“Huh,” said Velveteen. She gave the cornfield another, longer look. “That’s a lot of corn.”
“Halloween is important to a lot of people. Good adult experiences go into one of our apple orchards. They make the sweetest cider that you’ve ever tasted. But see, harvest happens after a year’s growth, regardless of age. Can’t have the really good memories of a holiday until that holiday comes around again. And we’ve got a problem.” Hailey’s expression hardened. “There are crows in the corn.”
“Crows.”
“Yes.”
“Crows in the corn.”
“Yes.”
“So you brought me, a woman made of fabric, to scare the crows that are eating your good memory corn. Wow. It’s like I’m some sort of…huh. There must be a word for something shaped like a human that you use to scare the crows.” Velveteen folded her arms and glared at Hailey.
Hailey rolled her eyes. “Oh no, you came to a world that flat-out refers to itself as a metaphor and somehow things have gotten all symbolic. How did that happen? I do not know. Look, I can be as sarcastic as you. Doesn’t change what we’re here to do, so maybe let’s stop, okay? I have shit to do. So do you.”
“Because you need me to fight the crows that are in your corn,” said Velveteen.
“Yup,” said Hailey. “See, bad Halloween memories have wings. They’re here to eat what they can’t become, and the more they eat, the more people forget what they love about Halloween. We need kids to keep loving Halloween when they’re young, because that’s what powers the less likely to murder everybody on sight aspects of our holiday. You’re really doing a public service.”
“By fighting the crows that are in your corn.”
“Precisely.” Hailey’s expression turned grave. “This is part of how the servants of this Season work to protect us all. I’d like to stay here and enjoy more of your pathetic attempts to make me feel bad about our metaphors, but I need to go chase the owls out of the orchard. The crows are your concern, at least for tonight.”
“But I don’t know how to fight crows,” said Velveteen helplessly. “What do you want me to do, shout ‘boo’ and hope they’ll scatter?”
“No,” said Hailey. “I want you to kill them.”
*
Velveteen looked at the corn. She had the distinct feeling that the corn was looking back, taking her measure even as she was taking its. Hailey was gone, off to protect the orchards: her parting words had been a muttered warning about being back on the road by midnight, since the corn had “other defenses” once the moon was high enough. Velveteen had no real idea of what those “other defenses” might be, and more importantly, she had no desire to learn. Being an animus had taught her that everything had teeth. Sometimes those teeth were hidden, but that didn’t change their reality. She had absolute faith that the cornfield was dangerous, and not to be trifled with.
She also hadn’t seen a single crow, standing on the road as she was, which made her suspect that the only way to protect the corn was to go into the corn.
“I hate this holiday,” she announced to no one in particular, and stepped into the green.
The change was immediate. There was no way the road should have dropped behind her so quickly, but it did: with a single step, she was lost in a sea of cornstalks, surrounded on all sides. They were all tall, stretching two to four feet above her head, but that was where the similarity ended. Some of the stalks were fresh and green, barely putting forth ears. Others were golden and dry, already harvested. Still more were fully mature, heavy with corn, ready for the picking.
“Okay, this is weird,” said Velveteen, turning slowly. Cornhusks crunched underfoot. Everything smelled like chlorophyll. And then, in the middle of her turn, she found her first crow.
She froze. So did the bird. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, exactly, but it wasn’t this…this thing, which bore a resemblance to the glossy black birds she sometimes saw back home in Portland only in the sense that it was large, black, and covered with feathers. Apart from that…
It had a jagged, tooth-filled beak, more like a small dinosaur than a normal bird. Its talons were abnormally long, almost tiny, scaled hands, and looked perfectly capable of husking an ear of corn without trouble. And it had a single red eye with a snake-slit pupil in the middle of its skull, which looked at her with an eerie intelligence.
“Um,” said Velveteen.
