HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  There was just one cloud in the blue-black night sky. “That cloud is shaped like a Band-Aid,” Gwen said. And it was. The thin dirty-looking cloud was stretched over the blister-like moon but didn’t hide much. The cloud gave the moon a red halo, like blood on a bandage, and seemed to make the face of the man in the moon stand out more sharply, so you could see every bit of it, even the crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes . . .

  Or maybe it was just the Hawaiian weed making it seemed that way. She saw the lips of the man in the moon move, then. Yeah, the hesh, probably.

  She sighed and turned to look at Gwen and Julie. Gwen’s four water balloons were sacrifices made from the four condoms she kept in her purse. She’d carried them for months; hopelessly, really, so not much of a sacrifice. Gwen and Julie sat crosslegged just above the front edge of the roof, their feet right by the rain gutter, looking down at the street. Across the street two groups of small children were walking along in costume, shepherded by parents and older siblings. The children tittered and waved their plastic candy bags. Some of them ran, and skidded to a stop when they were reined in by their parents. Orange glows studded the row of houses irregularly, where people had put out jack-o’-lanterns. Across the street the Castlemans had a more elaborate display, with Styrofoam tombstones and one of those dancing skeletons with the wanly glowing bones and hot coals for eyes.

  “What if they dug down under those fake tombstones,” Maura said, “and found real bodies under each one?”

  “Ha-a-a,” Gwen cackled. “That’d be awesome . . . ”

  “Awesome . . . ”

  “Who said that?” Maura asked, looking down in the bushes. She half expected to see Cliff there, trolling them.

  “Said what?” Julie asked, looking at her.

  “I thought I heard a man’s voice say awesome after Gwen did.”

  “She’s going crazy crazy cra-zyyyyy, ” Gwen chanted, making a scared face and pointing at Maura.

  They all three cracked up at that. When that calmed down, Maura said, “That hesh is good. Is there any left?”

  “Just a whatsit, what my dad calls it . . . a roach.” Gwen held it up in her black gloved fingers and looked at it so close her eyes almost crossed. “Teensy.”

  “That skeleton can dance, like on a motor,” Julie said. “I didn’t know they could do that.”

  “Oh yeah, they got all kinds that move around now,” Maura said, suddenly bored again. “Skeletons that come down on strings and shit. Wish I hadn’t mixed Jager and tequila. I’m like, about to spout orange goo.”

  “You feel sick?” Julie asked. “You should drink a glass of water.” Her mom was a nurse and some of it had rubbed off.

  “You could suck the water out of one of these condoms,” Gwen said seductively, holding up a water-bloated oblong of blue latex that sloshed in her palm. Condoms were their water balloons.

  Maura laughed and then said, “Don’t make me laugh, I might puke.”

  But that made them laugh more.

  Maura looked back at the dancing skeleton Halloween decoration, and saw it was now dancing to the edge of the Castleman’s yard. “Wow, it can move forward and backwards too, look . . . ”

  They stared. Gwen said, “Whaaaaat? It must be on a rail or something.”

  “Wow, that’s a good illusion,” Julie said. “Really really good. Looks so real.”

  “I think you said the same thing three times, Julie . . . Oh! Here comes Cliff, get the condoms ready . . . ”

  “Eee-ewww, with Cliff?” Gwen asked, screwing up her face.

  “I mean the balloons, retard.”

  “I know you did. Here’s one balloon for you and one for you.”

  Cliff was walking down the sidewalk toward Maura’s house. He was tall and awkward; he had narrow shoulders and wide hips and the sagging pants he wore, to be all hip-hop, just made his hips look worse. He had his hair teased up in a faux hawk and he was wearing his worn-out Oakland Raiders jacket open over a Necro T-shirt. He had one hand in his coat, where he concealed a bottle in a paper sack, probably a forty of that horrible ale he liked. As he walked, Cliff kept staring at that dancing skeleton in the Castleman’s yard. The Halloween decoration looked like it was making little warning runs at him, as if it was preparing to rush him. He just looked at it and laughed. Even from here Maura knew he was stoned, the way he gaped and stared and laughed.

