Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (14 page)

and the two of them got into one of those sibling arguments that

made Clara glad she was an only child. Having tons of cousins was

exhausting enough. She couldn’t tell if Spence was here or not. Maybe Reba hadn’t left the westward window open right for him, either.

Reba was sort of a ditz.

Clara passed the zucchini casserole. Zucchini was disgusting.

Maybe that chick she’d danced with had been somebody’s out-

of-town visitor here for the party. But she didn’t see her at table, and she reasoned that it wasn’t very likely the girl had been a stranger; strangers didn’t come here without being approved and introduced

all around, and, besides, she’d known Clara’s name. Maybe it had been some cousin dressed up in costume and make-up. She had looked so

much like what Clara thought she herself looked like: same crooked body, same face both younger and older than she was, same boobs

getting bigger every day so that Clara couldn’t bring herself to look at herself in a mirror.

The backpack was getting uncomfortable between her and the

chair, but getting it off would mean leaning and twisting and turning and creating even more of a scene. The big bright dress ballooned

[104] LESSER FIRES

out around her, and she felt ridiculous. She drank a tiny bit of Pa’s good amber ale when the bottle came around. Busy chatting and

laughing, Ma wouldn’t notice anyway, so she let herself make a face.

Ma called out to Auntie Reba, “He doesn’t have to come, you

know. I bet he’s not coming.”

Reba howled, jumped up, grabbed the plate of her gross cakes

for the dead that nobody would eat any of, dashed around the

table crashing into people and chairs, and dumped the whole thing

including the plate on her sister’s head. Like practically everybody else, Clara laughed. These fights between Ma and Reba were pretty

ridiculous. But they were also embarrassing, and somebody always

got hurt. Pa moved in to break it up, and then both of the sisters were fighting him, and then other people got into it, and everything just sort of blew up. No wonder Spence didn’t want to come home.

She saw the shimmer that maybe was Great-grandma Beryl leave the

empty chair at the end of the table, too.

Clara started to feel sick. Her head swam, and her hands and feet

felt as if they’d come loose from her body and were floating around like sparks and smoke. She was going to faint. She was going to throw up. That would be embarrassing. She struggled to her feet, swayed, steadied herself on the back of Spence’s empty chair, started on her own version of hurrying out of the room. Ma yelled after her, sort of absent-mindedly. The good amber ale made Clara’s name sound

weird coming loud out of Ma’s mouth, and she was more interested

in fighting with Reba and kissing Pa than finding out what was going on with Clara.

Clara kept going, not fast and not steady, but determined. She

was relieved that nobody tried to stop her or ask what was wrong. It also hurt her feelings.

She almost fell a couple of times, and she banged the backpack

with the crystal ball in it against the door frame, but she made it outside. The cool air and quiet cleared her head a little, but she still felt sick. It was probably just Pa’s good amber ale and the cakes for the dead. She’d probably feel better pretty soon.

The cool air did clear her head a little. Darkness had come down

like a tent over the town. The big toothy bonfires on the hilltop

STEVE RASNIC TEM & MELANIE TEM [105]

grinned. Clara followed the lesser fires away from the house. She

was cold and hot, shivering and sweating. Her face was stiff.

Going up the hill, she stepped on the hem of the too-big too-

bright dress again and fell. The crystal ball in the backpack clunked and felt like two or three jagged pieces now pressing against her

back. She couldn’t keep track of where all the pain was, leg and back and head and stomach.

“Don’t worry your little head about it,” Great-grandma Beryl

said. “It ain’t real.”

Clara’s head was swimming so she wasn’t sure, but it seemed to

her that Great-grandma Beryl was shimmering in one of the gentle,

flickering lesser fires that could show the way if you didn’t trip over them and catch your costume on fire. “Are you real?” She couldn’t

believe she was asking that. Ma would have a fit. Being sick was her excuse. Everybody knew that ghosts were real, and the veil between the worlds was real, and when the veil was thin like this, ghosts were realer than ever, realer even than the living.

“You betcha.” The fire that was Great-grandma Beryl was steady

and low to the ground and warm but not too warm. Clara let herself lie down by it. “So’s Clara real.”

“Well, yeah,” Clara managed to say. “Never thought I wasn’t.”

“Clara,” said Great-grandma Beryl. “Meet Clara.”

The chick with the body like Clara’s and the over-sized tie-dyed

dress like Clara’s was squatting beside her. Their costumes drifted over each other’s knees. “We met,” the girl said. “Clara just didn’t recognize me. I don’t know why.”

Great-grandma Beryl hissed and crackled. “They never do. Mine

didn’t at first neither. It shouldn’t be that hard, we look just like ’em.

I mean, who else would we look like, I ask you.”

“Didn’t expect me, did you?” The girl named Clara nudged Clara,

but she didn’t feel it.

“They never do. Not yet.” Great-grandma Beryl sort of sputtered.

“Not ever yet.”

Clara was too hot and too cold. High up on the hill the great

bonfires snagged the edges of the thin thin veil. She wondered which west window they’d leave open for her next year, if it would have to

[106] LESSER FIRES

be low and wide so she could get through it or if that wouldn’t matter anymore. Would she have to walk in front of everybody to get to her empty place at table? At least it wouldn’t be Auntie Reba’s turn to make the cakes for the dead so they’d probably be okay.

