Was it the land itself? Or something done on or to the land to forever change the spirit of the place? Was it something bound up in the people, their heritages and bloodlines, that would’ve followed them anywhere if they’d packed up the whole of Dunhaven and moved the town someplace else? The residents of both the town and the surrounding county, out to a distance of at least eighteen miles, had benefited from it, if benefit was really the proper word for such a thing, and there were many who argued that it wasn’t. That it was not the blessing people thought it to be.
Which never seemed to discourage anybody from hoping to be the one whose call was answered.
The truth came down to this: Deeply ancient custom held that, on Halloween night, the cusp between summer and winter, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin, so thin that spirits might cross over to wander for a night. Another custom—perhaps related, perhaps not, and not nearly so ancient as the other but old enough—held that scarecrows came alive on Halloween night. Dunhaven was the only place in which Bailey had ever heard of it actually happening . . . although for all she or anyone else knew, Dunhaven was the place where this legend had been born.
One night, one scarecrow, and the returned soul of one person who had died during the past year. Just one. Never none, never two or more, only the one.
The rite had inspired a deep legacy of secrecy. It had never been a thing to share with the outside world, beyond the town and surrounding farmland. Here, you grew up understanding the importance of silence even before you fully understood what it was you weren’t to talk about with anyone from farther off.
In the early decades, when people journeyed by horse, and most not very far, Dunhaven had been sufficiently remote that the secret was easy enough to keep. But time brought paved roads and the vehicles that traveled them, so stronger measures were needed. Roads could be closed. Innkeepers could be persuaded to turn away potential lodgers. Lingering strangers could be made to feel unwelcome. For every threat, there was an answer.
Still, peoples’ tongues were the first and last lines of defense. Most children grew up indoctrinated with tales of bogeymen who punished those who let secrets slip. By the time they were old enough to know better, they’d already seen enough each Halloween to fear that bogeymen might not necessarily be a myth. And as adults, the last thing they wanted was a tide of incomers desperately seeking assurance of life after death, driving up the property tax base in the process.
Whatever few stray whispers did manage to escape seemed to suffocate in the skepticism of the modern world, and so the sacrament remained theirs alone. It had been going on for so long they took for granted it always would . . . even though people never liked to dwell on how which soul came through got decided on the other side. One preferred to believe in the concept of rest and peace, not in cutthroat competitions to seize the last second chance you might have to say goodbye.
Trinkets, things that had special meaning, seemed to sweeten the odds.
After Bailey and Cody set theirs down, they stepped back, as she took another look up at the face gazing blindly down at them, the potential of personality trying to crawl past the burlap and buttons.
“What will you say to him, if it’s Daddy?” she whispered.
Cody thought for a long time. “If he’ll take me with him.”
Just a few simple words, worse than a dagger in the heart. Her first impulse was to tell him, command him, to never say such a thing. Not the best lesson to teach, that he had to censor himself around her. Hadn’t she just been ruing, not half an hour ago, the fact that he already had secrets?
“Wouldn’t you miss me?” she said instead. “I’d miss you. I’d miss you with all my heart.” Every minute of every day, she almost said, but didn’t want to oversell. It wasn’t Cody’s kind of talk. “I’d miss all the fun stuff we do.”
He still didn’t seem to grasp what the big deal was. Just looked at the scarecrow as if it were his escape clause, the answer to all the problems. “Then I’d come back next year.”
She stiffened, thought she saw where this was going.
“Let’s get you back home and into your costume,” she said. “Nobody wants to be late for a party.”
In Dunhaven, Halloween ran according to a different schedule. As most of the world had come to recognize it, Halloween was a holiday for children, and a tacky one at that, all cheap scares and greed. There could be no abolishing this part of it—they were realists here—but they could at least see to it that the childish side of the day was over and done with before sunset, before things turned serious, when even the grownups took pause. Parties in the morning, trick-or-treating in the afternoon. It helped if the day’s sky was grim, and after a bright sunrise, the clouds were starting to cooperate.
Once Cody was suited up, she took him to the gathering in the basement at St. Aidan’s Episcopal and turned him loose into the clamor of his classmates and friends. She doubled-checked the time the party was scheduled to end, and then the next three hours were hers.
Hardly anyplace in town was more than ten minutes from anyplace else, but still, Troy’s house seemed another world away. He met her at the door, and she did her best to leave her guilt about this back in that other world. It would always be waiting when she returned.
Five minutes later, she wasn’t really thinking about anything at all.
She pulled and she pushed, rode and was ridden, and it was still easy to tell herself that none of this meant anything. It was just an itch that needed scratching, one she couldn’t reach on her own. That was all. The first time, of all the sorry, sad clichés, had been alcohol-related, on a night six weeks ago when Cody had been on a sleepover, and in a purely unforeseen development, she’d ended up doing the same.
After Drew’s funeral, she’d promised herself, and him, if he was listening, that she would wait a year, at an absolute minimum, before she’d even think of dating again . . . and here she had barely made it six months before skipping the pretense of dating altogether. She’d awakened that next dawn wondering how it had happened, and vowing that it wouldn’t happen again . . . but it was too late. The groove had been greased, so to speak. The second time was even easier to agree to, sober, than the first had been after wine.
