The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Read online

  Jon was unsure which two she meant. He stared at his reflection in the mirrored wall, whose gold veins marred his face like cracks in a fragile mask. This image bored into him, caused his hands to tremble. Halloween’s masquerade was now over and fate, it seemed, was forcing him out of his cherished disguise. The last twenty-four hours, with all their ugly spite, antagonism, and above all cowardice, raced through Jon’s mind. Everything was coming undone. His precious mask was slipping. Jon lowered his head, partly in shame and partly to avoid looking at the marbled glass. He knew it was only a question of time before he’d have to look upon the long-hidden face of his true self.

  BONE FIRE

  STORM CONSTANTINE

  Storm Constantine is the creator of the Wraeththu Mythos, the first trilogy of which was published in the 1980s. She has written more than thirty books, including full-length novels (such as Hermetech and Burying the Shadow), novellas, short story collections, and nonfiction titles.

  Her latest book is the Wraeththu story collection A Raven Bound with Lilies, and she has recently edited two anthologies—The Darkest Midnight in December, supernatural tales connected with Yuletide, and Songs to Earth and Sky, an anthology of seasonal stories. She is also the founder of the independent publishing house Immanion Press.

  “For this tale I delved into the origins of various Halloween customs,” reveals the author, “the traditions that were allegedly taken over to America by Irish settlers. I incorporated some of this fascinating folklore into my story.

  “Two ideas particularly intrigued me: children being dressed up as ghosts and imps to confuse malevolent spirits and demons, who would mistake them for their own kind and leave them be, and that the term ‘bonfire’ is derived from ‘bone fire’—the rest of the story grew from these two ideas.

  “Jenna’s chant to Hekkate is adapted from a quote by George Carlin: ‘There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.’”

  WHEN THE SUN threatens to die at the end of the year, it’s up to us to keep it alive during the long dark. When it’s weak, the rule of light weakens too, and the dark may slip through a veil we cannot see. Here, far away from the world of the blind, we do what we must. We make our own light.

  Our village, Door’s Dale, lies in a hollow, surrounded on two sides by ancient forest. A road pours down from Heron’s Cop, to the east, and wanders through the village to the setting sun and the slow rise of Acre’s Hill, in the west. At Hallow’s Eve, in the fields, where once the wheat and barley blew, we raise the bone fire. Its flames mimic the sun in summer, and through our intent, keeps the solar eye alive throughout the long darkness. You wonder what we burn upon the fire? Must be bones, mustn’t it? Do you want to hear?

  Summer had been good that year; the Kindly Ones had turned smiles to us rather than blades: they who live in the trees, in the clear cold brooks, and beneath the fields. We knew, however, that winter would be harsh, for in August the fields had been hidden often by thick fog, and the geese and ducks had left early, heading south. Woodpeckers had been spied, in their green and red coats, sharing a tree—always a sign. Among the hedgerows, I’d noticed spiders had spun their webs larger than usual, and the house-walker kind was heading indoors in crowds, to scuttle about in the evenings and be eaten by cats. So, as a precaution, the bone fire would be bigger than usual too this year.

  Jenna Harne was my friend. We were fourteen years old, tugging at the leash of childhood, knowing it must eventually snap; if we tugged hard enough perhaps that would be soon. We loved Hallow’s Eve, but who didn’t? It was a time for games and celebration, feasting and dancing and dressing up. I would guise as a Kindly Woman that year, with a face of green and a robe of leaves, with bees in my hair, albeit made of wire and sheep’s wool rather than real ones. Jenna’s costume was that of a demoness, of red and black rags with a crown of late roses she’d dyed almost to soot by standing them in ink. Her face was painted red, with gouts of black around the eyes and mouth. She looked wickedly lovely.

