Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (31 page)

black skirt clung to her legs, ink bleeding into her skin, bleeding into the sidewalk, bleeding into the dark.

If she reached the end of the sidewalk, she would be lost. Michael felt it as down-in-his-bones-true. Whatever rules governed witches made it so; those rules governed him now, too.

He kept going, half running and half limping. He reached for her

shoulder. The witch whirled on him and shouted something, but it

was torn away by the wind.

Tendrils of wet hair clung to the witch’s cheeks. She swung

the suitcase like a weapon, and Michael ducked. He slipped again,

scraping his palm.

The witch stepped off the sidewalk.

His heart lurched.

A black shape streaked past him. Spencer.

Headlights swept around a curve in the road, bearing down on

the witch. Michael shot up, rain-blind, drunk.

He might have shouted as he plunged off the sidewalk, chasing

the witch, chasing the cat. The witch turned, mouth open, but he

couldn’t hear her. Headlights washed her out, and made her eyes the same color as the storm.

They collided in midair.

She pushed him out of the way, or he pushed her. Or they pushed

each other. Brakes squealed, and over the noise, a sound like wings and all of October taking flight filled the air. Against all reason, he heard the jam jar as it slipped from his pocket and became tiny

splinters of glass and a magic potion washed away by the rain.

A slew of water hit him in the face. Michael threw up an arm to

shield his eyes, and the bumper of an ancient ’67 Oldsmobile stopped inches from his leg.

“Jesus, are you okay?” The woman, soaked the instant she stepped

from the car, left the Olds askew in the center of the road, door

hanging open.

Something nudged Michael’s leg. He looked down. Spencer

twined around his ankles, dragging his sodden tail over Michael’s

pant leg. The witch was nowhere to be seen.

“My cat,” Michael said.

[234] FOR THE REMOVAL OF UNWANTED GUESTS

He bent and scooped Spencer into his arms. The wet bundle of

fur purred louder than he’d ever heard her purr before.

“What?”

“She’s okay,” he said.

The woman stared. After a moment she nodded, looking more

frightened than concerned. She climbed back into her car and shut

the door. Michael held the cat, listening to her purr, listening to the woman’s engine purr. The rain slackened, still slanting through the headlights cutting the night. He realized he was standing in the

middle of the road and limped back to the sidewalk. The woman,

ghosted behind the car’s windows, shook her head in confusion as

she pulled away.

A shape lay on the far side of the road, which might be the witch’s suitcase. He couldn’t be sure. But he didn’t see the witch. The car hadn’t hit her, or him, or Spencer. He squeezed the cat harder until she squirmed in protest; he unburied his face from her fur.

“Come on, let’s go home.”

The witch would be waiting for them with a cup of tea. Or she

wouldn’t. But it was possible. And she hadn’t died. Just this once, life had decided to be fair. The witch could go on living on her own terms. Anything was possible on Halloween.

“Thank you,” Michael said to the night and the turning year.

Behind the rain and the dense clouds, he could sense the sliver of a crescent moon, waiting to break free. It felt like a smile.

N

A. C. Wise
was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as
Clarkesworld
,
Lightspeed
, Apex, and
The
Best Horror of the Year Vol.

4
, among others. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits the online magazine
Unlikely Story
. You can find her online at www.acwise.net.

a

ANGELIC

—

Jay Caselberg

And so it begins . . .

Clouds roiled across the darkened sky, whipped as though with

the breath of angels, though angels they were not.

A hint: the taste of stone upon the air; the flavor of old earth

mixed with the spattering frozen drops, slashing against his back and loud in his ears through the hood cinched tight around his face. The wind gusted, splashing icy water in his eyes. It dribbled in rivulets down his forehead and over his brow. Using the back of one hand, he tried to wipe it away, to clear his sight.

Storm water, storm watch, storm dreams. His hands were numb,

his knuckles aching with the cold, yet still he stood, waiting, watching, resolute.

Behind, the old church, gray stone made white and black with

age, the roof collapsed, slates tumbled, and the jagged teeth of

burnt rafters mouthing at the wind-tossed sky. To one side lay the graveyard, headstones leaning, ancient stone crosses mottled with

lichen. A mound, a sunken hollow, pooling water, and a confusion of weeds and grass gone wild. The fence, once solid, had rusted through in places, brown and encrusted with years. It had been hallowed

ground once, a sacred place. Now it just cradled rotted memories

of the dead. The dead stayed dead. It was simply what lived beyond them that did not. He knew the truth of that, knew it well, but he

[237]

[238] ANGELIC

chose not to keep it foremost in his mind. It was the living that bore the deepest part of it, whether inherited or not. At least he thought that was so. From time to time, though, these days, he was no longer sure.

He stood there upon the hillside, waiting, watching the road. She

would come, he knew it. She would come. She would be there for

that special night but two days hence, the family celebration, the tradition. She always came.

Inside the remains of the old church, behind him, in darkness, a

tortured Christ figure stared down upon a littered floor. Streams of leaf-stained water made brown tears upon its cheeks.

Martin watched the empty road for a while longer. Not yet. Maybe

tomorrow. She would come. She would come: he knew it.

He had heard the voices. And so, he knew.

Step back. Consider.