Troy was nothing like Drew at all, and perhaps that was what made this easier. Where Drew had been beefy, Troy was lean and hard. Where Drew had towered, Troy was compact. Where Drew’s hair was black, Troy was fair all over. While Drew had been quick to laugh, Troy found the humor in subtler things. Whereas Drew had loved living in the heart of town, Troy liked it out here on the periphery, in a renovated one-time farmhouse that hadn’t been attached to a farm for a generation, after Dunhaven had grown out to meet it.
To look at them, at least, she and Troy matched up much more readily than she and Drew ever had. But it would never go further than this. She couldn’t imagine Troy as a father, much less a stepfather. And that, she supposed, was the safety valve here.
“Tell me the truth, would you,” he said, once it was all over, one more time, and they were free to stare at the ceiling. “How are you hoping it goes tonight? Are you really hoping he comes through?”
How to answer without either encouraging him or sounding like a callous bitch? “If it wasn’t for Cody’s sake? I don’t know that I’d be going through with this after all.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It might be good for him,” she said. “He wasn’t there when Drew had his heart seizure. And I’m glad of that much, that Cody didn’t have to see it. But it robbed him of his chance to say goodbye. He goes to kindergarten one morning and he’s got a dad, and by the time he comes home he doesn’t. So tonight would probably be good for him.”
Troy traced a finger along the downy blond fuzz at her temple, which felt better than she wanted it to. “And what about you?”
She couldn’t find the words, and of course, that spoke volumes.
“If you’re ambivalent, I can understand that,”
he said.
“Were you, with Angela?”
“Yes and no. The circumstances, they couldn’t have been more different. With her, there was so much we didn’t know. There were so many questions we would’ve liked to have answered. Obviously.”
Obviously. Like, Who took you, Angela? Who killed you? And where’s the rest of you?
She hadn’t known Troy then, not in person and barely by sight. The first she’d seen of him was Halloween three years ago, Troy joining Angela Pemberton’s sister Melanie, the two of them kneeling beside each other at the foot of the scarecrow, in that first row that custom reserved for the hopeful. It had been someone else’s night, though, Angela apparently choosing to remain silent then and forever.
To see Melanie afterward, her crushing disappointment, was to understand the cruelty of this night. Trying not to be obvious about it, Bailey had watched Troy console her, and he’d seemed so kind and attentive that she wondered at the time if he and Melanie might become a couple in their own right. But it had never happened, and now she knew how naïve that was. Death and bereavement would always be the foundation of the relationship.
So now she saw that night for what it really was. Troy had been sowing his seeds in her heart without realizing it.
“But,” he went on, “you learn what happens here, or you grow up with it, and you think it’s going to be this great experience. You think, wow, who gets this chance, how lucky this place is. And some years, for some people, yeah, I’m sure it does turn out to be everything they hope it will be. But a part of me was scared. I wanted it to happen for Melanie’s sake, it was her sister and all, but for me? The closer the night got, the more I didn’t want it after all.”
Bailey hung on every word. This was it. This was the thing nobody in Dunhaven ever talked about, at least not publicly, even though you could see it in their eyes every October. You could see the trepidation, the misgivings. Could recognize the look of someone who was going through with an act even though they’d begun to have second thoughts. None of which they would ever admit to. For obvious reasons: Who wanted to be first to come out and admit to being an ungrateful freak?
“What scared you about it?” she asked.
“I’d gotten to a place where I’d accepted that Angela was gone,” Troy said. “That she wasn’t coming back. I’d gotten to a place where I’d accepted we might never know what happened to her. And I realized I didn’t want to know anymore. I didn’t want to know how she’d suffered. And then . . . ”
He seemed to have trouble, but Bailey thought she might be able to take it from here. “And then everybody expects you to put that aside for one night, and it’s not as easy as it sounds?”
Troy nodded. “That’s it. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“And because you just get them back for one night, how are you supposed to deal with the pain of having to let them go all over again?”
He laughed, very quick, very soft. “You’ve obviously given this some thought. It’s like you’ve got a stake in this for yourself, or something.”
“But I do want it to happen for Cody,” she said with resolve. “That’s the bottom line. That’s all that matters.”
“Then I hope you get it. I hope it’s him.” Him, Troy always said. He never called Drew by name. “Who’s the competition, do you know?”
She didn’t, not exactly. They could only recall who’d died in the past year, and who among them might match up with the anonymous gifts lain thus far beneath the scarecrow’s perch. The glove and the sheet music, the medal and the cake.
“The Purple Heart . . . I bet that was Larry Hughey’s. He would’ve won that in Korea. He’s the only veteran I can think of who’s died this year.”
“Oh god,” she said, and imagined the man’s poor widow coming out to leave the medal on the grass. “Candace Hughey’s got to be in her eighties. Seems like she should be the lucky one tonight on seniority alone.”
