Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (28 page)

repurposing.

[212] WHILST THE NIGHT REJOICES PROFOUND AND STILL

Almost a quarter mile beyond the dome’s west gates and locks and

cargo hatches of Balboa, on a low rust-colored hill, is the vast field of monuments. Always, the wind blows between the stones, but on

Phantom Night it blows with the voices of the dead. Even if few have heard these voices for themselves, few doubt the truth of the tales.

One night each twenty-four months, the dead come awake. But

not to
haunt
the living. One night a year the dead come awake to howl reassurance across the planum. To whistle and sing thin, papery songs. To be grateful that the heirs to their incarnations are faithful and have kept the covenant to insure the Seven and the Seven keep

the Four at bay. This is how the dead celebrate.

The dead sing.

And the living tell tales of the ghost songs.

The sun sets.

On the boulevard, the March begins.

-5
-

In their rooms three stories above the revelers, two women lie in bed.

Earlier, they were among those visited Beáta Copper’s stall to buy their gourd, and they are the mothers of a girl child named Miranda.

The women do not number themselves among the believers, not in

the strictest sense. For them, this all the expression of metaphor.

They might even use the word
superstition,
in the company of like-minded individuals. But they also do not doubt the value of

ceremonies. Life is nothing easy, and whatever eases the passage is to be cherished, so long as it doesn’t encourage waste. Like the faithful, they find no greater wrong against humanity than waste. So, in their own ways they observe the night. For example, there are few greater affirmations of life than sex.

Beryl sits up and gazes towards the open doors leading out onto

their balcony. She’s a school teacher, and her partner is employed at the windworks. Together, they can afford a good room above the

streets, and they can afford to raise a daughter. Beryl sits and watches the not-darkness of the evening outside. The revelers are chanting, laughing, cheering, and soon enough now the march will pass

in front of their building. Miranda is down on the street with her CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN [213]

friends, waiting to catch the sweets and baubles that will be tossed by the harlequins, and shudders at the towering marionettes.

“We should go out now. It’s getting late,” Beryl says, and turns to smile at her lover. “We don’t want to miss the mummers.”

“Are you very sure?” asks Aruna, whose skin is almost a dark

as Beryl’s is pale. “It may be we could show greater devotion to the Ladies if we had another tumble.”

“It might be you ought get dressed,” Beryl replies.

Aruna kisses the small of her back, then lets one finger trail

gently up the length of Beryl’s spine. “We can’t have ours the only dark veranda, now can we?” she whispers.

“No, we can’t,” Beryl says, standing, pulling on a simple white

shift with elbow-length sleeves. “It would be a poor example.”

Aruna makes an off-color joke, but she fol ows her partner’s

example, gathering up her trousers and a gingham shirt, and they go together out onto the balcony. Beryl uses a pocket flint to light the tcandle set into the gourd, and then she hangs it from a hook on one of the doors. They sit together at the edge of the balcony, letting their legs dangle through the iron bars, as if they were as young as their daughter.

On this night all are young, as all are as old.

On this night all simply
are.

When she was twenty, Aruna drew a crimson tile, though she

never talks about that dawn in the depths of the temple. She never brings up the subject, and Beryl never asks, though she’s known

for years. Beryl secretly hopes Miranda will be so lucky, even if her mothers do not accept the Seven and the Seven and the Four as literal fact, and even if they have raised their child to believe likewise.

“I can’t see her anywhere,” Aruna says, but that’s hardly a surprise.

It would be almost impossible to spot Miranda in the throng lining the boulevard.

“She’s fine. You shouldn’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

“
You
worry,” Beryl replies, and Aruna knows it is pointless to argue.

Below them, there is the warm glow of hundreds of gourds, and

the facades of every home and business are adorned with at least

one—and sometimes several—soul lights. The sight of it makes Aruna

[214] WHILST THE NIGHT REJOICES PROFOUND AND STILL

sleepy, despite the noise, or it may be that she was sleepy before they stepped outside, and the glow is only making her sleepier. She lays her head on Beryl’s shoulder.

“Stay awake,” Beryl says immediately.

“I’m awake.”

“You’re awake now. Doesn’t mean you’ll be awake in five minutes.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t be.”

Beryl turns and lightly kisses the top of Aruna’s head. “I know you.”

The drummers come first, escorted by the rows of temple monks,

and for the time it takes them to pass, most of the onlookers fall silent. Beryl presses her face between the bars for a better view. After the monks will come the council and then retinue of priestesses. The women who were fortunate enough to draw the fourteen select tiles

this year will follow after, still nude and four of them still wearing the dried gore of their feasts. The Four will be on their heels, in turn pursued by the Ladies. By then, the crowd will be a cacophony.

But before the monks have passed, Aruna is dozing.

Beryl doesn’t wake her, not even once the avatars have passed,

the proxies of the Seven and the Seven, shadowed by the puppets.

N

The New York Times
recently hailed
Caitlín R. Kiernan
“one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include
The Red Tree
(nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and

The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
(winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus,

Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently
Confessions
of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best
of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One),
and
The Ape’s Wife and Other
Stories.
Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series
Alabaster
for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel,
Red Delicious.

a

FOR THE REMOVAL OF

UNWANTED GUESTS

U

A. C. Wise

The witch arrived at precisely 11:59 p.m., just as September ticked over to October, on the day after Michael Remmington moved into

the house on Washington Street. She knocked at exactly midnight.

The house was all boxes, and Michael all ache from moving them.

