Halloween Is For Lovers (14 page)

"Try me."

"I died three years ago on my wedding day. I crossed over from the Kingdom of the Dead to see her, to tell her I love her, but I only have tonight."

"You're a ghost. The dead can cross over on Halloween. None of that's true." Morton shook his head.

"Go see for yourself. My gravestone is in the cemetery on the hill. Hugh Rudd." He pointed into the night, toward where he felt the cemetery was.

"Maybe I will." Morton plugged his hands into his pockets and turned to leave but then turned back. "If you really are a ghost, why can't you just walk through this wall or float over it or, I don't know, just appear in her bedroom?"

"I don't know. I've never been a ghost before. I guess it doesn't come with any special powers, which is really kind of crappy." Hugh waded into the dark pool and squatted down in front of the culvert. "I don't have much time."

Morton nodded. "Just one more thing. Is it scary?

"Is what scary?"

"Dying."

"No, dying's not that scary, but being dead sure sucks." Hugh ducked down into the culvert. Morton watched and listened as Hugh's complaints echoed and faded down the black tunnel. "Aw man, it's full of spider webs, and the sides are all slimy, and it smells like cow manure ..."

Morton stood for a moment in silence, wondering if any of it had happened. He rattled the pill bottle he had taken out of the ambulance and decided to head back to that bottle of peppermint schnapps he had stashed in the bushes.

Hugh flushed from the pipe’s mire into Frederick's interior. Covered in green muck and tangled in spider webs, he tried to pull the long strands of slimy brown moss off his warm-up jacket. At least he hoped it was brown moss. He wiped his eyes clean and emptied the liquid mud out of his shoes. Pulling up his pant leg, he noticed dozens of fat black leeches attempting to feed off his legs. He didn't bother to pull them off. As soon as they got a mouthful of the stale air in his blood vessels, they dropped off and searched for a living host.

The full moon had just crested Frederick's highest ridge and bathed the east gardens in a lunar glow. Hugh slid and scraped in the shadows, making his way to the house. He stopped and leaned on a tree. A beam of moonlight caught his face and he rocked his limp head around and looked up at the warmly lit window in Frederick's east wing. Spiders inched through his hair and spun webs from his ears to his shoulders. Something came over him and for no apparent reason he let out a horrible moan and lurched toward the house.

Quickly inside, through an unlocked patio door, Hugh made his way secretly into the mansion’s interior, lurking in one hiding spot and then bursting across the hall to another. His legs were giving him more trouble than usual. If he had taken the time to read the ministry’s pamphlet on haunting, he would have known that unequal stiffness in the legs was a symptom of being dead in the Land of the Living. Now it was his right leg that wouldn't bend at the knee as he tried to climb the stairs of Frederick's east wing. He leaned against the wall, sliding his way up and smearing drainpipe mud along the Venetian plaster wall.

Upstairs he ducked into an alcove. The house seemed empty. He turned and caught a reflection of a monster in a hallway mirror. He froze in terror, but the trembling turned to despair when he realized the monster was him.

What have I become? What am I doing? I'll scare her to death. This is wrong, I shouldn't have come. He swallowed hard and looked away from the mirror.

I should ... I ... I need to see her.

No longer hiding, he dragged his stiff leg down the center of the hallway toward a door decorated with lace and white ribbon. The word
Bride
embroidered on a satin heart hung at the center of the top panel. He stood in front of it, his face pinched with anguish.

This is wrong ... so wrong ... but I have to see her.

He reached out, grasped the doorknob and opened the door.

Remember the Kingdom

Darkness continued to loom over the Kingdom, and a low, undulating cello note sobbed somewhere in the gray nothing. The streets were vacant except for a fog of dust that hung in the air like a crucified veil.

At the Ministry of Life Accountancy Ms. Swindon fine-tuned her position of recline. Hidden snack wrappers crinkled and crunched as she reached to adjust a mirror and get a better view of Hugh's desk. "Excuse me, could we have Hugh's desk moved?" she directed.

