She looked skeptical. “And that works? I mean, it helps someone get out of purgatory?”
Richard shrugged. “It’s supposed to. Look, I don’t make the rules. And as I said, it’s been a long time since I considered myself a Roman Catholic. I’ve probably got a couple of the details wrong, but that’s the gist of it.” He looked round. “There are a lot of Europeans buried here, it looks like. I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of visitors here today. Old traditions from the old country, that sort of thing.”
By now they had crossed through the heart of the cemetery and come to where the road split into two, heading left and right. “I just want to walk along this way for a bit, and get a couple of shots looking back over the cemetery toward the gates,” said Richard. “Aren’t you going to take any pictures?”
“I guess I should,” Debra replied, pulling her digital camera out of her pocket. “Knowing me, it’s the only time I’ll have my camera out all week. I don’t know why I bring it along to these things.”
Her little Canon looked insignificant compared with Richard’s camera, and he was clicking shot after shot, not bothering to check them for quality. Debra raised her camera to her face and peered through it, trying to frame a decent picture. If only all those people weren’t milling about, she thought. Not very atmospheric.
She clicked a shot, and the glare of the flash going off made her sigh. She still hadn’t quite got the hang of the settings, and she ran her eyes over the buttons on the back, trying to figure out how to turn the flash off. As she did so she saw the picture she had just taken, framed in the screen on the back. It was only there for a second or two before disappearing, leaving a view of the road and her left foot that shook slightly as she tried to process what she had just seen.
She looked up at the scene before her: gravestones, bare trees, muddy grass, and several people standing among the gravestones, most with their heads bent as if in prayer. She took a deep breath, then pushed the button that would scroll back and show her the picture she had just taken of the same scene.
And there it was. Gravestones, bare trees, muddy grass, all slightly overlit because of the flash. But—and it took her brain a few seconds to comprehend it—there were no people in the shot.
None at all.
She looked up again, blinking. There they were, plain as day. Dressed in black, as befitted people come to mourn the dead, say prayers for their souls.
Or dressed in black, as befitted people who had died and been laid out for burial.
She shook her head. This was crazy. As if to prove it she raised her camera and fired off two quick shots, then looked down at the screen.
No one.
This was wrong, all wrong. Richard had finally stopped taking pictures and turned towards her, and she saw a look of concern sweep over his face. He crossed to where she was standing and took her arm.
“Hey, are you all right? You look awful. Do you want to sit down somewhere for a minute?”
She fought to keep herself under control. “Richard, could you do something for me? Just turn and tell me how many people you see.”
He looked confused, and started to say something, but she cut him off. “Please, Richard, just do it.”
He turned his head and she heard him counting under his breath. “About three dozen, at least in the immediate vicinity. I don’t know how many others there might be. Why?”
“Could you just take a picture, trying to get as many of them in the shot as you can?” she asked. Her voice sounded funny to her own ears, and she tried to keep it steady. “Just take the shot, and then look at it.”
“Yeah, okay.” He lifted the camera up to his face, fiddled with it for a moment, and then pressed the shutter. She heard the sharp click, then watched as he turned the camera in his hands and pushed a button.
“Jesus Christ.”
So it was true. Debra didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not. Relieved, on balance, until she looked up and realized how far it was back to the gate, and where their route would take them.
“What does it mean, Richard?” she asked. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, and they both knew he was lying. “But I think we need to get out of here.” He took her arm. “Stay close,” he said quietly, “and don’t look to the side. Keep your eyes on the ground in front of you.”
They began walking as quickly as they could, keeping to the middle of the road. Even though she kept her eyes down, Debra was conscious of the figures on either side of them. Was it her imagination, or were there more of them? No one had passed them save the one car, and a quick glance ahead, measuring the distance to the gate, showed there were still only two cars parked in front of the office. They didn’t all come in three cars, and there was no one else on the street, she thought. Then, No wonder the office is closed today. I bet they couldn’t pay anyone nearly enough to work here today.
They were getting closer and closer to the entrance, and Debra tried to work out how much farther they had to go. As she did so she stumbled over a slight dip, and would have fallen if it weren’t for Richard’s firm hand on her arm, holding her up. She turned to thank him, and her gaze fell on a man standing at the side of the road, turned towards them. He was beside the marker they had stopped at earlier, the one for Guiseppe Gagliano, and his heavy-set face and close-set eyes were expressionless as they passed him.
If Richard noticed, he said nothing, other than “Not much further. We’re almost there.” Then they were past the office and at the gates and through them, out on to the sidewalk beyond.
It had started to rain at last, but neither of them noticed as they made their way back to the car. As she stood by the passenger door, waiting for Richard to unlock it, Debra glanced across the street toward her grandparents’ old house. The woman she had spoken to earlier was standing inside the front window, looking out at them, her face expressionless.
“I think all the pumpkins will stay out until midnight,” she heard Richard say. “Then it’ll be safe to get rid of them.”