  In the early evening, we’d walk the lanes between the farms, each carrying a basket and a lantern. At the crossroads we passed over, we would place an apple and a gobbet of raw meat for She of the Four Faces, but when we came to a house or farm where a turnip lamp was lit upon the step, we’d knock at the door and ask for gifts for Those Unseen. At the end of our journey, we’d eat what we’d been given—small sweetmeats—and say, “This for you, dear ghost, enjoy its taste through me.” If we carry out this task every year, then the ghosts and demons themselves do not have to, and it’s safer for everyone. We dress up to fool the real spirits, for they are partial to children, especially at Hallow’s Eve, for then the Kindly Ones and their friends from beyond the veil are full of tricks and mischief, as we are. If we wear a guise, they take us for one of their own and pass us by.

  Jenna and I set out as usual, with apples and wrapped meat in our baskets and our lanterns on sticks. I wore a cloak of green, and Jenna one of crimson. We sang songs to warn people of our approach. As younger children, we’d loved this part of the event the most, but now, with that leash tethering us to innocence wearing thin, we were eager to return to the village for the main celebration. On this night, we’d be allowed to drink cider. Jenna wanted to flirt with boys and show how well she could dance. At the end of the evening, she’d allow someone to kiss her. I hadn’t quite caught up in that respect and was looking forward to the feast more than anything, and being able to pretend I was an adult, but in a different way. I’d walk around as if I had property and animals, my head held high, my gown trailing in the grass.

  At the first crossroads, we placed our offerings at the stone cross—me the apple, Jenna the meat—and Jenna chanted:

  “Hekkate, Hekkate, bring me tonight

  sweet love in the light of the bone-fire,

  when your dogs hold their tongues

  and only the moon may howl.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. Even I knew Hekkate was not a goddess interested in love, since she was the four faces of the moon, from light to dark, and was friendly with Death. “Maybe she’ll give you a corpse to love,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Emlie,” Jenna snapped. “I want one of her sons, for she lends them sometimes and puts them in the body of a boy. Tonight, I want something better than a sweaty, snotty barn-boy.”

  “Idiot,” I said, and we linked arms and walked away.

  We called at six farms and, after the seventh, intended to return to Door’s Dale. Earlier, we’d passed many other guiser groups on their rounds of the farms, but now, on our way to Kettle Farm, the lanes felt empty and desolate. A snowy owl swept across our path and Jenna said, “There’s winter’s sentinel.” Anything could be keeping pace with us behind the high hedges on either side of the lane. We shivered and hugged each other, laughing in delicious fear.

  A lamp burned upon the porch step of Kettle Farm, but when we knocked the door there was no answer. Jenna put her hands in a funnel against the kitchen window and peered through. “No one here,” she said.

  “Maybe they’ve gone to the feast already,” I said.

  “Perhaps, although there are two pies on the table. They wouldn’t forget those.”

  “Maybe they’re for later. Shall we go?” I was beginning to feel more than mildly frightened. The night felt so still, watchful, and we were alone out here. Would our guises hold? I adjusted my crown of bees.

  Jenna picked up her basket and lamp, but before we could go back down the track, someone came around the side of the house. We both shrieked and jumped, then began to laugh. It was a boy, probably a son of the house, dressed in a costume of black, with the white bones of a skeleton painted over it. He was tall and had long black hair that was grayed with ash. His face was painted white like a skull. He might be beautiful or hideous, it was impossible to tell, but struck me as graceful. He bowed to us extravagantly and said, “Ladies!”

  “This house has no gift for us?” Jenna said archly. “Would you scorn a
Kindly Lady and her friend from Hell?”

  “My bones can’t hold a gift,” said the boy.

  “What about those pies in there?” Jenna insisted.

  “You must know I can’t go in and steal those without being invited.”

  “Oh well …” Jenna’s banter faltered. “Let’s go, Emlie.”

  I felt that boy standing there behind us all the while we walked down the farm driveway. I didn’t think he was a son of Kettle Farm, but more likely a guiser, like us. They had a lot of boys there, true, but he’d felt different somehow.

  “What a fool,” Jenna grumbled, once we’d reached the lane.

  “Could have been Hekkate’s son,” I said.

  “Her sons aren’t idiots.”

  For a moment, I wondered why she was so grumpy, but then she began to sing, and I joined in, and the spirits kept their distance.

