October

by Michael Rowe

  You think those words sound alike? You think you could mistake them?

  “Shut up,” Mikey whispered. “Just shut up.”

  He hurried back into the school. When he reached the locker room, he looked around expectantly. “Adrian! Where are you? I forgot, the appointment isn’t until next week!”

  His voice echoed against the damp tiles, through the faint drifts of residual steam from the showers, but there was no answer in the empty room.

  [36]

  “You made your bed, Mikey, you lie in it,” Wroxy said. “You’ve got some nerve coming to me at this point. I don’t know if we’re even still friends.” She sat in a stiff-backed chair in front of her desk in the basement bedroom. Mikey had rarely seen her without makeup, and he was struck by how young she looked. “This guy comes out of nowhere and you dump me for him. You . . . change. That’s the best way I can describe it. Now you want to tell me—just now, mind you—that you think there’s something weird about the fact that he wants to be with you all the time?”

  “I didn’t say it was weird. It’s not weird, it’s nice—sort of. But he said something today that kind of freaked me out.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t make any sense.” Mikey knew he was dissembling but he was still not prepared to tell Wroxy about killing the cat. And he couldn’t tell her about the website or the spell without giving her all the details. “Couldn’t you trust me, just this once?”

  “I did trust you. That’s the problem. We’ve been best friends for three years. I never once betrayed you. I kept all of your secrets. You turned on me and called me a cunt, remember?”

  “I’m sorry.” He was pleading. “Really, please forgive me.”

  “Have you had sex with this guy?” Mikey hesitated, then nodded. Wroxy’s eyes widened. “Really? You’ve had, like, actual sex with him? He’s gay?”

  “I don’t know if he’s gay. He doesn’t say he’s gay. He just says he loves me.”

  “You don’t know much, do you?” Wroxy was softening, her maternal instincts taking over in place of her anger. “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “Could you read your cards? I need to know some things. I promise things will be different. I want our friendship back, for sure. And I want this thing to work out with Adrian as well. I love him. And I love you. Differently, of course, but the same. Well,” he added, “you more.”

  “I did a reading on him once,” Wroxy said, ignoring Mikey’s words about their friendship with difficulty. “It all looked okay. It looked like you and I were going to be friends again, and it looked like he was helping you change—which you have.”

  “Please, read them again,” he urged her, thinking of the undertone he’d heard in Adrian’s voice in the locker room. “For me? Please?”

  “All right. I’ll get the cards.” She lit some votive candles and spread her deck out on the floor in front of them. “We’ll do a drawing of three. Pick three cards.”

  Mikey drew the first and held it up to Wroxy.

  “The Queen of Swords? How weird.”

  “What does the Queen of Swords mean?” He looked at the card, which showed a dark-haired woman weeping.

  “Well, it would appear to be you,” Wroxy said. She sounded confused. “She often represents being blessed, or cursed, with insight or perception. This could refer to your coming out, or maybe to some new information you’ve received recently. Ring any bells?”

  Mikey shook his head and said nothing. “It can also mean a person—usually a woman, mind you—but in your case the cards could be saying something about you being gay—in a phase of life where she temporarily becomes a sword. Sometimes it’s a death card, but not usually. Are you okay?” Mikey nodded, still not speaking. Wroxy hesitated, then gestured toward the deck. “All right, pick the next card. This will be the one that shows the major influence on your life right now.”

  Mikey took a deep breath and drew the second card. He handed it to Wroxy without looking at it.

  “Mikey, this can’t be right.” Wroxy went pale. “You drew the Devil.” She pointed to the engraving of a goat-headed Satan, its right hand extended, fingers uplifted. “This card signifies great malice. It doesn’t necessarily mean the literal Devil, but it’s a seriously nasty card. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Are you sure you want to draw the third card? That’ll be the one that reveals the outcome of whatever it is you’re going through. Maybe we should talk about what’s happening with you before we go this route.”

