Halloween Carnival, Volume 5

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  And now she got a full-throated laugh, his whole torso shaking before he spoke. “Ghosts in the attic, you mean? Gatherings of witches in the midnight forest? Nothing quite that newsworthy, I’m afraid.” The emphasis on newsworthy extended the mockery of his laugh. A deliberate insult aimed at her profession.

  She decided to turn his strategy against him. Now that Sibley had implied she was a fool, she was free to ask anything she liked.

  His mention of witches gave her an opening.

  “Not everyone considers witches a laughing matter.” Adeline leaned forward, squinted her eyes, and tensed her whole body to indicate the seriousness of her next question. “Are you saying you don’t believe in dark magic? In sorcery?”

  Any residue of a smile disappeared from Sibley’s face. “I didn’t say that at all.”

  The windowless office broke any connection with the weather outside, but at that moment, Adeline imagined that a dark cloud passed over the sun.

  Then Sibley recovered from his momentary bristle, continuing in his classroom voice: “What I mean to say is, the idea of sorcery being tied to a specific day is hardly logical. Why is it that dark magic, as you call it, would have especial powers on All Hallows’ Eve? At midnight, for that matter. Perhaps it was the case in our distant, uneducated past, when simple religious fears gave witchcraft more credence, when the seasons seemed random and cruel, crops dying and livestock ill, and out of fear people imposed calendar expectations to give the world a coherent structure. The worst things only happen on Halloween, which means that’s the only time you have to guard yourself. ‘Just one night,’ as Young Goodman Brown says to his wife, Faith, as he sneaks off to observe a devil’s meeting in Hawthorne’s forest.”

  To Adeline’s mind, the air in the enclosed office shifted. Not a change in temperature, but like a change in thickness: an invisible fog that, without suffocating her, made her more aware of the effort of breathing.

  “In modern life, seasonal distinctions have less impact. We spend much of our time indoors, where we can control our environment with air-conditioning or heating vents. There could be a blizzard outside, or a heat wave. Who knows? Right now, we’d only notice a cloudburst if hard rain struck the roof. A lightning bolt might strike the side of the building, but we’d be blissfully ignorant in this internal room.”

  As he mentioned each weather event, sensations flickered over her like a conjured slideshow. She imagined temperature changes outside…then water sheeting through the air, followed by bright surges of electricity.

  “Why connect magical ideas to the date of a fall harvest,” Sibley continued, “when we’re sheltered inside, with thermostats set to a temperate seventy-two degrees? And why be frightened of midnight darkness in these days of electric lights? October thirty-first is essentially no different from any other day.”

  He was giving her interesting, quotable material. But he was toying with her, too, alternating between agitation and bemused cooperation. The headline he provided wouldn’t please newspaper readers: local academic proves halloween is no longer a special day.”

  Sibley’s hand covered his chin again, a gentle massage to encourage contemplation. In the silence, the wiry tufts of his beard scratched audibly against his palm. “You’d rather I conceived things differently, I imagine.” He stared past her as if trying to locate a book on a facing shelf, thumbing through its pages in his mind, locating an obscure phrase or strange woodcut illustration. “All right. You’re writing a Halloween article, intended to be read on Halloween Day. But you’re researching it now, several weeks in advance. Your words won’t strictly be Halloween words, will they?”

  With that last question, he’d ceased his mental perusal of the bookshelves and looked directly at her. Adeline was an unprepared student, safely hidden among classmates, suddenly called on by the professor. “Uh. Not really?”

  “Good. Now think of a fiction writer composing a Halloween story. Ray Bradbury, for example. Do you think he wrote ‘The October Game’ in the month of October?” Before she could stammer out a guess, he cut her off: “I don’t know, to be honest. It doesn’t matter. Because the story’s been read at other times of the year. Certainly, we don’t all read it at the stroke of midnight on the thirty-first. Do you follow?”

  She wasn’t sure that she did. “Another reason why the day doesn’t matter, I guess?”