“Absolutely not,” Troy said. “If you feel guilty about that, stop right now. Every time it goes to the geriatric crowd, it’s a wasted year. It’s like old people winning the lottery, you know? They’re going to be dead in another three years anyway, so what’s the point?”
She didn’t want to laugh at this, but couldn’t help it. “You’re going to Hell for that one, I’m afraid.”
“And if you’re all lucky, I’ll come back and tell you what it’s like there.”
She wasn’t laughing anymore, and wondered why she had at all. It wasn’t just talk, not in Dunhaven. Say a thing like that, and it could well turn out to happen.
“ ‘Hell is other people,’ ” she mused, for no better reason than that it came to mind. Then again, there was always a better reason for most things. “Did you ever hear that? I don’t remember who said it.”
“No. But whoever it was, I’d buy him a drink.”
They dawdled some more, in bed and then out, and shared a bite to eat—breakfast for him, brunch for her. They ate in the little nook before a bay window, overlooking the fading trees of autumn, bare enough and tall enough to appear to scrape the bellies of the charcoal clouds. It was almost like being outside, in the chill and unpredictable wind, on this day when the spirits gathered to roam.
And when it came time to leave, she both wanted to, and didn’t.
“You going to be there tonight?” she asked.
“Should I? Do you want me to?”
Who could say what spirits understood, or were prepared to overlook? If they saw you getting on with your life, when theirs had been over a mere eight months, was that, to them, another kind of Hell?
“I don’t know if that would be a good idea or not,” she said.
He nodded. “I’m sure I’ll hear all about it tomorrow.”
When she left, every step between his door and her car felt like a few more degrees of transition between worlds—this time back to putting herself second, because that’s what mothers were supposed to do. Halloween was the perfect day for this feeling, for changing masks so many times, one after another, so quickly that she could no longer be sure which of them was most real.
Trick-or-treating was a supervised event in Dunhaven, the kids going out in groups overseen by at least one parent, or better yet, two. You had to love them, of course, and their excitement, all dressed up and everywhere to go, but you still didn’t want them roaming at will, losing track of time. It was better for all concerned that they get in by curfew, before nightfall, when Halloween was taken over by more adult concerns.
Bailey had wanted to be one of the parents helping out to escort the kids around. She’d volunteered for duty again and again, but the other mothers and the few dads who pitched in wouldn’t hear of it. Telling her no, of course not, you’ve got enough to worry about this year. Like they couldn’t see that this was precisely the point—that today, of all days, was a day when she could use distractions instead of dwelling on what might or might not happen after sundown.
So after she’d collected Cody from the party at St. Aidan’s, and gotten him into his costume, then dropped him off at the grade-school gym where the candy-fueled army teamed up and set out, there could be no going home. The last thing she wanted was to sit around listening for the doorbell so she could spend the next hours throwing miniature Snickers bars at other people’s children.
It was time to check on the offerings they’d left this morning anyway.
She was relieved to find them still there, right where they’d been left, along with the rest, nothing tampered with. They’d even been joined by a few more items, one a stuffed teddy bear with the nose half-chewed away, and with this one it only took a moment to figure out the likely source: the latest generation of Ralstons, Ellis and Kristen, who’d lost a baby girl to SIDS last spring.
Oh, come on, Bailey thought. She wasn’t even a year old, she wouldn’t have been speaking anything more than a word at a time, so what’s she got to tell you now?
For which she felt perfectly ashamed a few mome
nts later.
This day, this weird day—it did things to you, none of them good.
She’d never appreciated what a merciful thing it was that only those who’d died in the past year were able to come through. This limitation kept the incivility contained. If anyone could come back any year, the whole town would be at one another’s throats each and every October. There wouldn’t even be a Dunhaven by now, she was sure of it. The place would have imploded generations ago.
It wasn’t just the sabotage from your fellow mourners you had to worry about, someone snitching your offering away to thin the competition for their own dearly departed. It was the sabotage you couldn’t foresee coming that had, other years, made things interesting.
You didn’t have to be old enough to remember it firsthand to have heard about the year James Gosling was caught stealing a locket and other items set out to call a woman named Meredith Hartmann, for fear of what her spirit might’ve had to reveal about the decade they’d kept secret from their spouses.
And beyond any living person’s memory was a year that had passed into local legend. One of Dunhaven’s most disreputable sons, Joseph Harrington, was alleged to have salted the earth of the entire town square, and soaked the wood of the fence post in holy water, in an attempt to keep anyone from coming through. Several people had died that spring, on the same night on the eve of May, three in ways that, it was said, left their bodies so mangled they looked as though they’d gone through a combine—although no one ever needed to run a combine until harvest. Whatever had happened, Harrington had thought it better to incur the wrath of all of Dunhaven than let someone have a chance to say a word about what they’d been up to out in the woods and fields far from the heart of town.
Anywhere else, people would write that off as lore that had grown so much in the telling that by now the episode was more fable than fact. But here, given what everybody knew would happen each October . . . ? Here, you couldn’t be so sure.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 26