  “No,” he said fretfully. “I want to know.” Mikey reached down and drew the third card. This time he turned it over and looked at it himself. The engraving was of a full red moon hanging suspended over a range of dark purple mountain peaks. He showed it to Wroxy. “What does this mean?”

  “The moon card represents a yearning for fulfillment or enlightenment. It’s been said to represent working through ‘the dark night of the soul’ as a way of reaching something better in the morning. It’s not a bad card to draw, all told. Also, interesting since there’s a lunar eclipse two nights from now, on Halloween. Remember? You and I were planning to get out and watch it.”

  “Does it mean anything else?”

  It wasn’t lost on Wroxy that Mikey had ignored the fact that she’d just reminded him that they’d planned to watch the Halloween lunar eclipse together.

  “Well, Mikey, it also means false friends, betrayal and deception.” She looked at him accusingly. “Were you asking any questions about you and me when you pulled that card? Were you thinking of us and our fight?”

  “No,” he said, thinking of Adrian. “I wasn’t. My mind was clear, just like you taught me to keep it when we read. What do you think it all means?”

  “I think it means you’ve got to watch yourself, I think it means, in a nutshell, that you’ve come by some information that you aren’t sharing with me, and that there’s something nasty at work in your life that you’ve let guide you. And I think it means that you’re going to get your answers very soon, whether you want them or not.”

  “Am I going to be all right?”

  “I hope so, dude.” Wroxy took his hand in hers. “And I don’t want to put down your precious Adrian, but as far as I can tell, he’s the only new thing in your life, so just watch yourself. Okay?” She reached out and brushed a shock of hair off his forehead, something she’d done a hundred times before. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I can’t,” he said, thinking of the way the rain had sluiced through the dead cat’s dashed brains in the light of the sputtering fire that night in the forest. “Not now. Soon, I promise. Just not yet.”

  “Mikey, I have to ask.” Wroxy faltered, then spoke again. “Did you do something to Jim?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did Adrian?

  He opened his mouth to speak, then pressed his lips together. Then he said, “No, he didn’t. Adrian would never hurt anyone.”

  [37]

  The two officers believed they were responding to a routine domestic disturbance report on Dagenais Street when they pulled the squad car into the driveway of the prim split-level. The younger of the two, Jimmy Moretti, was the detachment rookie. He hated the idea of violence against women and the thought of locking up a wife beater got his testosterone flowing. His partner, Aaron Prothro, was the more seasoned of the two, and therefore less likely to bust in like a pent-up superhero.

  Inside, the two cops couldn’t make any sense of what the terrified, hysterical woman—who was neither bruised nor cut, ruling her out as the victim, much to Moretti’s mixed relief and disappointment—was trying to tell them. The more they urged her to calm herself, the more hysterical she became, crossing herself repeatedly. The torrent of mingled English and Polish
alternated with more of the screams that had alerted the neighbours in the first place.

  From what they had been able to gather, the lady, Mrs. Verbinski, had been watching television in the living room. She’d heard a terrible crash, and then she’d heard her son begin to scream. She’d run upstairs as fast as she could. The room had been dark, she’d said, except for the lamp that had been knocked to the floor. By its light, she’d seen something—apparently her son, Karol, struggling with someone. Her exact meaning had been unclear, but in the middle of the keening and weeping they’d caught the word “wings,” though it had come out as “vinks.”

  Eventually the two officers had to call for an EMS detachment. A sedated Mrs. Verbinski was taken to Milton District Hospital for observation. They hadn’t yet been able to contact her husband, Stanislaus, who was making an out-of-town pickup for his manager at the warehouse where he worked.

  As they waited for backup, the two officers stood in what they gathered was the boy’s bedroom surrounded by broken glass, and twisted metal that looked as though it had once been a window frame. The power had gone out and the only light in the room came from their flashlights and the moonlight through the window.

  Moretti said, “Before she went out, she said she didn’t see who he was fighting with.”

  “You speak Polish?” Prothro snorted. “Who knew you’d actually serve some purpose?”