  “Nicely done. The effect of Halloween is spread out. Diluted.” He lifted an arm, gripped a handle in the air. “Now give the idea a turn.”

  He twisted his wrist, opened a door.

  “What if Halloween…bleeds into other days? It doesn’t matter when the story is written, or when you read it. What matters is that it has an effect on you. It casts its spell.”

  Adeline envisioned a new headline to her article: the halloween bleed. She caught a pun in Sibley’s phrasing, related to her profession: In newspaper layout terms, “bleed” referred to text or images that extended beyond the margin of the page.

  He smiled, pleased with himself. “Now, instead of thinking that our hypothetical dark magic works best, or only, during the prime ritual hours of All Hallows…Why not consider the possibility that its influence magnifies as it bleeds into other days? The date doesn’t matter. Our Halloween ideas proliferate, we write and share them on different days, and we’ve forgotten how to contain their influence.”

  She was struck anew by his mention of the word bleeds. It implied everything awful: the idea of life blood pooling away from the cracked head of an accident victim; mixed with gristle between the sharp teeth of a ravenous beast; spraying the air behind the path of a suicide’s bullet; dripping off an infant sacrifice onto an ancient stone altar, while robed figures chanted their horrible philosophies.

  And an extra connotation, Adeline was certain…directed at all women, but specifically at the threat posed by the woman currently seated in his office—a veiled, insulting reference to menstruation. She felt that personal attack, as strong as if he’d slapped her, though she could never prove the intent. For the most part, Sibley had behaved as a perfect gentleman.

  That was most of the problem, she decided.

  Adeline stood from the chair. “I want to thank you for your time,” she said, extending the illusion of courtesy. “You’ve given me some good material for my article.”

  “Oh, the interview’s over?” He pressed down on the front of his desk with one hand and struggled to stand. In a rare appearance of vulnerability, physical rather than mental, he wobbled slightly—as unsteady as the stacks of books or papers that surrounded him. All of it could tumble: this great collection of learning, of ideas stamped or scratched onto pages; the oddly intimidating man animated by them.

  He steadied himself, reached across the desk. He was going to offer to shake her hand, and she didn’t want to touch him.

  Instead, Sibley lifted her business card from where she’d placed it earlier. He held it closer to his face, tilting his head to read the small print. “Adeline.” The first time he’d spoken her name. “I have something for you. A parting gift that I think will explain things in better detail.”

  He moved to a bookshelf behind his desk. This one, instead of housing books, was a kind of open file cabinet with stacks of papers and folders on each shelf and a few sections bricked-in with cardboard boxes of varying sizes and condition. From a lower shelf he lifted a water-stained box, raising a cloud of dust. The tape seal at the top had long lost its adhesive ability, and the flaps opened easily. Sibley reached into the box.

  Watching him, Adeline backed up slowly. She wasn’t sure she wanted a gift from this man. Her hands sought the closed door behind her, the wall. But it wouldn’t be a wall. It would be a bookcase. Her hand pressed against the lip of a wooden shelf. She gripped the shelf to maintain her balance.

  And something gripped back. Fingers wrapped over her own. A warmth emanated from them but also a crisp texture of dry skin, surpassing the awful handshake she’d dreaded earlier. The palm contorted i
nto a scaled texture, like bark: a fragment of a stake where a witch had been burned. Next, a hard gathering of coils, laced with dark sprouting hairs: the rough grain of a rope that had hanged a Salem innocent, her pain twisted into the hempen strands.

  “Here it is.” Sibley held up his trophy: a mud-colored disc sandwiched between two covers of round, transparent plastic. “People think my office is messy, but I can always find things when I need them.”

  He extended the gift over his desk. “Take it,” he said, urging it forward.

  Adeline recognized the item as a reel of old-fashioned magnetic tape. She made a reluctant step closer. “I don’t have a machine to play it on.”

  “Try our library. Or the pawn shop in town.” He set the tape on the black reference book where Adeline had previously placed her business card.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking the tape reel. She also collected her spiral notebook and pen, which had fallen to the side crease of the chair while she’d been conducting the interview.