Lifeless men hanging in the shadows like stale coats shuffled to Hugh's desk and picked it up.

"Bring it here, close to me."

The men delivered it with a collective sigh and plodded back to their haunts.

Ms. Swindon looked down at the frumpy desk and its hard, cruel chair and imagined her new son-in-law just beneath her. With no need to shout across the room, she could sigh her requests under her breath and they'd waft down onto the broken and bowed man at her feet like a settling gloom.

She looked over at Missy, who was needlepointing a new cover for her chair doughnut—gray cloth with two black skulls kissing. The feminine skull already had
Missy
embroidered under it in monastic calligraphy. She had just started working on the name under the male skull, which began with an
H
.

"Tell you what," Ms. Swindon called out to her dusty drapes slumped along the walls. "Let's have the desk right here between Missy and I."

Missy looked up with a smile but quickly tucked it away. Smiling was considered quite rude in the Kingdom. Her eyes kept smiling, though, as the men moaned and dragged Hugh's desk into the dusty little wedge between her and her mother.

A wrinkled stablehand blew the dust off a reel of black-and-white film and threaded it into a rickety projector. The pegasi rammed their beefy heads out of their stables and watched as the projector came to life with a clickity-click. On a faded gray sheet hung from the rafters, spliced-together film clips played. Bucking broncos throwing their riders, jockeys being carted off the track in neck braces, polo players helplessly scrambling for cover under a tempest of hooves. A ten-year-old boy in a birthday hat being dragged to his death by a riderless Western pony wearing a cowboy hat. Grisly let out a whinny and applauded with clomps of her right front hoof.

In the barracks, Leroy and the other reapers took slugs off a bottle of brown whiskey as thick as motor oil, their faces still hidden deep in leather hoods, their eyes windows into a blast furnace of torment. Chuck wiped the whiskey from his lips with his remaining sleeve. "So what about this one." He looked around the room. "You ride in after a big accident, like a plane crash, and you say, ‘Did someone call for a garbage pickup? Cause it’s time to take out the trash.’"

The reaper sitting next to Leroy hunched his shoulders. "Ehh."

Chuck tried again, waving his remaining hand for effect. "Okay, how about this. You swoop in and land right in front of them with your sickle fully cocked, ready to swipe, and you say," lowering his voice to a grumble, "‘Mortal, your life has come to an end.’" He slapped his thigh. "Now this is the good part because they're all like, no, not me, please God no, sniff-sniff, cry-cry. And you lower your sickle and you pretend like you're not going to take them. You're all like, gosh, maybe it isn't your time to die, maybe there was a mistake. Sorry if I scared you, buddy. And they're all like, really, I get to live? And then," slapping his thigh again, "you say ‘Sucker!’ And chop their heads off. Huh? Huh? Is that a good one or what?"

The reapers' eyes sunk to the floor with a groan and they shook their heads.

Rusty huddled in a hallway with a few council ministers that were sympathetic to his cause. He whispered his pitch. "Now, I'm not saying we have to give up on all the sad stuff, you know, the
le
désespéré
Crain is always pushing. I'm just thinking we could take it in a new direction. Instead of all doom and death it would be more akin to ... I dunno, riding into the sunset on a pale horse. You know, spirit walkers, dust devils and the sort. Three days’ ride to Goshen, fixin' to lasso a dream buffalo and the like ..." The others tried to understand and subtly nodded in agreement.

In a small café, Patrick sat staring out a window while a sullen old man with a bald head and a shocked goatee recited a dour poem. "The pyre is heaped with the souls of the forgotten, the unloved, the unlovables. Set aflame by white bolts of lightning, sorrow ignited, smoldering darkness, the limp embers of torment roast the blinded sky."

