Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (36 page)

scent that was entirely male, entirely Drew. And he’d adored getting it back, once it smelled of her.

Just a shirt, but still, it was what love would feel like if you could wear an emotion. She couldn’t imagine anything more appropriate

to leave as his lure.

And Cody? She watched from the doorway of his room before he

knew she was there, and saw that he’d narrowed his choices to only enough to cover his bed. It was progress. Toys and books and items of clothing and things dragged in from the yard, and it made her

sad in a way she’d never been before to realize that she really had no idea what many of these things even meant to Cody in relationship

to Drew. Six years old and already he lived half the time in a world of secrets, and it was only going to get worse from here.

BRIAN HODGE [273]

“What’s it going to be, champ?” she asked.

“This,” he said, after one final deliberation that twisted him into knots, then he turned around holding his Pinewood Derby car. “We

built this. We built it together. This should be right . . . right?”

One of the last great projects of the previous winter. Cody hadn’t even been eligible for Cub Scouts yet, much less the race. He’d just wanted the practice, to be ready for the day he was. As he had wanted nothing else, he’d wanted to build that car. She never would’ve guessed how much pride and joy that a $3.99 block of wood and four wheels

could bring a kindergartner and a grown man.

“It’s perfect,” Bailey said. “Now get your jacket and let’s get

going.”

Dunhaven was the only town she’d ever heard of where Halloween

was a school holiday, but then Dunhaven wasn’t like other towns.

It was the only place she knew where the night brought more than

just trickery and mischief. In Dunhaven, genuine magic, dark magic, pierced the veil on All Hallows Eve.

This would come in its own time. For now, morning was bright

with the golden light of a cool sun, and the streets were uncommonly busy. Everybody had business on a day like this. Along the seven-block walk from home, she saw neighbors and friends, fellow

teachers from the high school, students past and students present, as well as people in from the countryside that she might not see again until next year.

Everyone had business with the dead today, or believed they

did.

And she couldn’t help but wonder: Who among them would die

in the year to come, and who would be hoping to call them forth

next October?

The town square was less crowded than she might have guessed,

green and crisscrossed with sidewalks that converged at the fountain in the middle, and nearly empty. More sunflowers than people, more shrubs than visitors, vibrant with the yellow of goldenrod and beds of sedum whose close-packed blossoms looked like bright red slashes in the earth.

[274] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

One presence, at least, was a permanent fixture, and if it was

an illusion of life now, no more animated than one of the benches

flanking the walkways, night would change everything. Darkness

would remind people why they tended not to idle about while this

thing hung waiting for a soul.

It was just clothing and straw, a stuffed burlap bag for a head with buttons for eyes and stitching for a mouth and a broad-brimmed hat to hold the horsetail hair in place. Affixed to a rough-hewn field-cross in the heart of town and looking as if it had gotten lost from the corn, drawing stares instead of frightening crows . . . yet even now, it felt possible to offend it.

She held Cody’s hand tighter as they approached. Usually he

squirmed and pulled away when she tried that. Not today.

It seemed to wait for them, the slumped head looking down as

they neared. Too light to hang there sagging like the agonized Christ of a crucifix, its pose looked casual, its weathered denim arms draped wide over the crossbar like someone stretching with a yawn across

the backrest of a bench.

On the bottle-green grass, before the towering fencepost that

pierced the earth, they set down their summonses: the well-worn

flannel shirt and the beloved Pinewood car. These joined other items left by other hands: a book, undoubtedly the favorite of someone’s lifetime, and a baseball glove, and a folio of sheet music, and a Purple Heart medal from some war. The most unusual was a cake that looked not just frosted but frosty, as though until some time around dawn it had spent months in a freezer, never sliced and eaten, someone’s happy occasion turning tragic before the plates and forks came out.

There were so many little stories here, each of them sad in its

own way.

She would have to check later, though, to make sure that the shirt and car were still here. There was a strategy to this. Put your offering out too soon, and you were only prolonging temptation, increasing

the odds that it might disappear. This day did not always bring out the best in people. Lonely people, bereaved people, who wouldn’t

mind sabotaging their neighbor’s chance at a reunion if it meant

improving their own.

BRIAN HODGE [275]

Put your offering out too late, though, and . . . well, nobody could say for sure when was too late, when these pieces of lives left behind started being
noticed
.

By the same token, nobody could say with any certainty when

this custom had even started, or how. The oldest families in town—

the Ralstons and the Goslings, the Chennowics and Harringtons—

all claimed some propriety in the matter, but none of their stories matched up very well with any of the others, so much so that blows had been struck over it in the past . . . at least one, ironically, fatal.

What was beyond denying, though, was that it had been going

on for at least 162 years, maybe longer, from a time when the land they stood on was the town commons, bordering a cornfield whose

earliest ownership would be forever disputed. The records had been lost well before the arrival of the twentieth century, in a fire that had leveled the county clerk’s office.

Was it the land itself? Or something done
on
or
to
the land to forever change the spirit of the place? Was it something bound up

in the people, their heritages and bloodlines, that would’ve followed them anywhere if they’d packed up the whole of Dunhaven and

moved the town someplace else? The residents of both the town and

the surrounding county, out to a distance of at least eighteen miles, had benefited from it, if
benefit
was really the proper word for such a thing, and there were many who argued that it wasn’t. That it was not the blessing people thought it to be.

Which never seemed to discourage anybody from hoping to be

the one whose call was answered.