She said nothing, just nodded her head. All the way past the long expanse of cemetery to their right she kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead of them, and did not breathe deeply again until they had turned onto Bloor Street and left the cemetery far behind them.
Barbara Roden lives two hundred miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, in the heart of ranching country. Since 1994 she has been joint editor of All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society, and in that same year co-founded, with her husband Christopher, Ash-Tree Press. Roden has edited or co-edited seven anthologies. A World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher who has, since 2004, been turning her hand to writing: her story “Northwest Passage” was nominated for the World Fantasy, Stoker, and IHG Awards. Some of her short fiction has been collected in Northwest Passages. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Apparitions, Blood and Other Cravings, Chilling Tales, Exotic Gothic, Poe, and Subterranean Online.
AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU
John Shirley
It was a hot afternoon and her fingers were slick with sweat as she worked the shears along the edges of the glaring face. Today and tomorrow, it was Chun’s job to cut the faces from the dangling sheet of rubber.
Some factories had machines that did all the trimming, her cellmate Bao-Yu had told her. “But here we are the machines.”
Bao-Yu was across the room from her touching up the masks with spray paint. Chun wished they could talk while they worked, but she wasn’t allowed to leave her station for hours yet.
They were in a Shen Yang labor camp, after all, not a regular manufacturing site, though in truth conditions weren’t much better in an ordinary factory. People got paid a little more, and they worked perhaps twelve hours a day instead of the fifteen Chun and the others worked. And they weren’t likely to be beaten.
There was a hand-operated machine in the main work shed that pressed out forms for the Halloween masks, before they c
ame here to Chun and Bao-Yu and the other girls; here the masks were trimmed, and connected to the straps that held them on the wearer’s head. The masks, it was said, were for the American custom of Halloween, and sometimes they reminded Chun a little of the images displayed during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, to placate the lost ghosts of ancestors. But the American Halloween seemed to Chun to be something else entirely. This mask, intended for export to America, didn’t have the plaintive, pitiful look of a hungry ghost. This monster’s face was angry, cruel, wild, and absurd all at once. It was a furred man, partly wolf, its mouth agape to show fangs, its pointed ears tufted, the deep lines of its face suggesting it was straining with all its will to leap into the real world and kill whatever stood in its way.
She would have to trim more than a thousand of these today. Yesterday it had been a green-faced demon with bright red lips; the day before she’d assembled the plastic bones of dancing, mockingly hateful skeletons with glowing red eyes.
Today she seemed to feel the three years she’d been imprisoned here, and the three more years awaiting her, like crushing weights. Her arms ached; it was mid-afternoon, a long time till the twenty-minute dinner break. Her mouth was dry. The Halloween masks were not just made of rubber, there were other chemicals in them too, and working around them for five days made her skin red, her fingers swollen. The painting the others were doing in the same poorly ventilated room made her eyes burn; she coughed sometimes and it was often hard to catch her breath.
Sometimes when she was feeling tired and sick it seemed to her that the Halloween masks sensed her vulnerability. Then, from the corners of her eyes, she could catch them looking directly at her, waiting for her weakness to increase. As if they were waiting for the right moment when they would snap their jaws at her . . .
The wearier Chun grew, the sharper the smell of rubber and chemicals grew, till she thought she might throw up. But last time she’d vomited on the job the supervisor had shouted at her, slapped the back of her head and said to stop malingering. If she slowed down her work too much, or went to the bathroom more than once a shift, he would jab her in the belly with his baton.
Did the people across the sea know how these masks were made? Did they know about the labor camps, and the factories where other such decorations were made? Where those strange horrible bearded “Christmas” figures were sewn together, with the blow-up man in the white and red suit and black boots: the “Santa” who lived inside a transparent plastic globe, seeming to delight in a perpetual blizzard? Or the eyeless reindeer made of blinking lights? Did the Americans know about the people who worked so long, worked until they sickened, for so little, making these bizarre trinkets?
Chun reached up with her clippers to trim another face free of the sheet, feeling her joints grinding with the motion. She snipped it out and laid the limp, bestial face on the worktable, face down, so that its inverted inner face watched her. She started to attach the flexible straps . . .
And then everything darkened, shrank to a murky picture at the end of a tunnel. She felt herself swaying, close to falling. She heard the supervisor shouting at her, telling her to stop pretending or he would get the electric shocker and really wake her up and . . .
She tried to focus her eyes. She was rushing down the tunnel, toward the mask on the table; toward its wide-open black mouth.
She didn’t really believe in the old ancestral worship her grandfather had practiced. But she didn’t believe in the People’s Republic, either. She had no one but her grandfather to call upon for help. No one but grandfather, and the ancestors, the lonely ghosts who looked for a chance to help so they would be set free from this coarse world . . .
So she cried out to them.
Use your strength, grandmothers, grandfathers—your strength is great! Use your strength to defend me!
Flying through whirling darkness, Chun called with all her soul, all the energy of her anger and all her frustration. She called to those who wait beyond the darkness . . .
The tunnel ended. She was back in the shed, still standing, staring at the face on the table.
