Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (48 page)

She looked up at the scene before her: gravestones, bare trees,

muddy grass, and several people standing among the gravestones,

most with their heads bent as if in prayer. She took a deep breath, then pushed the button that would scroll back and show her the

picture she had just taken of the same scene.

And there it was. Gravestones, bare trees, muddy grass, all slightly overlit because of the flash. But—and it took her brain a few seconds to comprehend it—there were no people in the shot.

None at all.

She looked up again, blinking. There they were, plain as day.

Dressed in black, as befitted people come to mourn the dead, say

prayers for their souls.

Or dressed in black, as befitted people who had died and been laid
out for burial
.

She shook her head. This was crazy. As if to prove it she raised

her camera and fired off two quick shots, then looked down at the

screen.

No one.

This was wrong, all wrong. Richard had finally stopped taking

pictures and turned towards her, and she saw a look of concern

sweep over his face. He crossed to where she was standing and took her arm.

“Hey, are you all right? You look awful. Do you want to sit down

somewhere for a minute?”

[362] ALL SOULS DAY

She fought to keep herself under control. “Richard, could you do

something for me? Just turn and tell me how many people you see.”

He looked confused, and started to say something, but she cut

him off. “Please, Richard, just do it.”

He turned his head and she heard him counting under his breath.

“About three dozen, at least in the immediate vicinity. I don’t know how many others there might be. Why?”

“Could you just take a picture, trying to get as many of them in

the shot as you can?” she asked. Her voice sounded funny to her own ears, and she tried to keep it steady. “Just take the shot, and then look at it.”

“Yeah, okay.” He lifted the camera up to his face, fiddled with it for a moment, and then pressed the shutter. She heard the sharp
click
, then watched as he turned the camera in his hands and pushed a button.

“Jesus Christ.”

So it was true
. Debra didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not.

Relieved, on balance, until she looked up and realized how far it was back to the gate, and where their route would take them.

“What does it mean, Richard?” she asked. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, and they both knew he was lying. “But

I think we need to get out of here.” He took her arm. “Stay close,”

he said quietly, “and don’t look to the side. Keep your eyes on the ground in front of you.”

They began walking as quickly as they could, keeping to the

middle of the road. Even though she kept her eyes down, Debra

was conscious of the figures on either side of them. Was it her

imagination, or were there more of them? No one had passed them

save the one car, and a quick glance ahead, measuring the distance to the gate, showed there were still only two cars parked in front of the office.
They didn’t all come in three cars, and there was no one else on
the street
, she thought. Then,
No wonder the office is closed today. I bet
they couldn’t pay anyone
nearly
enough to work here today.

They were getting closer and closer to the entrance, and Debra

tried to work out how much farther they had to go. As she did so

she stumbled over a slight dip, and would have fallen if it weren’t for Richard’s firm hand on her arm, holding her up. She turned to thank BARBARA RODEN [363]

him, and her gaze fell on a man standing at the side of the road,

turned towards them. He was beside the marker they had stopped

at earlier, the one for Guiseppe Gagliano, and his heavy-set face and close-set eyes were expressionless as they passed him.

If Richard noticed, he said nothing, other than “Not much

further. We’re almost there.” Then they were past the office and at the gates and through them, out on to the sidewalk beyond.

It had started to rain at last, but neither of them noticed as they made their way back to the car. As she stood by the passenger door, waiting for Richard to unlock it, Debra glanced across the street

toward her grandparents’ old house. The woman she had spoken to

earlier was standing inside the front window, looking out at them, her face expressionless.

“I think all the pumpkins will stay out until midnight,” she heard Richard say. “Then it’ll be safe to get rid of them.”

She said nothing, just nodded her head. All the way past the long

expanse of cemetery to their right she kept her eyes fixed on the

road ahead of them, and did not breathe deeply again until they had turned onto Bloor Street and left the cemetery far behind them.

N

Barbara Roden
lives two hundred miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, in the heart of ranching country. Since 1994

she has been joint editor of
All Hallows
, the journal of the Ghost Story Society, and in that same year co-founded, with her husband

Christopher, Ash-Tree Press. Roden has edited or co-edited seven

anthologies. A World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher

who has, since 2004, been turning her hand to writing: her story

“Northwest Passage” was nominated for the World Fantasy, Stoker,

and IHG Awards. Some of her short fiction has been collected in

Northwest Passages
. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as
Apparitions, Blood and Other Cravings, Chilling Tales, Exotic Gothic,
Poe,
and
Subterranean Online.

a

AND WHEN YOU CALLED US

WE CAME TO YOU

V

John Shirley

It was a hot afternoon and her fingers were slick with sweat as she worked the shears along the edges of the glaring face. Today and

tomorrow, it was Chun’s job to cut the faces from the dangling sheet of rubber.

Some factories had machines that did all the trimming, her

cellmate Bao-Yu had told her.
“But here we are the machines.”

Bao-Yu was across the room from her touching up the masks

with spray paint. Chun wished they could talk while they worked,

but she wasn’t allowed to leave her station for hours yet.

