Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

HALLOWEEN:

Magic, Mystery,

and the Macabre

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Other Anthologies Edited by

Paula Guran

Embraces

Best New Paranormal Romance

Best New Romantic Fantasy

Zombies: The Recent Dead

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

Vampires: The Recent Undead

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

Halloween

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

Brave New Love

Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

Extreme Zombies

Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

Season of Wonder

Future Games

Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

HALLOWEEN:

Magic, Mystery,

and the Macabre

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Edited by Paula Guran

O

PRIME BOOKS

HALLOWEEN: MAGIC, MYSTERY, AND THE MACABRE

Copyright © 2013 by Paula Guran.

Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

Cover art by Sandra Cunningham.

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,

and used here with their permission.

An extension of this copyright page can be found on page 383.

Prime Books

www.prime-books.com

Publisher’s Note:

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means,

mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the

permission of the copyright holder.

For more information, contact Prime Books:

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-60701-402-7

Again, for My Kids

May the magic of Halloween

always be part of your lives.

N Contents N

Introduction: New Boo • Paula Guran • 9

Thirteen • Stephen Graham Jones • 17

The Mummy's Heart • Norman Partridge • 31

Unternehmen Werwolf • Carrie Vaughn • 85

Lesser Fires • Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem • 99

Long Way Home: A Pine Deep Story • Jonathan Maberry • 109

Black Dog • Laird Barron • 137

The Halloween Men • Maria V. Snyder • 155

Pumpkin Head Escapes • Lawrence C. Connolly • 181

Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still • Caitlín R. Kiernan • 199

For the Removal of Unwanted Guests • A. C. Wise • 217

Angelic • Jay Caselberg • 237

Quadruple Whammy • Chelsea Quinn Yarbro • 251

We, The Fortunate Bereaved • Brian Hodge • 271

All Hallows in the High Hills • Brenda Cooper • 299

Trick or Treat • Nancy Kilpatrick • 317

From Dust • Laura Bickle • 333

All Souls Day • Barbara Roden • 351

And When You Called Us We Came To You • John Shirley • 367

About the Editor • 381

Copyright Acknowledgements • 383

r

Hark! Hark to the wind! ’Tis the night, they say,

When all souls come back from the far away—

The dead, forgotten this many a day!

—“Hallowe’en,” Virna Sheard

While researching and compiling the anthology
Halloween
, a treasury of reprinted stories published by Prime Books in 2011, I felt there was a need for some fresh tales for the old theme.
Hal oween:
Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre
is the result: eighteen new works of Halloween-inspired fiction. Happy Halloween!

Since I provided a lengthy essay about the holiday and its history as an introduction to
Halloween
, I won’t repeat myself here. (That introduction is available online here: www. prime-books.com/an-introduction-to-halloween.) But I will reiterate a few ideas pertinent to this volume.

Until fairly recently, we humans were much closer to nature and

our lives far more dependent on the annual cycle of the seasons.

For most of the northern hemisphere, autumn meant crops had to

be harvested and stored, livestock slaughtered or secured for winter months. Survival during the upcoming darker colder days of winter

must be considered and assured. But we couldn’t simply depend on

nature, hard work, or even a bountiful harvest when it came to such matters of life-and-death; the season begat celebrations, ceremonies, rituals, religious beliefs, and the working of magic.

[9]

[10] INTRODUCTION: NEW BOO

In Western European tradition—particularly that of the Celts—

fall also marked one of the two times of the year (the other was the beginning of summer) when the mundane world was supposedly the

closest to the “other world.” The friendly dead could commune and

visit with the living; less-than-friendly supernatural entities could cause harm. Beloved souls traveled abroad, but so did fairies, vengeful ghosts, and malign spirits. One did one’s best to appease all.

Christianity gave the English language the word
Hallowe’en

sometime during the sixteenth century: a Scottish contraction of
All
Hallows’ Eve
(evening)—the night before All Hallows’ Day, set by the Church on November 1. The “hallows” being the “hallowed”—the

holy—commemorated on that feast day, also known as All Saints

Day, The Feast of All Saints, and Solemnity of All Saints.

Long before the word was coined, however, Christianity’s efforts

to dampen pagan belief in the extramundane had to be augmented

to accommodate ideas that refused to disappear—concepts that are,

perhaps, ingrained in our psyches. (After all, one of the defining elements of any religion is a belief in supernatural beings and forces.

And most cultures develop mechanisms to help the living cope with

the mystery of death.)

The connection with the dead and the supernatural was too

powerful to be obliterated by merely honoring saints, so All Souls Day—also known as the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed—

was established on November 2. The living could remember and pray

for the souls of all the (Christian) dead; prayers offered for souls in Purgatory could alleviate some of their sufferings and help them reach heaven.

This was all well and good, but the older ways and beliefs persisted.