Patrick snubbed out his cigarette and allowed himself an unspeakable indulgence. He parked his head in his hands and stared at the Kingdom's nothing sky. Imagining a galaxy of stars, he took a little breath. Under those stars he imagined a living, breathing world and his dear friend Hugh draped in the arms of the woman he loved. It was too painful to picture it, the dream was too wonderful to imagine; it choked him and he started to cry. He lit another cigarette and called out to the poet, "Again, again with the pyre, the smoldering darkness and all that." The poet nodded and repeated his sinking fugue of torment.

Ana sat huddled in her illustrated garden, where she had rubbed a section of the wall clean with the sleeve of her robe. She drew two flowers, gently swept up with each other, their stems intertwined. One was graceful and slight, the other a bit gregarious, its petals a bit ruffled. Next to them a flower twice as tall was watching over them, protecting them. She gently stroked the tall flower and stared far, far away.

Crain paced the oak planks around the enormous gears, chains and springs that made up the Kingdom's soul clock. Above, in the tower's dome, an elaborate tangle of moons, stars and planets impaled on brass rods slowly trembled and ticked out the passing of time. A frail butterfly made of gold and perched on a silver cherry blossom descended into the dark center of the clock. The end of the season of life, spring and summer, was just a few hours away. From the clock’s dark center, a chamber cracked open and an all-consuming blackness bellowed out. The season of cold dying death was rising. Crain's eyes lit up and welcomed it.

He exited the clock’s mechanism chamber through a small hatch held open by Jerry. "There are only a few hours left, then the season of death takes hold."

Jerry nodded. "Is there any chance he'll find it, you know, find L-O-V-E?"

"How could he find something that doesn't exist?"

"Then why did you let him go?"

"When he returns, heartbroken, despising that life he once cherished, I'll hold him up for all to see. His complete failure will finally put an end to these grumblings about L-O-V-E.”

Jerry slowly nodded again and they walked out onto a balcony where the entire Kingdom sprawled out at their feet. Crain propped one of his dance shoes up on the parapet. "Without L-O-V-E, the Land of the Living has nothing. The sooner they realize it's a myth, nothing but a fantasy, they will bow to despair and be blinded by darkness. This season of dying will last for eternity."

Jerry was confused. "Forever? But the season of life will return, right?"

Crane cracked a sinister grin. "There is no immutable law that life must exist."

Jerry shook his head. "But that's crazy."

Crain slowly nodded, his body swelling with the echoes of souls in despair. "Can you sense it? A gathering storm, a swelling night ascending." He put his hand on Jerry's shoulder. "I have a vision of eternity. When the brokenhearted spirit returns, I will ignite my prophecy."

"Prophecy?" Jerry stuttered, scared.

Crain made a fist. "Not just a Kingdom, a growing empire. Death will reign supreme."

A bolt of black lightning shot across the horizon and Crain laughed with evil glee.

Reunited

Hugh opened the door to Lily's room but quickly shut it. He recomposed himself in the hallway, trying to shake the green glop off his pants and brush the spiders out of his ears. He hunched his shoulders up to support his head in a somewhat upright and centered position and then ran his fingers through his hair, which only served to add height and structure to the brown stuff clinging to it. He reached out and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. He knocked again, this time pressing his ear to the satin embroidered "Bride" heart hanging from the door. He listened for Lily to respond. There was nothing but silence. Biting his lower lip, he opened the door and peeked in. "Hello, is anybody here?"

The room looked empty, so he quietly walked in. "Hello? Lily?"

A voluminous wedding dress hung from a wardrobe rack, with the veil carefully perched on an armature above. Pins tented the train to the carpet. Hugh, tangled and dark, stood in stark contrast to the radiant shimmer of the invisible bride.

He reached out with his dirty, dehydrated hand and stroked the soft veil.

Suddenly the high-pitched screech of a woman shattered the room, and he turned to see a maid standing in the doorway. Hugh held his hands out in a calming gesture. "Don't be scared, I won't hurt you."