Not On My Patch: a Young Wizards Hallowe'en Story (3 page)

After the first few houses, where everyone collected the usual little bags or miniature candy bars, they came to the McLoughlins’ house up the street. There were no lights in the windows, no light on over the front steps. “Nobody home,” Ronan said.

“No,” Nita said, “they’re never ‘home’. They don’t do Halloween.”

“Seems like other people have opinions about that, ” Ronan said as they walked past the house. He was noting the enthusiastic TP-ing of the big sycamore tree in the McLoughlins’ front yard.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “And it’s gonna make a big mess all over their lawn. I think I might stop by real early tomorrow morning and see if I can get all that to sort of melt away…”

“What, just vanish it?” Ronan said.

“Nothing so obvious. But the paper’s made to biodegrade pretty quickly, so it’s just a matter of convincing it to do it all in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks…”

They stopped at another house and collected a couple of taffy apples and a caramel pop each, then headed off again, idly discussing the best ways to use wizardry to disguise the artificially accelerated breakdown of toilet tissue. As they got down toward the end of the street where Nita’s road crossed another one and more trick-or-treaters were visible, she caught Kit giving some of the kids down the road a dissatisfied look. “What?” she said.

“I’m starting to feel like a walking wardrobe malfunction.”

“Why?” Nita said. “You look great. You heard the people at the last house, they thought you were something out of the movies! And anyway, we haven’t seen that many other pirates.”

Kit snickered. “It’s not that,” he said. “I mean, look at them…” He gestured down the cross street at some of the other trick-or-treaters making the rounds, among whom there were a lot of long overrobes, pointy hats, souped-up broomsticks, and a positive superfluity of wands. “Half the planet’s running around dressed as wizards.”

Ronan grinned one of those lazy superior grins he specialized in. “One day of the year, sure we can cut them some slack,” he said. “Since
we
dress as wizards the other three hundred and sixty-four…”

As they continued to work the street, the four of them amused themselves for a while by counting the wizard costumes. But there were also a fair number of the usual glow-in-the-dark skeletons and bedsheet ghosts, not to mention Supermen and Batmen and winged fairies of various types, often shepherded by watchful parents or older brothers and sisters. And there were also other forms of supervision, both more annoying and less green.

Cars were very slowly driving up and down the street in the slowly growing dusk, stopping, pausing, driving on again. “What are they doing?” Ronan muttered.

“Curb-crawling,” Kit said, his disdain only thinly veiled. They paused on the sidewalk to watch as yet another overprotective parent in an SUV pulled up into the vacant street space between a couple of the neighbors’ driveways, let a batch of costumed kids out, waited until they’d rung the nearest houses’ doorbells and collected the expected booty, and then— once they’d all piled back into the station wagon again— drove them a few doors further down to repeat the process.

“What the feck happens when these kids grow up?” Ronan said under his breath, disbelieving. “Will they be able to wipe themselves, you think?”

“No telling,” Dairine muttered. “Never mind them. Here’s the Kerricks’ place, they love Hallowe’en and they always give out a ton of stuff…”

They stopped there, had their costumes duly admired by the Kerricks, were given truly astonishing amounts of candy and fruit, and headed on down the street again. It was an old familiar route for Nita: down East Clinton to the cross street, Park Avenue; work up and down Park for about a quarter mile in each direction, then retrace your steps to East Clinton and hit all the houses up the length of it to Nassau Road. Then head for home, because by the time you got near there, you’d be having trouble carrying your candy bag, it’d be so heavy. If you got your second wind, you might then go out and do another run up some of the nearby side streets.
Might as well enjoy this first run,
though,
Nita thought.
Because who knows if we’ll feel like a second? Or for that matter, whether this might be the last time we do this. We may really be getting a little old for this kind of thing…

She sighed. “How’re you holding up?” she said to the pumpkin.

I’m all right. This is interesting. There’s a lot to see…

“I can’t just keep calling you ‘hey you’,” Nita said. “What should I call you?”

I don’t know. I never gave it any thought before today…

“Well, you’re a Jack-O-Lantern now… how would Jackie be?”

Behind her, Dairine snickered. “Sooooo predictable…”

Nita rolled her eyes and ignored her. The pumpkin said,
That’s a nice name. Jackie…

“Jackie it is,” Nita said.

