Enter Three Witches (14 page)

“The Halloween parade in the Village,” Bren said, and when she raised her eyebrows incredulously, he plunged on. “It’s not just kid stuff. They have the most wonderful costumes in the world.
Everybody
dresses up. Groups get together and build things like floating skeletons half a block long and snakes and dragons. Some of the best things they do every year, but you never know what you’re going to see, and the whole Village is decorated with weird things. Everybody who wants to marches in the parade—families with kids and dogs, teen-agers, lots of grown-ups, especially the gay people from the Village. They spend the most time and come up with the best ideas. Anyway, it’s amazing, and I bet you never saw anything like it.”

“Okay, please stop. I’m sold, but I hate dressing up,” said Erika, who spent much of her life doing just that.

“No, we’ll just watch,” Bren said. “I never dress up either. The crowds are horrendous, though. You’re not crowd-phobic or anything?”

“I’m not crowd-phobic, and don’t start trying to unconvince me. It sounds cool.”

“I’ll pick you up at five-thirty,” Bren said. “It pays to be early, believe me. See you tomorrow.” He bounded up the stairs ahead of her, reluctant to push his luck, anxious to get outside and celebrate. Halloween was only three days away, and in the interval he had to produce a convincing thunderstorm for Behrens. At the moment, all things seemed possible.

Erika stood for a moment where he had left her, bemused and delighted. Something prickly and perverse in her nature had led her to quarrel with the one person she most wanted to please, and she had found no way to reverse the downward spiral of their friendship. Every time she opened her mouth to say something warm and forgiving, something snappish or sarcastic came out. Nothing in her short and lonely life had prepared her for a simple relationship.

She shrugged and laughed and started up the stairs. “Halloween!” she said to the empty stairwell. “He wants to take me out on Halloween, of all things. Well, why not?”

It was early evening when Erika reached the street. The lights of the city glowed soft and golden, seemingly full of promise for the coming night. A warm wind blew off the river. She paused in the stream of people hurrying to get home from work and thought about going home herself. It seemed a dreary prospect. If only Bren had waited, they could have walked a while together, looking in windows and making silly jokes as they had nearly every night only a short time ago. Walking by herself seemed a poor substitute, but an improvement on the apartment. Erika turned away from the Apthorp and began to walk up Broadway.

She walked north until she was tired, then crossed the street and started back toward home. By the time she was in the eighties it was almost totally dark; she was hungry, and the lonely adventure had begun to lose some of its charm. She paused in front of a coffee shop and studied its offerings. It was a small, oddly cozy-looking place with red café curtains and shaded lamps inside. Not a very Broadway place, Erika thought. Possibly it was the kind of place that put real whipped cream on hot chocolate. She went in and settled into a tiny booth. The waitress was raw-boned and motherly, like a farm woman, thought Erika, who had never been near a farm. While she waited for her chocolate, she noticed a stack of business cards on the table and examined one idly. “Madame Rose, Spiritual Adviser,” it announced, and continued in smaller print, “Madame Rose knows your future. She sees it in the magic crystal. She reads it in the stars and in the ancient Tarot cards. All questions answered. All problems clarified. Reasonable. Confidential.”

Erika stared curiously at the address, which was on West Eighty-fourth Street, and then, with widening eyes, at the telephone number. The bell it rang was loud and clear. She laughed out loud, startling the pair of elderly ladies in the next booth. “Oh, Bren,” she whispered. “So that’s your terrible secret.”

The hot chocolate came, and Erika sipped it absent-mindedly, almost oblivious to its richness and plenitude of whipped cream. She was trying to remember what Bren had told her about the ladies of his household. Not his mother, she said to herself. His mother’s name is Miranda, and she’s young and beautiful. His grandmother, then, or the roomer in the attic. Not the black woman, although she sounds pretty weird. Oh, what a lovely secret. I’ll visit Madame Rose one of these days when he’s not home, if I have to cut school to do it.

Erika paid for her unappreciated chocolate and skipped out onto Broadway. She was tired no longer. The rest of the walk home seemed like nothing as she savored her new knowledge and rejoiced in the prospect of Halloween with Bren.