  “She said that part in English. But yeah, I speak some Polish. My mother’s family is Polish.”

  “Did she say anything you could understand?”

  “Sounded to me like she was calling out to her kid, or calling to someone to bring him back to her. I heard Karolka—Karol, the kid’s real name, and blagam, which I think means ‘please.’ Jezusa means ‘Jesus,’ obviously.”

  “She thought that Jesus took her kid?”

  “No. She was calling out in Jesus’ name.”

  “I remember this kid from the Fields investigation,” Prothro said. “He’s a big kid, tough. Rumoured to be a nasty piece of work. I don’t see him losing a fight to anyone.”

  “What about all this glass? Maybe he jumped out the window to get away?” He looked out the window and frowned. He’d break a leg. It’s too high up.”

  “Not only that. Look at where the glass is.”

  Moretti looked down at his feet. “All over the floor. So?”

  “Exactly. On the floor. So whoever broke the glass came through the window, not out of it.”

  Moretti laughed nervously. “So what are you saying? Something came flying through the window and carried the kid off? You mean, like a vampire or something? Two nights before Halloween? Weird fucking town.” He started to hum the Twilight Zone theme song but stopped when he saw the expression on his partner’s face. “Aaron?”

  “Go look outside and see if there’s any glass on the ground outside.”

  “Come on,” Moretti said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Just go and look, rookie,” Prothro snapped. “Make yourself useful, and don’t touch anything.”

  “Oh Christ,” Moretti said, bending down and picking something off the floor near the bed. “Hand me a tissue, would you? Oh fuck, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “What is it?” Prothro looked down at the floor, trying to see.

  Mutely his partner held up two severed fingers, still attached to part of a hand joint. The blood was still wet. They didn’t look neatly severed or even torn. They looked as though an animal had bitten them off. Prothro shone his flashlight on the bloodstained carpet. The fibers gleamed wetly in his light.

  “Why didn’t we notice this before?”

  “Too dark in here,” Moretti said. “No light.”

  With the flashlight, Prothro followed the trail of blood across the floor to the window, where it stopped. He walked over to the window and played the light across the empty yard, looking for glass but finding none. In the sky above, the moon was nearly full.

  “Jesus,” Prothro said.

  “What?”

  “Get those fingers in the refrigerator!” Prothro barked. “If we find the kid, they can still attach them, but only if they’re put on ice right away! Where the fuck is the backup I called for?”

  Moretti began taking the stairs by twos. He stopped, then turned back. “She said something else,” he said haltingly.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said Diabel zabrat moje dzisciatko.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Prothro barely glanced at his partner. This was going to be some shitstorm.

  Moretti’s face was ashen in the reflected moonlight from the open window. “It means, ‘the Devil took my baby.’”

  [38]

  Mikey, wake up. Wake up. Mikeeeee.

  He opened his eyes. The bedroom was dark, but he felt someone sitting astride him. The shape—clearly male—blocked the moonlight that came through the window. Mikey reached up and touched its arms. He smiled in the darkness, feeling warm, familiar flesh and sinew.

  “Adrian,” he whispered. “Am I still dreaming?”

  “No, Mikey, you’re awake. Can you feel my body?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “What are you doing here? How did you get into the house? My parents—”

  “Shhhhh. Your parents don’t know I’m here. It doesn’t matter how I got here. I’m here for you now. Turn the light on. I want to show you something.”

  Mikey reached over and switched on the light. The window was wide open. The curtains blew in the night breeze. The room was freezing.

  Adrian was naked, covered with dirt and what Mikey first took to be dark smears of mud that crisscrossed his body like a child’s finger-paint. Streaks of the same mud daubed the lower half of his face. He sat upright and leaned back against the headboard. The streaks were red, not brown.

  Mikey drew a sharp intake of breath. “Jesus Christ, Adrian! What happened to you? Were you in an accident?”

  “Oh, no. I’m fine. But I brought you a present. Here—close your eyes and open your hands.”