Clara might come back if they invited her right. Or, she was

sorry, she just might not.

N

Steve Rasnic Tem
’s newest story collection is
Celestial Inventories
(ChiZine), to be followed by
Twember (
New Con Press) in October.

Next year will see publication of his new novel
Blood Kin
(Solaris) and the novella
In the Lovecraft Museum
(PS Publishing).

Melanie Tem
’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, and

a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She has published

numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two with her husband, Steve Rasnic Tem.

She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. Her stories have recently appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
and the anthologies
Supernatural Noir
,
Shivers VI
,
Portents
,
Blood
and Other Cravings
, and
Werewolves and Shapeshifters
. The Tems live in Denver. They have four children and four granddaughters.

“

LONG WAY HOME

A Pine Deep Story

F

Jonathan Maberry

Author’s Note:
This story takes place several years after the
events described in the Pine Deep Trilogy, of which
Ghost Road Blues
is the first volume. You do not need to have read

those books in order to read—and hopeful y enjoy—this little

tale set in rural Pennsylvania.

Donny stood in the shadow of the bridge and watched the brown

water. The river was swollen with muddy runoff. Broken branches

and dead birds bobbed up and down—now you see ’em, now you

don’t—as the swift current pulled them past.

The river.

Jeez
, he thought.
The river
.

He remembered it differently than this. Sure, he’d lived here in

Pine Deep long enough to have seen the river in all her costumes.

Wearing gray under an overcast sky, running smoothly like liquid

metal. Dressed in white and pale blue when the winter ice lured

skaters to try and cross before the frozen surface turned to black lace. Camouflaged in red and gold and orange when early November

winds blew the October leaves into the water.

[109]

[110] LONG WAY HOME: A PINE DEEP STORY

Today, though, the river was swollen like a tumor and wore a

kind of brown that looked like no color at all. It was like this when Halloween was about to hit. You’d think a town that used to be built around the holiday, a town that made it’s nut off of candy corn and jack-o’ lantern pumpkins and all that trick or treat stuff would dress up for the occasion. But no. This time of year the colors all seemed to bleed away.

The last time he had seen the river was on one of those summer

days that made you think summer would last forever and the world

was built for swimming, kissing pretty girls, drinking beer, and

floating on rubber inner tubes. It was the day before he had to report for basic training. He’d been with Jim Dooley, he remembered that

so clearly.

Jim was going into the navy ’cause it was safe. A red-haired Mick

with a smile that could charm the panties off a nun, and a laugh that came up from the soles of his feet. You couldn’t be around Jim and not have fun. It was impossible, probably illegal.

They’d driven twenty miles up Route 32 and parked Donny’s

piece-of-shit old Ford150 by Bleeker’s Dock. The two of them and

those college girls. Cindy something and Judy something.

Cindy had the face, but Judy had the body.

Not that either of them looked like bridge trolls, even without

makeup, even waking up in Jim’s brother’s Boy Scout tent in the

woods at the top of Dark Hollow. They were both so healthy. You

could stand next to them and your complexion would clear up. That

kind of healthy.

And with Jim around they laughed all the time.

Nothing like pretty girls laughing on a sunny day, as the four

of them pushed off from the dock and into the Delaware. Way up

here, above the factories down south, way above the smutch of

Philadelphia, the water was clean. It was nice.

On that day, the water had been slower and bluer. It hadn’t been

a dry summer, but dry enough so that in shallow spots you could

see the river stones under the rippling water. Judy swore she saw a starfish down there, but that was stupid. No such thing as freshwater starfish. Or, at least Donny didn’t think so.

JONATHAN MABERRY [111]

Didn’t matter anyway. That was the last time Donny saw Judy. Or

Cindy or even Jim for that matter. The girls went back to college. Jim went into the navy.

Donny went into the army.

It all seemed like a long time ago.

Way too fucking long.

It was no longer summer. October was burning off its last hours.

Even if the river looked like sewer water at least the trees were

wearing their Halloween colors.

Donny stood by the bridge and watched the brown river sweep

the broken, dead things away. There was some message there, he

thought. There was at least a Springsteen song there. Something

about how nothing lasts.

But Donny was no more a songwriter than he was a philosopher.

He was a man who had spent too long coming home.

Donny climbed up from the bank and stepped onto the creosote-

soaked planks of the bridge. It was a new bridge. The old one had

been destroyed in the Trouble.

He’d missed that, too.

He’d read about it, though. Probably everybody read about it.

That shit was how most people first heard of Pine Deep. Biggest news story in the world for a while. Bunch of militia nutjobs dumped all sorts of drugs into the town’s water supply. LSD, psychotropics, all sorts of stuff. Nearly everybody in town went totally ape shit. Lots of violence, a body count that dwarfed the combined death tolls of Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven thousand six hundred and forty-one

people dead.

So many of the people that Donny knew.

His folks.

His cousin Sherry and her kids.

And Jim.

Jim had come home on leave from the navy. He hadn’t taken

a scratch in boot camp, had been posted to an aircraft carrier, was halfway through his tour and filling his letters with jokes about how the worst thing that happens to him is the clap from getting laid in every port in the Pacific.

[112] LONG WAY HOME: A PINE DEEP STORY

Jim had been stabbed through the chest by a drugged-out corn

farmer who claimed—swore under oath—that he was killing vampires.

How fucked up was that?