“Caw,” said the crow, and launched itself into the air, talons angled toward her face. Velveteen had time to see that it had a long, scaly tail, like some sort of lizard, before self-preservation took over and she hit the ground. When she lifted her face out of the corn husks, she saw the crow flying off with an ear of corn clutched in its talons, crowing triumphantly. Before that moment, she wouldn’t have said that a bird could sound smug. This one did. Smug, and nasty, and maybe a little bit malicious. Maybe a lot malicious.
Then the sky turned black with beating wings, and the harsh caws of the crows drowned out everything else, and Velveteen realized that this job was considerably larger than she had expected.
“Fuck. Me,” she said, and turned and fled into the corn, looking for a place where she could hunker down and come up with a plan. Waving her arms and screaming wasn’t going to cut it, she could tell that for damn sure; these were not crows that gave a single fuck about being yelled at. They were out for blood, or at least for corn, and if she got in their way, they were going to rip her to pieces. Serving the Season was one thing—she had signed up for that—but dying for it? Oh, that was something else altogether, and if that was what Halloween wanted from her, Halloween was going to be deeply disappointed.
The direction she was running should have brought her back to the road. It didn’t. Instead, it brought her more corn, until she ran into a clear patch that had already been harvested. The stalks here were crushed flat, and the sky overhead was mostly empty, since there was nothing here for the crows to steal. She stopped, wheezing and trying not to think about how a rag doll that walked like a woman could be short of breath. Everything here was a metaphor. Pick at it too much and it would come apart at the seams.
“Okay, fuck, crows,” she said, putting her hand against a convenient pole as she wheezed. Then she stopped, looking up, and met the eyes of the disemboweled scarecrow that dangled there. It was impossible to tell whether it had originally been an animated doll, like she was; it didn’t matter much, since the thing was clearly not animated now. It was a dead thing, and looking at it made her shudder.
But it was a dead thing with a face, and while she had never become Roadkill in her timeline, she knew full well that she was capable of animating dead things.
Getting the scarecrow down from its post was harder than she had expected, and several times she had to swallow the urge to just wake it up and tell it to get down on its own. Without knowing how it was suspended, that could easily have ended in the scarecrow ripping itself limb from limb as it tried to follow her orders. That wouldn’t have been helpful, especially not when she needed it relatively intact to fight for her. So she climbed and she slid and she struggled and she unhooked, until finally the scarecrow fell to the ground, leaving her hanging from the crossbar that had held its arms in position.
“This was a brilliant plan and I am a genius for having it,” she said, deadpan. Narrowing her eyes, she focused on the scarecrow. She hadn’t actually tried to use her powers since arriving in Autumn this time, and after her experiences in Spring and Winter, she was a little worried about what would happen. Indeed, it felt like the “reach” that always accompanied an animation came easier than it ever had before, accompanied by the tiny sensation of loss that she now recognized as the expenditure of her own energy. The deep wellspring of power that had always been her own was back now; she didn’t have to be a vampire. The relief that accompanied that realization was so intense that she nearly lost her grip on the crossbar.
Only nearly. She held on, and the scarecrow staggered to its f
eet, possessing none of her grace, moving with the uneasy bend of straw and canvas and severely damaged fabric. It tilted its painted face blindly toward her, its one remaining button eye glinting in the light. There wasn’t that much of a difference between snowmen and scarecrows, when you got right down to it. Both of them were inanimate, humanoid, and hers.
“Catch me,” she said, and let go of the crossbar before she could change her mind. If the scarecrow didn’t move fast enough, well. She was made of cloth at the moment. She would probably be fine. Probably.
The scarecrow caught her. Velveteen beamed.
“You are the most useful person I’ve met since I got here,” she said. “Put me down.”
The scarecrow put her down. It took a shambling step back, giving her some space. Velveteen wasn’t sure whether it had done that on its own or because she wanted room to breathe, and it didn’t really matter. Her toys had always been better at controlling their own actions than anyone expected them to be. As long as they still did as she asked, she didn’t mind.