The night of Halloween would be clear and cold, much like the night of the dance program, Bren thought as he ran the few blocks from school to house. He was short of time. Eli, left alone and resentful in the theater, had insisted that he refocus one last light for the technical rehearsal the following day, and now he had to rush home to take Shadow out and pick up a warm coat to wear to the parade. It was five o’clock already, and he spared no time for his mother, who in any case was doing something in her studio with the door closed.

This shortage of time was fortunate for Bren’s peace of mind. It didn’t occur to him that Miranda might be dressing for the parade or that she would even think of going. Halloween was one of the two most important nights of the year for witches, and Miranda usually spent all evening in elaborate preparations for the midnight mass. Thus he was spared the ominous discovery that on this particular Halloween his mother had resolved to have a little harmless fun before settling down to the more serious business of a major Sabbat.

The streets of Greenwich Village were already filling with people when Bren and Erika arrived at six o’clock. Erika had abandoned her usual somber dress code and was wearing a huge orange ski sweater with her ankle-length black skirt. “You’ll be easy to find if I lose you,” Bren said.

“Just don’t lose me,” Erika answered. She was, in fact, a little afraid of large crowds, and Bren had promised that the sidewalks would be packed along the route of the parade.

“Don’t worry,” Bren said, tightening his grip on the small hand that nestled so agreeably in his own. “And now, look up!”

They had come along West Tenth Street almost to Sixth Avenue and now had a clear view of the gothic magnificence of the Jefferson Market Library. Erika stopped in her tracks, speechless with delight. The tall, pointed windows flickered with multicolored lights, and against their panes strange shapes moved and changed. There, surely, was a flight of bats, and there an evil face that peered for a moment at the crowd below and then was gone. Her eyes traveled up to the lighted clock face at the top of the tower and then down to the wrought iron balcony that encircled it. “Oh, Bren, look!”

He grinned and put his arm around her, as pleased as if he had created this wonderful set piece himself. Something was crawling over the edge of the balcony—something large and black with many groping legs, dragging its bulbous body down the side of the tower. Spotlights swept up from the dense trees behind the library and illuminated the progress of the gigantic spider creeping toward the lighted windows of the main building.

Bren gave his companion a little shake. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to find a good place to stand for the parade. The spider will do its thing a lot of times tonight. Maybe we’ll see him again on the way home.”

They hurried through the thickening crowd to the middle of the block on West Tenth. There Bren found a place at the curb directly behind a woman with three small children. “Always stand behind some little ones,” he explained. “If you’re at all grown up and stand in the front line, someone even more determined will come and stand in front of you, but the chances are good that no one will be mean enough to do that to a clutch of tiny tots. In this case, I think they’d better not try,” he added, after getting a better look at the mother, who was wearing the traditional garb of a black belt karate expert.

Looking across the street, Erika saw why he had chosen this particular spot. The row of tall brownstones on the other side had a continuous balcony running along their parlor floors one flight up from the street, and on Halloween this balcony was used by the occupants of the houses as a natural stage. Each set of French doors stood open, and each family had contrived an appropriate tableau. Bren pointed. “Look at the Addams family.”

“An obvious choice,” Erika said, “but also an awful lot of work. And there’s the crew of the
Enterprise
with a…what?…a chained Klingon, maybe. Bren, this is amazing. You didn’t tell me.”

“I might have elaborated,” Bren said, “if you’d shown any sign of turning me down.”

They had a long wait, but it was clear that if they had come any later, Erika would have seen nothing at all and Bren very little. The crowd behind them grew and grew. Railings, phone booths, and the lower branches of trees were draped with teen-agers, and everywhere small children bobbed on the shoulders of tall men. The atmosphere was relaxed and festive. Even the police, who made halfhearted efforts to maintain a clear path down the street, smiled and joked with the people who stepped out of line. “They probably fight over who’ll get this assignment,” Erika commented.

The tableaux on the balcony continued to unfold, and many people in costume were already strolling down the middle of the street. At last a single police car could be seen crawling through the crowd at the corner, and the people around Bren and Erika began to applaud. No band or bannered float marked the beginning of the Halloween parade. The police car, instead, was followed by an incredibly tall man in the costume of a drum majorette. His spangled skirt came only to mid-thigh on his long and shapely legs, and the tight satin bodice clung to a seemingly perfect female form. He strode with assurance in high-heeled boots, twirling, tossing, and catching his baton. “He’s beautiful,” Erika said in an astonished voice, staring at the fine, aquiline features and the deep-set eyes that glanced proudly left and right at the admiring crowd.

