Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (42 page)

world and frankly, Malina, the world has changed considerably. It’s a much more open place than your mother, for instance, could have

imagined.” She smiled. “You’ve made good progress here. You’re

ready for the next step, a practical step in our philosophy: checking out reality!”

Guin raised her eyebrows, lovely reddish-gold brows, perfectly

shaped over innocent yet wise blue eyes. So unlike me, Malina

thought, thinking of the darkness of her hair and eyes, the olive tint of her skin, of her shadowy soul. Darkness had shaped her view of

herself and the world’s view of her. No, she reminded herself, catching that negative thought as Guin had been teaching her to do, not the
world’s
view of me, what I was
taught
was how people see me.

Suddenly, Guin tossed an orange crystal and by reflex, Malina

snagged it with her hand. “Nice catch!” Guin said, her full lips turned up, nothing like the thin downturned mouth Malina had inherited

from her bitter mother and grandmother. “It’s carnelian from India.

It will bring you joy. And protect you from demons, in all their

forms.”

“How did you—?”

“It was on your face, the instant scowl of disbelief. And in a split second, a flash of understanding that it was
just
a belief, nothing more, not reality.” She smiled again, her face emitting that glow so like the sun.

Guin picked up both of Malina’s cool hands and held them in

her warm ones. “You’ve changed, you really have. It’s time to take another step up in consciousness. Praise be to the Goddess!”

As the session ended, Malina felt pretty good about herself. It

was a feeling that had grown over time. She
was
stronger, ready to put these new ideas to the test.

She slid the carnelian into the little pouch she wore around her

neck, adding it to the many tiny pieces of black onyx, hematite, and NANCY KILPATRICK [319]

black jade: dark stones her mother had made her promise she would

always wear. Stones that Guin explained symbolize fear and death

and dark forces in the universe, said with a hint that they should be gotten rid of. Malina wasn’t quite ready to part with the dark stones.

In fact, the idea brought on a new fear—the unspecified outcome of losing touch with the stones, which would bring about something

awful. That spoke volumes about her witchy mother’s influence!

But that challenge was for another day. Today, she felt good,

so good that on the way home she decided to buy a pumpkin. She

selected a large, plump one, then spontaneously she bought a bunch more, little ones.
Pumpkin children
, she thought, laughing, which made the older clerk look at her strangely, but Malina said quickly,

“I’ve never carved one and thought I’d better practice.” It was a bold thing to say to a stranger, and she
never
talked to strangers. But never was a long time, and this little public confession elicited a shift on the face of the man behind the counter.

“Well, you’ll need a big, sharp knife. The skins of these little

suckers is tough. And make sure you scrape out all the seeds. Some dry ’em and eat ’em, but I never had a taste for that. You can take out the pulp and make a pie,” he suggested, receiving her money,

and she didn’t hear the rest of it, she just smiled and nodded and felt . . . normal. Yes, that was the word.
Normal
. Just like everyone else. A regular person, not a strange person suspect in the eyes of the world, distrusted, feared. A regular woman buying Halloween

pumpkins from a regular store clerk.

The man didn’t seem to notice that she was smiling like a lunatic.

And once he’d handed over her change, he offered to help her load

the pumpkins into her car. He lifted the big one out of the cart and she handed him the small ones, two at a time. He placed them all in the back seat, like an adult surrounded by thirteen children. Malina laughed aloud, thinking that maybe she should seatbelt them all in.

The man swung his head quickly at her sharp laugh, a questioning

look on his face. Should she explain it to him? She wasn’t sure, but this new-found openness needed testing. “I was just thinking how

they look like a bunch of children with a parent. Maybe they need

seatbelts.”

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As she said it, it sounded stilted. Silly. An odd thing to say. But the man suddenly grinned. “Could be,” he said, then closed the back door and began to walk away, saying, “Happy Halloween to you,

Miss. I guess I should say Happy Mischief Night first!”

No one had
ever
wished her a Happy Halloween before. She

wasn’t even sure how to respond, but finally said, “Yes. You too!” He didn’t turn so maybe he didn’t hear her.

She drove home in a cloud of optimism, finding parking on the

street quite close to her house, another good omen. She lifted out the big pumpkin and one small. She’d have to come back for the rest.

This was one of those times she wished she didn’t have thirteen

steps to climb to the old house she’d inherited. Out of habit, she counted them all in the rhyme her mother had taught her:
A baker’s
dozen, twelve plus one, none will see the rising sun. One . . . two . . .

Maybe she should hire a carpenter to build a fourteenth step, to

break the cycle. She felt positive about breaking cycles now.

Three more trips were needed to retrieve the other small

pumpkins that she hauled to the kitchen. She brewed a pot of herb

tea and sat looking at her acquisitions for a while. She hadn’t realized it when she was picking them out, but the little ones were all shapes and a variety of sizes. Some were taller, others wider, perfect rounds, and misshapen gourds with curiously odd stems. Even the colors

were slightly different one from the other, She rearranged them first by size, then by pale to dark orange, drinking her tea and thinking that this was going to be the best Halloween ever. Nothing like the ones she’d lived, caught in terror of the night and those who walked it and the torment they inflicted. And especially that last Halloween before her mother died. Her determined and cruel mother who liked

to force dark thoughts inside Malina’s head, stirring up anxieties about a vicious world of “normal,” those who didn’t like “our kind.”

Mother had been a darkling raised by another darkling of a mother

and Malina hesitated to call them “evil” but the word was right

there, in her mind if not on her tongue. As Guin said once, “Both

your grandmother and your mother were women who drove their

husbands away, apparently, and would rather have destroyed their

daughter than to change.”

NANCY KILPATRICK [321]

Malina was not going to be like her mother. Not
ever
.

