As she neared the intersection, she spotted five male Deep Ones, early to mid-twenties, nearly transformed, nigh on tadpoles to a toad, standing on the corner under the street light. They were young and rebellious, dressed in jeans, jean jackets, cowboy hats and boots, their cowboy hats pulled down low over their brows.
And they were bored, looking for fun. It was Hallowe’en, but the holiday was foreign to them. They didn’t celebrate; even the humans that lived in Innsmouth didn’t celebrate. The humans were mostly an older lot, their kind dying out. The sooner the better as far as Innsmouth’s Deep One populace was concerned.
Martha Jean suddenly appeared out of the shadows. The five Deep Ones turned, stared, gurgled and grunted, their big round watery eyes glistening in the street light. Here was a human female, young, blonde, stacked, and grinning. She approached the young Deep Ones and ran a hand over an arm. It was cold, clammy, and slick, like slime.
“Happy Hallowe’en boys,” Martha Jean said, a sensuous taunt to her voice. “Any plans for the night?”
Well, it looked like fun had just arrived.
The young Deep Ones, all five of them, grinned and gurgled and grunted with excitement as they gathered around her, tugging at her jacket, toying with her hair, running cold and clammy webbed fingers over her face.
Fun had indeed arrived.
***
It was a small abandoned shack just off Elliot Street on Innsmouth’s southwest side. The wood was rotting, some roof tiles stripped away by Atlantic storms, some wall slats missing. The place contained a scattering of dust and cobwebs. A four legged table was pushed up against a wall. An oil lamp rested on the table; a small flickering flame cast dancing and writhing shadows on the walls.
Martha Jean lay on her back, her jacket and clothing piled in a corner of the shack while boots, cowboy hats, and jeans and jackets were scattered about. She smiled up into the large round watery eyes of a Deep One that was hovering over her. Her time had come, she had decided. The old man wasn’t going to tell her what to do anymore.
Pa ain’t gonna like it, she thought as she reached up for the Deep One, but it serves him right.
When the sun rose on All Saints Day, Martha Jean MaGee would be tainted.
***
Across the bay, all was quiet again in Falcon Point. It was late, nigh on midnight, and Hallowe’en had ended for the night. Jack o’Lanterns were dark, TP fluttered on a slight breeze, some windows were waxed. The Jaycee’s haunted house had been a success. The streets were now deserted but for a few straglers shuffling along the Falcon Point wharf.
The little tikes and early teens had all gone home, prodded by their parents. Fat and happy, they had sampled their hordes of candy before slipping off to sleep the night away, eager to wake on All Saints Day to sample more.
Somewhere in town a lonely bell chimmed the mightnight hour while out on the Point a mist was rising off the ocean. Something was there, something dark in the mist, briefly returning to the old Enoch Conger place. It would be gone back to the ocean by morning.
Spider Wasp
Tim Curran
Moss pulled into town at 4:15, his anxiety spiking as he stepped from the car, a tall knife blade of a man with a face scraped hard by life. His flinty eyes sat in craggy draws, taking in the town, the festivities, the throngs of people that wriggled in the streets like spawning salmon. Place was called Possum Crawl, of all things, a lick of spit set in a bowl-like hollow high above Two-Finger Creek in the very shadow of Castle Mountain. Lots of pastures and trees, hicks towing hay wagons outside town.
This was where The Preacher had gone to ground and Moss was going to find him, drag him kicking and screaming out into the light.
Sighing, he stepped out on the board sidewalk, checking his watch and lighting a cigarette. He carried only a heavy silver case. What was inside it, would be for later.
“Festival,” he muttered under his breath as he stepped down into the street and merged with the mulling crowds of the town. “Festival.”
That’s what they called Halloween up here in the yellow and gold hills of Appalachia. Maybe it was about tricks and treats other places, but here in this dead-end mountain town, it was serious business. Festival was not only a harvest celebration, but a time of seeding and renewal, a time of death and resurrection.