“We’re going to fight the army of crows that tore you open,” she said. The scarecrow tilted its head, seeming obscurely disappointed. She swallowed the urge to apologize. “Anyway, we need more of an army if we want to take them out without winding up in a million pieces. Have you ever made a cornhusk doll?”
The scarecrow had not. The scarecrow was, however, willing to learn. Velveteen couldn’t have said how she knew this; she just did. She grinned.
“Great,” she said. “Let’s get cracking.”
*
Gathering cornhusks was easy, even with the crows glutting themselves in the field. The clearing had plenty, and when those started running low, Velveteen ducked into the nearby green and grabbed great fistfuls of leaves and husks from the ground and from the already-denuded cornstalks. A few crow sentries spotted her and cawed loudly, summoning reinforcements, but Velveteen kept low and moved fast, and none of the flocks managed to descend on her before she could retreat to a safe distance again.
“I would kill for someone with animal-control powers right now,” she said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the clearing and beginning to twist cornhusks together, forming the shape of a crude doll. The scarecrow sat beside her, mimicking her motions as well as it could. Its hands were twigs, skeletal and clumsy, but they bent like fingers, thanks to the power she was pumping through its body, and while it wasn’t fast, it was better by far than nothing. “I mean, get Cinder or Monstrosity or Jack Daw out here and we could clear this problem up in no time flat. Halloween needs to network better.”
The scarecrow didn’t say anything. The scarecrow just kept making corn dolls. Velveteen gave it a sidelong look.
“You were a scarecrow when you started, right?” she asked. “I mean, you were always a scarecrow, you’re not somebody who got turned into a scarecrow? Because I’m not really in the business of animating corpses, when I can help it. It never ends well.” Her mind helpfully supplied her with an image of Tag, sleeping in his glass coffin back in The Princess’s castle. Velveteen resisted the urge to punch her own brain in the face.
The scarecrow’s face was paint and a button on canvas; it didn’t have expressions, as such. Somehow, it still managed to give her an amused look before it shook its head. It had always been a scarecrow, said the motion; it had never wanted to be anything else. It hadn’t wanted to be abandoned and torn apart by crows, either, but what could you do? Sometimes the story went to uncomfortable places.
“Oh, good,” said Velveteen, and reached for another handful of corn husks. The two of them worked in silence for a while, with her producing three cornhusk dollies for every one the scarecrow completed. Those slow additions added up, and when her questing hand found that their pile of cornhusks had been utterly depleted, there were piles of dollies around them, heaped high.
Velveteen stood. “Okay,” she said, looking at the scarecrow. “If I fall down, you catch me. Get me out of the corn if you can. I’ll try to keep animating you until I can’t anymore. Got it?”
The scarecrow nodded.
“Awesome. Here we go.” She turned to the piled-up dollies. They were humanoid in only the barest of senses: they had cornhusk legs, cornhusk arms, and smiling little faces poked into their heads with nails Vel had pried from the base of the scarecrow’s perch. They were humanoid enough. Velveteen reached and they responded, sitting up, looking around, and finally helping one another to their cornhusk feet. A hundred or more silently smiling faces looked at her, waiting.
It was like something out of a horror movie. Velveteen resisted the urge to shudder. She was like something out of a horror movie, at least right now. This was where she belonged, until it was all over. Until she could go home.
“There are crows in the corn,” she said. “I know you grew here: this is your home. I know that once, you sheltered the good Halloween memories of children. And I know that many of you fell because of those same crows. They stole the memories you were supposed to protect. This is your chance to get revenge. This is your chance to do for someone else what no one was willing to do for you. Are you with me?”
They were. Every last one of them. They grabbed nails and sticks from the ground, arming themselves for the fight that was to come. Then, silent, they swarmed into the corn with Velveteen and the scarecrow close behind. It was time to fight, and win, or lose, as the season decreed.
