The Saints of October – Part Two By Nick Manzolillo
V.
“And did he mention what he’ll do to us acolytes? I’m kidding, I’m kidding, we’ll figure this out, Jack. We’ll find our lost lantern.” Ernest has a carving knife in each hand as he leans over the kitchen table, where two pumpkins sit, gutted and awaiting Jack’s wavering hand. Ernest has taken to constantly wearing the cowboy hat Jack lent him.
“We know who’s involved. We know who took it,” Juliette says from the open doorway leading to the garden. She hasn’t stood still since the encounter with the pale man. Old and wise as she is, she’d never heard of monsters disguising themselves as leaf piles before.
“Mischief kids?” Ernest taps a short blade against his pumpkin head. “Let’s catch one, strap ‘em to the sofa, see what they know. Juliette, can you worm your way into a demon’s head?”
“They are spirits, you should know that. Can’t get into their head anymore than I can yours.” Juliette’s voice is weary, older than Jack remembers. This is the most she’s talked in years. If ever.
“It’d be just like one of them to trick me into taking a real kid, no, only violence that has to happen is my foot going through the lantern, soon as we find it.” Jack leans against the entranceway to the living room, staring at his flickering lanterns from beyond the windows beside the front door.
“Where would one hide a lantern during October? Plain sight? That was a pretty pumpkin face and all, but are you really going to be able to pick it out from a line up?” Ernest has a point. A horrible, horrible point. Jack has no idea if he’d be able to pick it out. The divine ways of a master pumpkin carver are not unlimited.
“Jack, they were bluffing. I don’t think they can harm your family.” Juliette tries to soothe him and for a moment, Jack wishes he were alone.
“What do you know, spell caster?” He uses the pale one’s own words against her. “I’ve never felt the need to ask you questions but, now? What should I know? What should I have always known? Apparently my pumpkins can be used as magical charms, yeah? And the kingdom can just go and bless them and now some lunatic has them, doing what? Starting the apocalypse? Don’t laugh.” Jack knows he might come off as insensitive but whatever. Ernest is giggling, does he even care?
“Someone with the right charms, like your pumpkin, would have a leg up. It’s not that they could harm anyone, but it’s the laws they could break. The natural laws. Someone with the right charms could defy death, for instance. Resurrect the recently deceased. They could take over your mind, turn you into a zombie like those voodoo barons from the islands. Or they could turn lead into gold. It’s for personal gain, that’s never not been the case. The severity of the wickedness would be limited.” Juliette doesn’t match Jack’s tone and he instantly regrets how he came off. His fists don’t unclench, however.
“If we know it’s the kids, then what’s the move here? Jack, couldn’t you just carve another lantern, tell them you found it?”
“They said they have eyes everywhere.” Could Jack ever trust the mere leaves on the ground again? Is that fall charm ruined now?
“Oh nonsense. In my day every wannabe smuggler told ya that. Rake up them leaves, and I’ll keep an eye out for crows. It’s easy to go unnoticed, trust me.” Ernest rubs a hand over the closest pumpkin. There have been times in the past where he’s carved a pumpkin of his own, Jack’s no hog. Ernest was always deflated after, which could be because that ego that stayed with him unto death, and the fact that no matter what he does, his work won’t be half as beautiful as Jack’s. Not that Jack didn’t admire Ernest’s pumpkins, sincerely.
“I’m going to get to work, and think…” Jack takes a seat and picks up his blade. His October companions can only wait by his side and wait to slowly admire the image he brings to life. He forms a semicircle before his grip on the knife tightens as his arm begins to tremble. Wordlessly, Juliette sends him a telepathic current of peace and sedation and Jack continues his arc. Ernest takes a seat, tucks his head into his vine-fingers, and waits.
Soon, there are more leaves in Jack’s yard then Juliette’s petty summoning of the wind can blow away. He can only walk down his pathway via keeping his head on an endless swivel, which doesn’t matter because the kingdom’s scouts are not in one place or the other, but, rather, everywhere. After two days of inactivity, he leaves the house alone, to wander the neighborhoods in search of his missing pumpkin. Because of the pumpkins width and weight, he’s able to dismiss similar pumpkins left and right, as he makes his way through the town center.