The streets were a whirlwind of people, a scattering of autumn leaves blowing down avenues and filling lanes and clogging cul-de-sacs with thronging bodies, conflicting currents, human riptides of chaos. No one sat still. It was almost as if no one dared to.
Moss could feel all those bodies and minds interlocking out there with grim purpose, a rising electrical field of negativity. One thing owned them, one thing drove them like cattle in a stockyard, and tonight they would meet it.
He walked down the main thoroughfare, beneath spreading striped awnings. Blank faces with sinister dark eyes watched him, studied him, burned holes through him. It made something inside him writhe with hate and he wanted to open the briefcase, show them what was inside it.
“No,” he said under his breath. “Not yet, not just yet.”
Not until they were gathered and not until he saw the face of The Preacher.
He avoided the herds as best as possible, taking in Festival. Vines of dangling electrical cords drooped down like snares to capture the unwary. Orange-and-black cardboard decorations leered in every window. Corn shocks and wheat sheaves smelled dry, crisp, and yellow like pages in ancient books. And the pumpkins. Oh yes, like a million decapitated heads, orange and waxy and grinning with dark pagan secrets.
As he passed huts that sold baked potatoes and popcorn and orange-glazed cupcakes, he was amazed at the harmless façade that was pasted over the celebration. What lie beneath was old and ugly, a pagan ritual of the darkest variety like slitting the throat of a fatted calf or burning people in wicker cages. But in Possum Crawl, it was not openly acknowledged. It was covered in candy floss and spun sugar and pink frosting.
This is what drew you in, Ginny. The carnival atmosphere. The merriment. The glee. The Halloween fun. Your naivety wouldn’t let you see the devil hiding in the shadows.
Moss blinked it all away. There was no time for remembrance and sentiment now; he was here for a purpose. He must see it through.
Now the evil face of Festival showed itself as parade lines of celebrants intermixed and became a common whole that crept forward like some immense caterpillar. They carried gigantic effigies aloft on sticks, grotesque papier-mâché representations of monstrous, impossible insects—things with dozens of spidery legs and black flaring wing cases, streamlined segmented bodies and stalk-like necks upon which sat triangular phallic heads with bulbous eyes. Antennae bounced as they marched, spurred limbs dangled, vermiform mouthparts seemed to squirm. Subjective personifications of an immense cosmic obscenity that the human mind literally could not comprehend.
And here, in this incestuous, godless backwater of ignorance where folk magic, root lore, and ancient malefic gods of harvest were intermixed like bones and meat and marrow in the same bubbling, fat-greased cauldron, the image was celebrated. Something that should have been crushed beneath a boot was venerated to the highest by deranged, twisted little minds.
But that was going to come to an end. Moss would see to it.
He walked on, a sense of dread coiling in his belly. Not only for what was to come, but what he carried in the case.
As he watched it all, he felt words filling his mouth, wanting to come out. Ginny had been fine and pure, a snow angel, eyes clear blue as a summer sky. He worshipped her. She was the altar he kneeled at. She had been perfection and grace and he lived in her soul. Then she had come to Possum Crawl with that little girl’s fascination of pageantry and spectacle and this place had ruined her. It had handled her with dirty hands, sucked the light from her soul and replaced it with black filth. Contaminated, she no longe
r walked, she crawled through gutters and wriggled in sewers.
She loved Halloween. The child in her could never get enough of it. That was how she heard about Possum Crawl’s annual celebration, its arcane practices and mystical rituals. That’s why she came to this awful place and why the best part of her never left.
But the child, Moss thought. She should have thought of the child.
As the shadows lengthened and a chill made itself felt in the air, he watched little girls in white gowns casting apple blossoms about. They wore garlands of flowers in their hair. Symbols of fertility. And everything was about fertility in Possum Crawl—fertility of the earth and fertility of the women who walked it and the men who seeded both. The crowds marched and whirled and cavorted, singing and chanting and crying out in pure joy or pure terror. It looked like pandemonium to the naked eye, but there was a pattern at work here, he knew, a rhythm, a ceremonial obsequience to something unnamable and unimaginable that was as much part of them as the good dark soil was part of the harvest fields.