They were in a Shen Yang labor camp, after all, not a regular

manufacturing site, though in truth conditions weren’t much better in an ordinary factory. People got paid a little more, and they worked perhaps twelve hours a day instead of the fifteen Chun and the others worked. And they weren’t likely to be beaten.

There was a hand-operated machine in the main work shed that

pressed out forms for the Halloween masks, before they came here to Chun and Bao-Yu and the other girls; here the masks were trimmed,

and connected to the straps that held them on the wearer’s head.

The masks, it was said, were for the American custom of Halloween, and sometimes they reminded Chun a little of the images displayed

[367]

[368] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, to placate the lost ghosts

of ancestors. But the American Halloween seemed to Chun to be

something else entirely. This mask, intended for export to America, didn’t have the plaintive, pitiful look of a hungry ghost. This monster’s face was angry, cruel, wild, and absurd all at once. It was a furred man, partly wolf, its mouth agape to show fangs, its pointed ears tufted, the deep lines of its face suggesting it was straining with all its will to leap into the real world and kill whatever stood in its way.

She would have to trim more than a thousand of these today.

Yesterday it had been a green-faced demon with bright red lips; the day before she’d assembled the plastic bones of dancing, mockingly hateful skeletons with glowing red eyes.

Today she seemed to feel the three years she’d been imprisoned

here, and the three more years awaiting her, like crushing weights.

Her arms ached; it was mid-afternoon, a long time till the twenty-

minute dinner break. Her mouth was dry. The Halloween masks

were not just made of rubber, there were other chemicals in them

too, and working around them for five days made her skin red, her

fingers swollen. The painting the others were doing in the same

poorly ventilated room made her eyes burn; she coughed sometimes

and it was often hard to catch her breath.

Sometimes when she was feeling tired and sick it seemed to her

that the Halloween masks sensed her vulnerability. Then, from the

corners of her eyes, she could catch them looking directly at her, waiting for her weakness to increase. As if they were waiting for the right moment when they would snap their jaws at her . . .

The wearier Chun grew, the sharper the smell of rubber and

chemicals grew, till she thought she might throw up. But last time she’d vomited on the job the supervisor had shouted at her, slapped the back of her head and said to stop malingering. If she slowed

down her work too much, or went to the bathroom more than once

a shift, he would jab her in the belly with his baton.

Did the people across the sea know how these masks were made?

Did they know about the labor camps, and the factories where other such decorations were made? Where those strange horrible bearded

“Christmas” figures were sewn together, with the blow-up man in

JOHN SHIRLEY [369]

the white and red suit and black boots: the “Santa” who lived inside a transparent plastic globe, seeming to delight in a perpetual blizzard?

Or the eyeless reindeer made of blinking lights? Did the Americans know about the people who worked so long, worked until they

sickened, for so little, making these bizarre trinkets?

Chun reached up with her clippers to trim another face free of

the sheet, feeling her joints grinding with the motion. She snipped it out and laid the limp, bestial face on the worktable, face down, so that its inverted inner face watched her. She started to attach the flexible straps . . .

And then everything darkened, shrank to a murky picture at the

end of a tunnel. She felt herself swaying, close to falling. She heard the supervisor shouting at her, telling her to stop pretending or he would get the electric shocker and really wake her up and . . .

She tried to focus her eyes. She was rushing down the tunnel,

toward the mask on the table; toward its wide-open black mouth.

She didn’t really believe in the old ancestral worship her

grandfather had practiced. But she didn’t believe in the People’s

Republic, either. She had no one but her grandfather to call upon for help. No one but grandfather, and the ancestors, the lonely ghosts who looked for a chance to help so they would be set free from this coarse world . . .

So she cried out to them.

Use your strength, grandmothers, grandfathers—your strength is
great! Use your strength to defend me!

Flying through whirling darkness, Chun called with all her soul,

all the energy of her anger and all her frustration. She called to those who wait beyond the darkness . . .

The tunnel ended. She was back in the shed, still standing, staring at the face on the table.

Its mouth was moving. It was speaking to her . . .

“You have been heard. For many years they have cal ed to us,

without knowing it. Now your call has lifted their voices, so that we
hear them clearly; it has lifted their masks of summoning. Oh how they
tantalized us! Their icons cried out to us, but we could not respond. It
was never quite enough. Something more was needed.

[370] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

“But now we answer. You have given us what was needed. And

now we will respond. You have cal ed us and we will come to you.”

The Ouija board was a big-ass fail. Just a tired old disappointment.

Maura got annoyed when Julie tried to force the planchet to form

messages from her ex-boyfriend who wasn’t even dead. Apart from

that zoggy bullshit nothing happened with the Ouija board.

“Ohhhh well, let’s do shots,” Gwen said, but that was pretty much

her answer for any boredom challenge.

They were in the basement of Maura’s house, with the lights out

and candles lit. All three of them in their lame costumes, sitting with big ol’ Gwen, the hefty goth girl—not really fat, exactly, just
big
, with the bulk of a linebacker. And little Julie, a Filipina girl who was almost small enough to be a midget.

Cliff had said, “You could fit two Julies in a Gwen, you totally

should, and have two friends in one, and save on ticket prices and shit.” Then he’d made that donkey sound he called laughing.