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.”
They all filed in, pausing at a table by the front door, where visitors were exchanging admission tickets and getting their hands stamped. Behind the table sat a gorgeously witchy-looking woman wearing a slinky glittering deep-purple dress with black lace appliqued over it in a spiderweb pattern, and a matching long veil or mantilla in the same spiderweb lace.
“You haven’t met this lady,” Tom said. “This is a cousin of ours from out west. Helen Walks Softly: Kit Rodriguez, Nita Callahan. And from a little further out of town, Ronan Nolan…”
Hands were shaken and everyone quietly said dai stihó, for there were nonwizards wandering around the ground floor, looking at static displays of scary stuff. “Your eyes are seriously cool,” Kit said in complete admiration. They were those of some big cat, a lion maybe, large and golden. “Contacts?”
Rhiow and Hwaith burst out laughing. “Not exactly,” Helen said. “We can discuss technique later—”
“What is with your earrings??” Nita said. She leaned close and peered at one of them, a fuzzy bobbly looking thing hanging from Helen’s earlobe.
The earring promptly opened two small eyes, flicked out two small ears, and unfolded two perfect, delicate, fingery wings. Nita jumped in surprise, and then burst out laughing while the tiny bat gazed at her upside down.
“That’s just sick,” Ronan said in complete admiration. “Most people keep their bats inside their belfries…”
“We have these tiny little ones up in the mountains in California,” Helen said. “Makal, my people call them. We’ve got caves full of them on my tribal band’s lands: sometimes in the evenings they follow me around when I’m up there doing shaman work. And if they feel like hanging out with me afterwards…” She chuckled. “On a night like tonight, why would I argue?”
“Hey there cousins,” Nita said, tickling one of them behind the ear. It peeped at her and closed the wings up; a second later so did its counterpart hanging from Helen’s other ear.
“So step upstairs and have a look around,” Tom said. “We only get a chance to do this once every six years or so, and Carl’s really pulled out the stops this time. Leave your stuff behind the table: Helen’ll take care of it for you.” He eyed Nita’s pumpkin with interest. “Something new in the way of accessories? You can leave that too if you like…”
“No,” Nita said, ?
??I’ll hang onto him.”
Tom and Carl both raised their eyebrows at the pronoun, but neither commented. “Right this way, then,” Carl said. “Try not to scream more loudly than our other guests…”
The next half hour or so was a tour de force of flapping giant bat-shapes, half-seen clammy things with too many eyes that leapt at you from closets or dropped on you from the ceilings, sudden vistas of bottomless pits where no such pits were possible, claws that grabbed, beastly teeth that snapped just in front of your nose out of the darkness, webs that brushed across your face, hissing black demon cats with glaring eyes and fur that stood on end and sizzled with sparks, tentacles that suckered onto you and creepily clung, and dreadful wet moldy smells that you didn’t want to know the source of. Nita screamed as often and loudly as any of the others— even Ronan got caught off balance this way several times— and knowing that clever wizardries were behind about half these effects, and friendly alien wizards were behind the other half, didn’t help at the time. It was all about staging, at which Tom’s script work made him expert. Your own too-suggestible mind, in tune with the archetypes associated with the horror genre and many old myths, did the rest. Nita finished the tour exhilarated but surprisingly wrung out; and while Ronan and Kit went through it again, and Dairine paused downstairs to have a drink of some ominously bubbling and smoking fruit punch, Nita took Jackie out into the relative peace and quiet of the back garden.
She sat down on the edge of the koi pond and got her breath back, listening to more screams floating down from the upstairs of the house, and to the sound of her pulse starting to slow down at last. After a little while a tall shape came out the back door and made its way over to her through the shadows. “So tell me,” Carl said, “how’s it look?”
“Really great,” Nita said. “I didn’t know you two were so into this.”
“Well, why not?” Carl said. “If you spend all the rest of the year fighting the serious Powers of Eeeeevil, then sometimes you just want to spend a little time enjoying the harmless kind of spooky stuff. Keeping the old traditions alive…while making it plain that fewer and fewer of the old ploys the Lone Power used have so much fun scaring us with will work any more: not for anything serious. Sure, it comes up with new ones all the time…”
“But laughing at the old ones still gets under Its skin.”
“Way under,” Carl said, “since it really, really hates not being taken seriously…” He looked back at the house. “But who doesn’t like being safely scared, occasionally? Pleasantly scared, by something that can’t really hurt you?” He grinned as an eldritch howl came floating out one of the upstairs windows, accompanied by the shrieks and then the laughter of small children. “It starts getting you used to fear… so when you come up against something really scary, you can cope a little better.”
“Like being vaccinated,” Nita said. “The weakened bugs make you immune…”
“A useful metaphor,” Carl said, over more of the upstairs screaming. He grinned in the dark. “I should get back in there: some of those spells have to be reset after they fire a few times.” He patted Nita on the shoulder, vanished into the dark again.
Nita sat there for a few moments, listening to the noises from inside the house, and then glanced over at Jackie. “You’ve been quiet…” Nita said under her breath to the pumpkin.
It took a moment before the answer came back. Something’s wrong, the pumpkin said.
Nita started to get concerned. Oh God, I did something wrong and the cutting’s affecting it now after all…! “Are you all right? Do you want to go back home?”