She stood abruptly and spread a heavy dark tarp over half the

table, placed the pumpkins haphazardly onto it and then covered the rest of the table with the tarp.

She had seen carved pumpkins, of course, and had watched them

being carved on TV, but had never done that herself. And she knew

the history—of the hideous faces used to scare away demons, or

offering those very same demons a home for the night when they

breeched the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In her childhood there had been no pumpkins at the window

or on the porch. Her mother said they didn’t need them; demons

were always welcome in their house.

Malina picked out a large carving knife from the knife rack and

walked to the table. She touched her fingertip gently to the blade edge.

Instantly, a line of blood appeared on her finger. Before she could move her hand away, blood dripped onto the thick skin of the large pumpkin, the three bright red drops sliding down the orange shell.

Something about that troubled her and she raced to the sink to get a cloth. But in those short moments when she’d turned, the pumpkin

had absorbed the blood. She couldn’t believe her eyes. But then, she could. She had seen many strange things in her life, why not this?

She spent the better part of the afternoon and early evening carving pumpkins. Something in her was determined to finish them all. She

ended up with a mess of pumpkin “guts” spilling over the table and onto the floor, seeds and the stringy bits everywhere, some clinging to fragments of hard pulp. She decided to use a shovel to clean the floor and ended up folding the mess in the tarp and tossing it into the trash.

Once the cleanup had been done, she gathered every candle in

the house, seven of them, all black, and cut them in half so she’d have enough for all the jack-o’-lanterns.

The sun had set and while the sky still held streaks of paleness,

she turned off the kitchen light to looked at the mother and thirteen babies—as she had come to think of them—with their glowing and

flickering eyes, noses, and mouths. They really did look amazing.

And horrifying. Instinctively, she had managed to carve frightening

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faces. Well, that was normal, wasn’t it? That’s what normal people did.

On impulse, she opened the pouch around her neck and dumped

the stones into her hand. Besides the orange, there were thirteen

black ones. One for each, she thought, and placed a black stone

inside every small pumpkin and the orange stone inside the large

one. This would test her mother’s theory. And maybe it was a first step in parting with them.

Then, carefully, she moved them one by one onto the front

porch, lining them up on the long weather-worn carpenter’s bench,

the mother in the center, six babies to her left and seven to her right, ordered by height, all of them aflame inside.

She backed up to the top step but needed a better view, one that

everyone else would see, so she went down the steps and backed

along the path. Yes, they looked spectacular. Hers was the only

house in the neighborhood with so many pumpkins, she was sure

of it. To confirm this, she turned and glanced at the porches and

windows of her neighbors, seeing a pumpkin here, a fake pumpkin

there, no pumpkin in the next, and so on, until her eyes scanned

past her car . . . and then went right back to it. The car windows were smashed!

Malina hurried down the walk and raced around the car, stunned,

not believing what she was seeing. The side, front and back, the

rear window, and the other side were broken through, glass shards

littering the seats and floor. The windshield had spider-webbed, with a hole that had to have been caused by the huge rock sitting on the hood. Even the driver’s side mirror was shattered. She picked up the gray rock that was as big as her two fists and at the sound of laugher spun around, unable to determine from where the wind had carried

the sound, but able to make out the words, “Witch!” repeated over

and over like a chant.

“Brats!” she shrieked. “You’ll pay for this!”

She sounded to her own ears like her mother, shrill, loud, evil.
I
don’t care
! she thought, her new-found optimism crushed by cruelty for which she had no recourse.

She rushed indoors, still holding the heavy stone that had

NANCY KILPATRICK [323]

damaged her car, envisioning pulverizing heads with it, but mostly aware of how much this stone had wounded her. She sat with the

cool rock resting in her palms, trembling, and soon tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks until she was sobbing. It took some time, but finally she was able to make the call.

“Calm down,” Guin said, “and tell me everything.”

The events were repeated, from the enthusiasm of buying and

carving pumpkins to the shattering of hope for a new way of living

“in this rotten world! They’re so cruel, Guin. I can’t stand it! Maybe I should just do what my mother would have done and—”

“Malina, stop! Just stop.”

She struggled to hold her emotions in and the effort produced

a loud, low moan, something that didn’t even sound human to her

own ears, but Guin said, “I know you’re hurt. And you’re afraid. But, calm down, Mal. We’ll deal with this together.”

By the end of the long conversation Guin had convinced Malina

that what happens on Mischief Night is not personal, and she

shouldn’t take it that way. Yes, children can be cruel and the word

“mischief” doesn’t really cover the extreme damage to her car, but if Malina was friends with the neighbors, she’d probably discover

that things just as terrible had happened to their cars or houses or gardens too. For some reason, it was tradition for children to do

bad things on Mischief Night, hence the name. “Mal, this was very

wrong. But, you can call the police. And you have car insurance for vandalism that will pay for the damage. Hold on, okay? Tomorrow

night is Halloween. Those same kids will be ringing your doorbell, begging for candy. And that’s when you have the biggest opportunity of your life to change. You can tell them from a vulnerable place just how hurt you were by what they did.”

“Tell them?”

“Yes. It’s part of healing, expressing from your most vulnerable

self exactly what you feel. It’s the place that touches others and allows
them
to change. These children can see the error of their ways and you can help them. Oh, and don’t forget to also give them a piece of candy, to show you’re human.”

“Am I? Human?”

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“Of course you are! If you weren’t, you wouldn’t feel wounded by

this. And, by the way, your little pumpkins sound delightful. I’m busy tomorrow, and tomorrow night I’ll be giving out candy myself, but

leave those pumpkins out and I’ll drive by the day after Halloween and have a look. That’s quite a creative idea, you know.”