*
The crows were not expecting an assault. That was clear from the way Velveteen and her makeshift army found them, perched on the cornstalks, glutting themselves sick on the memories that grew, golden and sweet, around them. What’s more, the crows were not expecting an assault that came on like a wave, silent, swift, and terrible. The corn dollies were light enough that they could swarm straight up the corn, attacking whatever they found there. They were merciless with their borrowed weapons. They were fearless in their fury. What did it matter if one of them fell, when three more would be closing in right behind?
The crows shrieked and cawed, ripping corn dollies from themselves, beating them away with their wings. The corn dollies kept coming, driving their sticks into crow eyes, stabbing their nails into crow flesh. Whenever one of the dollies was caught it would come apart in a shower of husks and silk. Velveteen raced between the stalks, filling her hands with fresh husks and shaping more dollies, waking them and sending them into the fray. Every “death” hurt her a little, but it returned that doll’s energy to the well she was using to power them; as long as their numbers stayed roughly constant, she would have the strength to keep rebuilding her army.
Crows shrieked. Dolls disintegrated. It was a holding action: there were always more dolls, but there were always more crows as well, reinforcements summoned by the dismay of their fellows. Midnight was coming, and Hailey’s warning was beginning to echo in her ears: she didn’t want to be there when Halloween’s defenses kicked in.
But there was still something she could do, even if she didn’t want to. Something that would turn the tide. Velveteen sunk to her knees in the green, green ground, closed her eyes, and reached.
The crows that had fallen twitched. They twisted. And they rose on black-feathered wings, taking back the sky, silent now, flying for someone else. On the ground, Velveteen slumped forward, hands digging into the soil, head bowed. She was pouring everything she had into the crows, into the dolls, into the sky. This was too much for her. She knew that it was too much for her, and still she kept pushing, driving her reanimated crows higher, chasing the living vermin from the skies she had been tasked with protecting.
The scarecrow moved to stand behind her, unbidden by any conscious thought. The dollies struck down more crows, only for their corpses to rise and join the fight against their fellows. Velveteen’s nose began to bleed. She might have been relieved to see that, if she’d been more aware. Something that could bleed wasn’t entirely made of cloth and rags; something that could bleed still had a heart. But all her attention was reserved for ot
her matters.
The surviving crows turned and fled, leaving the cornfield for something safer, someplace less filled with their silent dead.
Velveteen collapsed, and corn dollies and dead crows fell around her like rain.
*
Hailey was waiting when the scarecrow carried Velveteen out of the corn, cradled gently against its chest. She looked at it. It looked at her. Then, slowly, she smiled.
“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?” she asked. “Cool. Just get her home.”
The teenage spirit of Halloween slung her leg over her bike and rode away down the endless country road, lit from above by a midnight harvest moon. Behind her walked the scarecrow, Velveteen sleeping peacefully in its arms.
Time didn’t pass in the Seasonal Lands the way it did in the Calendar Country. It wasn’t a matter of one day following another in a steady, predictable way. Sometimes, Velveteen went to bed at sunrise, slept for a full eight hours, and woke to find the sun rising, or the sky set to deepest, darkest, horror movie midnight. Other times, she’d wake to find Hailey and Scaredy pounding on the door with pillowcases in their hands, screeching “Trick or treat!” and beaming like they hadn’t seen her in weeks. She’d long since given up any attempts at actually figuring out what day of the week it was, and months didn’t matter here; it was always harvest time, always the ripe and reaching Autumn, where the air tasted like bonfires and drying hay, and the moon was a bloody jack-o’-lantern set against a cloud-strewn sky. She could have been there for only a few weeks. She could have been there for years.
The worst part was that she was no longer sure she cared which it was. She didn’t like living in a Halloween world, exactly. She missed having skin, internal organs, bones—she’d never really thought of bones as something that could be missed, but not having them was surprisingly inconvenient. She didn’t miss using the bathroom, or menstruation; the fear of spending an eternity as a rag doll was slightly reduced by the thought that she wouldn’t spend four days out of every month bleeding uncontrollably for the rest of time.