He could do nothing at all, and see what happens. He could keep up his carvings, and it’s not as if the things beneath the leaves could kill him, not until the thirty-first, when his time is up, and by that point they will be rendered obsolete and out of season. Blossom’s main street is alight with hay bales and skeletons intermixed with scarecrows nailed to doors. Everything from streetlights to white picket fences are adorned in faux spider web. A cluster of pumpkins go un-carved near town hall, as if to preserve the stuffy integrity of civilization. It’s eleven PM, and the town is barren; distant headlights winding along back roads may as well be phantoms. Many of the homes don’t have a single light beaming through their windows.
When a black cat crosses Jack’s path, he at first takes it for coincidence, until he notices how only one of its eyes reflect in the streetlight’s hue. “Juliette?” he calls just as a sharp snicker of laughter erupts from the dirt road beside the post office. An echoing call of laughter comes from elsewhere down the street, near the intersection of Main Street and Harvey. Amongst the patches of streetlight splashed shadows along the ground, Juliette gallops forward. “They came, they showed up on your doorstep and you weren’t there. Ernest went to chase them off-” From behind Jack there comes a voice, long and whiny, like a child doing a bad job at lying.
“Trick…Trick…Trick…” Like a black widow dangling over his shoulder, Jack whips around, just as Juliette comes to a stop by his side, her face a fanged snarl. Jack has no doubt she could roar like a lion. Before them, and with both hands, the mischief demon holds a mask over its face. Like the phases of the moon their masks travel from their hips to their chests to hover over their identities before Devil’s Night arrives and they slip on their true faces, leaving their hands free to cause havoc.
The mischief child is motionless, muttering “Trick, Trick, Trick” in endlessly slow succession. His mask is green with yellow eyes and four curved fangs dangling from the corner of a black grin, bringing to mind oriental dragons.
“Where’s the pumpkin?” Jack asks as a gust of wind blows the collar of his jacket over his ear. The mischief child keeps repeating his endless punch line and Jack considers ripping the mask from his hands, but he doesn’t want to know what’s on the other side.
There comes a distant cry over the wind. “You’re not supposed to hurt me!” Jack would recognized Ernest’s voice anywhere. “Stop, please, stop, there’s so-“ His voice is cut off and Juliette’s leading the way, bounding past the still motionless mischief child. The side road by the post office leads into the forest, and a lake, if Jack recalls correctly. He bangs the mischief child’s shoulder as he runs past and there’s a brief chuckle, in between the monotone uttering of “Trick, Trick.”
Just as he’s dreading the darkness from the waning shine of the streetlights as the forest swallows Jack and his October friend up, there comes a new light in the distance. That of flame, and the outline of a human figure. Ernest’s screams are of genuine pain and composure-erasing panic. In the past, Jack’s heard plenty of people scream who didn’t deserve to scream but Ernest, fearless and joke a minute Ernest, may be the most heartbreaking of all.
The scarecrow is a pyre as he twirls in circles, his arms spread wide as he twists and spins along the forest path, a ballet dancer slowly dwindling into nothing. Blowing as if from Juliette’s tiny lungs themselves comes a sharp, focused series of wind blasts that beat back the flames. Because Ernest’s body is of tobacco, and straw and vines and cloth, bits of Ernest flake with the ash and embers. He crumples to his knees as his arms drop off and before Jack can even choke out a few words of comfort, there is only the image of a smoldering, black pumpkin before the true nighttime darkness converges over everything and Ernest’s flame is snuffed. Juliette remains silent as Jack sobs. Through the woods, children snicker.
VI.
Jack was once a soldier. He caught the last few months of a war nobody won, and what little combat he saw gave him plenty of reason to avoid watching violent movies, entering gun shops, and socializing with the kind of people that are apt to take or deliver a punch. He would hurt the mischief spirits, but only to stop them from hurting anybody else. From burning Juliette, too. He’s heard those awful rumors of black cats being sacrificed in October, and how animal shelters refuse to sell them in this month of Jack’s that was supposed to be the greatest thirty-one days of the year.
