October

by Michael Rowe

  The man pushed the animal roughly into the dirt. Two of the black-robed figures stepped forward and knelt, holding the animal down. One held the goat’s neck, the other held its back legs and hooves. The goat began to bleat frantically, but the chanting that rose in crescendo drowned out its cries.

  From inside his crimson robe, the man with the crown of horns withdrew a knife. Its blade flashed in the firelight as he brought it down in a slashing arc across the goat’s throat, severing the carotid artery, releasing a shower of blood. The animal stopped struggling. It shuddered once, then was still.

  Mikey felt his bladder empty itself warmly into his jeans at the exact moment he stumbled backward, turned, and vomited. The stench of his bile blossomed against the earth like a rich, sickening flower. His stomach heaved again and again till it was empty and his legs were soaked with his own warm piss.

  He wiped a dribble of puke off his mouth with his hand and looked back.

  A woman had stepped forward out of the circle. She carried a bowl in her hands. They looked very white against the draped black sleeves of her robe. Delicately, as though she was dipping a cup into a punch bowl at a tea party, the woman leaned forward and caught some of the blood still gushing from the animal’s severed neck. The blood looked black in the firelight. The woman bowed to the man with the knife, who was now standing over the goat’s lifeless body, and handed the bowl to him. Then she walked back to the circle and joined hands with the others.

  The witches—for by now, Mikey, in the throes of the whitest terror and no longer in any position to think of them any other way—formed a complete circle around the horned man and waited in apparent anticipation. The man raised the bowl to his lips and drank from it. When he raised his head, there were dark smears around his mouth, and his cheeks were stained. Then he raised his arms. He appeared to be offering the bowl to something overhead. Mikey looked up, but saw nothing. Reverently, the witches waited, looking up into the night sky.

  Mikey first felt the hairs rise on his arms, then he felt as though he’d lost the ability to see or hear, felt sucked into a soundless vacuum.

  In the distance he saw the glow of the lights of town. Raising his head farther, he saw that the moon was slightly down, but otherwise the sky was clear. Higher up, he saw the stars, bright in the country dark in a way that they never were in the city.

  The air had grown thick and heavy and silent, the way it did before thunderstorms in the summer, pregnant and huge with coiled power about to spring. Mikey smelled ozone and something like the odour of just-lit matches, or old pennies, sulfurous and metallic and sour.

  Lightning flickered at the centre of a boiling, tenebrous bank of clouds in the air directly above the witches. The clouds thickened and darkened and began to spin in a lazy, hypnotic vortex. Mikey knew that what he was seeing was impossible. Storm clouds didn’t form beneath a clear night sky, and lightning didn’t flash five hundred feet in the air.

  He heard a gasp from the assembly, but it trailed off into a sort of sigh of something like ecstasy, and they began to sway in unison as though they could hear music that he could not.

  Faster and faster the clouds swirled and danced, shaping themselves into forms that looked vaguely human, then grotesquely inhuman. The lightning flickered inside the pulsing heart of the cloud bank like a mischievous child playing with a powerful flashlight inside a tent. The smell of sulfur grew stronger and Mikey felt himself gagging again. He covered his mouth with his hand, willing his stomach to calm itself.

  Mikey knew that if any of the black-robed figures around the fire discovered him hiding behind the boulder, they would kill him. It was late at night, and he was miles from home. He would vanish, and no one would ever hear from him again.

  Then he felt the ground under his feet begin to tremble. The lightning inside the clouds turned red and exploded across the meadow, bathing the trees, the ground and the rocks in aureate light. From the centre of the boiling mist, a massive column in the rough shape of a man’s arm formed itself from the shifting bank of necromantic fog. The arm grew distinctly human in form, powerfully muscled and fully formed with an encompassing hand that ended in long, taloned fingers.