Folks still believed the dead and supernatural beings wandered on

All Hallows Eve; they were still—at least for that one night—part of the living world. Rituals and traditions were adapted . . . and continue to endure and evolve.

This—combined with other superstitions, bits of ancient and

newer religions, different regional undertakings to prepare for winter and harvest, a hodgepodge of ethnic heritages, diverse cultural

influences and practices, and various occult connections that seem PAULA GURAN [11]

always to be associated with the season—eventually became a

celebration of otherness when scary things are acceptable, disguise is encouraged, and everyone can become anyone or anything they

wish.

The season has always offered us an opportunity to consider

or confront the coldest, darkest, deepest, most primal of our fears: death. In a multitude of ways the basic meaning of Halloween and the symbols and practices that have become associated with it—pranks,

pumpkins, treats, bonfires, masks and costumes, the supernatural,

the frightening, the fun—are ways of dealing with or even mocking

that which comes to us all.

We might have faith or theory or hopes about what comes after

death—a 2013 HuffPost/YouGov poll showed forty-five percent of

American adults believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations; sixty-four percent believe there’s a life after death. But no one
real y
knows, do they?

Of course there’s always the chance that Halloween truly is a time when magic is possible, that forces beyond our ken are present, that the living and the dead can interact.

Magic, mystery, and the macabre
—elements that inspire thoughts of the fantastic, the enchanting, the supernatural, the horrific, that which is not explainable, and so much more involved with the holiday.

When soliciting stories for this anthology, I asked the writers keep that in mind. “Scary” was not necessarily the goal, but is a natural part of the mix. Nor did stories need to adhere to customs associated with the primarily North American Halloween as we know it today.

Other—real or imagined—holidays and rituals that coincide with

or parallel the Halloween season, or have connections to it could

also be themes. Sometimes the fact that it
is
Halloween became the linchpin of a story.

The remarkable results are contained within. These tales are

each a treat; no tricks involved, but there are certainly some very interesting twists. In Laird Barron’s “Black Dog,” a Halloween date in a whistle-stop town leads the protagonist far beyond its Catskills location. A small-town legend combines the sinister spells of a certain silver screen and Halloween in Stephen Graham Jones’s “Thirteen.”

[12] INTRODUCTION: NEW BOO

In Dunhaven, Brian Hodge’s isolated town of “We, the Fortunate

Bereaved,” Halloween is a school holiday and genuine dark magic

occurs on All Hallows Eve. Jonathan Maberry’s “Long Way Home”

takes us back to his mysterious town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania,

on Halloween as a soldier returns from war. Brenda Cooper also re-

visits a fictional site she previously introduced—a truly enchanting place on the other side that is more or less analogous to Laguna

Beach, California—in “All Hallows in the High Hills.”

The season’s thin veil between the living and the dead is gently

breached and a soul does some traveling in Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Lesser Fires.” “Angelic” by Jay Caselberg also brings a family together for an annual get-together, but one fraught with far more meaning than one relative is aware. A strange multi-generational

alliance in 1930s Kansas culminates with a Halloween harvest in

Laura Bickle’s “From Dust.”

A modern witch copes with trust issues and Beggars’ Night in

Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Trick or Treat.” Another witch manages some

challenges of contemporary life by moving into a man’s new home—

uninvited and accompanied by her cat—for the month leading up to

All Hallows Eve in “For the Removal of Unwanted Guests” by A. C.

Wise.

Both Norman Partridge and Carrie Vaughn take monsters whose

popular tropes began in 1930s movies and are now connected to

Halloween—the mummy and the werewolf—and add their own

imaginative components: human trauma and psychosis in Partridge’s

“The Mummy’s Heart,” and the World War II Nazi SS in Vaughn’s

“Unternehmen Werwolf.” “Pumpkin Head Escapes” by Lawrence

Connolly creates an entirely new boogeyman by combining theatrical and Halloween magic.

A visit to a haunted house unexpectedly takes the ghost hunters

to a cemetery and a strange encounter in Barbara Roden’s “All Souls Day.” A hospital’s emergency room staff deals with Saturday night, the full moon, Halloween, and the weird in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s

“Quadruple Whammy.”

In John Shirley’s “And When You Called Us We Came To You,”

a young Chinese factory worker making products for the huge

PAULA GURAN [13]

commercial U.S. Halloween market calls for aid from those who wait beyond the darkness, and they answer—thousands of miles away

amid American teenagers. “Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and

Still” by Caitlín R. Kiernan takes us to a far future, another planet.

and a strangely evolved festival with roots in our ancient celebration.

Maria V. Snyder’s “The Halloween Men” are enforcers in a strange

time and place far different than our own.

I’m sure that our All Hallows Eve brew will help make this a

happy Halloween for those who consume it. With some luck—and

maybe the casting of a magic spell or two—perhaps
Hal oween:

Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre
will become part of the season itself.

Paula Guran

Beltane 2013

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