Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (38 page)

She should’ve guessed.

Come Halloween time, Melanie was a reliable fixture here, ever

since the year of that grim business with her younger sister Angela.

Came early, stayed late, would’ve swept the streets, probably, if they’d handed her a broom.

Melanie noticed her now, for the first time, and saw that Bailey saw her, and there came the awkward moment of being unsure whether

they should go back to pretending they hadn’t, or consolidate space.

Oh, why not.
Bailey pointed to the spot on the bench beside her, and Melanie came over.

She was dark-haired and the last three years had left her hard-

faced bordering on severe . . . but Bailey thought she understood the ongoing need in her, and didn’t judge. If Drew wasn’t the one who

came through tonight, she felt confident that that would be it. Free to move on. Not haunt the place year after year, seeming to hope for a replay. But, like Troy had said, with Melanie it was a whole different set of issues.

“Even as a girl, I always wondered why we leave stuff,” Melanie

said. “Leave
stuff
, and walk away.” She was stressing the word
stuff
as though it were something unpleasant, like
hospital waste
. “
We
should be camping out here, instead. But no. We seem to accept it on faith that inanimate objects will do a better job calling back the people we’re supposed to love than we can.”

Bailey had never regarded it quite that way, and anyhow, who

really knew what went into the founding of a tradition this old?

Here, 162 years ago, if you weren’t spending every waking moment

of October bringing in crops and preparing for winter, you were

probably going hungry and cold long before spring.

Mostly, Melanie just seemed angry. She had good reasons to be

angry.

“You don’t have kids, do you?” Bailey asked.

“And bring them into a world like this? Not likely.
Not
likely.”

[286] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

“I was just going to say,” Bailey went on, “that before they get

to a certain age, kids seem to see a soul in everything. Everything’s alive, on some level. So who’s to say they don’t know something we all forgot? And maybe the ones who’ve died, they remember it. So

they’re just happy to see a familiar soul that . . . I don’t know . . . loved them unconditionally, maybe?”

Melanie sat there taking this in. At least she wasn’t chewing it up and spitting it back in Bailey’s face.

“Unconditional,” Melanie said softly. “That’s hard, isn’t it.”

Bailey swirled her cup and drained the cocoa, now cold, to the last dribbles. “Chocolate, that’s easy for unconditional love. Everything else . . . ?”

Melanie laughed a little, maybe just being polite. Then she fell

back into the black hole. “The day she disappeared, Angie and

I . . . we had the worst fight. We said the worst things to each other.

Me, mostly.
I
said them.” She bowed her head in a prayer to nothing, then snapped up again. “Of all the days, huh? Of all the days.”

Bailey wanted to say something, anything, the kneejerk words

that you thought nobody must have thought to tell her before now.

But of course she would’ve heard them all, listened to them until she was sick of them, and sick of the people who kept spouting them at her like found wisdom.

Instead, Bailey kept her mouth shut and reached over to rest her

hand across the back of Melanie’s, until she nodded, the understanding between them in no need of words, and it felt like time to draw her hand back again. Melanie looked at the scarecrow, and if longing

alone could’ve done it, the thing would have come down off its cross and danced.

“That helped, actually. What you said.” She sounded surprised

about this. “It really did. But you know? There’s only one thing that could ever make me feel like I could finally put it all behind me.”

“I know.”

Melanie stood and straightened her scarf. “Good luck tonight,”

she said, a rare wish that could assume the form of such opposing

outcomes.

˜ ˜ ˜

BRIAN HODGE [287]

Evening fell, and dragged the night behind it.

The streets began to fill well before dusk, permanently now,

people staking an early claim for a good view instead of having to rely on hearsay filtering back through the crowd. Everyone Bailey

had seen throughout the day seemed to return fivefold, tenfold,

expanding out in a circle from the center of the town square. When the span grew too great for that, the latecomers were forced to clog the streets between the low brick buildings of downtown.

Hundreds, easily. Thousands? Probably. She felt their pressure

at her back, their eyes and expectations. Cody? Oblivious. Like his father, he could tune out anything he didn’t want or need to hear.

She leaned close to his shoulder, thinking of his stated intention this morning to ask Drew to take him along.

“Have you thought about what
else
you’re going to say to Daddy, if he comes?”

Cody nodded, looking more pensive than a six-year-old should.

“Uh huh.”

“Wanna tell me about the rest? Run it past me?”

Cody thought it over, then shook his head no. “That’s okay.”

It stung, yes, shut out again, but it was a thing to be proud of,

too.
Good boy,
she thought.
This day of the year, at least, don’t trust
anybody.

Here at the foot of the cross, in the al eged position of honor, they were sitting on a blanket folded quadruple to keep from hogging space and, less effectively, to shield their bottoms from the chill of the moist autumn earth. On either side, all in a tight row, were the rest of the bereaved. Candace Hughey, eighty if she was a day, eyes fixed on her husband’s Purple Heart. The Ralstons, El is and Kristin, their true north that sad teddy bear; Kristin looked as if she’d recently finished crying and could start again if so much as a raindrop fell wrong. Others, more than a dozen by now, everybody too close for comfort in this quiet rivalry.

Cody was an hour coming down off the high of trick-or-treating,

costume shed and stuffed into new clothes in a bathroom at the

gradeschool rendezvous. He may not have needed it, but she poured

him a hot chocolate anyway, from the Thermos she’d had filled at the Jittery Bean, to keep the inevitable sugar crash at bay a little longer.

[288] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

She leaned in close again. “You know Daddy loves you very much.

If it’s not him tonight, that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean any different. You know that, don’t you?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Where he is now, we don’t know what it’s like there. How they

decide things. We’ve got our rules here, but we don’t know what

theirs are. Do you understand?”

