What October Brings

  She slid the heavy volume back and pulled out the one beside it. This one was beautiful, an octavo bound in stained, deep yellow silk with a winding silver pattern embroidered on the cover. She ran her fingers over the threads, and pulled them quickly away. Something in the design had slithered under her touch.

  Wary now but drawn in, she opened the book and leafed through the heavy pages. Tucked between the leaves near the beginning was a sheet of lined notepaper covered in sharp blue lettering.

  C.M. trans. Polyglot Lat. and Arab., some Grk., Germ.?.—Lord of the Wood, Black Goat of the Wood, Mother of the Wood and the Stars, Black Goat with a thousand young—incantation? Mother of Winter, End of the Sun, Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

  Without thinking, she folded the sheet and put it in her pocket.

  She flipped more pages. The words shimmered and turned, unreadable. She blinked, clapped the book shut and replaced it on the shelf. Still, her hand lingered on it. She wanted it. She pulled it out again and slid it into her purse.

  She looked around, suddenly furtive. The sinking sun cut through the window above her in a wide pale beam, catching in her eyes, making her wince. The room seemed to close around her. Something could see her here. She knew it under her skin

  She stepped to the door, and listened only a moment before pattering fast down the stairs. At the bottom the world filled with the thin radio music again, and Davey gave no sign of having seen her as she fled.

  ***

  Days melted into days. Josh and Claire were often out. They did not ask her to come. Without them, Dana kept to the house. The days were too chilly and the town too empty for her to want to wander alone.

  She spent her hours reading in the living room with the husk of Joe for company. He deteriorated slowly, like a great wet cake sinking in on itself. Sometimes he sighed, but otherwise he made no sound. As far as Dana could tell Joe never left the living room. She didn’t want to be near him, but felt safer if she could watch him.

  She finished the novel she had brought with her, and the magazines she found in the house. One dusky afternoon she pulled out the yellow silk book from where she had hidden it in her empty duffle bag under the bed.

  She settled back in the living room and paged through it slowly, then got out the sheet of notebook paper. She tried to match it to a passage, but the language in the book was nothing she could grasp. She read the translation over, softly, aloud, her lips bending over the stranger syllables, her tongue halting at the sounds.

  “Lord of the Wood, Black Goat of the Wood, Mother of the Wood and the Stars, Black Goat with a thousand young—Mother of Winter, End of the Sun, Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—”

  Joe moaned and leaned toward her, reaching. The hand he raised looked eaten away, the skin grey and peeling. Dana shrieked and leapt up, the book falling from her lap.

  Claire stood in the doorway. She smiled, her lips wet.

  “It’s all right,” Claire said. “Don’t let him bother you.”

  “He doesn’t,” Dana said, gathering herself again.

  “Josh, I mean” Claire said. She went to smooth the blanket over Joe’s misshapen lap, pressing him back into the chair. “There now,” she said to him.

  She came over to stand beside Dana. She glanced down at the book on the floor, then up into Dana’s eyes. “Josh knows what he has to do, and he doesn’t want to do it. Family is hard, sometimes.”

  She lifted Dana’s hand in her own, turned it over.

  “Look,” Claire said, pressing her finger against Dana’s palm. “Do you see what’s written there?”

  “No,” Dana said, pulling her hand back.

  Joe snorted wetly in his chair, falling to one side. Claire moved to straighten him.

  “I think you will,” Claire said, bending to tend her father.

  ***

  The evening was cold and still. Dana had talked Josh into leaving the house with her, to show her the quiet town. He had grown up here, after all. There were only six streets, and most of the small houses that lined them were dark. Some of the lighted ones were decorated with ghosts and plastic skulls.

  “The way you talked, I always thought Newbrook was bigger,” she said as they looped past the nursing home back to the main road. Her breath hung white in the air. “There can’t be many trick or treaters. There’s nobody here.”

  Josh smiled. “There are some,” he said. “The town clears out after tourist season.”

  His voice dropped. “But twenty, thirty years ago, we lost a lot of people. They went...elsewhere.”

  “I guess that happens to a lot of small towns. The economy changes and it’s hard to stay.”

  “Things do change, but our traditions…they make us,” Josh said, and fell silent.

  They strolled past Davey’s, and Dana laughed with sudden bravado.

  “You know there’s some weird shrine in there?” she said, keeping her voice low.

  Josh stared at her, no humor in his eyes. He stopped walking.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Dana looked at him.

