What October Brings

  “I still don’t understand why I’m here. Whatever Mom did… with that… she never mentioned it to me.”

  In the dimness behind Thali, the diadem of primacy flashes as her mother shuffles forward.

  “You already know what you need to. It’s in your blood.” The corners of her lipless mouth twitch up. “Your Mason blood.”

  She gestures left and right at the cave walls. As Zill struggles to focus, thin lines of light manifest and begin twisting themselves into half-familiar symbols. Diagrams. Patterns that reach into places she could never make her advisor understand even existed—

  “The Keziah formulae.” Her mother’s hushed voice.

  Then Thali’s, and all the others.

  Zill sways on her feet, reaching out with both hands for the patterns now detaching from the stone, shedding symbols in their wake. Physics plus math plus magic. They make more sense than any blackboard equation, pure and certain. Obvious. So damn obvious how they run between here and elsewhere—

  “Yes.” Seven voices in the shadows.

  Unimpeded by chalk, Zill’s hands move freely through the shining patterns, weaving and revolving them. Helping them synchronize with unseen counterparts. Quantum entanglement, but there are no tangles here. No flaws or knots in the pattern now opening before her in the mouth of the cave.

  At first, she barely hears the footfalls at her back.

  Then their scent (deep ocean strangeness turn your eyes away now) washes over her, and her fingers move faster. As she feels the last of this pattern (this gate) mesh with its partner on the other side, her blurred gaze drops to the cave floor. She keeps it there as the visitors pass through, still chanting some phrase of the evening’s rite. A reminder of their communion with the congregation; that all here are of one blood and one destiny, deathless.

  After the last has crossed, she is still staring down at the wet stone when a hand fastens on her shoulder.

  “Turn around, Zillah. Lift your eyes.”

  When she does not, cannot, comply, the grip tightens to pain. “Turn around, daughter. See me.”

  Her mother’s features have changed beyond words—almost beyond recognition. Below the sea-gold diadem, eyes clouded with more years than she ever suspected meet hers. Zill struggles not to turn away, even when her mother lifts the diadem from her half-bald scalp and extends it towards her.

  Those hands against her own are damp and cold and slippery. And webbed? Zill’s fingers curl back reflexively, but her mother lifts the diadem higher.

  Glittering in the cave’s watery light, the object suspended above her head is distinctly misshapen. Oblong. Unlikely to fit any human skull, let alone hers. Yet her mother is lowering it now, clamping it onto her forehead with a strength she never—

  White agony blossoms behind her eyes.

  Momentarily blinded, dazed with the contents of Thali’s goblet, she hears rather than sees her mother’s robes slide to the floor. Then flat-footed, claw-scraping steps head for the cave mouth, and the pattern-gate through.

  “Keep watching if you can.” Thali’s voice catches. “I didn’t.”

  Her vision is already shattering, but Zill tries to hold on. There are swimmers on the other side of that gate, now, reaching through dark water to touch the shimmering lines. Her mother stretches out her own arms and leans forward. No one breathes.

  Then, with a single splash, she is gone.

  ***

  Daylight seeps through her eyelids like cold acid. Zill curses, rolls over, and shoves her face into her pillow, wincing at the pain this simple action brings.

  Pain and remorse. No matter what she’d been trying to escape, going drinking with Thali last night (last night?) was her worst idea ever. Jack and Coke minus the Coke, not even a decent bitch session, and now she’s got the mother of all hangovers—

  Mother.

  The word trips a trigger in her head—or a floodgate for nightmares she’s had too little night for. Zill’s hands clutch her blankets as the image-torrent rises, sweeping her back into memory, half-lit black waters and shards of a city drowned before Pangaea broke apart. Shining swimmers with gill-fringed throats stare out at her with her mother’s face. With the face of Thali’s mother, gone last year—

  Gasping, she claws herself up into the light of waking. Her bed is a disaster.

