Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (41 page)

even through his jeans.

“What are you doing?”

“Just something I learned here. Sit still for a bit.”

Whatever she was doing with her hand, he liked it, so he let her

shoulder him sideways to make room for her to sit beside him. She

left her hand on his knee, the heat of her penetrating like the heat wrap they’d put on him the last time he let the girl at the doctor’s office do physical therapy on it. “Wait a bit, and then you can get up.”

“You live here?”

[308] ALL HALLOWS IN THE HIGH HILLS

“I built a little house. I’ll show you when we go to fix the butterfly.”

“I have to go back. The festival’s open for the holidays, starting tomorrow.”

“I’d hate all that Christmas retail.”

He smiled at how she felt just like he did about the whole thing.

“I still weave. That cloak that Gisele’s wearing, that’s mine.”

He couldn’t see much of it from where he sat. “You do all right

then? You have enough?” She’d been like him, always running on the far edge of anything like security, showing up at the free Thanksgiving feeds and sitting through the Hare Krishna temple’s silly dances in trade for hot lentil soup and flatbread one Sunday every month.

“I have more than enough. I miss the modern version, but maybe

you pay a price for every good thing in life.” She looked at him, a question in her eyes. “You could stay, too.”

He stared at the fire. “It wouldn’t be any easier to make glass over here. I’d still be old.”

“There won’t be time, now. You can’t stay tonight. But we can

take parts of your studio through over the summer.”

“Why summer?”

“The door is open during the festival . . . and this one night. Rest of the year, even Jack can’t come through.” She set her head on his shoulder. She’d never done that in the real world. “I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t realize there was anything . . . anyone . . . I missed from back there.”

For a long time he didn’t say anything and he didn’t move. He

just watched the fire and the skipping stones and felt the warmth

of her hand. He wanted to hold her, but he couldn’t quite do it. He settled for saying, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

She glanced up at him. “Do you remember the first year of the

festival?”

“And the year off, when I sold stuff in stores, instead, and they

took more than half my profits.”

She laughed. “We’d all sworn never to do the festival again.”

“And now look at it.”

Her hair was unbound, and it looked even longer that way than

when she braided it. She was still wearing bellbottoms, too. Retro-BRENDA COOPER [309]

woman. But he probably didn’t look different either, except older and more bent-over, and of course a little more hairless. He kept what he had left short now.

Jack and Gisele walked over to them. Gisele was an interesting

woman, her face marked with sorrow and resolve and covered in

more wrinkles than Justine’s. He couldn’t judge her age—she could

be sixty or ninety. Her voice was stronger than an old woman’s, and so melodious he wondered if she had been a singer once. “There’s

going to be a feast in an hour.”

Justine held up the half a butterfly Jack had been carrying. “Jack wondered if we could fix this, first.”

“Sure.”

Justine had stopped leaning on him when Gisele came up, and

now she lifted her hand from his knee and stood and held the hand

out to him. “Are you game?” She looked almost like a little girl,

excited and happy.

He stretched out his legs before he stood. They felt good. As he

and Justine followed Gisele and Jack away from the fire, he leaned over and asked, “What did you do? My knee feels fabulous.”

She grinned. “The small magics are the best.”

He shook his head and kept his silence. The knee moved as well

as the other one. No, better.

After a while they were back on the outskirts of the little town

they’d come through on the way down, but near a building he didn’t remember seeing. Gisele went through the door and lit a candle,

throwing dim light so that he could make out bulky shapes. Then a

light above a workbench bloomed on, making him blink and work

to adjust his eyes. They stood in a workshop that smelled of sawdust and paint. Small wooden figurines filled baskets and bowls all over the shop—all animals of one kind or another.

He didn’t see any way to way to heat glass. A regular fireplace sat cold and dark at the moment. He didn’t even see small blowtorches.

“How are you going to repair glass here?”

“I don’t know if I am. I’m just going to try.” Gisele reached out

for the second half of the butterfly. “What can you tell me about this piece?”

[310] ALL HALLOWS IN THE HIGH HILLS

“See that ridge of gold running through both of the wings? I’m

trying to preserve that.”

Gisele shook her head softly. She had both pieces now, laying on

a high bench kind of like a draftsman’s table. She had a tall chair, but she was standing and studying the glass. She looked more closely at him, and in the brighter light she looked even stranger to Jack, her face dark and the light throwing a halo around her head. “What did you feel when you worked on that piece?”

“My back hurt.”

Gisele frowned, and then touched the break. “And its back broke.

What else?”

“I always like to think of little girls liking my lawn ornaments.”

The words kind of surprised him, even though they were true. They

just weren’t the kind of thing he usually said. He kept going, too.

“Everybody buys them, but I’m always happiest when a little girl buys them. Sometimes they walk out of the booth holding them up—they

come on sticks, and the girls hold them up and bob them and their

mothers tell them not to, but some of them do anyway.”

“That’s better.” Gisele looked away from him and down at the

butterfly, and then she opened a jar of paint and picked up a brush.

“Watch,” she told him.

She painted the thinnest line of blue along the break on one side, and then along the break on the other, and then she joined the two pieces.

“You should use a vise,” he said. “You can’t just hold them until

the paint dries.”

She opened her hands, and the butterfly flapped its wings twice.

He blinked at it. He looked back at Justine of the long hair and

the bellbottoms. She was grinning at him, like someone who had just pulled off a surprise party. Jack seemed to be playing guardian of the door, but he looked happy as well.

