As the session ended, Malina felt pretty good about herself. It was a feeling that had grown over time. She was stronger, ready to put these new ideas to the test.
She slid the carnelian into the little pouch she wore around her neck, adding it to the many tiny pieces of black onyx, hematite, and black jade: dark stones her mother had made her promise she would always wear. Stones that Guin explained symbolize fear and death and dark forces in the universe, said with a hint that they should be gotten rid of. Malina wasn’t quite ready to part with the dark stones. In fact, the idea brought on a new fear—the unspecified outcome of losing touch with the stones, which would bring about something awful. That spoke volumes about her witchy mother’s influence!
But that challenge was for another day. Today, she felt good, so good that on the way home she decided to buy a pumpkin. She selected a large, plump one, then spontaneously she bought a bunch more, little ones. Pumpkin children, she thought, laughing, which made the older clerk look at her strangely, but Malina said quickly, “I’ve never carved one and thought I’d better practice.” It was a bold thing to say to a stranger, and she never talked to strangers. But never was a long time, and this little public confession elicited a shift on the face of the man behind the counter.
“Well, you’ll need a big, sharp knife. The skins of these little suckers is tough. And make sure you scrape out all the seeds. Some dry ’em and eat ’em, but I never had a taste for that. You can take out the pulp and make a pie,” he suggested, receiving her money, and she didn’t hear the rest of it, she just smiled and nodded and felt . . . normal. Yes, that was the word. Normal. Just like everyone else. A regular person, not a strange person suspect in the eyes of the world, distrusted, feared. A regular woman buying Halloween pumpkins from a regular store clerk.
The man didn’t seem to notice that she was smiling like a lunatic. And once he’d handed over her change, he offered to help her load the pumpkins into her car. He lifted the big one out of the cart and she handed him the small ones, two at a time. He placed them all in the back seat, like an adult surrounded by thirteen children. Malina laughed aloud, thinking that maybe she should seatbelt them all in.
The man swung his head quickly at her sharp laugh, a questioning look on his face. Should she explain it to him? She wasn’t sure, but this new-found openness needed testing. “I was just thinking how they look like a bunch of children with a parent. Maybe they need seatbelts.”
As she said it, it sounded stilted. Silly. An odd thing to say. But the man suddenly grinned. “Could be,” he said, then closed the back door and began to walk away, saying, “Happy Halloween to you, Miss. I guess I should say Happy Mischief Night first!”
No one had ever wished her a Happy Halloween before. She wasn’t even sure how to respond, but finally said, “Yes. You too!” He didn’t turn so maybe he didn’t hear her.
She drove home in a cloud of optimism, finding parking on the street quite close to her house, another good omen. She lifted out the big pumpkin and one small. She’d have to come back for the rest.
This was one of those times she wished she didn’t have thirteen steps to climb to the old house she’d inherited. Out of habit, she counted them all in the rhyme her mother had taught her: A baker’s dozen, twelve plus one, none will see the rising sun. One . . . two . . .
Maybe she should hire a carpenter to build a fourteenth step, to break the cycle. She felt positive about breaking cycles now.
Three more trips were needed to retrieve the other small pumpkins that she hauled to the kitchen. She brewed a pot of herb tea and sat looking at her acquisitions for a while. She hadn’t realized it when she was picking them out, but the little ones were all shapes and a variety of sizes. Some were taller, others wider, perfect rounds, and misshapen gourds with curiously odd stems. Even the colors were slightly different one from the other, She rearranged them first by size, then by pale to dark orange, drinking her tea and thinking that this was going to be the best Halloween ever. Nothing like the ones she’d lived, caught in terror of the night and those who walked it and the torment they inflicted. And especially that last Halloween before her mother died. Her determined and cruel mother who liked to force dark thoughts inside Malina’s head, stirring up anxieties about a vicious world of “normal,” those who didn’t like “our kind.” Mother had been a darkling raised by another darkling of a mother and Malina hesitated to call them “evil” but the word was right there, in her mind if not on her tongue. As Guin said once, “Both your grandmother and your mother were women who drove their husbands away, apparently, and would rather have destroyed their daughter than to change.”