  As she struggles to pull the quilt straight, her hand closes on cold metal: some fragment of dreaming, sharp-spiked and impossible. Zill lifts it up with bloodied fingers, then carefully lowers it onto her matted hair. Into the fire still encircling her forehead.

  It fits perfectly.

  Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You.

  John Shirley

  Elwin McGrue was not ready for Halloween. He had not set up his sprinklers, to spray the bastards T.P.-ing his lawn. He hadn’t bought the novelty store candy—super sour and super-hot and a few with ants in it—to drop in the bags of any who persisted in tormenting him. He hadn’t yet received the mail-order recording of a vicious dog snarling and brutishly barking, which would trigger when anyone came up the walk…

  It was already October 30, and he wasn’t ready. Something else was troubling him more. The new house, a hundred feet from his, across the circle at the dead end of this street—the brand-new house that no one would ever live in. It bothered him. Indeed, it seemed to target him.

  “Sometimes I think you like fighting with the kids on Halloween,” said His neighbor Mary Sue.

  “I don’t relish the conflict, Mary Sue”, he said, as he stood on his lawn in the morning mist.

  “Certainly, you do, Elwin,” she said, locking eyes with him, matching him frown for frown as they faced each other over the wooden fence—the decaying fence she said was on his property and he said was on hers.

  Mary Sue was sixty-five, about seven years younger than him, but just as stubborn. She stood there with her arms crossed, the wind stirring her long, white hair. It was a hair style she’d kept from being a damned hippy in the 1960s, he supposed. Her blue eyes were fading but could be just as chilly as ever. Secretly, he had always admired her.

  “No,” he said. “It’s what happened to Andy.”

  It was true. McGrue had turned his back on Halloween, long ago, because of what had happened to his grandson, and he wasn’t going to have it forced on him.

  Her eyes softened at the reminder.

  “He was a sweet little boy, Irwin.”

  “He isn’t dead, Mary Sue.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “These kids now…they’re no better than the ones who hurt him…”

  And one of those kids, McGrue realized then, was riding down the street on a bike, without his hands on the handle bars. Lon Kimble. Maybe fourteen by now, Elwin thought. Acting like a drunk teenager just to mock him and Mary Sue.

  Lon had his hands up in the air, and was whooping, steering by leaning this way and that as he came to the circular cul-de-sac at the end of Skellon.

  Skellon Way, with its prominent Dead End sign, followed the top of a small branching ridge, right where the road ended in an ivy grown cliff. The cul-de-sac overlooked another neighborhood street below. Some of the Skellon kids last Halloween had gotten in the half-finished new house—the house where no one was ever intended to live—and stood on the raw wood planks of the second floor throwing bric-a-brac down onto the roofs below.

  This kid—Lon was his name— was one the chief culprits, making twisted faces at Elwin as he circled on his bike, look-no-hands, around in the end of the road.

  “Hon, I wish you wouldn’t ride in a circle, with no hands,” Mary Sue called to him. “You’re gonna fall and break something!”

  But Lon handily completed the turn, still no hands, giggling out, “Oooh, look I’m gonna fall off the bike and break my ass! Yahhhh!”

  McGrue watched in hope, but unfortuna
tely the kid didn’t take a header. Off he went, peddling and chortling down the street.

  “Disrespectful little bastard,” McGrue said. “Behaving like that toward you.”

  “Oh, I’m an old veteran,” she said. “I’ve got a skin like a rhino by now.” She was referring to having been a schoolteacher. She had taught Jr. High English for thirty-seven years before retiring. Teaching was something they had in common. He had taught at the same school, though he’d retired the year after she’d transferred in. He’d taught shop class before the District, in its infinite wisdom, decided that shop class was a waste of money.

  He remembered a lot of good kids who spoke respectfully to him, in the early days, called him “Mr. McGrue”. He’d liked most of them.

  But something was screwing kids up now. Was it cellphones? Videogames? Parents more interested in social media than their kids?

  Whatever it was, the kids around here, anyway, were worse than ever.