  The hand flexed once, then plucked the bowl held aloft, pulling it up into the cloud bank. The hand reached down again and pulled the butchered body of the goat by its hind legs into the air. Mikey clearly saw the gaping wound at the animal’s severed throat as the head lolled at a grotesque angle, the fur clotted with gore, matted nearly black in the area closest to the wound. He saw the goat’s forelegs hanging suspended for a second. Then its body disappeared into the cloud bank.

  And then, something like an enormous face formed of cloud and shadow, with eyes like red lightning, leaned down and smiled in benediction with a mouth full of terrible teeth. Then it, too, vanished into the fog.

  The effect on the witches was immediate and devastating. They dropped reverently to their knees and raised their supplicant arms toward the thing in the cloud above their heads, chanting and shouting in a language Mikey had never heard before.

  As he watched, they removed their robes, revealing nude bodies of every shape and age. Casting the garments aside, they began to half-shuffle, half-skip around the fire. They linked arms and hands as they reached up, then bent low in an orgasmic spiral dance. Breaking away, one of the younger men grabbed a woman with long grey hair and sagging breasts and threw her slack, puckered body to the ground, into the puddle of gore where the goat had been slaughtered. Mikey watched his muscular back and rear flex and buck as he fucked the old woman hard, her legs circling his solid, tattooed midsection, pulling him in closer. When he flipped her over and mounted her from the rear, Mikey saw that her back was slick with the animal’s blood. Two men faced each other and began to grind their naked bodies against each other. Entwined in each other’s arms, they sank to the ground and they, too, began to fuck. Others joined in, and soon the ground was a mass of writhing, entwined limbs.

  Above them the cloud began to dissipate, breaking off into shreds of vapour, and the flickering lightning grew weaker, flashing dully now like dirty brass. Then it, too, dissipated.

  Mikey forced himself to tear his gaze from the orgy and look up. He became aware that, as the swirling fog blew away, he could again hear the natural sounds of the night. The pressure of the air had likewise lifted. He looked around at the dark forest behind him, beyond the border of rocks on the side of the road above the meadow.

  He smelled August—humidity and the promise of rain. The scent of sulfur lingered briefly in the air, and then it was simply . . . not there. The air above the tangled mass of bodies was now completely clear, lit only by moonlight and the reflected glow from the bonfire.

  Backing away slowly, crouched low, keeping close to the shadows and praying the darkness would cover his path, Mikey reached for his bicycle and brought it upright. The grinding of the rubber tire against the dirt and twigs as he walked his bike backward, away from the meadow, sounded deafening.

  Mikey.

  He stopped in his tracks and stood completely still. The whisper had seemed to come from all around him, and yet at the same time it was as though it ricocheted in his mind through some sort of mental echo chamber.

  His brain registered dread, then circumvented that dread in order to facilitate survival as his body went into the full fight-or-flight mode he’d studied in biology class. His pupils were dilated and his veins sang with adrenaline as blood was shunted away from the digestive tract and directly into his limbs. His sight sharpened, and his impulses felt quickened, muscles coiled. He knew that if he jumped on his bicycle right now, it would feel like flying.

  Mikeeeeeeey.

  The brain-sound of his name shivered through his mind like the dry rattle of dark leaves tossed by the wind. The witches were staring at him, and he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they could see him. Some were squatting on their haunches, others had paused in their rutting and propped themse
lves up on their elbows and knees, heads turned in his direction. Others rose to a standing position and stood with their arms hanging at their sides.

  There was a hum in the air that made him think about the time, as an eight-year old, some bigger kids had tricked him into entering a fenced-in compound surrounding a power station near his house. That day, as he’d stared at the DANGER sign and the line drawing of a male figure prone on the ground with crude lightning bolts firing toward his body, he’d been aware of the massive surge of raw energy that thrummed through the ground.

  It was like that now. He felt twelve pairs of terribly knowing eyes on his body. Intellectually he knew it was impossible. He was too deeply in the shadows of the tree line near the road. And yet they saw him. He knew they did. He could feel it.

