Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (30 page)

“Where . . . were you before?”

The witch paused, the knives, forks, and spoons stilling in her

hands. Michael wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.

“A long way away.” The witch’s shoulders stiffened.

Her words smelled of bonfires. They felt like dirt, filling his

mouth. They tasted like Halloween.

His mind clicking over to her frequency again, Michael saw the

witch walking barefoot along the side of a road, headlights sweeping over her through a heavy rain. Broken glass from a car accident cut her soles, but she didn’t seem to care. She either walked to, or from, A. C. WISE [227]

her most recent death, and it clung to her like a shadow. Whatever her death had been, or would be, it wasn’t pleasant. Not that any

death was ever pleasant, Michael supposed, except for perhaps dying quietly in your sleep.

“Witches don’t die that way,” the witch said, so softly he could

barely hear her. He flinched, and Spencer squirmed out of his arms.

He should go upstairs right now and throw away the apples, the

dirt, and the candy corn, pretend he’d never seen the list or been in the witch’s room. But if he did that, he’d be admitting she could stay.

Even if he never said it out loud, he’d be inviting her into his life, and nothing would ever be normal again. Magic would be real, and

witches, too. A woman could drown and hang and burn and still be

in his kitchen organizing his spoons.

Cutlery rattled softly in the witch’s hands. Michael stared at her back. If she turned around, the witch’s eyes would be the color of smoke, the ghost of a thousand violent deaths drifting in the black at center of them. Could he live with all that death crowded behind her eyes? Could he live with all her impossibility? Michael was glad she kept her back to him. While the witch counted spoons, he turned silently, and slipped from the room.

It snowed the day before Halloween. The last time Michael

remembered that happening, he’d been about nine years old. His

parents had bundled him off on a Boy Scout trip, up in the mountains.

It snowed on October 30, and the Scout leaders cut the trip short

after one night because it was too cold. They all came back on the bus with flakes still falling, and white dusting the ground. Michael’s mother made him go trick-or-treating in a bulky snowsuit, so no one could tell he was supposed to be Spider-Man that year.

Michael stood in the open front door, coffee in hand, Spencer at

his feet, watching the flakes fall. Carved pumpkins all along the street wore caps of white lace. It was peaceful, beautiful even, but Michael couldn’t shake his deep unease.

He’d spent yesterday at a nature preserve, where he’d found

the mushrooms and the feathers from the witch’s list. At least half an hour of the excursion had been Michael sitting in the car with

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the heater going full blast, comparing mushrooms and feathers to

Google image searches on his phone.

He still hadn’t decided what he was going to do. He told himself

to think of it as insurance. Just because he gathered the ingredients didn’t mean he had to use them.

“You’re letting out all the warm air.” The witch’s voice snapped

Michael’s spine straight, and he wheeled guiltily, accidentally stepping on Spencer’s tail.

The cat yowled, and shot away; the witch glared. Her eyes

reminded him of sea-wet stones, slammed by endless waves.

“It’s my heating bil .” The words came more sharply than he intended.

The witch pressed her lips into an even thinner line, breathing

through her nose. She’d snapped at him last night, too, when he’d

suggested tacos for dinner. Spencer had hissed indiscriminately,

taking in both their bristled postures without choosing sides, and stalked out the door when Michael had opened it to gather the mail.

Did she know he’d found the book? And if she did, why didn’t

she come out and say something, or cast a hex on him? Or whatever

it was witches did when they were angry. She could turn him into

a toad, and the house would be all hers. She wouldn’t even have to share. Maybe it was the same for witches as vampires, and he had to invite her in, or she couldn’t stay. He had no idea what the rules were, if there were any.

The witch shifted without moving, strain showing in her clenched

jaw. Now, more than sea-wet stones, her eyes reminded him of

lightning trapped beneath a skin of dark clouds.

There was only one day until Halloween. The witch had said she’d

stay until Halloween at least, and the rest was up to him. Did that mean he was supposed to make the potion? That he was destined to

betray her?