Moss was shaking. His brain was strewn with shifting cobweb shadows, his eyesight blurring. For a moment, a slim and demented moment in which his lungs sucked air like dry leathery bags, Possum Crawl became something reflected in a funhouse mirror: a warped phantasmagoria of distorted faces and elongated, larval forms. The sky went the color of fresh pink mincemeat, the sun globular and oozing like a leaking egg yolk.
Barely able to stay on his feet, he turned away from the crowds that swarmed like midges, placing his hot, reddened face against the cool surface of a plate glass window. His lungs begged for air, sour-smelling sweat running from his pores in glistening beads. After a moment or two, the world stopped moving and he could breathe again. The plate glass window belonged to a café and the diners within—old ladies and old men—were hunched-over mole-like forms scraping their plates clean with sharp little fingers, watching him not suspiciously, but with great amusement in their unblinking, glassy eyes. They looked joyful at the sight of him.
“Ginny,” he said, the very sound of the word making him weak in his chest.
He saw her reflection in the glass—she was striding out of the crowds, a swan cut from the whitest linen, her face ivory and her hair the color of afternoon sunshine. Her sapphire eyes sparkled. Then he turned, hopeful even though he knew it was impossible, and saw only the mulling forms of Festival: the dark and abhorrent faces shadowed with nameless secrets and mocking smiles. He could smell sweat and grubby hands, dark moist earth and steaming dung.
There was no Ginny, only a shriveled beldame with seamed steerhide skin, head draped in a colorless shawl, her withered face fly-specked and brown like a Halloween mask carved from coffin wood. She grinned with a puckered mouth, sunlight winking off a single angled tooth. “It was only a matter of time,” she tittered. “Only a matter of time.”
“Go away, you old hag,” Moss heard his voice say.
His guts were laced with loose strings that tightened into knots and he nearly fell right over.
“Oh, but you’re in a bad way,” a voice said but it was not the scarecrow rasp of the old lady but a voice that was young and strong.
He blinked the tears from his eyes and saw a girl, maybe thirteen, standing there watching him with clear, bright eyes. Her hair was brown and her nose was pert, a sprinkling of freckles over her cheeks. She smiled with even white teeth.
“I will help you,” she said.
“Go away,” Moss told her. He didn’t need any damn kids hanging around him and especially not some girl dressed in Halloween garb like the others: a jester in a green-and-yellow striped costume with a fool’s cap of tinkling bells.
“I’m Squinny Ceecaw,” she said and he nearly laughed at the cartoonish sound of it.
“Go away, kid,” he told her again. “Go peddle it somewhere else, Squinny Seesaw.”
“Ceecaw.”
Her eyes flickered darkly. She looked wounded, as if he had called her the vilest of names.
Suddenly, he felt uneasy. It was as if he was being watched, studied, perhaps even manipulated like a puppet. A formless, unknown terror that seemed ancient and instinctual settled into his belly and filled his marrow with ice crystals. Again, his eyesight blurred, pixelated, and his head gonged like a bell, his body twisting in a rictus of pain as if his stomach and vital organs had become coiling, serpentine things winding around each other. Then the pain was gone, but loathsome images still paraded through his brain, a psychophysical delirium in which the horned mother parted infective black mists to spread membranous wings over the cadaver cities of men and peered down from the blazing fission of primal space with crystalline multifaceted eyes.
Then he came out of it and Squinny Ceecaw had him by the hand, towing him away he did not know where. He told her to go away, to get lost, but his voice did not carry. It seemed to sound only in his head. He gripped the silver case as if his fingers were welded to it. He felt weak and stunned.
“It’s too early for Festival yet,” she informed him.
She brought him through an alleyway and into an open courtyard. Then he was on his hands and knees, gulping air and swallowing a dipper of water she handed him from a well. It was cold and clean and revitalizing. But seconds after he swallowed it, he had realized his terrible mistake—he had drank the water, the blood, of this terrible place.
“You’ve come for Festival?” the girl asked him.
“Sure, kid. That’s why I’m here.”
