouds.

  There was only one day until Halloween. The witch had said she’d stay until Halloween at least, and the rest was up to him. Did that mean he was supposed to make the potion? That he was destined to betray her?

  “Why me?” Michael asked.

  He hadn’t meant to speak at all. The witch’s eyes turned the color of certain snakes Michael had seen on a nature show—the kind that hid in the sand, and uncoiled all at once to strike.

  “Because this house needs a witch.” The witch returned words like a slap. “And I thought you needed one, too. But maybe I was wrong.”

  Even though she hadn’t moved, she’d folded the space between them somehow. They were face to face, the witch leaning into him, her nose pointed at him accusation-wise.

  “All I want is to live a normal life. Is that too much to ask?” Michael stepped back. Coffee slopped over the edges of his mug, barely missing the witch’s toes.

  “Yes.” The door banged shut behind Michael, punctuating the word. Startled, Michael dropped his mug; shards of ceramic skittered across the floor.

  The witch made an impatient gesture with her hand, and the ceramic shards flew across the hall and into the kitchen, pelting the sink like hail.

  “Life isn’t fair. Nobody gets to choose whether they have a normal happy one or not. If they did, do you think anyone would get sick, or have their hearts broken? Would anyone die? It doesn’t work that way.”

  The witch’s deaths were in her eyes again. And her eyes themselves flickered from moonlight, to toadstools, to tsunamis and flames. The heat of them, the cold of them, the shock of them drove him back another step. Michael opened his mouth, but the witch spun on her heel, and banged up the stairs.

  The floorboards shuddered when she slammed her door, and plaster dust filtered down from the ceiling. Michael blinked, the grit catching in his eyes.

  Something in him tightened, twisting. Her life wasn’t fair, but her anger wasn’t either. All he’d done was move into a house with upside down windows and a staircase made of shipwrecks. And he could hardly be blamed for that.

  “Damn it.”

  Michael’s slippers smacked at his bare feet as he climbed the stairs. Inside his bathrobe, sweat gathered at the base of his spine. He knocked on the witch’s door, and it swung open.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to an empty room.

  Michael gaped. The bed, the dresser, the chandelier—all gone. And the witch, too. A tired looking cobweb hung where the birdcage had been, stirring on a breath of wind. Curtain-less windows let in gray light, showing the desiccated bodies of arachnids in the corners. Dust puffed, gritty beneath his feet.

  The sheer emptiness of the room shot through him, a current driven like a spike from his soles all the way up his spine. It was the worst kind of absence and it sent him running down the stairs in unreasoned terror. The witch was so thoroughly gone, she might never have existed.

  The house bowed under the insubstantial weight of snow. No, it mourned. Down in its bones, the house was melancholy over the loss of the witch. Like a haunting, there were sounds and scents just on the edge of perception. Turning a corner, he would catch a whiff of the sea. He didn’t dare touch
the walls, knowing they’d weep salt-dampness against his skin. An un-played note on a harpsichord sighed and shivered its way from the roof down to the basement where a black cat lay buried in the leftmost corner.

  He needed to get the witch back.

  Michael set out an hour before midnight with a measuring cup, his hands jammed in his pockets. Halloween stood on the other side of the clock’s tick, all gathered up with fallen leaves and bats’ wings and clouds across the moon. The snow had stopped, but the cold had deepened. The whole year waited to pivot on this point; the world was thin. It wasn’t just the house—this night needed a witch, too.

  A black cat streaked across his path. It might have been Spencer, or a random stray, he couldn’t tell. The cat didn’t pause. Michael glanced furtively in either direction. When he was certain he was alone, he used the razor blade he’d tucked into his jacket to shave the frost from his neighbor’s pumpkin.

  He felt like a fool. It was Devil’s Night. The cops would be on high alert. What would they think of a man with a razor—even if it was only a Bic disposable—lurking outside his neighbor’s houses, paying far too much attention to their pumpkins?

  But he didn’t have a choice. He would make the potion, and drink it himself. He was the unwanted guest that needed banishing. Then the witch would come back home, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be. It wasn’t rational, but nothing about the witch was. Deep down on his bones, he knew the truth of it. He had to bring her back, because if he didn’t . . . Because if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a witch here.

  The logic was as faulty as the logic of witches in general. And so it stood to reason his plan would work. It had to.