“Why me?” Michael asked.

He hadn’t meant to speak at all. The witch’s eyes turned the color of certain snakes Michael had seen on a nature show—the kind that

hid in the sand, and uncoiled all at once to strike.

“Because this house needs a witch.” The witch returned words like

a slap. “And I thought you needed one, too. But maybe I was wrong.”

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Even though she hadn’t moved, she’d folded the space between

them somehow. They were face to face, the witch leaning into him,

her nose pointed at him accusation-wise.

“All I want is to live a normal life. Is that too much to ask?”

Michael stepped back. Coffee slopped over the edges of his mug,

barely missing the witch’s toes.

“Yes.” The door banged shut behind Michael, punctuating the

word. Startled, Michael dropped his mug; shards of ceramic skittered across the floor.

The witch made an impatient gesture with her hand, and the

ceramic shards flew across the hall and into the kitchen, pelting the sink like hail.

“Life isn’t fair. Nobody gets to choose whether they have a normal happy one or not. If they did, do you think anyone would get sick, or have their hearts broken? Would anyone die? It doesn’t work that way.”

The witch’s deaths were in her eyes again. And her eyes themselves flickered from moonlight, to toadstools, to tsunamis and flames. The heat of them, the cold of them, the shock of them drove him back

another step. Michael opened his mouth, but the witch spun on her

heel, and banged up the stairs.

The floorboards shuddered when she slammed her door, and

plaster dust filtered down from the ceiling. Michael blinked, the grit catching in his eyes.

Something in him tightened, twisting. Her life wasn’t fair, but her anger wasn’t either. All he’d done was move into a house with upside down windows and a staircase made of shipwrecks. And he could

hardly be blamed for that.

“Damn it.”

Michael’s slippers smacked at his bare feet as he climbed the

stairs. Inside his bathrobe, sweat gathered at the base of his spine. He knocked on the witch’s door, and it swung open.

“I’m sorry,” he said to an empty room.

Michael gaped. The bed, the dresser, the chandelier—all gone.

And the witch, too. A tired looking cobweb hung where the birdcage had been, stirring on a breath of wind. Curtain-less windows let in

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gray light, showing the desiccated bodies of arachnids in the corners.

Dust puffed, gritty beneath his feet.

The sheer emptiness of the room shot through him, a current driven like a spike from his soles all the way up his spine. It was the worst kind of absence and it sent him running down the stairs in unreasoned terror. The witch was so thoroughly gone, she might never have existed.

The house bowed under the insubstantial weight of snow. No, it

mourned
. Down in its bones, the house was melancholy over the loss of the witch. Like a haunting, there were sounds and scents just on the edge of perception. Turning a corner, he would catch a whiff of the sea. He didn’t dare touch the walls, knowing they’d weep salt-dampness against his skin. An un-played note on a harpsichord

sighed and shivered its way from the roof down to the basement

where a black cat lay buried in the leftmost corner.

He needed to get the witch back.

Michael set out an hour before midnight with a measuring cup,

his hands jammed in his pockets. Halloween stood on the other side of the clock’s tick, all gathered up with fallen leaves and bats’ wings and clouds across the moon. The snow had stopped, but the cold had deepened. The whole year waited to pivot on this point; the world

was thin. It wasn’t just the house—this night needed a witch, too.

A black cat streaked across his path. It might have been Spencer,

or a random stray, he couldn’t tell. The cat didn’t pause. Michael glanced furtively in either direction. When he was certain he was

alone, he used the razor blade he’d tucked into his jacket to shave the frost from his neighbor’s pumpkin.

He felt like a fool. It was Devil’s Night. The cops would be on high alert. What would they think of a man with a razor—even if it was

only a Bic disposable—lurking outside his neighbor’s houses, paying far too much attention to their pumpkins?