  Then the man in the crimson robe took a step forward, away from the others, toward Mikey. He raised his arm and waved with a colloquial familiarity that would not have been out of place in a mall parking lot or a movie theatre. In his hand the twelve-inch blade still clotted with blood and fur glittered redly in the firelight. Although the hood covered the upper part of his face, the lower half was completely visible.

  The man was grinning.

  Mikey swung his legs over the sides of his bike and launched himself in the direction of the road with a force that almost pitched him over his handlebars.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see what might be there if he did.

  [11]

  Mikey had never pedalled faster in his life, nor had he ever felt more like he was flying, nor had flight ever been less of a luxury or a fantasy. When the country roads had given way to the outskirts of town, he had not slowed down. It was only when he passed his first Tim Horton’s doughnut shop, brightly lit inside and full of late-night truckers, shift-workers, and a couple of cops, that he had allowed himself to slow his pace slightly and coast. He careened through the residential streets till he got to his house on Webster Avenue, turning sharply into his driveway, recklessly swinging his legs off the bike and flinging it up against the wall of the garage. His father would have a cow in the morning and ask why the bike had been left out all night. He would think of something. The garage was dark, and Mikey didn’t want to be in a dark place right now.

  Inside the kitchen, the potpourri of familiar odours enveloped him like a blanket. His mother had cleaned the kitchen before she’d gone to bed, and the faint scent of Windex and dishwasher soap hung in the air. In the past, the smell might have never registered anything other than familiarity, but tonight it evoked everything sane and normal in a world suddenly poisoned by the night.

  Now, in his room, Mikey sat up in his bed, back pressed against the wall, staring at the open bedroom door and the night-light from the hallway, a Bible clutched tightly to his chest as though it were a hot water bottle. He’d always kept the Bible on the bottom of his bookcase, wedged between a copy of Anton Szandor Lavey’s The Satanic Bible and Gerald B. Gardner’s 1954 classic, Witchcraft Today. Before tonight, Mikey had enjoyed the perverse irony of his Bible’s placement. Now, though, as he waited for dawn, the irony wasn’t even something he considered. He felt that if he let go of the Bible, he would be completely defenceless.

  His terror was all encompassing, and his heart felt like it was straining to leave his chest. His bedroom had always felt safe to him. It had always been a haven. Tonight, though, he watched his bedroom window in dread. He’d left his door open not out of bravery but because he wanted to be able to hear the sound of scratching at the living room window or the rattle of anyone trying the doors in the house. He had double-checked the locks before mounting the stairs to his room, afraid to look out the windows as he passed them, but even more afraid not to.

  The clock on his bedside table read four a.m. The house was silent except for the faint sound of his father snoring behind the closed bedroom door down the hall. When Mikey had been a little boy, he was comforted, as he drifted off to sleep, by the notion that there were adults awake in the house, adults who could protect him from anything in the nameless bestiary of childhood terrors.

  But he doubted very much that the witches, or the monstrous thing in the cloud, would care too much about his father’s might, or even his mother’s religion.

  Mostly though—and this was the worst part to Mikey—he knew that his father wouldn’t believe a word of what had happened tonight. He didn’t care, for once, about being believed for the sake of his vanity, or being taken seriously by his father. No, tonight it was about survival. And the fact that Mikey knew he had seen what he had seen, with no room for any doubt whatsoever, meant that he was completely alone against whatever walked in the forest at night.

  He rolled his head on the pillow and stared at the telephone. He wanted to call Wroxy. She was the only one who would understand what had happened and the only one who would believe him. Pragmatically he knew that if he called her house at four in the morning, he would wake her mother and then he would have to answer more questions than he was prepared to.

  Mikey continued to stare at the telephone. He wondered if any of them had seen who he was. He wondered if under the black hoods and robes there were people he knew, people who had always known him. People who had been able to keep a side of their lives completely hidden from view. He wondered if the telephone would suddenly begin to ring in the dark house as his parents slept, as he lay in his bed, shivering, waiting for the dear, dear dawn.

