Read Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Online

Authors: Paula Guran

Tags: #Magic & Wizards, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Horror, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #Anthologies, #Fantasy, #Genre Fiction, #Literature & Fiction

Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (50 page)

BOOK: Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

3.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

She stood up to watch as the air filled with dark forms, shapes

in black and red and bone white, glittering eyes and clutching

hands . . .

And a thumping came from somewhere and everywhere, regular

as a dance beat. The summoned throng descended, and they capered

in dance.

JOHN SHIRLEY [377]

All around Maura’s house, the dark spirits danced. And Maura,

standing now, simply watched, swaying to the beat from the drum

that was a thrumming of the air itself.

“Oh,” she said. She couldn’t hear her own voice. But she was

saying, “Oh. Oh.”

The skeleton’s dance was a summoning, every turn drawing ever

more furies from the stunned and sickly air, the pregnant density of the atmosphere birthing cannibalistic witches and vicious, sparklefree vampires and icy-eyed slashers in ski masks and masks of human

skin and hockey masks. Demons formed and slid down the sky, as

if sliding on invisible stalactites; white-winged angels turned black-winged and cruel; friendly ghosts became hatefully unfriendly; wolf-faced men gnashed and howled.

A great, swelling crowd of lunatic figures danced around

Maura—figures that had once been ornaments on Halloween lawns,

and had once been costumes, and had once been images in movies

and in posters and in books, dancing now in mad Samhain glee;

in Dionysian delight: obscenely, profanely, mockingly, satirically, but in deadly earnest, surrounding her house. Some detached from

the crowd to chase a car down the street, leaping on it, covering it, tearing open the steel roof as if it were thin cardboard, laughing at the screams from within as it crashed, jigging in the flames rising from the burning car . . .

She looked over at Gwen who was standing, mouth open, shaking

her head as she stared at the thronging masquerade of dark spirits, smiling and then frowning and then smiling and then frowning

again. Clinging to Gwen, Julie was weeping, her shoulders shaking.

The thickness was still pressing in on Maura, and she felt it

whisper urgently to her.

“Give them to us, and thus sign your pledge. Give them to us, before
we rise and take them. Give them to us and you may join us.”

Maura thought about her mother, and that party and the priest

who’d put his hand up her dress when she was twelve, and her father not returning her calls, and her teachers who wanted the class to be over even more than the students did, and her friends whom she

didn’t really like much . . .

[378] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

“Okay,” she said. She could barely hear her own voice. “Sure.”

“You know what to do.”

“Yes.”

She moved toward Gwen and Julie, finding it hard to push

through the thick air, but she came up behind them, Julie turning a questioning, startled face toward her—

She shoved them both. Julie had a good grip on Gwen, and they

both went quite neatly off the roof, falling into the macabre throng.

His face squeezed into its own Halloween mask of terror, Cliff

was just getting up, swinging a fist at her. It hit her glancingly. She hardly felt it.

She squatted, grabbed the forty by its neck, smashed it on the roof, swung the broken end up into Cliff’s belly. She felt it cut through his shirt, his skin, his muscles . . .

Not a killing blow, but it didn’t matter, he staggered back, mouth open, a red hole yowling . . .

And he fell into the throng.

Maura looked down, saw the dark crowd tearing at Julie and Gwen

and Cliff, pulling their limbs off as cruel children pull wings off flies.

Then the air thickened even more, crushing in around her,

squeezing . . .

And it squeezed her out of her body. She felt herself fired up, into the sky, like a pressed pip, flying upward, arcing down—and then

rushing headlong into a flying cannibal witch, that was opening its mouth wide . . . wider, and wider . . .

She flew into that rubbery maw, and down, spun about inside.

Then she found she was in a new body, a form corporeal and

incorporeal at once; a body that flew as she willed it to, upward, along with many other dark spirits, sweeping into the sky, heading to the East.

It was not quite dawn, but Chun was awake. Something had whispered to her.

“We are here,”
it said in Mandarin.

“Who?” she asked hoarsely, getting out of bed, to stand in the

weakening darkness.

JOHN SHIRLEY [379]

“Those whom you cal ed! The ancestors heard, and brought your

cry to us, and now we descend, because of your merit and trueness,
and because the Earth and the planets turned within the lock of the sky
to open the gate. But your cry was the key. And when you cal ed us, we
came to you. Now—come and see.”