There are un-carved pumpkins on Jack’s table with their guts intact. He can only stare into the blank canvas and wish for a better world. Ernest left his cowboy hat behind on the kitchen table. Jack slips it on. He’s not capable of getting revenge. He’s not capable of taking that old service pistol out of its shoebox and pretending he’s Clint Eastwood. He tries to listen to Juliette as she tells him that Ernest’s spirit is surely fine, that there’s only so much you can do to someone once they’re dead. He can’t hear her. On the blank canvas in front of him, he can’t see anything.
The next day he builds another scarecrow, and waits. The pipe remains in the kitchen. Juliette curls up on the bench beside him. The bugs have stopped their cries, the crickets have dismantled their band and gone home. When the sun begins to set and the scarecrow has only seemingly sagged on its perch over the pumpkin patch, Juliette apologies.
“All they say is ‘Trick’, and yet we followed them. He may not be able to come back like he did. He was corporeal, he had a body, and Halloween is in four days. You’ll know, if you see him at your doorstep… there’s no goodbye forever.” No goodbye forever. Jack can’t count how many times he’s chanted those words to himself. He rises from the bench, takes a deep breath, and realizes he can’t smell it anymore. The month has lost its scent. His blade has lost its point.
“We’re going to go back to that house and tell them we gave it everything. Then I am going to make a bargain, and I won’t let you disagree with it.” Jack doesn’t like how he sounds, he doesn’t like the risk his words imply. The drama is a weight that drowns everybody in the end and somehow, for some reason that comes down to his carving pumpkins that stand out, he is shackled and sinking.
“I’m flattered you think me powerful enough to stop you,” Juliette says and there’s something so much worse about how little confidence she has. Mysterious as she’s always been, there’s nothing more disappointing than realizing she’s just another October denizen with only a small bag of tricks puffed up by shadows.
They enter the house at the end of Wilmore lane side by side. Without so much as a flashlight, Jack stands in the middle of that front hall, in the same spot he’d previously set his lantern down. “I can’t do what you asked. I failed, and my friend is gone. The mischief children did this like I already told you. But I’m thinking, you know that. You want me to try and solve an impossible mystery. You want me here, on my knees.” Jack refuses to take his words literally and sink to the grimy, spider slick floor. “Give me something to sign and I will sign it, but you better believe I have conditions.” He licks his dry lips and waits. Juliette, alert beside him, spins in circles, peering into the inky black of the closest rooms. There is nothing, not even a natural creak from an old, neglected house.
“They’ve abandoned it,” Juliette remarks as they head back outside.
“Do you think they heard me?” Jack asks, but of course, they did. Maybe the cobwebs themselves were like silken microphones. The kingdom knows whatever it needs to know, and yet it came to Jack, with a confusing, illogical mystery to solve.
The duo have barely crossed the truly empty house’s lawn when a nearby cluster of leaves begins to move, accumulating together. This time Jack watches the grass, and where it meets the leaves. He spots, in the streetlight’s waning glow, a hint of centipede-like orange legs prickling into the earth. The cluster of leaves draws across the lawn and then stops. “It wants us to follow it,” Juliette says just as the thing beneath the leaves moves farther away before stopping again, and Jack wonders if there’s a hidden pair of eyes rolling at them.
“Into the woods….” Jack begins and there’s almost the hint of a dry chuckle from Juliette. Given all that’s occurred and this is the October Juliette goes and expresses something akin to human joy?
“And you, ready to sell your soul and you didn’t think to bring a flashlight.”
“Why follow it? House should be good enough, right?”
“Subjects of the kingdom do as it bids. I can smell smoke in the air. An Autumn fire…” Juliette leaps after the travelling leaf pile before Jack can. She’s right, there is a fire in the air.
There comes a point, in the woods, where Jack only has Juliette’s tail fluttering against his leg to keep him in line. Call it a cat’s sense, but that and his trust in her is the only thing that keeps him from wondering if he’s being lead to the leaf pile to end all leaf piles, a legion of leaves that will one day swallow the world.