  Adeline stepped into the reception area, nodding quickly at the department secretary, then hurrying past. Her hard-soled shoes clicked along the tile hallway, with cinder-block walls and closed classroom doors on either side, and the double exit doors far in the distance. She anticipated the weather outside: a blast against her costumed face, a preview of chill wind from the month’s final, festive day.

  —

  The university library had been no help. Their remaining reel-to-reel player had malfunctioned years ago, and they’d disposed of it rather than having it repaired. What would be the point? They’d already digitized their analog collection into MP3 files.

  The pawn shop had been a better lead. Unfortunately, their only reel-to-reel player—a “portable” that weighed some thirty pounds, folding into its own metal carrying case with a black rubber handle—ended up costing her eighty dollars. The clerk guaranteed her it was fully restored, with superior sound through its built-in speaker grille.

  Eighty dollars, just to listen to one dusty old tape. Some gift. She wouldn’t be able to charge this expense to her employer. Perhaps she could sell it back to the pawn shop when she was finished.

  With both arms, she swung the suitcase up and let it crash onto the room’s only work surface: a small wobbly table that her motel intended to serve as breakfast nook, notepaper stand, and coffee-table display for local coupon booklets and trader magazines. Adeline flipped open the metal latches and lifted the suitcase lid to reveal the player beneath: controls, threading mechanism, and spindles. She uncoiled a cloth-covered cord from the back and plugged it into the wall socket.

  Before trying the tape Sibley had provided, she tested the buttons and dials on the device. The power button produced a quick pop, then a steady hum as the speaker warmed up. She unsnapped the blank uptake reel from the inside of the lid, then attached it to the left spindle. Turning the dial to play, the threading wheels closed tight and the blank reel began a slow, counterclockwise spin.

  So far, so good, Adeline thought. She looked to the queen-size bed, its red and gold polyester quilt pulled back to reveal the thin, scratchy sheets she’d barely slept in the night before. She’d left a lot of her materials on the bed, including her closed laptop, and had instructed the desk clerk not to let anyone clean the room. She tossed her unused spiral notebook on the bed.

  The motel had only one floor. Heavy beige curtains blocked most of the light through the sliding glass doors that opened into the back parking lot. A thin, body-length mirror hung crooked on the wall across from the table. Adeline sat in the armless wooden chair, which creaked until she held herself completely still.

  A faint crackle sounded from the grille of the tape player, followed by a scratchy puff of air: an amateur blowing into a microphone to make sure it’s operating.

  She turned the volume dial higher, granting Sibley’s voice its usual classroom bluster as the recording began. “I’ve been asked to tell a story about Halloween.” Not quite enough resonance in the bass levels but clearly the same pompous department chair she’d interviewed that morning. “The first important thing to do is to establish the festive atmosphere of the day. The dress-up parties at school, young kids parading their princess and devil and pirate costumes through the cafeteria. Some poor child forgot his mask and cloak at home, so the teacher helps him improvise a costume out of a paper grocery bag or a cardboard box. Those kinds of sweet, humorous stories. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  A click sounded on the tape, indicating the user had stopped the device, then turned it on again.

  “Halloween story…take two. It’s nighttime. A brisk fall evening but not too terribly cold. Preferably a bit of fog or mist. Families take their children from house to house, a safe adventure with sweet rewards at every doorstep. The children shout a challenge through the mouths of their plastic masks, but each threat of a ‘trick’ is an empty one.”

  The reel spun as the voice carried through the front speaker grille. A flap of the magnetic tape stuck out from where she’d threaded one end into the intake reel. She felt her head twist slightly to follow its motion. Each time the stray wisp of tape brushed against the spindle, it brought a crackle like wind through dry, dead leaves. The effect was almost hypnotic…

  Motion. Cyclic repetition. And that voice droning behind it all.