  “Above the shop. Upstairs, there’s a shrine set up. Fertility goddess, I think. And a collection of old occult books. I couldn’t read them. Someone started to translate them and—”

  “Why were you upstairs at all?” Josh hissed at her. “Did anyone see you?”

  She stepped back.

  “I was just goofing around.”

  “What is wrong with you?.”

  Dana blinked back sudden tears. She looked at her feet, then up over Josh’s shoulder at the side of Davey’s building. The narrow attic window was lit with a dim yellow glow. Shadows moved across the light. She wondered who was up there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He pushed past her. “We have to go home now,” he said.

  He was trembling. She realized he was scared.

  She followed him into the soft blue night, back up the road.

  ***

  She heard him leave the house before dawn. She heard low voices from outside, then the crush of gravel under wheels. She rolled over and willed herself back to sleep.

  Claire woke her before noon, standing over her, watching until Dana opened her eyes.

  “I haven’t been a good host,” Claire said. “I’ve left you to your own devices all this time.”

  Dana blinked and sat up on the edge of the bed, pulling the blankets around her. She was groggy and pliant, beginning to feel unmoored in this empty town.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve found stuff to do.”

  Claire sat beside her, her grey eyes huge. Dana could feel the heat from Claire’s skin.

  “Where’s Josh?”

  “Around,” Claire said. “But I have something for you.”

  Dana opened the twist of paper Claire handed her. Inside lay a tangled clutch of roots, grey with dirt.

  Claire grinned. Dana nodded, closing her fingers around it.

  “This is the welcome you should have,” Claire said. “You do belong here.”

  “I hope so,” Dana said.

  ***

  The afternoon was almost gone when Dana realized Josh had not returned. She had lounged away the time outside on the porch with the goat skull for company, bundled in her coat, too tired to read. Not a single car had passed. She felt as if she were waiting at the end of the world.

  Claire walked out of the stand of leafless trees that edged the property, and waved.

  “Dana,” Claire called, “I have something else for you.”

  “Okay,” Dana said, not moving from her seat.

  “No, come with me,” Claire said, coming closer.
<
br />   “It’s going to be dark. Josh has to be back soon.”

  “Maybe. We’ll leave him a note” Claire said, pulling a crumpled ball of notebook paper from her front pocket. She smoothed it out on the hood of the car and tucked it under the wiper blade.

  “He’ll know what to do,” she said.

  Dana sighed and got up, following Claire across the yard. As she passed the car she glanced at the scrap of paper. The writing on was the same lettering as in the yellow silk book.

  ***

  The sun slanted down behind the trees as the afternoon waned, the sky dissolving to a deeper blue. They walked into town, and then turned down Airport Road to follow its long loop. When they reached the nursing home Claire pulled Dana across the facility’s parking lot toward the woods behind it.

  As they passed the building Dana saw a line of slack figures propped in wheelchairs, drowsing in the deepening dusk. Their postures reminded her of how Joe sagged, boneless yet waiting. From where she stood it looked as if their skin was sloughing off like birch bark, peeling away and drifting across the concrete pad in shreds. Like masks, she thought. Like paper masks for Halloween. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

  “What’s wrong with them?” she asked Claire.

  Claire paid no attention to the nursing home patients. “Inbreeding. Cousins,” she said, without glancing toward them.

  Dana looked at the people in the chairs. Maybe Claire was right, and it was an ineffable weakness in the blood.

  “Mason cousins?” she asked.

  “Come on,” Claire said. “It’s not far.”

  Behind the home’s parking lot a path snaked back through rough grass toward the trees. Claire tugged Dana along behind her, urging her to speed up, to reach the woods. Cedars and pines and bare maples grew over the path, blocking their line of sight, forcing them to push through the branches. Over their own noises Dana heard voices, and the sounds of other passage all around. Claire gave no sign she heard anything.

  In less than a mile the trees thinned out, becoming sparse and unhealthy. The ground grew soggy underfoot as they walked into the swamp. Cold seeped through the soles of Dana’s shoes. Claire stopped before they reached standing water.

  “Here,” she said, and pointed. “This.”

  The hulk of an ancient willow listed like a shipwreck a hundred feet from where they stood, rotten and broken but still alive. Where its roots had pulled free of the ground a great pit opened, greasy with mud. It gaped like a mortal wound to the earth.

  Claire raised her arm and the sky suddenly dulled, the remaining light fading into ocher and purple and acid green. Night swarmed down.