He’d been sitting on an air mattress—the bed wouldn’t be delivered for another week—staring at a crossword puzzle at least five years old. He’d found it in the back of the closet, yellow as bone, and peeled it from the floor—an unwitting gift from the previous tenant.

Michael opened the door, only questioning the wisdom of it after

it was done. It was midnight in a strange neighborhood; he wore a

bathrobe and slippers, and he’d left his phone upstairs, so if it turned out to be an axe murderer at the door, he wouldn’t even be able to call 911.

“Hello,” the witch said. “I’m moving in.”

A suitcase sat on her left, and a black cat on her right. The cat’s tail coiled around its neatly placed feet. It blinked at Michael, its gaze as impassive as the witch’s.

Michael couldn’t say how he knew she was a witch, but he did,

deep down in his bones. The truth of it sat at his core, as inevitable as moonrise, or spaghetti for dinner on Tuesdays.

“Okay,” he said, which was not what he’d meant to say at all.

[217]

[218] FOR THE REMOVAL OF UNWANTED GUESTS

But he’d already stepped back, and the witch had already picked

up her bag and crossed the threshold.

“I mean—What?”

The cat dragged a silken tail across Michael’s shins, following the witch. It felt like a mark of approval. A chill wind chased the cat, swirling fallen leaves; Michael closed the door. The witch set her bag down, turning a slow circle while remaining in place.

“This house should have a witch.” When she stopped, she faced him.

Her eyes were green, like pine boughs in winter, or the shadows

between them.

“A witch needs to live here,” she said, sniffing the air. “Can’t you feel it?”

Michael sniffed, smelling only the witch herself. She smelled of

cinnamon and fresh-cut cedar. She didn’t look like a witch, except that she did. Not that Michael knew what witches looked like. People, he guessed. Mostly.

She wore black, a loose-fitting sweater over a long skirt that

seemed to have layers. It reminded him of petals, like a flower, hung upside down. Her shoes clicked when she walked.

Michael couldn’t begin to guess the witch’s age. When he closed

just his left eye, she might be around forty, but when switched and closed just his right eye, she seemed closer to fifty. Either way, her skin was smooth, except for a few crow’s feet around her eyes, and a few lines at the corners of her mouth. Her hair hung half-way down her back, dark brown like thick molasses, threaded with strands of honey, rather than gray, and she wore a lot of jewelry—most of it

chunky, most of it silver.

“Okay,” he said again, then, “why?” after he thought about it.

“The windows are in upside down.” The witch pointed.

Michael couldn’t see anything unusual, but considered he

wouldn’t know an upside down window from a right-side-up one.

“The board for that step,” the witch indicated a tread halfway up

the staircase, “comes from a pirate ship that wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod, near Wellfleet.”

She paced three steps forward. The floorboards clonked hollow

under her shoes.

A. C. WISE [219]

“There’s a black cat buried in the leftmost corner of the basement.

Sorry.” She addressed the last to the cat at her feet, not Michael.

“So, a witch should live here. I’ll take the attic.”

“But it’s my house,” Michael said. “I have papers and everything.

You can’t just . . . ”

The witch lifted her suitcase: a small thing, battered at the edges, and held closed with two brass catches. She gathered her skirt, and Michael found himself following her up the stairs.

“I haven’t even unpacked yet,” Michael said.

“I’ll help you in the morning. I get up at seven. Tea with honey.”

She rounded on him so suddenly Michael nearly tripped on his heels.

They’d come to the foot of the second set of stairs, leading to the attic. Close up, the witch’s eyes were flecked with gold, like bits of mica in stone. Michael stepped back a pace, but was annoyed when

he did. He could follow her up the stairs if he wanted. Couldn’t he?

“Hoop,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s the answer to 47 across.” She flicked the crossword puzzle,

and Michael realized he still held the yellowed paper in his hand.

“All around, Robin’s backward friend. Four letters. It’s
Pooh

spelled backward. As in
Winnie the
. Sixteen down is
Marilyn Monroe.

That should give you enough to get started.”

“Oh.” Michael didn’t know what else to say.

“You’ll find the mugs in the third box from the left in the kitchen.

For the tea. I’ll see you in the morning.” Halfway up the steps, she paused, and turned again. Her eyes were luminous in the dark.

“You’ll want to shut the windows. It’s going to rain.”

Michael stared until the door at the top of the stairs closed.

He listened to the witch’s shoes clomp over the floorboards, and

wondered where she would sleep. There was nothing in the attic

except dust and dead spiders. Maybe she’d hang herself from the

ceiling like a bat. Maybe witches didn’t sleep at all.

“Okay. Goodnight. I guess,” he said to the silence.

Michael went back to his room. He closed the door, and after a

moment’s consideration, closed the window, too. The witch’s cat had taken up residence in the middle of his pillow. It opened one eye,

[220] FOR THE REMOVAL OF UNWANTED GUESTS

defying Michael to displace it. He sat gingerly and when the cat didn’t leave, he risked petting it. The cat rewarded him with a faint purr.

As if on cue, rain tapped light fingers against the glass. The house creaked, settling it bones around them. No, not around them, around the witch. A few moments later, the downpour began in earnest.

The witch came down the stairs precisely at seven, the cat at her heels.

She seemed to be wearing the same clothes as the night before, only in the dust-laden light slanting through the kitchen windows they looked deep green, or blue, rather than black. Michael wondered if he simply hadn’t noticed the subtleties of shading last night. He handed the witch a mug of tea.