The Saints of October – Part Two By Nick Manzolillo
VII.
The next day drags onwards as Jack awaits nightfall. He tries carving a pumpkin but he can’t shut his brain off. He can’t get past the gutting stage. He can’t help but wonder what will happen if he’s wrong, and if the Pumpkin Spectacular is nothing more than a gallery of other artists’ work. At last, dusk draws in while he stands in the garden, wearing the cowboy hat and clutching his pipe, staring at the scarecrow swaying in a light breeze, almost as if it’s alive. He slams the pipe into the earth and the still sweet, green grass.
Juliette doesn’t have to tell him out loud how uncomfortable she is as she perches onto the passenger seat of his pickup truck, an old survivor of the early eighties. He’d bought the truck cheap because no matter how much you hate them, eventually you need a car. Spectacular’s just far enough away that they need to drive. After moving to Blossom, he’d bought, specifically, a pickup, because they handle getting into a wreck better than anything else. Nevertheless, Jack’s hands tremble as he gets behind the wheel. He imagines the faint scars along his face, chest and arms opening fresh and raw. He remembers the screams, after how still everything became. He remembers the silence that followed those screaming, ever-weakening voices in his ears, as he awaited rescue. He feels Juliette’s soothing influence settle over his nerves, and he doesn’t resist as he adjusts his hat and together they drive off into the Eve of Devil’s Night.
Lanterns draw souls. The Devil’s Night gives birth to Halloween, and the spirits will flock through the dark. Jack’s thought about it before, about how many spirits must mingle with the crowds. Or maybe they wait for after hours. The Pumpkin Spectacular is held in the Waverly Zoo. Being mostly out of season, the natural walkway that extends through the rather small park is perfect for aligning with pumpkins. Pumpkins on spikes and smaller carved gourds dangling from wires and decorate the oak trees like Christmas ornaments. Jack went just once, before he met Ernest. After meeting that particular, departed October friend, he began to enjoy staying at home, having found a way to stave off the loneliness.
“You know you can’t just follow me around. They frown on people bringing animals to the zoo,” Jack mentions as Juliette gazes at him with uncertainty.
“No.” Juliette guesses what he’s going to say before he says it.
Jack gestures to the pocket on the side of his jacket. He looks like a regular cowboy, between the coat that easily could be mistaken for a duster and the cowboy hat upon his head. “There’s plenty of space.” More than enough, given how bony she is.
“I’ll sneak through. I’m not a house pet, in case you haven’t noticed.” She grumbles, staring out the window at the groups of people wandering from their cars to the ticket lines. There are too many children, some of whom are even in costume. Will the mischief devils stand out? This plan is a horrible one but it’s here, it has to be. The Halloween kingdom can be damned, this is personal, like the pale one told him. Jack stares at his hands, pondering the act of creation
Juliette gives in and rides in his jacket pocket as Jack buys his ticket and enters the spectacular. He dips the cowboy hat over his eyes. Juliette offers some advice. “Avoid looking directly into their masks. They’ll see who you really are.” Jack pats the side of his pocket, smiling smugly. One of her ears perks up from the pocket’s fold. She’s a good friend, but Ernest was too. Friends, and family, can be plucked away until you have to face the darkness, and the cold, on your own.
The crowd is a rippling sea as people walk lazily in admiration at the pumpkin galleries around them. Jack feels almost guilty, pushes his way through the crowds. One row of massive pumpkins is a memorial to all the celebrities and public figures that died in the past year. Other themes are sprinkled throughout the park, from marine life, to Hollywood monsters, to aliens and outer space, and then back to animals and classic movies.
The zoo has a horse exhibit, which in addition to serving as a testament to how poor of an exotic zoo it actually is, means there’s a field and a stable. Tonight the field is a mess of flickering light and long shadows. There are at least a hundred pumpkins cluttering the horse’s playpen as they rest in their stable. Jack, already dreading how he’ll be able to investigate each pumpkin in the field, is reaffirmed when he sees a mischief kid leaning along the fence. The kid’s mask is pale, and perhaps blank, for all Jack knows as he follows Juliette’s advice. The fence along the pumpkin field stretches long enough that Jack’s able to distance himself from the lingering guard dog of a mischief kid, as he squeezes past the other spectators and gazes at the field. He pats his pocket and Juliette slips out, squeezing between the fence’s wooden beams.