  We reached the field just as the bone fire was being lit. It was built of branches and unwanted lumber, but there were bones in its heart—those of the first lambs eaten in the spring and kept for this time, as well as the flayed bones of beloved old dogs who had died, because the dog was Hekkate’s sacred animal. Fiddlers were playing and capering about, and the air smelled of burned sugar, apples, and turned soil. Torches on tall poles blazed wildly, providing the traditional hellish light. A large crowd had gathered, people from the village and all the outlying farms. Jack of the Lantern had been brought from the church, where he was kept all year in a box under the floor stones, and was being paraded around by Farmer Docken, he who owns the most land in our parish. The lantern was an ancient human skull, in which a candle burned; the sun caught in bone. Jack grinned at the fire, his eyes alight with the writhe of captured flame. He was, for that night, lord of the land, our lord, who protected us. The priest had come to join us, as he always did, although he’d left his saints at home.

  Jenna and I joined a group of our friends, and began to dance and sing. Jenna indulged herself in some mild but apparently unsatisfactory flirting. “They’re all so dull,” she confided to me. Hekkate’s son was yet to materialize.

  Then I nudged her arm. “Look, the skeleton.”

  On the other side of the fire, close to the trees of Tedder’s Wood, stood the tall boy we’d met at Kettle Farm. He was drinking from a cup and appeared to be eyeing up the revelers. “I think he’s a stranger,” Jenna said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Perhaps the answer to your prayer,” I said.

  “Let up on that!” Jenna snapped. “He must be a relative of the Kettles. Hekkate’s son would be different.”

  “Can’t we just pretend he is?”

  Jenna sighed. “Don’t be silly. Come on.” She took my arm and we went over to him.

  “Hello,” Jenna said boldly. “Are you with the Kettles? We met you at their farm earlier.”

  “Yes, I’m from that farm,” said the boy, somewhat unconvincingly, I thought.

  Close up, you could see his wide dark eyes and the fine shape of his lips, even though they were caked in white paint. He smelled like burning, like a hearth fire in winter. Once again, he bowed to us, “Lady of Hell, will you walk with me around the fire?”

  Jenna took his arm. “All right.”

  I was about to protest, “What about me?” then realized the folly of it. The time had come to let Jenna make her own entertainment. Somewhat downhearted, I began to walk back to our friends, but then another boy stepped into my path. It was the night for it, of course. He didn’t smell of burning, nor was he very tall, but his eyes were pale without being blue, and his teeth when he smiled looked sharp. “Why aren’t you in costume?” I said.

  “I am,” he replied. “I’m a spirit of the hedgerows.”

  “I see.” I noticed then, as if it had just appeared, he wore a wreath of berries and twigs on his head. But he felt comfortable to me, as if I’d known him as a kind friend for a while.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  I told him.

  He offered me a berry sprig, and his arm, which I took hold of, and suddenly Jenna was forgotten. Skipping along beside this unexpected prince of the night, I rejoined the party, and danced till my shoes were blood, as the saying goes.

  Eventually, the flames burned lower and people were yawning. Only the stalwart few were left to dance and sing till dawn. And dawn is a long way away at Hallow’s Eve. I’d drunk enough cider to be tipsy and was wondering if I wanted to kiss my prince or not. He was certainly handsome, a little older than me, and my friends were all clearly fascinated by him. His name, he’d told us, was Tom, and he was the son of a traveling woman, who was visiting several parties that night and would eventually come to fetch him. He had his arm about my shoulder now. I’d lost my crown somewhere and my hair hung loose. I felt beautiful and grown up, and didn’t want this magical night to end.

  Jenna’s mother came up to me. She was wearing her cloak, as if she was about to go home, and I saw that Jenna’s red cloak hung over her arm. “Where is the little strumpet?” Jenna’s mother asked, but not angrily. “I found this dropped on the ground near the woods, and it’s all muddy. You know where she’s gone off to and who with?”

  I said I really didn’t know, but imagined she was somewhere with her bony boy, perhaps being initiated into mysteries of life I didn’t yet care for.

  “Well, I can’t just leave her out here and let her come home alone, at the Kindlies know what hour,” said the mother. “Help me find her, children.”