But he didn’t have a choice. He would make the potion, and drink

it himself. He was the unwanted guest that needed banishing. Then

the witch would come back home, and everything would be the way

it was supposed to be. It wasn’t rational, but nothing about the witch was. Deep down on his bones, he knew the truth of it. He had to

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bring her back, because if he didn’t . . . Because if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a witch here.

The logic was as faulty as the logic of witches in general. And so it stood to reason his plan would work. It had to.

He moved to the next house, the next pumpkin. When he reached

the end of the block, the cup was a quarter full. By the time he’d gone another block, the measuring cup was half full.

His life had been normal and boring until the witch had shown

up. Then she had to go smell like smoke, and the sea, and cinnamon, and make him see that life was terrible, and unfair. And it was

beautiful, too.

Because the house settled around the witch, and the clomp-

clomp of her footsteps over the floorboards comforted him. He slept better with her in the house, and Spencer curled on his chest kept the nightmares at bay. And because the witch kept coming back, no

matter how horrible her deaths. The force of life itself, or her will to try again, to live on her own terms, wouldn’t let her give up. It was undeniable, and inexorable. Like moonrise, and spaghetti on Tuesdays.

Like witches and black cats. And that was something.
That
was magic.

The cup was full. Michael held it up, watching frost melt in the

moonlight. Maybe, just this once, life could play along and pretend to be fair after all. If witches were real, wasn’t anything possible?

On Halloween, Michael brewed the ingredients from the witch’s

list like tea. He poured them into a jam jar, and let them cool. The resulting liquid was reddish gold, the color of museum amber.

Michael held the jar. He expected it to hum with power, but it

only sloshed as he turned it from side to side. The contents left legs on the glass, like good alcohol. He wanted to say he was sorry. He wanted her to come back, and tell him her name. He wanted her to

explain herself, and he wanted the chance to do the same. And he

missed Spencer.

Michael sniffed the potion. After all the things the witch smelled of, smoke and the ocean, wet rope, and crashed cars, the liquid in the jam jar smelled of nothing. Not the candy corn, or the soft, half-rotten apples. He screwed the lid on, and slipped the jar into his pocket.

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Even though it was just past noon, Michael Remmington decided

it was high time he got well and totally drunk.

Sometime after sun down, it began to rain.

Would there be any trick-or-treaters in this downpour? Instead

of Spider-Man, they’d all be dressed as kid-in-raincoat. He snickered, but really, it was depressing. He pulled out the jam jar, watching the way the light slid through the liquid as he turned it round and round.

He needed to find the witch. She needed to see him drink the potion.

She needed to know he was sorry.

He pushed the chair away from the table. The front door was miles

away, but he made it somehow, and stepped out into the pouring rain.

A jack-o’-lantern carved from a pumpkin he didn’t remember

buying sat at the bottom of the porch steps. The lid had been knocked askew, and rain had drowned the candle. Along the street, other

houses were similarly struggling.

“Crappy Halloween,” he said to no one.

He couldn’t even call the witch’s name. Liquid sloshed

uncomfortably in his stomach and his pocket—the alcohol and the

witch’s brew. A few brave parents with umbrellas ushered kids from house to house. No one looked happy.

Michael made his way toward the main road and the hum of

cars. He could picture the witch walking past the library, and the grocery store; she’d come to the end of the sidewalk, but keep going.

She wouldn’t be barefoot, but her suitcase would be clutched in her hand, and she wouldn’t have an umbrella. Spencer, wet and miserable, would be close at her heels.

He spotted her up ahead.

Michael stopped, blinking water out of his eyes. The witch looked

just as he’d pictured her, which made him suspect wishful thinking. Or maybe the alcohol had gotten the better of him. He broke into a run.

A sudden gust of wind pulled leaves from the trees, and slicked

them over the sidewalk. Water blew sideways. Michael slipped, nearly turning his ankle.

“Hey!” The downpour stole his voice.

The witch didn’t turn. Even over the rain, he could hear the steady clunk of her heels. She clutched her suitcase in both hands, and her A. C. WISE [233]