Its mouth was moving. It was speaking to her . . .
“You have been heard. For many years they have called to us, without knowing it. Now your call has lifted their voices, so that we hear them clearly; it has lifted their masks of summoning. Oh how they tantalized us! Their icons cried out to us, but we could not respond. It was never quite enough. Something more was needed.
“But now we answer. You have given us what was needed. And now we will respond. You have called us and we will come to you.”
The Ouija board was a big-ass fail. Just a tired old disappointment. Maura got annoyed when Julie tried to force the planchet to form messages from her ex-boyfriend who wasn’t even dead. Apart from that zoggy bullshit nothing happened with the Ouija board.
“Ohhhh well, let’s do shots,” Gwen said, but that was pretty much her answer for any boredom challenge.
They were in the basement of Maura’s house, with the lights out and candles lit. All three of them in their lame costumes, sitting with big ol’ Gwen, the hefty goth girl—not really fat, exactly, just big, with the bulk of a linebacker. And little Julie, a Filipina girl who was almost small enough to be a midget.
Cliff had said, “You could fit two Julies in a Gwen, you totally should, and have two friends in one, and save on ticket prices and shit.” Then he’d made that donkey sound he called laughing.
Mom had gone to a Halloween party, one that Maura so totally did not want to go to, at the Stephenson’s house. It would be mostly middle-aged people playing old Alice Cooper songs and wearing costumes rented from shops. And anyway, Maura didn’t want to see her mom get drunk and whorey. Especially not at a party. Mom waited exactly one month after the divorce to start whoring around and sloppily draping herself on guys at parties. It was gross.
Then Mom would be hung over and insist on their going to Sunday mass so she could skulk into confession. Anybody within ten yards of the confessional could hear Mom crying in there. A real drama queen.
No, uh uh, not that party. But this wasn’t much better. Three teen girls wishing they were with three college boys instead of each other. Maura stuck in her Green Man costume, tights and a plastic mask with some fake plants stapled to it. The costume was left over from the school play, where they’d said, “You’re going to be the Green Man” and she’d said, “Can’t I be the Green Girl?” and they said no, that’s not the legend.
“We have lame costumes,” Maura said, looking at Gwen’s. “Julie’s is kinda okay but . . . mostly just lame.” Everyone was sick of zombies by now . . .
Gwen had wedged herself into a ridiculous Catwoman outfit from Batman Rising, a costume she’d mostly made herself that was only going to make guys snigger behind her back. And Julie was in her Evil Fairy outfit—she looked like Tinkerbell gone all zombie. They were drinking Jagermeister shots, which always made Julie sick. “If you drink enough shots, Julie,” Maura said, “you could throw up on yourself and it’d make your costume better.”
They all laughed at that. But somehow today Maura couldn’t feel like she was part of anything even while she was laughing along with her friends. Gwen and Julie both looked so loser. Julie was so eager to try to be “edgy” with them but really she was just another Catholic girl, planning to go to Community college, have a job in a dentist’s office, and then get married and have kids.
Who’s the losiest loser here? Julie asked herself, thinking of the song by Princess Doggie.
Who’s the Losiest Loser here
Who’s the one with facebook fake up
Who’s the Losiest Loser here
Who’s the one with fucked up makeup
“Maybe me,” Maura said, taking a shot of tequila from the bottle sitting on the Ouija board.
“Maybe you what?” Julie asked.
“Maybe I’ll get sick from mixing Jagermeister and tequila.” She did a shot. “Oh yuck, that didn’t go down good.�
�� Her stomach felt like some hand was wrenching at it.
“What if your mom comes home early?”
Maura shrugged. “So what? She’ll be so drunk she won’t notice what we’re doing. Or she’ll pretend she doesn’t.”
“We could find a party, there’s some, um, somewhere,” Julie said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. But there have to be. We can call around. There’s that Laura Ginsler party, but she’s such a Miss Thang snobby-ass.”
“She is, too,” Maura said. “All T no shade.”
“I’ve still got half of that Hawaiian hesh ciggie,” Gwen said.
“Ciggie? Who calls them ciggies?” Maura said, rolling her eyes.
“You’re, all, like, in a bad mood,” Gwen said, rooting around in her pocket-sized black taffeta-trimmed purse.
“Yeah I am in a bad mood. You should like that, you being all goth and stuff. Goths dress like bad moods.”
“No, that’s not what it is.” Gwen ran her stubby fingers through her red and black streaked hair. Then she went into one of her jolting changes of topic. “Oh! Let’s go on the roof!”
Julie blinked at her. “The roof?”
“Yeah! We can smoke up there and watch people on the street. We could throw water balloons at people. We might get some guys to come and check it out.”
“Oh God, listen to her,” Maura laughed. “You’re a worse whore than my mom.”
“Not worse than mine.”
“Your mom just sleeps with your dad.”
“Uh, hello, that’s what you think. Do you have a ladder?”
It was a little cold on the roof, but it wasn’t raining, and was, actually, pretty tight up there, Maura thought.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 34