  “But it’s the time after that interests you: when the children are home and clouds pass over the moon. Limbs of leafless trees scratch patterns in the sky, like fingernails raking scars across an attacker’s face. And in some forest, far from the public path, a group of thirteen hooded shapes gather. They chant in unison. The meaning of the words is unknown to them, but they hope they speak the language of spells. The language of dark influence.”

  The reels continued their slow rotation, the stray wisp of tape dragging across the spindle on each rhythmic circuit.

  “Would you like to hear some of this language, Adeline?”

  Beneath her, the wooden chair strained and creaked—although she sat perfectly still. A strange music came from the recording now. A human voice, still, but the syllables as indecipherable as notes from a musical instrument or the static hiss from an outdated machine.

  She reached out to stop the tape player, but a mild electric shock warned her not to touch the switch.

  A hard snap sounded, indicating another splice in the recording.

  “I don’t mean to frighten you.” Sibley’s normal voice had returned, speaking with a measured calm. “Halloween is just a day. I know about more than Halloween.” Another scratchy puff sounded as Sibley blew into the microphone. The air in her motel room seemed to stir. “But there are some things that I must keep to myself. If the public were to become aware, even to get a hint of everything I know, my influence might be diminished considerably.”

  In the mirror, Adeline saw the reflection of the motel curtains. Metal weights had been sewn into the lining to keep them closed at the bottom. A ripple ran through the fabric, and the weights pulled away, then fell back against the glass of the sliding doors. An insistent tapping, like something crouched low to the ground, asking to be let inside.

  “You tracked down a reel-to-reel tape player. Good.”

  His first words to her echoed in her mind. Have we met before? She couldn’t then pinpoint what bothered her about his manner: the theatricality of it. Now she knew. It was the phrasing of a magician, pulling a random volunteer from the audience, assuring the validity of his powers. We’ve never met, have we? But I know your name. I can reveal everything about you.

  He hadn’t been warned of her visit. She hadn’t told him her name until she offered her business card.

  “You’re alone, aren’t you? I hope you’re alone.”

  The tapping at the glass. The crouching thing.

  “But you’re not alone, if you hear my voice. If my voice isn’t coming from the tape player, I mean.”

  The tapping ceased. In the mirror, she saw the curtains lift from the bottom.


  “What did we do before these reel-to-reel players? Further back, even before those days we recorded voices on large wax cylinders?”

  Another long puff of air through the microphone, low and scratchy, and it brought to her mind the image of an animal belly dragged across a rough floor.

  The gust caught the spiral notebook she’d tossed on the bed. The notebook fluttered across the room, landing on the floor beside her chair. Its cardboard cover fell open and pages fanned in the wind. She’d never used the notebook, but she saw lines of fresh black ink—letters that looked like they had feet, insects crawling across the paper, animating like flip-book drawings as the pages fluttered in sequence.

  “Yes, the written word is a kind of record. Very good, Adeline. But we had other techniques. The art of mimicry, for instance.”

  In her mind the belly dragged across the rough floor…a belly of bristled hair…and small, strong legs on either side. Adeline was afraid to turn her head. Despite herself, she squinted at the darkening room reflected in the mirror, hoping not to find a crawling, crouching thing pulling itself along the threadbare carpet.

  “We taught other things to speak with our voices. Several dark entities, in fact, can sound exactly like me.”

  Another gust of wind, warm, like the foul breath of an animal breathing over her ear. Whispering: “You wouldn’t want to meet any of them.”

  Overcome with fear, Adeline steeled her body tight. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair so hard she threatened to splinter the cheap wood.

  Sibley had caught her. This whole thing was one of his gambits: the machine, her name on the tape, the spell of each story, the incantation.

  Her room grew even darker: a curtain, a blanket dropping over her. The chair creaked, and she felt an awful cramp—a pull along her spine, at her stomach, then lower, as if she were giving birth. She clenched against it, held onto the arms of the chair…

  The armless chair, she remembered, as her hands tightened and squeezed, and the illusion of wood breathed and bristled and burst in her grip, a hot, foul liquid pouring over her palms and oozing between her fingers.