He realized he had set down the silver case. She reached for it, perhaps to hand it to him, and he cried out, “Don’t touch that!”
She jumped back as if slapped. He shook his head, wanting to explain there were reasons she should not touch it. But in the end he did not speak. Perhaps, he could not speak.
“Do you live here?” he asked, mopping sweat from his face, pulling the case close to him so that it touched his knee.
“Yes.”
“Do you know The Preacher?”
She looked at him for a long time. Her mouth did not smile and her pert nose did not crinkle up with sweetness. He sensed something old about her, something in the shadows behind her eyes, a forbidden knowledge. She studied him suspiciously as if he was playing an awful trick on her.
“Do you know The Preacher?” he asked again.
“Yes, yes, I do.”
“Where can I find him?”
“You have come to Festival to meet The Preacher. Many do,” she informed him. “Many, many come but they are not like you. You are special, I think. You are one of the few and not the many.”
Tell her, he thought then. Tell her all about it so she’ll know. Tell her about Ginny, about how fair and pure she was until she got stained dark by this awful place. Tell her how she came for Festival and stayed forever. How she left you with the baby. Tell her how you came after Ginny that night and dragged her back to the city. How she squirmed like a snake in the backseat until you had to tie her hands behind her back with your belt and gag her with your handkerchief so she’d quit screaming obscenities about the Great Mother who seeded the world, reaping and sowing. And how first chance she had gotten, she slit her wrists, dying in your arms and spewing madness about the Mother of Many Faces who was Gothra.
But he didn’t tell her about that. Instead, he just said, “Tell me about Halloween. Tell me what it means to you.”
The girl sat in the grass not far from him, a brooding look coming over her features as she began to speak. “It is not Halloween here. It is Festival, which is much older. It is a celebration of harvest, of leaf and soil and seed,” she said as if by rote. “The Mother gives us these things as she gives us birth to begin and life to enjoy and death to take away our suffering. Once a year we gather for Festival. We celebrate and give back some of what we have been given. It is our way.”
Although the degenerate truth of what she said was not lost on him,
he refused to listen or accept any of it. He had heard it before and did not want to hear it again. “You should go home now, go to your parents.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. They disappeared last year playing festival.”
“Get the hell away from me, kid.”
Then he’d elbowed past her, making his way up the alley and to the main thoroughfare, whatever it was called in a pig run like Possum Crawl. He moved through the crowds like a snake, winding and sliding, until he found a bar. Inside, it was dim and crowded, a mist of blue smoke in the air. He could smell beer, hamburgers and onions that sizzled on a grill behind the bar. The tables were full, the stools taken. Men were shoulder to shoulder up there. But as he approached, two of them vacated their places.
Moss sat down and a beer was placed before him. Nice, that. Didn’t even have to wait for service. It came in a frosted mug. It was good, ice-cold. He drained half of it in the first pull, noticing as he had outside that there were no women. Outside, there were old ladies, yes, and little girls, but no teenagers, no young women. And in here, not a one.
Funny.
As he sat there in the murky dimness, thinking about the silver case at his foot, he had the worst feeling that he was being watched again. That everyone in that smoky room had their eyes on him. Sweat ran from his pores until his face was wet with it. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and didn’t even recognize himself. He looked dirty and uncomfortable, rumpled like a castoff sheet, his face pale and blotchy, pouchy circles under his eyes that were the color of raw meat. There were sores on his face that he was certain had not been there the day before. His guts turned over. His hands shook. His head hurt and his gums ached. Again, he felt waves of nausea splashing around in his belly and he felt the need to vomit as if something inside him needed to cleanse itself.
Moaning, he grabbed the case and stumbled back out of the bar. The sun had set. Shadows bunched and flowed around him like pools of crude oil. Faces seemed to crowd him, pushing in, eyes bulging and hands reaching, fingers brushing him. The crowds surged and eddied, hundreds of pumpkins carried on shoulders like conjoined heads. Scratchy Halloween music played somewhere. High above the town, the mountains were dark and ancient and somehow malefic. Their conical spires seemed to brush the stars themselves.
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