  Dana saw movement near the jagged pit. Long branches whipped with no wind to drive them. Distorted figures moved through shadows. Across the shallow water voices rose and fell in ugly song.

  “Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Lord and mother, hear us. Lord of the woods, hear us. Mother of Winter, hear us. Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”

  Dana recognized the words, and screamed. She turned to run but Claire grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her forward into the water. “No,” she hissed, her grey eyes like lanterns, “You belong here.”

  Dana twisted, caught. Figures emerged from the cavern beneath the willow, moving to form a ring around them.

  “Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young,” Claire chanted with them, and yanked Dana’s head in time to the incantation.

  Dana could see the approaching figures had heads and arms and swollen bellies, but a swarm of churning limbs where legs should grow. They had faces, with the skin grey and loose and slipping. As they drew closer, she thought one was Joe. Then the face she recognized fell off the misshapen head.

  She screamed again, helpless, wild. Claire called out again, laughing.

  The dimmed sky erupted in roiling black clouds, and withering cold washed over them. Water crackled and froze around them, crunching beneath the moving forms. Dana fell forward into the swamp, leaving a clutch of her hair in Claire’s grasp. She struggled to rise, but the ground seemed to shift under her. She looked up.

  Something had heard the chanting.

  Shadows in the sky coalesced into a column of black mist, shot with lightning and scored with flickering tendrils of smoke and muscle. It descended, wet with a slime like an afterbirth. It pooled in the hole beneath the shivering tree. Smoke and ichor dripped over the figures as they called out to it. Where the dripping touched them they burned.

  The chants howled into a frenzy. Claire had forgotten her, staring up at the blackness with joy and terror in her face. Dana gazed at the thing descending. She did not want to run, now.

  “Iä!” she whispered. “Shub-Niggurath!”

  She belonged.

  A human figure emerged from the woods, dressed in a horned goat’s skull and a still-wet skin, dancing and lurching and raising its bare arms to the thing in the sky.

  Dana recognized Josh beneath the costume. He chanted, too, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the tentacled cloud squatting over them, above the relentless chanting of the circling crowd. But his words were different than theirs. She stood unsteadily and reached for him, trying to answer.

  Lightning cracked across the sky. Dana’s senses wobbled as if she tumbled under waves.

  She could see through Josh’s eyes, under the edge of the skull. She watched his bare feet cross the rutted swamp to the fallen willow. She felt the weight of the dead skin hanging from his shoulders. She felt the fear that weighed in his lungs, and the need. He knew what to do.

  Then she stuttered back, fell, and was in herself again as Claire lifted her and led her into the pit. There she pushed Dana to her knees in the icy mud, muttered an unintelligible string of sounds, and retreated.

  Something squirmed in the slime Dana knelt in. She arched away, startled. Long flexing limbs slipped out and wrapped her body, binding her to a cold mass that moved over her skin, languid, lithe, slippery as water. There was foulness in its touch, a stirring of desires that should not be sated. The mass seeped into her flesh, displacing her. She cried out in mortal fear and delight. She wanted this.

  Josh stumbled forward under his heavy wrappings, tangling with all her new limbs. She felt the crack of his head striking rock, felt flailing strands stretch from her and sink into him. He pressed against the slick resistance of her swarming muscle, blooming as the undertow of her swelling body bore him deeper into her. He dissolved like sugar in water. Like warmth in winter. He had to end, that she could begin.

  She opened her mouth to sing out but another flowed in. Great ropy strands within her swelled, filling her, bursting her apart. Her flesh stretched and shredded, her mind scattered like dust. A million icy stars spilled out of her, a million cilia thrashed from her skin into blackest space. She rose in the column of her own wet flesh and smoke, seeing across the voids through a million lenses.

  The chanting voices were so far away, the creatures that made their pleas so very small. She could not understand what they said with their small voices. What they wanted. But it didn’t matter.

  As she opened into the cloud and chaos, she saw the vast sweep of the sky above her, as deep as time, as empty. And the million scattered stars she birthed were still too few to dispel the dark.

  Copyright Information

  What October Brings:

  A Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween

  Stories are copyright © their individual authors.

  This edition copyright © 2018 Celaeno Press. All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be sold or used in any way in any other work or product without explicit advance written permission from Celaeno Press. Thank you for helping to protect the author’s rights.

  Cover art © 2018 Daniele Serra
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  ISBN: 978-4-909473-51-6

  Edition 1.0

  Celaeno Press

  CELAENOPRESS.COM