  Mutely, Mikey obeyed. He felt something he didn’t recognize being placed in his palm, something cold and soft, like a smooth, cylindrical sponge or a sausage.

  “Open your eyes,” Adrian said. Mikey heard suppressed mirth in his voice. He opened his eyes and looked into his palm. It was an uncircumcised penis, the puckered foreskin grey and bloodless. The penis was tattered at the root.

  Mikey recognized it immediately. He’d seen it in the shower room enough times. And he’d never forgotten the humiliation the time its owner had waved it in his face and asked him if he wanted to suck it.

  “Jesus Christ.” Mikey doubled over. A wave of hot vomit sprayed from his mouth, soaking the sheets and splattering Adrian’s naked hips. The stench of it hit him almost immediately, and he disgorged a second time. Adrian didn’t move.

  “You said you hated him. So I hated him, too. Now he’s gone. He’ll never bother us again.”

  “You killed him? Adrian, oh my God. You killed Dewey?”

  “I love you.”

  His eyes are red, Mikey thought dully. Not blue. Why did I think they were blue? How could I have missed something as basic as the colour of his eyes?

  “I’ve always loved you, and I always will. I’ll always protect you. You wanted revenge, remember? You asked for a hammer. You received a hammer. We hated them, and now they’re gone.” Adrian’s visage began to blacken and decompose, the handsome features appearing to liquefy like wax.

  This time when Mikey inhaled, the sound was like a whistling teakettle squeal of pure terror. “How do you know about that?”

  The red eyes became incandescent. They blazed in the runny tallow that was now Adrian’s face. Mikey still saw love there: horrible, unending, unforgiving love.

  “I know everything,” Adrian said.

  [39]

  At dawn on Halloween morning Mikey was waiting outside Wroxy’s house. He’d risked calling
and waking her mother, but Wroxy had answered the phone herself.

  In her basement later, Mikey told Wroxy everything.

  This time the hysteria he felt served to focus his thoughts rather than scatter them. Wroxy sat open-mouthed as Mikey told her about the gay bashing in September, about finding the revenge spell on the computer, about the night in the forest when he sacrificed the cat, about Adrian’s appearance the next morning, and the aftermath.

  As he spoke, Mikey’s eyes shone wide and dark in his face. Sweat matted the sides of his temples and Wroxy briefly considered that maybe he had taken something, a thought she discounted just as quickly.

  “I’m telling you the truth, I swear. I promise. You probably don’t believe me, but I am.”

  “I have something to tell you, too,” Wroxy said. “I went there, to that place on the escarpment. The place where you saw the witches and the sacrifice. Something happened to me there.”

  “What?” Mikey’s voice was fearful. “What happened?”

  “Magic,” she said. “Nothing like what happened to you, but I know you’re telling the truth.”

  “What have I done? How is any of this possible?”

  Wroxy sighed. “I don’t want to go all Van Helsing on you, but it looks like you raised a demon. You spilled blood. You asked for revenge. That’s the sort of magic we witches don’t do. It’s bad stuff—you’ve fucked with something very, very dark.”

  “What am I going to do? Adrian—it—told me it was going to keep killing.”

  Wroxy spoke slowly. “Who else did you ask for revenge against? A spell has to run its course. Adrian might have been created just to kill the people you asked for revenge against. Or, if you asked for something more general, he might be around for a long time.”

  “I don’t remember,” Mikey said, beginning to weep. “I haven’t slept. I’m so tired. I’m so afraid.”

  “Mikey, listen to me. You have to focus. Tonight is Halloween. The veil between the worlds is at its most permeable tonight. Those . . . demon worshippers or whatever they are will be celebrating a Sabbat tonight, if that’s even what they call the holy nights. We need to go to them. Plus, it’s the lunar eclipse. Tonight the earth and the moon will be perfectly aligned. The moon will pass nearly dead centre through the earth’s shadow. It’s a night of power. Maybe they can be reasoned with, and they’ll help us send this thing back.”