  “He hasn’t seen us,” Julie said.

  Gwen put a finger over her lips to signal for quiet, and then crept across the roof, hunched down, toward the porch, carrying the condom water balloon. She raised the balloon; it jiggled obscenely in her hand as Cliff walked across the lawn, just missing a patch of dog waste, toward the front door.

  Then Julie giggled and Cliff looked up—he saw her. “Whoa, are you guys having a—”

  Whatever stupid thing he was going to say was cut short by the impact of a water balloon, hitting him just above the crotch and bursting nicely. “My aim is truuuuuue!” Gwen shouted triumphantly.

  Maura and Julie were throwing theirs; Julie missed, was probably not really trying to hit Cliff. Maura got him in the left leg as he backed away, hollering, “Oh that blows! You guys buh-low!”

  “Trick or fucking treat, Cliff!” Maura yelled, laughing.

  Then, backing up, he blundered right into the dog poo, and knew it immediately. German shepherd poo. Big. “Oh fuuuuuuuck! That so blows! Oh my fucking God! You bitches made me step in dog shit!”

  The girls laughed, Julie with her hand clamped over her mouth, Gwen almost falling off the roof in her mirth.

  “Use the hose to wash it off!” Julie shouted, tittering between words, pointing at the hose by the front door. “The hose!”

  “No way! You guys are gonna nail me again!”

  “We’re out of condoms, you’re safe, retard!” Maura yelled.

  “If we’re out of condoms we’re not safe,” Gwen said, as Cliff went to use the hose. “So sad. So sad.”

  As if Gwen ever needs one, Maura thought.

  She looked at Julie who was automatically covering her braces with her hand as she laughed at Cliff—he was hopping around on one foot trying to use the hose to spray the poop off a shoe.

  A few minutes later, Cliff was on the roof, sitting with them, hugging his wet legs, his forty of cheap ale beside him. He’d gotten most of the poo off so he only smelled a little and the cloud of smoke from the marijuana he’d brought made it go away. He passed them his pipe; Maura and Gwen took a hit. Julie said, “Nuh uh, I had enough already. I would but I’m afraid I might fall off! I mean we’re on a roof . . . ”

  “ ‘She paid the price of smoking dope,’ ” Cliff brayed. “ ‘Girl falls off roof, news at eleven!’ ”

  He and Gwen laughed and Julie smiled, covering her braces with her hand again, but Maura was feeling depressed and cold all of a sudden. She looked down at the Castleman’s yard. Something was missing. No skeleton. “Where’s that skeleton gone? Did they take it in?”

  Gwen looked at the house where the skeleton had capered. “Must’ve. He’s gone! That sucks ass. He was the cutest guy around here.”

  Julie laughed and said, “Don’t be mean to Cliff . . . ”

  She said something else too, and Cliff replied, but Maura wasn’t really hearing what any of them said, now. A feeling of weight was spreading, pushing down on her from above, as if the atmospheric pressure was suddenly all mad heavy; sounds were hushed and distant, as if they couldn’t fully make it through the thick, laden air.

  A movement drew her to look, with difficulty, to the left—and she saw the skeleton from the Castleman’s yard climbing up onto the roof of the porch.

  Hallucination. The dope.

  But she didn’t believe it was the dope. Especially when Gwen yelled, loud enough to penetrate the thick air. “How’d they make that thing climb up here!” Even that shout came out muted, like a voice heard when you’re swimming underwater.

  As Maura watched, the skeleton pulled itself up like
a gymnast from Cirque du Soleil: up and then a flip and it landed neatly on the roof—but it didn’t come at them, though Cliff and Julie were screaming and Gwen was laughing hysterically. It kept going upward. It jumped into the air, spinning around, a perfect ballet pirouette, its bony fingers waving like ribbons in a wind, singing to itself in some forgotten language. It sounded like some guttural old language from Europe, like you’d expect Vikings to talk.

  Up the wicked skeleton went, dancing its way into the air, defying gravity. Was it a flying machine, a balloon?

  She knew it wasn’t. Something was whispering to her . . . something was explaining . . .