Malina was not going to be like her mother. Not ever.
She stood abruptly and spread a heavy dark tarp over half the table, placed the pumpkins haphazardly onto it and then covered the rest of the table with the tarp.
She had seen carved pumpkins, of course, and had watched them being carved on TV, but had never done that herself. And she knew the history—of the hideous faces used to scare away demons, or offering those very same demons a home for the night when they breeched the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In her childhood there had been no pumpkins at the window or on the porch. Her mother said they didn’t need them; demons were always welcome in their house.
Malina picked out a large carving knife from the knife rack and walked to the table. She touched her fingertip gently to the blade edge. Instantly, a line of blood appeared on her finger. Before she could move her hand away, blood dripped onto the thick skin of the large pumpkin, the three bright red drops sliding down the orange shell. Something about that troubled her and she raced to the sink to get a cloth. But in those short moments when she’d turned, the pumpkin had absorbed the blood. She couldn’t believe her eyes. But then, she could. She had seen many strange things in her life, why not this?
She spent the better part of the afternoon and early evening carving pumpkins. Something in her was determined to finish them all. She ended up with a mess of pumpkin “guts” spilling over the table and onto the floor, seeds and the stringy bits everywhere, some clinging to fragments of hard pulp. She decided to use a shovel to clean the floor and ended up folding the mess in the tarp and tossing it into the trash.
Once the cleanup had been done, she gathered every candle in the house, seven of them, all black, and cut them in half so she’d have enough for all the jack-o’-lanterns.
The sun had set and while the sky still held streaks of paleness, she turned off the kitchen light to looked at the mother and thirteen babies—as she had come to think of them—with their glowing and flickering eyes, noses, and mouths. They really did look amazing. And horrifying. Instinctively, she had managed to carve frightening faces. Well, that was normal, wasn’t it? That’s what normal people did.
On impulse, she opened the pouch around her neck and dumped the stones into her hand. Besides the orange, there were thirteen black ones. One for each, she thought, and placed a black stone inside every small pumpkin and the orange stone inside the large one. This would test her mother’s theory. And maybe it was a first step in parting with them.
Then, carefully, she moved them one by one onto the front porch, lining them up on the long weather-worn carpenter’s bench, the mother in the center, six babies to her left and seven to her right, ordered by height, all of them aflame inside.
She backed up to the top step but needed a better view, one that everyone else would see, so she went down the steps and backed along the path. Yes, they looked spectacular. Hers was the only house in the neighborhood with so many pumpkins, she was sure of it. To confirm this, she turned and glanced at the porches and windows of her neighbors, seeing a pumpkin here, a fake pumpkin there, no pumpkin in the next, and so on, until her eyes scanned past her car . . . and then went right back to it. The car windows were smashed!
Malina hurried down the walk and raced around the car, stunned, not believing what she was seeing. The s
ide, front and back, the rear window, and the other side were broken through, glass shards littering the seats and floor. The windshield had spider-webbed, with a hole that had to have been caused by the huge rock sitting on the hood. Even the driver’s side mirror was shattered. She picked up the gray rock that was as big as her two fists and at the sound of laugher spun around, unable to determine from where the wind had carried the sound, but able to make out the words, “Witch!” repeated over and over like a chant.
“Brats!” she shrieked. “You’ll pay for this!”
She sounded to her own ears like her mother, shrill, loud, evil. I don’t care! she thought, her new-found optimism crushed by cruelty for which she had no recourse.
She rushed indoors, still holding the heavy stone that had damaged her car, envisioning pulverizing heads with it, but mostly aware of how much this stone had wounded her. She sat with the cool rock resting in her palms, trembling, and soon tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks until she was sobbing. It took some time, but finally she was able to make the call.