Cody looked at her with, of all things, suspicion. “How come we

don’t know? How come nobody’s asked?”

She blinked, feeling that special kind of stupid that kids could

make you feel. “Asked who?”

“The dead people from before. If it’s happened all these other times, then how come nobody’s asked one of ’em what their rules are?”

It was a good question. Maybe it was already on his shortlist of

things to discuss with Drew, or maybe he was adding it now.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe people mean to, but then they

get excited and forget.”

The mayor stepped up onto a small platform and said more than

a few words, as the mayors always did. It wasn’t an address anyone seemed to want. This had been going on for 162 years, for god’s sake, so it wasn’t like there were people out there who needed a refresher on what the night was all about. This had gone on long before him

and, presumably, would go on long after he became eligible to bore people from the other side.

The murmur of hundreds of conversations filled the night, a

subdued sound considering the numbers. Expectant and alert, she

felt electrified when something jolted her from the inside, then

foolish when she realized it was just her phone, ringer off and set to vibrate. She slipped it out to find a fresh text message from Troy:
Anything yet?

No
, she keyed back.
Everything quiet as a tomb. Except Mayor
Bob
.

Thought I heard the wind pick up.

What r u doing now?

Movie nite. Wishing u were here to hold my hand during the scary
parts.

BRIAN HODGE [289]

Probably not all u wish I was holding
, she keyed, and couldn’t believe she’d said it, sent it. This was wrong on so many levels.

Sexting, here and now, of all times and places, like she was trying to psychically sabotage the very thing her son wanted most in the

world tonight. The thing she wished she could want as much as Cody did, but couldn’t.

It came down to this, she realized: She had eleven years of

memories with Drew, most good, some exquisite. And she didn’t

want the final one, that desperate goodbye in the hospital, to be

shoved aside by some new one, post-mortem, the man she’d loved

now wrapped inside a creepy shell of straw and old clothes and

burlap, struggling to communicate whatever he felt he’d left unsaid.

Something to dream of
, Troy wrote back.
Turning in early. Thought
I’d be OK with this tonite but now I just want it over. Want it to be
tomorrow
.

Me 2 x 1000.

“Who was that?” Cody asked after she’d put her phone away.

Looking vaguely annoyed with her, as if her lapse in concentration would cost him everything. She’d lost her game face.

“Just a friend.” Great—on top of everything else, guilt and lies.

“She wanted to wish us good luck.”

The impatience grew, thick with apprehension, everybody here

in the front row appearing to feel it on some level or another. Down on the far end, a middle-aged widower was doing some breathing

exercise. Five-count inhale, five-count hold, five-count exhale—she could see him ticking it off on his fingers.

The chill plunged further and the courthouse clock tower chimed

nine, the mechanical crash of the hammer into the bell sharp and

deep and unnerving. The echo seemed to roll for miles, still lingering in the air when something else charged the night. Was it just her, or did everyone feel it? The crowd fell silent behind her for a moment, then a groundswell of murmuring picked up again, expectant.

Bailey looked up along the cross with the same dread that guiltier souls than she was might have felt for a headsman hoisting his axe.

Although she felt no wind, the fingers of one stuffed glove began to twitch. Then the arm began to stir, sliding along the crosspiece that

[290] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

held the thing in place, and one leg started to flex, the heel of the boot banging against the post.

You could blame everything on the wind until the head lifted.

The other arm moved, the other leg stirred, the shoulders

appearing to strain as it leaned forward and weakly, so weakly, tried to push itself away from the post. The head tipped back and looked to the sky, then around at the tops of the downtown buildings, and down again, down to earth, out over the rapt and waiting throng . . . and if the thing could be said to see at all, with its black button eyes, then yes, the sight appeared to hasten its sense of urgency . . . or of agitation.

It wasn’t the fact that it moved at all that most unnerved her. No, it was subtler than that. Everything breathed. Women and men, cats and cows, birds and apes. Everything breathed. But not this. Its chest and belly were as still as a corpse’s. She hadn’t realized how
wrong
this mimicry of life looked until now.

Beside her, Cody knelt tense and wide-eyed, hands clasped at his

chin as he nibbled on the tips of his thumbs. When she put her arm around his rigid shoulders, he gave no sign of noticing.

Above them, the scarecrow finally succeeded in flopping one

arm free of the crosspiece, then the rest of it followed, the entire faux being tumbling to the ground, where it landed on its side with a rustle of cloth and straw. It stirred for a moment, trying to right itself with the slow, helpless squirm of an overturned turtle. Then its glove caught, and it pulled itself over onto its belly, to crawl forward on elbows and knees, toward the gifts of its summons.

It inspected them for a long time, longer than she remembered

this taking in the past. Every year it was always the same—when

the scarecrow took the gift, found the link, that’s how you knew

who it was. Up and down the row it crawled, seeming to sense that

something
was here, something it just wasn’t finding.

Finally it lingered . . .

And chose.

The cake. The old cake that, this morning, looked to have come

from a freezer. She hadn’t known whose it was, and still didn’t. Beside her, Cody gave a groan of disappointment, so she squeezed him tight BRIAN HODGE [291]

to her. This time he let her, then buried his face into her side and sobbed. She glanced left, right . . .
and none of them were moving
. In fact, they looked to be growing as mystified as she was.

Then who had set it out there?

She looked again at the scarecrow. With its clumsy hands, it was

now pulling the cake apart, and something about the sight triggered a wave of revulsion in her. It had no mouth, yet it was going to try to eat? No, that wasn’t it—

Bailey became aware of a commotion behind her.

—it was ripping the cake apart to get to something
inside
—

She became aware of a voice trying to make itself heard above the

swelling din of the crowd.

—pawing aside frosting and crumbling cake that had been