“They all are,” Bren said. “Wait till you see some of the ones in evening dresses. Oh, there’s the camel. I look for him every year.”

The camel was composed entirely of Oriental rugs supported by three men. This, of course, gave it six legs, but it was otherwise a quite realistic two-humped camel with a long neck and large, supercilious eyes.

Even from their vantage point, it was impossible to take in everything that went by. There were children in witch hats, cereal boxes, and sheets, often accompanied by embarrassed dogs done up in ribbons and bedraggled crepe paper. The older marchers came in bewildering variety—a chaos of inventiveness and imagination. Some of the costumes, Erika thought, must have taken the whole year to construct. She started a mental catalogue and soon lost track. There were Cleopatra, Ronald Reagan, a Valkyrie and a Sphinx, Greta Garbo and Hirohito, four coiffed and wimpled nuns with Marx Brothers faces, Tarzan, Richard Nixon, a pair of Spocks—one white-coated with a baby in his arms, the other with pointed ears—the Dalai Lama, a giant lizard with sequined scales, Red Riding Hood chased by a wolf, Theseus and the Minotaur, a bear, a woolly mammoth and Luciano Pavarotti; there were jugglers and acrobats, flamenco dancers, tap dancers, belly dancers, break dancers, and a gigantic robot whose head was a functioning television screen.

Next came the first of the enormous bands. They had been hearing it for some time, and now that it was almost upon them, Bren had to shout to be heard. “The Brazilian percussion band,” he yelled. “Cover your ears, and you’ll still hear it without going deaf.” The band rode on linked floats pulled through the streets by enthusiastic supporters. The players were by no means all Brazilians; indeed, the entire community of New York percussionists seemed to have rallied with every kind of instrument that could conceivably be banged, thumped, or rattled. There were African drums, Caribbean drums, xylophones, ratchets, bells, snare drums, and even a set of symphony orchestra tympani. The music they made was Latin in rhythm, horrific in volume, and undeniably splendid.

In the wake of the band came a snake carried on long sticks by at least twenty people. It was half a block long and wove to and fro over the heads of the crowd, occasionally dipping its great, fanged head to snap at some half-entranced, half-terrified child.

The snake was followed by five Africans in witch doctor costumes, striding on four-foot stilts—magnificent, terrifying, their long fringes of straw shaking, their huge, white-circled eyes staring ahead, while at their feet their own musicians danced and drummed.

After the Africans there was a gap in the parade, and this was rather a relief. It also provided a perfect stage for the next figure, who appeared alone, walking slowly and majestically down the middle of the street.

Miranda wore black from head to toe, the simple splendor of her robe broken only by a girdle of golden serpents. Her fair head was crowned with dark laurel leaves. In her right hand she carried a staff encircled by runes of power and in her left the shining, black-hilted athamé. No broom or pointed hat for Miranda, but hardly anyone in the crowd could have doubted that she was a genuine witch.

It was clear, at least to Bren, that Miranda was having a lovely time. She cast stern, piercing glances from side to side; it would be only a matter of seconds before her eyes fell upon her only son and his unsuspecting date.

“Cripes, that’s the real thing,” Erika muttered. At the same time Bren jerked her hand and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough,” and made a dive for the solid wall of spectators behind them. Erika, however, had a mind of her own and had not had enough. She was fascinated by the queenly figure who was drawing abreast of them, and she gave her hand an even stronger jerk, disengaging herself from Bren, who plunged into a tiny fissure in the crowd. “Erika, come on!” he shouted, but the ranks of watchers opened and virtually sucked him in before closing again in a seamless barrier.

Thus Erika stood alone under the flashing eyes of the black-robed queen of witches, and was astonished to see that those eyes were blue and full of mischief. The witch even smiled at her, a slightly enigmatic smile, nodded her head once up and down, and then passed on. When Erika turned to find Bren, he was gone without a trace.