“I don’t plan on needing you to rescue me again,” she mutters, blending into the blackness by the fence. She’ll pick her way through the field like an assassin, sticking to the shadow patches.
“Good, cause it might be time you return the favor,” Jack tells her as she vanishes into the black. He has no idea if the mischief children can hurt him. It seemed by choice that they didn’t mess with him before. Choice, or the will of the master mask maker that probably has something to do with his. Wherever he dwells.
If Juliette finds the pumpkin she won’t be able to smash it herself. What loyalty does she owe Halloween? If it weren’t for the people he loved, and the honor of his holiday, and the idea that one of his pumpkins could be used for an abomination…who is really in danger? A graveyard was robbed. It’s only the dead and the damned that are being disturbed.
“Trick,” a voice says from Jack’s left as he turns, and then an arm latches around his neck, putting him into a headlock as he’s pulled over the fence. Something crept up on him, through the same shadow’s Juliette took advantage of.
Jack hears other spectators scream and shout for a moment before the voice of a mischief kid speaks out. “Trick or Treat, you know what he chose. Step right up, but don’t lean on the fence. We are hungry, tonight.” The mischief kid almost sounds human. A hand suctions against Jack’s mouth as he’s dragged in between pumpkins across the mud. He sees one of the mischief kids standing on the fence, delivering his speech and suckering the crowd into thinking he’s an actor, paid to scare them for some bonus Halloween delight. The coordinators of the Spectacular are scattered, more concerned about the animals coming to harm than the pumpkins or guests. Jack’s abduction is unremarkable, on the Eve of Devil’s Night.
He’s dragged away from the pumpkins and around to the other side of the stables, cast under a shade of blackness aided by the distant lights that align the walkway through the exhibit. Just one child drags him, stronger than any man Jack’s ever known, rivaling his drill sergeants and fellow infantrymen, and all the troops he’d exchanged blows with in the makeshift boxing and wrestling rings that served as entertainment at base camp.
The stable doors are cracked open, as Jack is led to a narrow space litby the glow of seven pumpkins. Jack recognizes only one of them, in the middle of the circle. His lantern grins back at him. Sitting with the lantern in the middle of his legs is a thing of bone and rotted flesh. A scarecrow made from people, a halfwit Frankenstein more skeleton than meat. Ernest sits with a permanent grin plastered over his yellowed skull. Every other finger is covered in skin. “I didn’t want you to see me like this.” He laughs, caressing Jack’s pumpkin…their pumpkin, for his hands helped gut it. The pale man, speaking in his riddles, couldn’t just outright tell Jack. He wanted Jack to figure it out for himself.
“You burned for this,” Jack says as the mischief child lets go of him, looming over him as he sits in the mud, opposite the pumpkin circle and his former October friend. Jack’s cowboy hat is smacked down upon his head; forgot about losing it when he was attacked.
“I wanted to tell you there was no harm in it, Jack, but I didn’t want you stop me. I’m sorry, really, but, you know, think of this as me getting my due credit,” Ernest says.
“You weren’t planning this all along…” Jack had figured only some of it out, before coming here. From behind Ernest walks another mischief child in a blue mask with black horns emerging from the forehead.
“Of course not! I didn’t think it possible, till I got to thinking. I travel, Jack, when I’m not inhabiting your, if I do say so myself, very lovingly made puppet. I may not be visible, but I’m always learning, travelling. During the off months I am the wind, nightly. I discovered a rite. I discovered the mask maker. He’s just like you, but focused. I knew you wanted nothing to do with the mystic arts, though I’ve never understood it. Do you know what kind of power a master pumpkin carver possesses? This year I knew, I knew that a pumpkin carved by you and given your blessing would be high magic indeed! I needed pure bones, you see, so that my skin could form anew. I can see my fingers, Jack. Giving me a pumpkin head was cute but…” he strokes his ever-grinning skull, “I’m a person too. I was. I will be, again. I can become real.” Ernest is made from the rotted flesh of stolen corpses. How many backwoods graves did the mischief children rob?
“I don’t know much about rituals and magic nonsense and, this….” Jack shakes his head at the dead thing before him, Ernest nearly brought to life, more ugly than any ghost he’s known. “What’s the price here? I know that much. I know there’s gotta be a price.”