Back home, it said, yes. But not your place. My home. Where I grew. Something’s wrong…
Her pulse had been starting to slow down, but now it started to pick up again, and she wasn’t even clear why. After a few minutes, when Kit wandered out into the garden looking for him, Nita’s pulse was beating even faster. “We have to go,” she said.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Jackie needs to go back to the pick-your-own place,” Nita said. “Something’s wrong there, he says.”
“Wrong?” Kit bent down and put a hand on the pumpkin. “What is it, guy?”
I don’t know. Just… something’s wrong. And getting wronger.
It was sounding more agitated by the second. Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Don’t ask me what’s going on,” Nita said. “Maybe a pumpkin can start getting sensitive to things if it spends all evening hanging out with wizards? But he was connected to that ground for a long time… he’s in a position to know if something’s wrong there. And considering the day he’s had, I think we should humor him a little, don’t you?”
“Can’t argue with you there. ”
“Where’s Ronan?” Nita said.
“He’s inside having some of that punch,” Kit said. He wiped his forehead, looking a little surprised at the sweat there. As if on cue, his mustache promptly fell off. Kit started fishing around in his pockets for the spirit gum again, and then muttered something rude under his breath and stuck it back on again, even though it would only go on crookedly now.
“Done with the punch,” said a voice out of the dark. “Dairine’s right behind me. I could smell you two worrying out here. What’s up?”
“Jackie wants to go back to where he was picked,” Kit said. “There’s some kind of trouble there.”
Nita had pulled her manual out of the little belt pouch where it hung on this costume, across from the chased sheath for her rowan wand. She paged through it hurriedly to the mapping section, tapped on it until it brought up an image of the little strip of suburban farmland that remained between her town and Uniondale. “I’ve got the coordinates,” she said.
Got them here too, said a calm voice in the back of her head.
Here’s another one who’s been quiet today, Nita said privately to the peridexis. Taking a day off?
Just staying in the background while you enjoyed yourself, the peridexis said. But the enjoyment seems to have hit some kind of hitch --
Because we may be back on duty again! Stay with me—“Dair, Bobo’ll feed Spot the targeting data—”
“Got it,” Dairine said a second later. “Spot, do us a circle—”Almost instantly a large spell-transit circle with five personal transport subcircles appeared on the grass opposite the koi pond. “Check your ID data and jump in,” Dairine said, stepping into one of the circles herself. “Concealment field’s built in, don’t worry about being seen…”
Nita shoved her manual back into its pouch, grabbed Jackie’s handle, and carefully stepped into one of the vacant subcircles, checking to make sure that Spot was using the most recent version of her name. Bobo, you’d better add something for Jackie here—
Spot’s handled it: there’s extra language in the submodule attached to yours, see it there?
Great. Nita glanced up after a few seconds to see everyone else in place, and Dairine waiting for her. “I’m good,” she said. “Hit it—”
*
Things around them went black, and then bright again. Nita glanced around hurriedly, trying to get her bearings.
The harvest moon had risen some hours earlier, and now it stood high over a rather sad and lonely landscape. Long ridges where pumpkins had been planted and raised ran down the length of the field, and from the ridges straggled tired-looking pumpkin vines. Some of these were withered and dying: others were still alive, but had only small or misshapen pumpkins left attached to them. The field was surrounded by windbreak trees on all four sides, with here and there a break or a gate through which tractors could drive in, and off to one side, a long line of plain wooden tables where the people who came to pick the pumpkins could clean up what they picked before paying for them.
Everything looked monochrome in the moonlight, ever so faintly golden, and very still. There was no sound. Nothing moved. The pirate, the caveman, the Jedi and the alien princess stood looking around them, not speaking for the first few moments.
/> “Okay,” Nita said to Jackie at last. “We’re here. What’s the problem?”
Something bad is happening in the ground, Jackie said. It was happening before. But it’s much worse now. It’s trying to get out—
They all stood still in the silence, looking, listening—
And then a pale thin hand shot up out of the damp crumbly dirt and grabbed Dairine by the ankle.
She shrieked at the top of her lungs, jumped back about three feet, and then staggered and nearly fell down, for the hand hadn’t let go of her ankle, and the arm behind it was pulled further up out of the ground and kept hanging on. A second later the blue-white fire of her lightsaber broke loose, and Dairine sliced the arm off at the elbow. She then spent the next few seconds jumping up and down and trying to dislodge the hand, which still wouldn’t let go—
All around them in the field, other bumps and lumps started heaving themselves up out of the dirt—skinny fleshless hands scrabbling at it, knobbly shoulders and backs heaving up, whole lank tatter-clad human shapes struggling up on hands and knees, staggering erect; blind faces and empty eyes searching for signs of life in the field, targeting on it, lurching toward it. Nita knew immediately that these weren’t actual high-end zombies of the animated-full-corpse type. But they were more than undead enough to be going on with: staggering cobbled-together shapes meant to inflict terror, disgust and despair. They had a blunt, insufficiently-detailed look to them that in some ways was worse than genuine rotting human corpses would have been. And they were unquestionably the bearers of a message: Take…Me…seriously!
“Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks cubed!” Ronan said. “What on earth brought this shite on?”
“Our old buddy,” Kit said. “Taking advantage of the moment.” He scowled and pulled out his wand. “Too many people have the idea that the forces of evil are stronger tonight… so to some extent, they really are. Lean that much conviction up against reality, and it frays around the edges a little. Then You Know Whose little friends that hang around the edges of existence to do Its dirty work jump right in and use the available energy to make mischief—”