Kit had been listening to this, and he was smiling a little behind the crooked mustache: but the smile had a slightly concerned quality to it.
You know,
he said privately to Nita,
this could be a problem.

What?

You’ve given it a nickname,
he said.
Sometimes when we’ve done that in the past… it hasn’t worked out all that well for whatever wore the nickname. Fred… Ed…

Nita gave him a look, not entirely sure if he was teasing her.
You’re having a sugar crash already,
she said.
Have one of those Three Musketeers we just got and see if your mood improves.

He started rooting around obligingly enough in his candy bag, and said nothing further. But there was something about the way Kit didn’t immediately come back with an argument or a smart remark that unsettled Nita slightly.
Even if that’s true,
she said after a moment,
I’m betting we could change the odds a little if we worked at it.

“Here’s one,” Kit said, and came up with a Three Musketeers. “Want half?”

Nita accepted it happily enough, but she found herself wondering briefly about the nickname issue: it wasn’t something she’d ever considered before.
I need to think about this a little and see if he’s got a point…
And a few seconds later she found herself looking through her own bag for another of those candy bars. They were kind of habit-forming

They hit another fourteen or fifteen houses, and the bags began to fill, and the dusk settled over everything, the streetlights flickering on one by one. Jackie was taking it all in, though in most cases not having any real idea of what was going on.
What do you do with all this stuff?
he said.

“We eat it,” Nita said.

Nutrients?

“Well, sort of,” Nita said. She wasn’t sure she was equipped at the moment to explain the concept of junk food to a pumpkin.

That’s all right, then,
Jackie said.
That’s pretty much what we do, really. Acquire nutrients.
He sounded as if the prospect, or the memory, brought him a lot of pleasure.

Nita caught a quick faint glimpse of his memory. “Sun and water,” she said. “You want all you can get of those…”

That’s right. Sun and water:
you s
oak ‘em up, all you can. And nutrients: pull in everything you can. Time’s short. All you get is one season in the sun. We’re hungry all the time. So we soak it all up and get big. That makes the seeds inside happy. So when we finally fall off the vine and break down, there’s plenty for the birds and animals to eat. And the more of me there is, the more of the seeds get away to grow.

“So that’s it for you?” Nita said. “Sprout fast. Get as big as you can. Die fat and juicy.”

You got it. That’s what it’s all about.

The generally rounded and enclosing imagery Nita kept getting from the pumpkin in these exchanges was making her start to wonder if “Jackie” actually ought to be short for “Jacqueline.” But there was always a danger in trying to introduce human gender ideas to a plant, so Nita kept her surmises on this count to herself. What was also intriguing her, though, was a slight unaccountable tang of sadness in Jackie’s thought. “What’s the matter?” Nita said, pausing at the foot of one house’s front walk as the others went up to ring the doorbell.

Well, you know, I didn’t get… all that big
.

Nita grunted as she shifted Jackie over to her other arm. “Sorry, but I have to disagree. Even without your insides, you weigh a ton.”

You’re just saying that to make me feel good.

She burst out laughing, both at herself and at the wistful tone. But Jackie took no notice.
You get a little unhappy,
it said,
when almost everybody else gets picked and you don’t. If the sun hit one side of you more than the other while you were growing… if you came out lopsided, or squashed in… the people just walk past you and leave you there…

Nita sighed, having too many memories as it was of those humiliating lineups before gym-class softball games, where each side fights to keep from having to choose you. These days she’d pretty much stopped caring about it. She’d gradually realized that the other kids’ opinions of her weren’t going to change no matter how well or badly she played, and she had a lot of better things to use wizardry for than becoming a heavy hitter. But the embarrassment and pain had been real enough until she found her way through them. “Look,” she said, “it really doesn’t matter. It’s what’s inside that counts, even if it sounds like a cliché to say it. I mean, clichés usually have some truth attached: that’s how they get to be clichés to begin with.”

I suppose you’re right…

The others came down the walk, and Kit handed Nita a toffee apple. “It’s good and dark now,” he said. “You think we should head for Tom and Carl’s?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Nita said.