“You are right, bud. There is a price, and there are rules, more rules than you could ever imagine. Just because we break the laws of popular science doesn’t mean we’re not kept in place, kept in line. I need spirits. Spirits drawn to a hell of a lot of pumpkins, more than I bet even you could carve in a month. Now, I’m not hurting them, or anybody. I’ll just borrow them, for the year, snatch em up while they’re mesmerized by the gallery. Instead of the underworld, they will live in me. Or rather, on me. Inch by inch they are drawn to our pumpkin, Jack, and then they become my flesh to go with my bone.” Ernest holds up his arm. Red meat and the idea of muscles and tendons are beginning to form.
“It’s uneven, patchwork, I know. But these bones, Jack, they’re fused. I’ve got dem bones.” He breaks into a fit of laughter. He still speaks like a spirit, not a living, organic thing with organs and lungs and lips. “I borrow these spirits for a year. Then next October I do it all over again. Like a doctor’s checkup. I’ll be free, and in the off season I’ll be a man again. Just think Jack, we could grab a beer together. Bunker down for them cold months.”
Jack ignores that idea, and how it almost sounds nice. “And you think those spirits are happy?”
“Who cares? Do you know how many dead people there are? Stretching through our universe? A year of suffering’s good for ya. You don’t even have to see them, hear them scream. It’s not Halloween yet. They’re not visible until Halloween. But they will be. Oh, come midnight, any hour now, they’ll come flocking in. Then maybe I will feel bad, Jack. Maybe their screams will be too much, but I’ve got to try. Don’t you see? A ritual like this is the only option I’ve got.”
“It’s not right. The kingdom…” They know, and they’re allowing this? They want Jack to stop it? Then again, why would they care about the spirits? Why should there be anything decent about a Halloween kingdom?
“The kingdom knows. They don’t care. They want to keep you in check, you’re a…you’re an oil barge, leaking a bit. They ain’t gonna clean the mess, they just want you to be made aware. It’s a win, win, win, Jack. We could be friends all year long, after I’m whole. We can take that fucker old man winter on together, yeah?”
“What if my family ends up sucked into your skin suit. Ever thinkabout that?”
“Think about the odds, Jack. All the dead that ever lived. I doubt that would happen. I doubt it.”
The wind is beginning to pick up outside. Howling, faintly, like wolves in the distance. From the open stable doors behind Jack, there comes a faint tide of fallen leaves.
“Is that Juliette? You brought her, didn’t you? She is the one we have to talk some sense into. She’s got secrets on secrets Jack, I’ve learned a lot about her. She’s met the mask maker. The master mask maker.” Ernest giggles. “The kingdom and him, they go way, way back. They are not friends. Not in the slightest. It’s a classic story. Mask maker was supposed to inherit something, maybe a throne. Was cut out like Shakespeare himself dictated. Learned how to control the minds of the meek.”
“You’re with them. That’s all you need to know that you made the wrong decision.” Jack tries to sneer, tries to be angry but there’s only pain and sobs he has to force himself to choke back.
“Trick,.” the mischief spirit says, as if on cue, from behind Jack.
“Oh Jack, what have you got against a little seasonal fun?”
“Yeah, Jack?” the spirit says from behind him.
“Jaaaaack,” the other mischief-kid says from over Ernest’s shoulder, and Jack realizes those are the mask maker’s words, seeping out through his children.
The pumpkins around Ernest begin to flicker with a higher frequency and there is a cry from outside. A cat, howling into the night as if it’s being slowly tortured. The hairs on the back of Jack’s neck prick up, and like a rogue wave the wind hurls a gust of leaves through the doors. All of the lanterns go out as one. All save for Jack’s pumpkin.
From outside comes a chorus of cries and screams from the guests throughout Pumpkin Spectacular. Jack can imagine hundreds of lanterns flickering out as one. What has Juliette done?
“Sacrilege…oh, who would do…she? Oh, that poor silly thing, I thought she was wise. On this night of nights, what she’s done…because of me? Because of this?” Ernest, a walking skeleton with bones yellow in some places and splashed red in others, shakes and shivers as he stretches onto his legs. In the sudden dimming of the room, it takes Jack a moment to realize the mischief children have vanished. What if they’re after Juliette? The great gust of wind died so shortly after it began. The cries of disappointed Spectacular viewers is loud enough to drown everything out.