  And if the answering machine would click on downstairs in the kitchen, and if a low, savage, goat-killing voice would cut through the silent darkness of the house on Webster Avenue and say, “Hello, Mikey Childress. Did you have fun tonight? We know you saw us. We saw you, too. We know who you are. And we’re coming for you really, really soon.”

  For the first time all summer, Mikey wept.

  [12]

  “You’re telling me the truth, right?” Wroxy said, slack-jawed. “You’re not lying, are you? Because if you are, I’m going to kill you. This is way too cool.”

  No, he assured her through a fresh torrent of tears, it was the truth.

  They were sitting in Wroxy’s basement bedroom. She’d been about to light candles, as she always did when they talked, when Mikey begged her not to.

  “Please,” he begged, crying. “I couldn’t take it. I need to feel normal right now. Nothing weird. I couldn’t take it.

  Wroxy had sat in rapt attendance and listened while Mikey told her the most incredible story she had ever heard. Her initial response was to believe her friend, though maybe not about the arm and the face in the clouds, or the insinuating voices that had forced their way into his mind before he took off like a bat out of hell.

  But as to the presence of the witches themselves, of that she had no doubt whatsoever. First off, Mikey was clearly terrified, so he had seen something. It all fit with everything she’d read on the Internet about the so-called witches of Auburn—the location, the twelve “witches,” even the animal sacrifice. The information she’d already gleaned indicated that, if it even existed, this was no run-of-the-mill neo-pagan coven, but something darker and older, rooted in counter-Christianity and devil worship. While real pagans (and Wroxy considered herself a real pagan) looked askance at “Satan worship” as being the primary province of warped Christians, she could not deny the fact that the worship of the demonic existed, if not exactly flourished. And if, as she herself believed, there was no “black” or “white” magic, only what was in the heart of the witch, the heart of this group, based on what Mikey had told her as he wept anew, was dark indeed. Whatever else was true in Mikey’s tale, the full moon last night would have been a source of immense power for anyone with the skill to use it properly. All of its power would then be drawn from that dark place. She thought of the slaughtered goat.

  “Okay, have you thought of going to the police with this story?” Wroxy asked him when he calmed down. “First off, whatever else they were, they weren’t actually witches.”
<
br />   “What were they then? Shriners? The Legion? And what about the thing I saw in that cloud? Have you been listening to me, Wroxy? They killed a goat in front of me and drank its blood!”

  “Mikey,” Wroxy began patiently. “I know you think you saw what you saw . . .”

  “I did see what I saw, goddamnit!” he shouted. “And I’m fucking scared that they saw me and that they know who I am. They’re witches, for Christ’s sake. Who knows what they can do? Oh God, I’m so fucked!”

  “Listen. First off, they weren’t witches, okay? They were, like, perverts or something. You got scared by a bunch of freaks in black robes. I’d be freaked out, too, if I saw something like that. Real witches don’t kill animals, and they don’t do bad shit. It’s bad karma if they do. Real witches are like me—they’re peaceful and politically aware, and they light candles and cast spells for good. Are you following me so far?” Mikey nodded, and she continued. “On the other hand, even if they weren’t actual witches with actual powers, they were the sort of people who have no trouble killing an animal for fun and drinking its blood. Have you thought about going to the police with this?” she asked again. “I mean, it’s probably, like, a crime or something to kill an animal, right? How about cruelty to animals?”

  “Listen, Wroxy, I know what I saw. I can’t help it if you don’t believe me, but I thought if anyone would believe me, you would.”

  “I do,” she said earnestly. “But I think that some other stuff got mixed up in what you saw and what you didn’t see. It was a weird night with that big moon, and it was late, and you were tired, and you were scared out of your wits. If I’d been there, I would have seen things, too.”