  He couldn’t afford to move away. He’d have to sell his house, which wasn’t worth much, and live in some old folks’ home, no other option. So, he stuck around, clinging like a barnacle to the ridgetop, working on little home repair projects, doing maintenance jobs part time. But now, at the end of the street, was the house not intended to be lived in, the house that buzzed and hummed and kept him awake at night. Sometimes he could feel it, the powerful field put out by the house. Microwaves, electromagnetics? Both? He wasn’t sure.

  “Mary Sue—your television working okay? Mine’s getting interference from that thing.” He nodded toward the buzzing house.

  “I don’t watch television much. I like to read.” She looked at the billowing fog below the ridge. “But I’m having trouble concentrating lately.”

  “Me too. And it started when they turned that damn thing on, up there.”

  “We were canvassed, the whole neighborhood was, Elwin. We had hearings about it.”

  “I was there. But they threw me out.”

  “You were unruly, Elwin.”

  “There were going to put in that big cell tower a hundred feet from my house!”

  “The whole valley voted against that tower.”

  “So, what’d they do? They installed that camouflaged monstrosity!”

  She sighed. “It looks like a house, it’s cosmetic, I guess. I don’t like it either. All the people with cell phones voted for it.”

  “You?” McGrue asked, looking at her with a scowl and narrowed eyes.

  The expression on his face made her laugh. “No, Elwin. I’ve got a cell phone but service before this thing was good enough for me. I guess they all wanted to get all the internet all the time on their phones, or…And there they go.”

  She nodded toward a young couple pushing a stroller, each with one hand on the stroller and one hand holding up a cell phone. They gazed fixedly at their cell phones as they walked along. Occasionally the woman giggled.

  “God help that child,” Mary Sue muttered, as the couple pushed the stroller around the circular sidewalk, past the faux house, without looking up from their phones or speaking to one another.

  McGrue noticed someone else coming down the sidewalk. “And who’s that?”

  The stranger wore a shabby gray suit, had noticeably muddy shoes, and toted a largish brown suitcase that looked to be heavy, judging from the way he carried it. McGrue could see the man had a scrappy short white beard, but his face looked fairly young. He wore a gray tweed cap, and had a long nose, a narrow face, red pouting lips.

  The stranger paused by the fence and looked over at them. “Good afternoon,” he said, touching his hat. Some kind of northeastern accent, McGrue judged, maybe some place like Rhode Island or Connecticut. He set down his suitcase and rubbed his arm. “I’m looking for a house that was built last year—a decorative shell for transmitters…”

  “That’s it,” McGrue said, pointing. “Are you here to burn it down? I’ll get you a match.”

  “Elwin!” Mary Sue hissed. “For heaven’s sake!”

  The stranger tilted his head and gave him a crooked smile. “The structure is, I take it, problematic?”

  “It sure as hell is! You can hear it buzzing and throbbing—you can even feel it! Keeps me awake at night and gives me nightmares. Screws up my television so I can’t see the Home Repair Show! Is that problem enough?”

  “I see.” The stranger looked at the house and said, just loud enough to hear, “Very good.”

  “Very good, that what you said?” McGrue snorted. “Is misery good?”

  The stranger looked back at him and pursed his lips. “No sir. Misery is not good. I hope to end some of mine, here.” He flexed his fingers. “Rather too much equipment for one suitcase.”

  “You’re a technician, then? They send you to work on that thing?”

  “Ah, well, as to that—I do intend to work on it, yes. I can make certain adjustments.” He looked at McGrue quizzically. “I am missing my usual assistant today. You look like a fellow who might be handy? I wonder if I could trouble you to assist me, for just a few minutes. When all is done, I may be able to…modify the device, so it doesn’t trouble you. I can even recompense you.”

  “That right?” Maybe this fellow could make the damned thing less obnoxious. “Why not!”

  Mary Sue cleared her throat. “Mr. uh—Could I ask your name?”

  “Oh, yes, forgive me, Ma’am. My name is Tillinghast. Oswald Tillinghast.”