One of the horses’ pens opens and a dark mare with a black sack over its head walks to Ernest’s side. No doubt the beast’s mind is not its own. “The kingdom, they’re players, they are. Con men. Careful Jack. They’re playing a game here. The kind where they purposely keep the rules from you. You could come with me, if you’d like.” He swings onto the horse’s back. Jack picks himself up from the dirt, eyeing the pumpkin on the ground. Ernest stares down at it, and then glances at the rippling leaves by the stable doors. “Do you know what you could do with that? Call it gruesome, but you could them back. I know you’d prefer them over me. Otherwise, I may have plotted with you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for Juliette, too. She’s in trouble now, Jack. Oh the trouble that comes with blowing out a pumpkin on this very Eve. These tricks, oh these tricks. I’ll be seeing you.” He ignores the pumpkin and as the horse gallops over the leaves by the entrance to the stable. Jack holds his breath in anticipation of a hidden monster’s strike. It never comes, as Ernest gallops off into the madness and confusion of another Devil’s Night. Jack, without admiring his work one last time, drives a foot through the pumpkin fit for a kingdom and drags his heel, splitting it into meaty chunks.
He finds Juliette shivering uncontrollably beneath his truck. With her body practically vibrating, she crawls out and lifts her head to him. “I’ve done something awful.”
“You blew them all out.” Jack knows it’s not as simple as that. Nothing is, the night before and the night of Halloween. “It was…Ernest. It was him that did this, trying to have a body, to be real. He’s all bones. I thought you were the kingdom, at first. The leaves.”
“I shouldn’t have helped you. I shouldn’t have come. There are laws even the kingdom fears to break. There are so many ways to damn yourself. I need to leave,” Juliette says.
“No, you don’t. I’ve got you. Maybe there’s a way I could protect you.”
“There are ways, sure. You’re just beginning to learn. I’ll be back next year. I will come back by the first of October and I will teach you. I need to leave, now.”
“What if the…the mask maker, what if they try to…” Jack can’t imagine Juliette dying and him not knowing.
“The mask maker won’t kill me. Not now. I’ve cursed myself, Jack. I cursed myself a long time ago, and so I can never stop moving. Never stop wandering. What I’ve done is a multiplier. My luck will get worse, much worse. I’ll be followed. The mischief children are wicked spirits tamed, Jack. Tamed by the masks, and the traditions of Samhein and Halloween. What’s coming for me is not bound by a mere month. I will see you next year. I’m sorry this had to happen. I’m sorry it all went so wrong. What you can do is beyond beautiful. All of these eyes are on you now, Jack. You’ve become a legend, after all these years, and now everybody wants a piece. Do me a favor, and carve a portrait of me, during the daylight tomorrow.”
“Of course, I-” He wants to tell her she can stay with him. He could put her in a pumpkin, for safety, maybe. But he’s not truly a part of her world. He is a stranger, plunging through the weird. It’s best he doesn’t drag her down. She’s miserable, but she’s not afraid. No. She’s shivering with action, action deemed from consequence. He begins to believe she will be alright, and that he’ll see her again. “Of course. It’ll be the first thing I do.” She nods, all set with her words, as she scurries away through the parking lot, weaving between disappointed admirers of the biggest pumpkin gallery in the country. But not the best.
The mischief children are waiting for him on his porch when he returns home, alone, and Jack doesn’t hesitate as he parks and steps free from his truck. The edges of their sweatshirt hoods enshroud their masks. Their hands dangle by their sides, fingers twitching. Jack walks amongst his carvings, head held high. “Trick. Trick. Trick,.” the children begin chanting, those r’s dripping venom. The leaves gathered along both sides of the porch begin to rise.
Jack stops at the edge of his first porch step and watches as the leaves converge. Fluttering up as a whirlwind, the children are lost amidst the storm of brown and orange. Giggling, they are plucked away, devoured before the leaves settle back into their unruly piles. Jack continues onward, unlocking his door with the twist of a key, before setting the deadbolt behind him.
As the sun begins to set on Halloween night, Jack sits on his porch with a plastic pumpkin crate filled with candy by his side. To his left is a freshly carved portrait of Juliette, freshly set aglow. He can hear children, the real kind, laughing and running from house to house, slowly creeping down the neighborhood his way. His daughter will be here soon. He’s not sure about his wife. His former wife. Some years she finds it harder to forgive him than others, but his daughter always comes, every year. Same with his parents, and all of his grandparents both great and grand, some of which he never did get the chance to meet. They don’t speak, but that’s okay. He can see their smiles as they inspect each lantern, raising their hands to it for warmth. Admiring his work. Not worrying about the days ahead.
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