The truth came down to this: Deeply ancient custom held that,

on Halloween night, the cusp between summer and winter, the veil

between the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin, so thin that spirits might cross over to wander for a night. Another custom—

perhaps related, perhaps not, and not nearly so ancient as the other but old enough—held that scarecrows came alive on Halloween

night. Dunhaven was the only place in which Bailey had ever heard

of it actually happening . . . although for all she or anyone else knew, Dunhaven was the place where this legend had been born.

One night, one scarecrow, and the returned soul of one person

[276] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

who had died during the past year. Just one. Never none, never two or more, only the one.

The rite had inspired a deep legacy of secrecy. It had never

been a thing to share with the outside world, beyond the town

and surrounding farmland. Here, you grew up understanding the

importance of silence even before you fully understood what it was you weren’t to talk about with anyone from farther off.

In the early decades, when people journeyed by horse, and

most not very far, Dunhaven had been sufficiently remote that the

secret was easy enough to keep. But time brought paved roads and

the vehicles that traveled them, so stronger measures were needed.

Roads could be closed. Innkeepers could be persuaded to turn

away potential lodgers. Lingering strangers could be made to feel

unwelcome. For every threat, there was an answer.

Still, peoples’ tongues were the first and last lines of defense.

Most children grew up indoctrinated with tales of bogeymen who

punished those who let secrets slip. By the time they were old enough to know better, they’d already seen enough each Halloween to fear

that bogeymen might not necessarily be a myth. And as adults, the

last thing they wanted was a tide of incomers desperately seeking

assurance of life after death, driving up the property tax base in the process.

Whatever few stray whispers did manage to escape seemed to

suffocate in the skepticism of the modern world, and so the sacrament remained theirs alone. It had been going on for so long they took for granted it always would . . . even though people never liked to dwell on how which soul came through got decided on the other side. One

preferred to believe in the concept of rest and peace, not in cutthroat competitions to seize the last second chance you might have to say goodbye.

Trinkets, things that had special meaning, seemed to sweeten the

odds.

After Bailey and Cody set theirs down, they stepped back, as she

took another look up at the face gazing blindly down at them, the

potential of personality trying to crawl past the burlap and buttons.

“What will you say to him, if it’s Daddy?” she whispered.

BRIAN HODGE [277]

Cody thought for a long time. “If he’ll take me with him.”

Just a few simple words, worse than a dagger in the heart. Her

first impulse was to tell him,
command
him, to never say such a thing.

Not the best lesson to teach, that he had to censor himself around her. Hadn’t she just been ruing, not half an hour ago, the fact that he already had secrets?

“Wouldn’t you miss me?” she said instead. “I’d miss you. I’d miss

you with all my heart.”
Every minute of every day
, she almost said, but didn’t want to oversell. It wasn’t Cody’s kind of talk. “I’d miss all the fun stuff we do.”

He still didn’t seem to grasp what the big deal was. Just looked

at the scarecrow as if it were his escape clause, the answer to all the problems. “Then I’d come back next year.”

She stiffened, thought she saw where this was going.

“Let’s get you back home and into your costume,” she said.

“Nobody wants to be late for a party.”

In Dunhaven, Halloween ran according to a different schedule.

As most of the world had come to recognize it, Halloween was a

holiday for children, and a tacky one at that, all cheap scares and greed. There could be no abolishing this part of it—they were realists here—but they could at least see to it that the childish side of the day was over and done with before sunset, before things turned serious, when even the grownups took pause. Parties in the morning, trick-or-treating in the afternoon. It helped if the day’s sky was grim, and after a bright sunrise, the clouds were starting to cooperate.

Once Cody was suited up, she took him to the gathering in the

basement at St. Aidan’s Episcopal and turned him loose into the

clamor of his classmates and friends. She doubled-checked the time the party was scheduled to end, and then the next three hours were hers.

Hardly anyplace in town was more than ten minutes from

anyplace else, but still, Troy’s house seemed another world away. He met her at the door, and she did her best to leave her guilt about this back in that other world. It would always be waiting when she returned.

[278] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

Five minutes later, she wasn’t really thinking about anything at

all.

She pulled and she pushed, rode and was ridden, and it was still

easy to tell herself that none of this meant anything. It was just an itch that needed scratching, one she couldn’t reach on her own. That was all. The first time, of all the sorry, sad clichés, had been alcohol-related, on a night six weeks ago when Cody had been on a sleepover, and in a purely unforeseen development, she’d ended up doing the

same.

After Drew’s funeral, she’d promised herself, and him, if he was

listening, that she would wait a year, at an absolute minimum, before she’d even
think
of dating again . . . and here she had barely made it six months before skipping the pretense of dating altogether. She’d awakened that next dawn wondering how it had happened, and

vowing that it wouldn’t happen again . . . but it was too late. The groove had been greased, so to speak. The second time was even

easier to agree to, sober, than the first had been after wine.

Troy was nothing like Drew at all, and perhaps that was what

made this easier. Where Drew had been beefy, Troy was lean and

hard. Where Drew had towered, Troy was compact. Where Drew’s

hair was black, Troy was fair all over. While Drew had been quick

to laugh, Troy found the humor in subtler things. Whereas Drew

had loved living in the heart of town, Troy liked it out here on the periphery, in a renovated one-time farmhouse that hadn’t been

attached to a farm for a generation, after Dunhaven had grown out

to meet it.

To look at them, at least, she and Troy matched up much more

readily than she and Drew ever had. But it would never go further

than this. She couldn’t imagine Troy as a father, much less a stepfather.

And that, she supposed, was the safety valve here.

“Tell me the truth, would you,” he said, once it was all over, one more time, and they were free to stare at the ceiling. “How are you hoping it goes tonight? Are you
real y
hoping he comes through?”