  “I’m Mary Sue Ellsworth, this is Mr. McGrue. Don’t you have a company truck, of some kind? I’d think whoever was tasked to work on that thing would be, you know, in an official vehicle…”

  “Ah yes, that too is absented along with my assistant. It’s a long story. And now I must get to work.” He turned to McGrue. “No time like the present, do you agree sir?”

  “Sure, let’s have a look at the damned thing,” McGrue said, stepping out to the sidewalk. “Let me help you with this.” He picked up the suitcase.

  “Very good of you, Mr. McGrue.”

  “Elwin—are you sure you should be going into that place?” Mary Sue called after him. “We’re not supposed to get near it!”

  Who does she think she is, my wife? McGrue thought. “I’ll be fine, fine…”

  He led the way around the circle at the end of the street, to the final house on Skellon Way. The house where machines lived.

  “Really quite extraordinary, their choosing this exact site for the transmitters,” Tillinghast said.

  “Why’s that?” McGrue asked, breathing raspily, beginning to regret offering to carry the suitcase. It was damned heavy.

  “It’s at the exact convergence of the sympathetic and disharmonious waves from a number of other transmission sources,” said Tillinghast, the words tripping lightly off his tongue. “One is a cell phone tower, one is a satellite. The third is a signal bounced from the ionosphere—a signal that started at the HAARP array, thousands of miles north. And then the additional electromagnetic field created by intense microwave transmission from within the house…”

  “Seems to me those microwaves are dangerous, down at this level, close to the people living on this street. They said those transmitters were aimed away from us, but I’m not so sure…And look at that!”

  They had reached the house, and in front of it, at the foot of the steps, were several dead animals. A dead blue jay was half covered by the body of a striped tabby cat, and, nearby, facing away from the house, lay a dead racoon. All of the animals, McGrue saw now, had no eyes. Only little pockets of dried blood where eyes should be.

  McGrue put the suitcase down and pointed at the dead animals. “You see that? I noticed the dead bird the other day…”

  “Ah, most disturbing,” Tillinghast muttered. “It appears there’s already been a preliminary resonance wave.”

  “A what?”

  “Resonance wav
e—ah, an unfortunate radiation leak as a result of the convergence of several resonation sources. It can be lethal. It’s not typical of these cellular telephonic devices. Extraordinary conditions here. And yet, contained and controlled, it can…it can be useful. But it seems there has been an uncontrolled resonance wave here recently, perhaps over several hours. The bird died, the cat investigated and died, and the racoon investigated the first two dead creatures and died itself, trying to get away.”

  McGrue took a step back from the house. “So—how do you know it’s not firing up that way right now?”

  “Oh, I would sense it, if it was. I’ve become quite…attuned to it.”

  “Sense it?” That sounded kind of nutty. Could be Mary Sue was right? Maybe he shouldn’t be here with this guy.

  “However, I will check for you…” Tillinghast partly unzipped the suitcase, reached in, rummaged around, and took out what looked like a modified EMR meter. “Now… let me see…” He peered at the instrument. “No, you see, it’s in the green range, here. No resonance waves. And I wouldn’t expect another for some time—we won’t have the full convergence here till tomorrow evening. Shall we go in?”

  “You have a key to this place? That door’s double locked.”

  “A key? Of a sort, come along, if you’re coming, Mr. McGrue,” Tillinghast said briskly. He picked up the suitcase, lugged it up the stairs, then took a tool from his pocket and did something to the front door locks that McGrue couldn’t see. He heard a humming sound—and the front door popped open.

  McGrue hesitated, looking up at the house—or the faux house, really. It was the equivalent of a cell phone tower disguised as a tree. The microwave transmitters were inside the shell of the house, which at a glance looked like a new, two-story tract home, its dormer windows tinted dark, and four dead junipers in the front yard. The house was eyeless, and empty of soul, and yet it hummed with an unnatural life. He could hear it; feel it in his back teeth. To McGrue it stood for the stupefying excesses of civilization in the twenty-first century.