The avenging angel with sharpened teeth.

We call it angel, because it makes it knowable, makes it familiar, though angel is only a word, not an explanation.

It swoops, confusing you with its lack of sexuality. It is man,

it is woman, it is both and yet neither. It has eyes that pierce you, transfixing you. It will rend you, limb from limb and feast upon your flesh, though you lie there still and pale, untouched.

It does not laugh, for it is without amusement.

It merely rails against your living. Your heartbeat, your breath,

the dampness of your eyes . . . all of these are an affront to it.

It does not understand remorse. It never will.

Consider it well.

It was ritual more than anything else, an old tradition that just

happened to coincide with the other rituals. Halloween, All Hallows, Samhain, call it what you will—it just happened to be the time when the family got together and worked hard at not doing each other

mortal injury during its passing.

Estella really didn’t know why it was that time of year rather

than any of the other high feasts, secular or otherwise, that other JAY CASELBERG [239]

“normal” families observed. Regardless, she liked the season, the

chill, the damp, the winds scattering wet leaves and memory across the landscape. The feeling of huddling inside warm clothes, big coats, and scarves gave a sense of protectedness that she found comforting.

There was something else about the time of year too, something

lurking beneath the surface. Nothing expressly tangible, but perhaps that was why she was comforted by that sense of protection. Ever

since she was a child, Estella had felt that otherness lurking at the shadow reaches of her subconscious, though it was more a knowing

than the dreamlike essence of that which was not expressly conscious.

She knew, she sensed, and she was aware of it, but she chose, rather, to ignore it, to put it from her mind. It was like the town. If you’d grown up and lived for any span of time within the boundaries of

Sangerville, you knew things—things that nobody talked about.

Estella’s family, the Hollings, had lived variously in Sangerville for five generations; long enough to accumulate and store those hidden memories in their own dark and secret places. There were family

memories that . . .

Estella shook her head and peered through the spattering drops at

the road ahead. On an afternoon like this, it was better to concentrate on driving than random musings. Not that there was much traffic

around Sangerville, apart from the townsfolk themselves and there

were few enough of those. There’d been a decline over the last few years, with the younger generations seeking their own fortunes

further afield more and more as the opportunities in the town itself dwindled. The old derelict church at the top of the hill was testament to that. Not even enough of a congregation to support it, though Old Martin did his best to maintain some sort of order in the grounds.

Some of the townsfolk said that Martin was not quite all there, a

little slow, but he was harmless enough. Everyone called him Old

Martin, though he was not that old, really. It just seemed as if he had been with the town forever and he was there as a fixture in Estella’s memory ever since she’d been a child. Someone had to be paying

for the upkeep of the grounds, but thinking about it now, Estella

realized that she had no idea who that might be.

She pulled into the small main street, wipers slapping the large

[240] ANGELIC

drops away from in front of her. There were other reasons for her

trepidation and the closer she got to the old family home the tension wound tighter. Bill and Linda Holling. They were a classic small town couple, bound up in the minutiae of the day to day that comes with living in an environment like Sangerville. One of the reasons she

escaped, really. And then, coming back each visit, each family event, it was no different. The problem was that she really didn’t
care
about what they seemed to care about, but she had to show that animated

interest that proved she was paying attention, that she was being a dutiful daughter. It was almost enough to make her eyes glaze over.

Sure Dad, that’s really interesting.

Estella took a left, barely missing one of the local residents

decked out in gray rain slicker and hat, fading conveniently into the washed out background and making him barely able to be seen. Well, she assumed it was a him. In the pouring rain and underneath the

amorphous weather gear, she had no way of knowing. She sighed,

shook her head and drove the last couple of blocks to her own street, tree-lined, but skeletal in these months, with the empty branches

clawing at the clouded sky. And there, at last, stood the family home. It was funny how her family never invested either the time or the money in Halloween paraphernalia. No grinning faces or colors. The house stood as it always stood. No one came out to meet her, not that she had expected they would. Perhaps they didn’t realize she was here yet.

She took a few seconds listening to the wipers beat back and

forth, breathing slowly and deeply, till she killed the engine, and taking one last deep breath, opened the car door.

Martin stooped, and with one hand wiped away some old brown

leaves that were adhering to a nearby gravestone. The rain had eased a little now, but already the light was starting to fade. She was here now. The cycle was almost complete. He straightened, turning slowly to gaze out over the town, avoiding the crumbling walls off to one side of where he stood. He didn’t need to see them. Below, one or two lights were already painting dark shapes with yellowish glow against gray. Down there, down in the heart of the little community, people moved, breathed, got on with their lives. Some of them knew. Some

JAY CASELBERG [241]

of them understood, but they kept that understanding to themselves.

It was something you didn’t talk about. Not that anyone really ever talked to Martin apart from the civil good morning and the silent

nod of the head. He was as much a familiar presence as he wandered the streets as the hulking hill that he stood upon now—a fixture in their memories, something that you acknowledged and with that

acknowledgement, fulfilled your obligations.

He crouched down in front of the headstone, peering at the

lettering, the carefully incised names and words, the once sharp edges softened with age, crumbling a little here and there, bruised with the moss marks and lichen. He reached out and traced the name with one finger. He had known this one many years ago. He looked back over