*

It was a four or five blocks’ walk from the point they’d reached near Nassau Road. Above the dryly rustling leaves on the trees, the stars were getting bright; Jupiter was well risen and showed coolly white in the northeastern sky. They turned the corner out of East Clinton onto Rose Avenue and headed down through the dark, seeing ahead of them the occasional glimmer of orange-shaded flashlights or glow-in-the-dark costumes or plastic-bladed lightsabers, the faint flicker of “ghosts” flapping by under the streetlights. “Remember,” Nita said, “the first time we looked Tom up in the manual? And we saw his address and said ‘Oh my god no, it’s that crazy guy, who knows what goes on in that place with the big hedge…’”

“We were so freaked,” Kit said, and laughed at the memory. But hard on the heels of the laughter came a long, high, spooky howl from down the road: a wolflike sound boosted by a very effective sound system.

“Imagine if we’d heard that…” Nita said, laughing too. “They’re rolling! Let’s see what kind of crowd they’ve got.”

They came to the yard with the tall hedges that had unnerved Nita so long ago. Now the hedge was festooned with fake cobwebs, and from inside it, little glinting eyes in batches of eight looked out creepily at passersby. A lot of costumed kids and escorting parents were heading in and out of the open gate that led through the single gap in the hedge. As the four wizards went through the gate and up the walk toward the front door of the house, Nita suddenly caught a glimpse of a couple of black cats off to one side, one a little slimmer and more angular than the other, their eyes glinting respectively golden and brassy in the dimness. “Guys, look—!”

“I see them,” Ronan said, and headed across the grass to where the cats were watching the proceedings from near the shrubbery closest to the house. “Hey, Rhiow! What’s shakin’?”

The little black cat put her whiskers forward at them all. “Things around here, I’d say! But you haven’t met my partner, have you, cousins? Hwaith, this is Hrronan— Khit and Hnita— Dhairine—”

Introductions were made all around. “What brings you two out this way?” Kit said.

“Well, you know how people get about black cats this time of year,” Rhiow said, and sat down and yawned. “Either you have to stay sidled for a few days to keep from attracting attention to black cats in general and giving some
ehhif
bad ideas…”

“Or you have to stay in,” Hwaith said, stretching fore and aft and sitting down next to her.
“So
boring. So we got out of town. Urruah and the twins are handling the Grand Central gates for the evening…”

“And when Tom and Carl told us what they were up to this year, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll come by and add some atmosphere,’” Rhiow said. “Controlled circumstances, after all. We go where we’re needed…”

“You guys don’t fool me,” Kit said. “You just have fun being someplace where wizards are doing magic out in the open for one night in the year.”

“Well, who wouldn’t?” Hwaith said. “Bad enough that so much of this planet has to be
sevarfrith.
When one of the cultures has a night when you can come out and sing on the rooftops a little, interventionally speaking… who’d miss that?” He chuckled. “Anyway, they’ve really knocked themselves out— you ought to go take the tour.” He looked over his shoulder toward the front windows, which were all curtained with something that let an eerie blue light shine through.

“Will do,” Kit said as the two cats vanished back toward the house. The four wizards made their way back up to the walk again and headed for the door and the steps up to the porch.

“Do my ears deceive me?” said a voice from inside the door, which had what appeared to be some kind of alien skeleton nailed up spread-eagled on it. Out of the door came lurching someone in classic Frankenstein’s Monster makeup of the Boris Karloff vintage, every detail complete right down to the giant heavy shoes, the jacket with the too-short sleeves, and the bolts in the neck. But the face under the makeup was Tom Swale’s, and Nita couldn’t stop herself from laughing at the sight of one of their Advisory Wizards in something so different from his usual jeans and polos. “It
is
you guys! Didn’t know if we were going to see you tonight.”

“How could we miss this!” Kit said.

“Well, just glad you could take time out of your busy schedules,” said another voice from behind Tom: and there was the normally very buttoned-down Carl Romeo in a frayed and apparently bloodstained business suit that had seen far better days, and some of the most realistic ghoul makeup that Nita had ever seen. Carl leaned out the door and peered at the sagging candy bags. “You folks have plainly been making out like bandits. Come on in, release your burdens for a while and have a look around.”