  She heard Cliff shout, “Awesome, fucking awesome!”

  And the whispering male voice said, as it had before, “Awesome . . . ”

  But it meant something else. Maura felt awe when she saw those the skeleton summoned.

  She stood up to watch as the air filled with dark forms, shapes in black and red and bone white, glittering eyes and clutching hands . . .

  And a thumping came from somewhere and everywhere, regular as a dance beat. The summoned throng descended, and they capered in dance.

  All around Maura’s house, the dark spirits danced. And Maura, standing now, simply watched, swaying to the beat from the drum that was a thrumming of the air itself.

  “Oh,” she said. She couldn’t hear her own voice. But she was saying, “Oh. Oh.”

  The skeleton’s dance was a summoning, every turn drawing ever more furies from the stunned and sickly air, the pregnant density of the atmosphere birthing cannibalistic witches and vicious, sparklefree vampires and icy-eyed slashers in ski masks and masks of human skin and hockey masks. Demons formed and slid down the sky, as if sliding on invisible stalactites; white-winged angels turned black-winged and cruel; friendly ghosts became hatefully unfriendly; wolf-faced men gnashed and howled.

  A great, swelling crowd of lunatic figures danced around Maura—figures that had once been ornaments on Halloween lawns, and had once been costumes, and had once been images in movies and in posters and in books, dancing now in mad Samhain glee; in Dionysian delight: obscenely, profanely, mockingly, satirically, but in deadly earnest, surrounding her house. Some detached from the crowd to chase a car down the street, leaping on it, covering it, tearing open the steel roof as if it were thin cardboard, laughing at the screams from within as it crashed, jigging in the flames rising from the burning car . . .

  She looked over at Gwen who was standing, mouth open, shaking her head as she stared at the thronging masquerade of dark spirits, smiling and then frowning and then smiling and then frowning again. Clinging to Gwen, Julie was weeping, her shoulders shaking.

  The thickness was still pressing in on Maura, and she felt it whisper urgently to her.

  “Give them to us, and thus sign your pledge. Give them to us, before we rise and take them. Give them to us and you may join us.”

  Maura thought about her mother, and that party and the priest who’d put his hand up her dress when she was twelve, and her father not returning her calls, and her teachers who wanted the class to be over even more than the students did, and her friends whom she didn’t really like much . . .

  “Okay,” she said. She could barely hear her own voice. “Sure.”

  “You know what to do.”

  “Yes.”

  She moved toward Gwen and Julie, finding it hard to push through the thick air, but she came up behind them, Julie turning a questioning, startled face toward her—

  She shoved them both. Julie had a good grip on Gwen, and they both went quite neatly off the roof, falling into the macabre throng.

  His face squeezed into its own Halloween mask of terror, Cliff was just getting up, swinging a fist at her. It hit her glancingly. She hardly felt it.

  She squatted, grabbed the forty by its neck, smashed it on the roof, swung the broken end up into Cliff’s belly. She felt it cut through his shirt, his skin, his muscles . . .

  Not a killing blow, but it didn’t matter, he staggered back, mouth open, a red hole yowling . . .

  And he fell into the throng.

  Maura looked down, saw the dark crowd tearing at Julie and Gwen and Cliff, pulling their limbs off as cruel children pull wings off flies.

  Then the air thickened even more, crushing in around her, squeezing . . .

  And it squeezed her out of her body. She felt herself fired up, into the sky, like a pressed pip, flying upward, arcing down—and then rushing headlong into a flying cannibal witch, that was opening its mouth wide . . . wider, and wider . . .

  She flew into that rubbery maw, and down, spun about inside.

  Then she found she was in a new body, a form corporeal and incorporeal at once; a body that flew as she willed it to, upward, along with many other dark spirits, sweeping into the sky, heading to the East.

  It was not quite dawn, but Chun was awake. Something had whispered to her.

  “We are here,” it said in Mandarin.

  “Who?” she asked hoarsely, getting out of bed, to stand in the weakening darkness.