“Calm down,” Guin said, “and tell me everything.”
The events were repeated, from the enthusiasm of buying and carving pumpkins to the shattering of hope for a new way of living “in this rotten world! They’re so cruel, Guin. I can’t stand it! Maybe I should just do what my mother would have done and—”
“Malina, stop! Just stop.”
She struggled to hold her emotions in and the effort produced a loud, low moan, something that didn’t even sound human to her own ears, but Guin said, “I know you’re hurt. And you’re afraid. But, calm down, Mal. We’ll deal with this together.”
By the end of the long conversation Guin had convinced Malina that what happens on Mischief Night is not personal, and she shouldn’t take it that way. Yes, children can be cruel and the word “mischief” doesn’t really cover the extreme damage to her car, but if Malina was friends with the neighbors, she’d probably discover that things just as terrible had happened to their cars or houses or gardens too. For some reason, it was tradition for children to do bad things on Mischief Night, hence the name. “Mal, this was very wrong. But, you can call the police. And you have car insurance for vandalism that will pay for the damage. Hold on, okay? Tomorrow night is Halloween. Those same kids will be ringing your doorbell, begging for candy. And that’s when you have the biggest opportunity of your life to change. You can tell them from a vulnerable place just how hurt you were by what they did.”
“Tell them?”
“Yes. It’s part of healing, expressing from your most vulnerable self exactly what you feel. It’s the place that touches others and allows them to change. These children can see the error of their ways and you can help them. Oh, and don’t forget to also give them a piece of candy, to show you’re human.”
“Am I? Human?”
“Of course you are! If you weren’t, you wouldn’t feel wounded by this. And, by the way, your little pumpkins sound delightful. I’m busy tomorrow, and tomorrow night I’ll be giving out candy myself, but leave those pumpkins out and I’ll drive by the day after Halloween and have a look. That’s quite a creative idea, you know.”
They talked a little more and while Malina didn’t feel happy when she got off the phone, a fragile scab had formed over the bleeding rawness within and she was able to pull herself to her feet and begin making the candy apples she’d planned as giveaways, deciding to not call the police, at least not until she calmed down. She had the bushel of Granny Smiths, bought a week before from the same vendor from whom she’d purchased the pumpkins—when she had been too terrified to look him in the eye! When he virtually ignored her. And hadn’t offered to help her carry the basket to the car.
Malina decided to keep busy—that was the best way to take her mind off the remnants of the destruction. At least that was one thing her mother had taught her that made sense.
She pulled out the large blackened pot that had been her grandmother’s and placed it on the stove top, taking up two burners. It was an easy recipe, one her mother had made several times, though once not as it should have been done. The year before her mother died, she made candy apples and placed the tiniest tip of a razor blade inside one of the apples. So many people gave out candy apples that year her mother had not been caught, but it was in all the news, especially stories of the little boy who’d received stitches and a tetanus shot. At school, the other kids had been suspicious and directed their accusations at Malina and her mother, and that made her life hell for months. In her head, Malina could still hear the cackle that resonated through the house as her mother recounted the event with fondness. Oh how mother wished she could imbed every treat with razor blades every year. Or perhaps the tips of needles. Anything to inflict pain—that would bring her such joy.
She had no intention of hiding anything in the apples that would cut the children, even if those same children had cut her emotionally. Guin was right. Tell them how much their actions had hurt her. Give them a chance to learn to be better people. That was the key.
Into the large pot she poured white corn syrup, water, sugar, and a colorant that turned the mixture a brilliant red. When the ingredients reached the right temperature, she coated the skewered apples, and then placed them onto a waxed sheet. Thirteen, that was the number she made. There were thirteen children in this neighborhood, as she recalled from the year before. A baker’s dozen. And she marveled at how that number seemed to be everywhere tonight. It was like an omen of some kind, but she didn’t let her mind travel far along that path, a rocky road of pitfalls that her mother had dragged her down far too often.