  So we split up into pairs to search the fields and the nearby woods. I hoped I wouldn’t be the one to find her and her boy. I didn’t want to see what they were doing.

  Tom came with me and asked me what was going on. I told him what had happened at the farm and by the fire. “He said he’s with the Kettles,” I said.

  “Then you should have told her mother.”

  I spluttered a laugh. “No! I couldn’t!”

  Tom stopped me, put his hands upon my arms. “Remember what night it is.”

  “What do take me for? I know it’s a night of spirits. But I also know that boy wasn’t Hekkate’s son.”

  Tom blinked. “What?”

  I told him the rest, Jenna’s prayer.

  “She asked for that?” he said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You should be careful what you ask for on Hallow’s Eve. You know why you wear the costumes. People you meet in the smoke might not be who they say they are, and they can hear the words inside you.”

  The atmosphere between us had dampened, and I felt I’d offended Tom in some way, and now he saw me as silly and frivolous.

  “She’s only larking about,” I said, peevishly. “He wasn’t a spirit, or a goddess’s son. Simply a boy visiting the Kettles. It’s just a party.”

  Tom’s voice was sour and cold. “Which is, of course, why your priest leaves his collar on the altar this night, and Jack surveys the land.”

  “Tom, don’t be like this. We were having fun.”

  He paused, looked at me for some moments, then smiled. “Of course. Shall I kiss you now?”

  “I suppose so.”

  It was the kind of kiss you remember for the rest of your life, so you can tell of it in detail to your great grandchildren. Perhaps the memory has grown better than the reality, but to a young girl that night, in the dying smokes of a Hallow’s Eve bone fire, and the scents of the land strong in witcheries, it was the kiss of a king of Faery.

  When he had done with enchanting me, Tom held my face in his hands and said, “What do you want for the future, Emlie? Make a wish.”

  “I will, but surely I mustn’t speak it.”

  “You can tell me.”

  So I told him my heart’s desire, for my own land, and a long, low house, and a high-stepping mare, and three black-haired daughters who looked like witches.

  “It’s yours,” he said, and kissed me again. “Now, I must go, because my mother is calling.”

  “I can’t hear anything.”
/>   “Sometimes calls are from the heart, not the mouth,” he said.

  Then he ran away and left me alone among the trees. I wasn’t very pleased about that, but found my way back all right. No one had found Jenna, though.

  By this time, her family were panicking and there was talk of kidnapping and murder. I had to tell them what had happened at Kettle Farm and that we’d seen the boy by the fire. My mother slapped my head for not mentioning it earlier. The Kettles were approached and—to no one’s surprise—didn’t know who the bone boy was. All their relatives were accounted for.

  We searched all night and found nothing, but in the wan, mist-haunted morning, the Docken twins found Jenna by Bride’s Mere. She was wandering as if blind, her hair like a thatch and her costume torn to tatters. She was muttering a weird song, and didn’t seem aware of other people around her. Rob and Lily Docken brought her to her family. The priest was called from wading in the nearest pond, where he and other men had been dredging. He put his hands on Jenna’s head and said she’d been assailed, although, when she was later examined by the women, there were no marks to be seen upon her. She didn’t seem frightened or hurt, only dreaming. Her song, when we could understand it, was a song of love.

  As for the bone boy, he’d vanished, having no doubt had his fun, though why Jenna’s mind had gone away with him, I’ve no idea.

  In the copse beside the mere, Amy Proudtoe found a pile of human bones—old, brown ones, as if unearthed from a grave—with a skull on top, laughing as skulls always must. We knew then that that had been his costume. The priest confirmed it. Jenna had dressed too well. Her disguise hadn’t failed, it had succeeded, or so people said. The bony boy had taken her for one of his own. If he hadn’t, they’d have found her bones, her cold flesh, not his discarded costume.

  The women carried the old brown bones to the embers of our Hallow’s Eve fire and found its dying yet still-beating, blistering heart. Here, they placed the demon’s guise, and the priest said a few words he’d never speak on a Sunday in his pulpit.