Gisele just looked matter-of-fact.

The butterfly flapped three more times and turned toward him.

Gisele dabbed black paint where its eyes should be and Jack was

certain the butterfly could see him.

She smiled.

BRENDA COOPER [311]

He just stood still, the very core of him shaken by the glass

butterfly’s move.

Justine prodded him. “You could say thank you.”

He opened his mouth and nothing came out. He closed it and

tried again. “Th-th . . . thank you.”

Gisele smiled. “You’re welcome.”

He swayed, feeling dizzy. Dream or not, this had become too

strange. “I want to go home now.”

Justine’s face fell. “Don’t you want to sit by the fire some more?

Eat with us?”

“I think it’s time for me to wake up.”

She reached over and pinched him.

He yelped and stepped aside.

“Take your butterfly,” Gisele said. “It’s too heavy to fly, even here.”

He picked it up and set it on his palm. It looked big and ungainly there, five inches of butterfly body and more of wing. The gold went through both wings really well now, and flared out at the top. Two gold drops had appeared on the long bottom of its wings.

Jack came up beside him. “You can choose whether to stay or

not.”

He swallowed, looking at Justine. There wasn’t anyone waiting

for him on the other side. “I might go crazy if I stay.”

Justine looked hard at him, concern edging her mouth. “I didn’t.

I like it much better here.”

“I . . . I’m not ready.”

Gisele handed them both flashlights, but didn’t go with them. She

waved them off, telling Mel, “Good journey. You’re welcome back if you decide to come.”

“And good journey to you,” he replied, and repeated “Thank you,”

because it seemed like that was needed. Gisele headed back toward

the bonfire on the beach, and after she’d turned around he realized he couldn’t remember the color of her eyes or how round her face

had been (or not).

Jack and Justine walked him back to the cliff face. Justine was

quiet until they were already over the wooden bridge, when she

whispered, “Will you be back in the summer?”

[312] ALL HALLOWS IN THE HIGH HILLS

“I don’t know.”

At the edge of the cliff, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, her lips warm and a little chapped.

He surprised himself by kissing her back, also on the cheek,

although he felt like she would have accepted a kiss on the lips. He was the problem. He always had been. Always had withdrawn.

Of course, he was still her friend, and she’d left all of the other men in her life. Maybe he’d made the right decision. Maybe he’d

never know.

“I’ll be here if you come back,” she said.

He nodded, all he could manage. He was blinking and his cheeks

had grown hot.

The butterfly flapped in his hand. His grip had grown too tight.

This time he didn’t have a hand free for Jack to take, so he simply followed him though the waterfall door.

On the other side, the butterfly was hard and cold and in one

piece. The shape of its wings was entirely different than anything he could have done in his workshop. A water drop splashed from his

eyelash onto the butterfly, next the new dark eyes.

“I’m going back,” Jack said. “But I’ll be here in the morning.

Before anything opens up. And—happy Halloween, Mel.”

Mel stopped for a moment, and then returned the greeting.

“Happy Halloween, Jack.” He watched Jack walk through the waterfall door. Mel put his butterfly down on a nearby bench, then went out to his van and retrieved his blanket. He curled up by the waterfall. Over here, his knee hurt all over again. When he checked the butterfly, it felt as cold and hard as the others, but it still looked alive. He would keep it; it made him smile.

The falling water made good background noise for sleeping.

Maybe he would dream of Justine of the long blond hair, and maybe

he would dream of summer. N

Brenda Cooper
is a technology professional, a science fiction writer, and a futurist. Her most recent novel,
The Creative Fire
, was published BRENDA COOPER [313]

in 2012; its sequel,
The Diamond Deep
, which completes this duology, will be out in October of 2014. Cooper’s short fiction has appeared in
Nature
,
Analog
,
Asimov’s
,
Strange Horizons
,
The Salal Review
, and multiple anthologies. She lives in Bellevue, Washington with her

partner, Toni Cramer, Toni’s daughter Katie, and two dogs. She has an adult son, David Cooper, a firefighter/paramedic with Cowlitz 2

Fire and Rescue. Cooper blogs regularly at www.brenda-cooper.com

and periodically guest-blogs at Futurist.com and other venues.

a

TRICK OR TREAT

;

Nancy Kilpatrick

“Malina, despite your resistance to change, I recommend you give

the idea a try. Change is what life is all about. The Goddess is here to help and protect you.”

“But, Guin, I’m not sure—”

“You never are! But, think about it. You’ve been coming to see me

for a year and while your confidence has increased in certain ways, you’ve taken few risks regarding social contact.”

“It goes against—”

“—the grain. Yes, I know. You’ve said this before, need I remind

you.”

Malina felt her face redden. Yes, they’d been over this ground

many times, enough that even
she
was getting bored. Maybe Guin was right. Maybe it was time to find the energy and the courage to try a different approach. Be a bit more open to the world. Wasn’t that why she’d sought out a New Age healer in the first place? A modern witch—oh how Malina’s mother would have laughed at
that
!

“I think this is why you came to me in the first place,” Guin said, and Malina bowed her head in a respectful nod to this wise woman,

whose intuition had proven itself time and again.

“It’s a trust issue,” Guin continued, touching Malina’s hand,

[317]

[318] TRICK OR TREAT

“and it always has been. You have to trust that all the messages you received in childhood are just the views of people who were angry, paranoid, and resentful. They had only one way to look at life and that was a skewed view. This is a welcoming planet, when the earth goddess travels with you. There are other ways to experience the