A great bonfire awaits them, in a clearing, a true hallow of the forest. The leaf pile scatters and dissipates when they enter the firelight. Jack doesn’t notice it for a moment, thinking the clearing and bonfire to be eerily abandoned, before he sees them. Shadows, humanoid shadows, dancing around the flames in a great circle. There must be hundreds of them. All shapes and sizes, dancing to the crackle of flames. In places illuminated by the great shards of fire, Jack can see the grass bending downward as if delicately stepped upon.
“Mind your shadow, it might be stolen,” Juliette warns and Jack doesn’t have a chance to ask her if she’s kidding, when something with great elk horns sprouting from its skull steps around from the other side of the bonfire. Tall and covered in fur on two legs, it’s a primal thing with its back turned to Jack and Juliette as its massive arms are lifted in the air over the fire. The shadows still, and a familiar voice of grinding sand speaks from behind Jack.
“The lady is right,” the pale one says. He wears the sagging, still bloodied skin of a forest animal, maybe a deer, though Jack could be forgiven for having deer on the mind as he glances back at the horned thing blurred by the flame and smoke. “But you’d get another in return.”
“You were lying to me. You were playing games with me, telling me to find the pumpkin…you know where it is, don’t you?”
“You are extraordinary.” The pale one counters with a compliment and Jack doesn’t know how to respond, so Juliette does.
“You were testing him.”
“Correct. And you failed, pumpkin carver. You’re failing as we speak. It’s not a mystery. The kingdom doesn’t need a detective. We need a symbol. We require a champion. Champions don’t get fooled so easily. Champions do not sulk, they act, decisively, before getting back to what they do best. Your love for this slipping season is blind enough to burn your heart black. That means you are weak. That means you’re not fit to be burnt on a pyre.”
“I have a deal. I’ll sign something, we can bargain.” Jack wonders how much his life would be worth. He’ll carve pumpkins in the underworld, if he has to. Maybe it would mean he’d get to be closer to the spirits…
“Pumpkin carver, devils are make believe. We do not bargain, we do not need your oath in blood. We could take you if we wanted you. We need a pumpkin carver that isn’t blind. Your loved ones are dead. We won’t harm them, because we are dead. The ground, the trees, they are all dead. This is death’s month, death’s holiday. You need to start appreciating what death means and what some will do to defy it. What must be done to enforce it. What you must do, to soften the blow. Someone is bending the rules with your creation. If you want to let them be, let them be. But you defy them. Yes, you are no Saint of the season. If you do not honor the consequences of your actions, then you are the true devil at the end of your tale, pumpkin carver. You are the one so flimsy in your faith that you will allow an abomination to be born.”
“I carve pumpkins, and occasionally I’m visited by miracles. I’ve never taken part in anything more,” Jack says.
“Miracles? You envision the world to be so simple? Leave. Now. You don’t belong here. We eat people like you. We gnaw the bone, bathe in the blood. Take your miracles and the cinnamon sugar you use to pretty the world up, and leave, before you can’t and this becomes the classic tale of man thinking he can compete with the real monsters.” The pale one turns and walks to the far side of the clearing and the vast expanse of black woods that await.
Juliette leads the way back down the forest trail, ushering Jack along like a blind man. Once they re-emerge onto Wilmore lane, Jack finds himself staring at his hands as they walk back to his place. The hands that bless each pumpkin he carves. Something is beginning to click. Something awful is beginning to make sense.
When they arrive on his porch, Jack asks aloud, “If you could hide a pumpkin anywhere, where would you hide it?” He stares at his armada of lanterns. Every now and then, he forgets their order, and smiles as he picks out a familiar image from the overwhelming tide of orange and shadow.
“Jack, don’t tell me you’re going to speak in riddles like one of them,” Juliette cautions.
“Hah, you’re not one of them anymore?” Jack says, before telling her about the closest Pumpkin Spectacular, and the hundreds of pumpkins that are kept there. He then tells her about hands, the hands one uses to carve a pumpkin. She draws her own conclusion, when she marvels about how pumpkins draw in spirits, and about what an individual would seek to accomplish with a blessed pumpkin and graveyards robbed of bones.
GO TO… PAGE ONE / PAGE THREE
About The Author