October thirty-first dawned with a foreboding in the chilly air. Dying leaves pirouetted from the wind, twirling in a graceful dance macabre, or so Malina thought of it as she stared out the window, her emotions flat-lined by the events of the night before.
She’d woke in fits and starts from nightmares, but only rose at noon, still overcome with exhaustion. Now it was late afternoon, headed towards evening. She sat in her grandmother’s rocking chair by the window, a pot of herb tea on the little table, watching the sun struggle to get down the sky until it gratefully disappeared behind a house across the way and ultimately hid below the horizon.
Malina heard then saw the first of the children at the end of the street. Wearing their costumes, holding small, dim flashlights so they could see in the encroaching darkness, each with a bag slung over an arm or clutching a little plastic bucket to receive treats.
The first three were quickly joined by another three and then another four and finally there were thirteen of them, all shapes and sizes, moving as if they were one unit, one being, and Malina thought they looked like a pulsing, throbbing single-celled life form, many parts joined together and coming apart but ultimately remaining together, and the word “parasite” came to mind with a new understanding.
They went from house to house, crossing the street, back and forth, laughing, pushing and shoving one another, waiting for doors to open then shouting in unison “Trick or treat!” Malina watched as candies were placed into bags, and more were demanded until the giver met their demands. One householder even offered the bowl—the greedy children grabbed handfuls of whatever was in it until the bowl was empty.
Once they reached her house they paused at the curb, pointing at the pumpkins she had lit earlier on the porch, no doubt discussing the wisdom of knocking on the “witch’s” door. A couple of the more brazen ones pointed to the car and laughed, admiring their work of the previous evening, the destruction bolstering their courage, no doubt, and Malina felt a fury rise in her which she quickly shoved down.
Finally, she heard the tallest boy say, “Don’t be chickenshits! Let’s do it!” and they moved as a group along the cement to the thirteen steps and climbed them, the youngest and shortest in the front, staring at the jack-o’-lanterns as they made their way up.
Malina rose from her seat and went to the door, waiting for the bell to ring. Wh
en it did, she opened the door without hesitation. The dim yellow porch light and the glow from the pumpkins offered the only illumination as she stood at the entrance of her home surrounded by darkness peering out at the costumed group. There were no presidents or princesses among them, no superheroes or pirates. Every single one wore the mask and costume of a supernatural, but to her eyes, they were all resembled demons.
The darkness that enfolded Malina stopped the chatter for a moment, and as she scanned the little mob she could see in the mask holes the eyes of the youngest ones reflecting something akin to fear. But as she examined them by age, the older they got, the more the fear turned to confusion, then questioning, and finally to blatant arrogance.
The oldest, a boy in a skeleton suit and cape, holding a wooden-handled scythe, the blade made of plastic, said in a snarky voice, “Trick or treat, witch!”
The others laughed. This gave them courage and a chant rose up that started with a few of them until all thirteen were shouting in unison, “Trick or treat, witch!” over and over.
Whatever confidence Malina had felt became submerged in her own fear. She tried to tell herself through Guin’s voice in her head: They’re just children. They can’t hurt you. But then she remembered vivid stories her mother and grandmother had repeated about the burning days, their kind being tormented, tortured then tied to a stake and set on fire. Terror surged through her and she shook her head rapidly to clear it of the horrific images.
The oldest boy mistook the head shake for a no and shouted, “Then we’ll trick you, ugly witch! Again!”
A survival instinct rose up and Malina blurted out, “I have treats!”
“Let’s see ’em?” yelled one of the younger ones, a bloody-fanged vampire, the voice so coldly demanding she could hardly believe it came from such a fragile-looking being.
“Yeah, where are the treats, ugly witch? Bring ’em, or we’ll torch this place!” The boy, a hairy lycanthrope, snarled at her and gnashed his teeth, making the graveyard ghoul next to him giggle.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 30