Chun walked stiffly to the door. It should’ve been locked, but as

she approached it, the door swung open, all on its own.

Muscles still aching from the previous day’s work, she walked

through the door, though she wore only threadbare pajamas, and

went barefoot out into the gray dawn.

She came to a sudden stop, freezing in place with a mingling

of horror and exaltation when she saw the throng in the sky; it was like a gigantic flock of starlings, swirling and turning in the air, but the dark spirits had replaced the starlings, and she saw many faces amongst the spirits she knew; faces she’d clipped from their rubber backdrop. But now they were not empty masks. They had been given

form.

The throng’s chorused shrieking woke the guards, who came

clamoring from their posts and their barracks, guns in hand, some

of them firing erratically and uselessly at the laughing nightmares who swooped down upon them . . .

Chun watched, gasping, as the dark spirits swarmed over the

guards; as they ripped and bit and killed . . .

Then the spirits rose from the ravaged corpses, spreading wings

of ectoplasm and shadow to sweep over the camp; they darted down,

and broke locked doors with contemptuous flicks of their hands; they knocked down gates. Then they flew up, and into the nearby city, to lay waste to any who would keep Chun and the other prisoners from

their freedom.

As the dark throng departed, Chun sat herself on the cold

ground, to wait, and watch. Others came out, murmuring, to gaze

about them in wonder.

Not quite a full hour later the throng reeled away from the city,

and up over the half-shattered buildings. Chun saw the spirits depart, ascending in the distance: a tornado of cruel laughter, into the sky.

She stood, and went stiffly to put on her clothes. Then, with Bao-

[380] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

Yu and the others, Chun walked into the burning town. Chun wished

to find one of the few old shrines that the Republic still allowed, so that they could thank their ancestors.

John Shirley
is the author of numerous books and many, many short stories. His novels include
Bleak History
,
Demons
,
Everything
Is Broken
, and seminal cyberpunk works
City Come A-Walkin’
as well as the A Song Called Youth trilogy of
Eclipse
,
Eclipse Penumbra
, and
Eclipse Corona
. His collections include the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning
Black Butterflies
and
In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley
. He also writes for screen (
The Crow
) and television. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult

and others. His two-CD album of songs,
Broken Mirror Glass
, was recently released from Black October Records. His most recent

publication is
New Taboos
, from PMPress/Outspoken Authors. It features both nonfiction and a novella. Novel
Doyle After Death
is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

This volume and the almost simultaneously released
Once Upon

a Time: New Fairy Tales
will be the third and fourth “original”

anthologies edited by Paula Guran; her twenty-second and twenty-

third anthologies altogether. As senior editor for Prime Books and Masque Books she also edits novels and collections. Guran has a

website (www.paulaguran.com) which she has yet to actually do

much with, but you can find out more about her there.

The website, however, won’t give you information like this: Even

if she does nothing else for Halloween these days, she still plugs in a green light bulb that illuminates a ceramic jack-o’-lantern her mother made over fifty years ago.

Guran used to do more for the holiday. As the mother of four, she

devised many costumes over the years and decorated the house in an appropriate manner. (At various times, her basement and yard were

turned into “haunted” attractions by offspring. To her knowledge, no money exchanged hands for those who visited.) One son and daughter-in-law are graduates of Ohio University, home of the international y infamous Athens Ohio Hal oween Block Party. Another son attended

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where a large portion of the town shuts down for a smal er, but equal y notorious Hal oween celebration that results in arrests of (mostly) out-of-town Ohio State students.

Guran lives in Akron, Ohio, where, on 31 October 1993, Nirvana

played the James A. Rhodes Arena at the University of Akron. Kurt

Cobain dressed as Barney and chugged Jack Daniels through the

costume’s mouth. Pat Smear dressed as Slash from Guns N’ Roses,

Dave Grohl was a mummy, and Krist Novoselic wore white makeup

and had
P. C
. written on his forehead (for “politically correct”). On 31

October 2012, President Barack Obama appeared in the same arena.

He did not wear a costume of any sort nor did he drink Jack Daniels.

Guran wonders if anyone ever reads these “abouts” anyway, and

figured she might as well have fun with this one. Trick or treat!

First published in
Sirenia Digest #83
.