  “Those whom you called! The ancestors heard, and brought your cry to us, and now we descend, because of your merit and trueness, and because the Earth and the planets turned within the lock of the sky to open the gate. But your cry was the key. And when you called us, we came to you. Now—come and see.”

  Chun walked stiffly to the door. It should’ve been locked, but as she approached it, the door swung open, all on its own.

  Muscles still aching from the previous day’s work, she walked through the door, though she wore only threadbare pajamas, and went barefoot out into the gray dawn.

  She came to a sudden stop, freezing in place with a mingling of horror and exaltation when she saw the throng in the sky; it was like a gigantic flock of starlings, swirling and turning in the air, but the dark spirits had replaced the starlings, and she saw many faces amongst the spirits she knew; faces she’d clipped from their rubber backdrop. But now they were not empty masks. They had been given form.

  The throng’s chorused shrieking woke the guards, who came clamoring from their posts and their barracks, guns in hand, some of them firing erratically and uselessly at the laughing nightmares who swooped down upon them . . .

  Chun watched, gasping, as the dark spirits swarmed over the guards; as they ripped and bit and killed . . .

  Then the spirits rose from the ravaged corpses, spreading wings of ectoplasm and shadow to sweep over the camp; they darted down, and broke locked doors with contemptuous flicks of their hands; they knocked down gates. Then they flew up, and into the nearby city, to lay waste to any who would keep Chun and the other prisoners from their freedom.

  As the dark throng departed, Chun sat herself on the cold ground, to wait, and watch. Others came out, murmuring, to gaze about them in wonder.

  Not quite a full hour later the throng reeled away from the city, and up over the half-shattered buildings. Chun saw the spirits depart, ascending in the distance: a tornado of cruel laughter, into the sky.

  She stood, and went stiffly to put on her clothes. Then, with Bao-Yu and the others, Chun walked into the burning town. Chun wished to find one of the few old shrines that the Republic still allowed, so that they could thank their ancestors.

  John Shirley is the author of numerous books and many, many short stories. His novels include Bleak History, Demons, Everything Is Broken, and seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin’ as well as the A Song Called Youth trilogy of Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. His collections include the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning Black Butterflies and In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley. He also writes for screen (The Crow) and television. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. His two-CD album of songs, Broken Mirror Glass, was recently released from Black October Records. His most recent publication is New Taboos, from PMPress/Outspoken Authors. It features both nonfi
ction and a novella. Novel Doyle After Death is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

  About the Editor

  This volume and the almost simultaneously released Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales will be the third and fourth “original” anthologies edited by Paula Guran; her twenty-second and twenty-third anthologies altogether. As senior editor for Prime Books and Masque Books she also edits novels and collections. Guran has a website (www.paulaguran.com) that she has yet to actually do much with, but you can find out more about her there.

  The website, however, won’t give you information like this: Even if she does nothing else for Halloween these days, she still plugs in a green light bulb that illuminates a ceramic jack-o’-lantern her mother made over fifty years ago.

  Guran used to do more for the holiday. As the mother of four, she devised many costumes over the years and decorated the house in an appropriate manner. (At various times, her basement and yard were turned into “haunted” attractions by offspring. To her knowledge, no money exchanged hands for those who visited.) One son and daughter-in-law are graduates of Ohio University, home of the internationally infamous Athens Ohio Halloween Block Party. Another son attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where a large portion of the town shuts down for a smaller, but equally notorious Halloween celebration that results in arrests of (mostly) out-of-town Ohio State students.

  Guran lives in Akron, Ohio, where, on 31 October 1993, Nirvana played the James A. Rhodes Arena at the University of Akron. Kurt Cobain dressed as Barney and chugged Jack Daniels through the costume’s mouth. Pat Smear dressed as Slash from Guns N’ Roses, Dave Grohl was a mummy, and Krist Novoselic wore white makeup and had P. C. written on his forehead (for “politically correct”). On 31 October 2012, President Barack Obama appeared in the same arena. He did not wear a costume of any sort nor did he drink Jack Daniels.

  Guran wonders if anyone ever reads these “abouts” anyway, and figured she might as well have fun with this one. Trick or treat!