“That says ‘trying to protect you,’” corrected Hailey. There was an odd tone in her voice. It took Velveteen a moment to realize what it was: kindness. The normally sarcastic, frequently cruel teen was trying her very best to sound kind. “That says ‘Halloween transforms everyone who enters one way or another.’ Didn’t anyone bother to tell you why you kept changing?”
“No,” said Velveteen.
“The Seasonal Lands are alive,” said Hailey. “Not in the ‘treat the Earth like a living thing’ animist nonsense sense—”
“It’s not nonsense,” said Velveteen, stung.
“—but in the literal, factual, no-bullshit ‘this is a living organism’ sense,” continued Hailey, as if Vel hadn’t spoken. “You are standing in the gut of one of the biggest creatures in existence. People like me and Scaredy, and maybe you if you take the job, we’re the immune system. We’re what keeps bad shit from getting in here and wreaking havoc. That’s why the Seasonal Lands call and claim people. Because they need to be protected, or they’ll die.”
“That’s not what Santa said. Or Persephone.” Velveteen struggled to keep her voice level. She was so tired. No matter what she did, no matter how far she went, it felt like there was always one more contradictory story to listen to, one more impossible mountain to climb. “Nobody’s mentioned this but you.”
“Because whatever’s true for them isn’t necessarily true for me; not in the details,” said Hailey. “You’re standing in the middle of a metaphor. It’s going to be self-contradictory from time to time, because that’s how symbols work. Think of the Seasonal Lands as monsters or memories or whatever. The fact remains that everything that enters here has to change.”
“You didn’t,” snapped Velveteen.
Hailey’s face fell. “I am the teen witch guardian protector of the season, because I haven’t been able to find anyone to take my place,” she said, voice going low and tight, throbbing like the beat of a tell-tale heart. “I am the cool kid who still likes trick-or-treat, the one who tempts you to leave the sidewalk and come on an adventure through the graveyards and the alleyways. I am safe scares in the shadow of the Halloween tree. Do you really think I didn’t have to change? Do you really think I didn’t have to pay?”
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” said Scaredy, selecting another cupcake from the pile and turning it over in his gloved paw like it was the most interesting thing in the world. “I hope you have a strong stomach.”
“What?” asked Velveteen. Her attention flickered to him. Only for a moment.
More than long enough for Hailey to undo the ties on her blouse, and pick up the knife.
“Well?” she snapped, bringing Velveteen’s head whipping around. The Halloween girl was standing there with black bra and pale skin exposed, holding the point of a wicked-looking carving knife against her stomach. She gave Velveteen a challenging look. “You really think I didn’t have to change?”
Velveteen’s eyes widened. “Hailey, put down the knife,” she said.
“You know, I could have done what Santa did,” said Hailey. “I could have found some sweet little thing with candy corn teeth and hair like corn silk and ordered them to become your best friend. I could have wooed you with all the sweetest, brightest parts of the holiday, and hid the things I knew you wouldn’t want to see until it was too late. Because there is a point of no return, bunny-girl. There’s a point past which it doesn’t matter if you accept the holiday, because the holiday will have fully accepted you. You’ll be digested and remade, and your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”
She didn’t pause long enough for Velveteen to say anything. She just rammed the knife into her stomach, sliding it home until the handle formed a seal against the skin of her stomach. She grimaced.
“Fuck, that stings,” she said, and pulled the knife out, opening a gaping tear in her abdomen. Leaves poured out. Autumn leaves, in gold and red and orange; all the colors of harvest, all the colors of the flame. They were mixed with corn husks and fresh green pumpkin vines, like intestines. They fell at her feet as she looked defiantly at Velveteen, expression challenging the other woman to say a single word.
Velveteen blinked. Velveteen didn’t say a damn thing.
“I didn’t realize at first what was happening, because Halloween took me as I was: flesh and blood and ambition like a flame,” said Hailey. “I still bled when I skinned my knees or bumped my nose—until the day I didn’t. Until the day there was just a sweet trickle of maple sap. My skin still feels like skin, because every pretty lure has to fool the fishes, but my bones? My flesh? That’s all long gone to dust, replaced by whatever pretty bits of the season were lying around. Everything changes. You change so dramatically because right now, you’re a tourist. Transforming you like this protects you.”
Velveteen opened her mouth, intending to protest. What came out was, “Didn’t it hurt?”
“It would have, if I hadn’t come willingly,” said Hailey. “I wanted this. The big difference between vampire stories and zombie stories is whether the person wanted to be bitten. I wanted the bite. I wanted to live forever in the space between seasons, and never get old, and never go back. I made my choice. But it would have happened either way. Willing victim or kidnapped hostage, the change would have come.”
“I didn’t change,” said Scaredy. He looked calmly at Velveteen, and his eyes were a sea of silent screams. “I was born here, like Trick and Treat. Like your friend Jacqueline. What the seasons make, they don’t have to transform, because we’re already suited to living in a place that isn’t real. Hailey, though, she was a human girl when she came to Halloween. She had something she could lose, and so she lost it.”
“You had something you could lose too,” snapped Hailey. “Don’t forget that.”
To Velveteen’s surprise, Scaredy Cat laughed. “I lost it the second the season started shopping for my replacement,” he said. “I was already half-dwindled by the time you got here. You never saw me at my best. I was the monster in every closet and the nightmare under every bed. You were the face of a kinder, gentler Halloween, and now the season’s trying to bring in something even kinder and gentler than you. It’s all rolling with the times. My day will come again, and then I’ll devour each and every sorry one of you.”
“You don’t have many friends, do you?” asked Velveteen.
Hailey chuckled grimly. She ran her hand across the skin of her stomach and the tear disappeared, sealed up by the touch of her fingers. “Of all the seasons, Autumn is the one that tells the fewest lies about ‘friendship,’” she said. “Winter says ‘oh, things will get better, come warm yourself by our fire,’ and ignores all the children freezing to death in the snow. Spring says ‘we’re the kind one,’ and pretends nature isn’t red in tooth and claw. Summer says ‘frolic in our fields,’ and turns your eyes away from the men who break their backs to bring about the harvest. Autumn says ‘try and survive me.’ At least we don’t dress ourselves up for your funeral.”
“And again, not many friends,” said Velveteen. “Look. It sucks that your guts are made of dried leaves and whatever. It sucks and it’s creepy and it’s not my fault. You keep saying that the seasons transform everyone, but I visited Winter dozens of time before they decided to turn me into Frosty the Snowman. You people turned me into a rag doll the first time I came here.”
“Because unlike your precious Winter, we were never interested in winning you by lying to you,” said Hailey. “You didn’t transform because you were a tourist. You weren’t property. If you ever said ‘you know what, this is where I live now, here, forever,’ you would have changed in an instant, and you would have had no warning or way to influence what you became. Here, we may have forced you into a starting position, but Halloween is all about the masks we wear. We don’t care what you become, as long as you’re willing to take up the role you were meant for.”
Velveteen was silent for a long moment, taking this in. Part of her wanted to call Hailey a liar,
and maybe demonstrate why giving an animus a house with a face that could be used to hit things was a bad idea. The rest of her, though…
The rest of her was thinking about how many times she’d gone to the Winter without being introduced to Aurora, or to Lucy, or to the dark things that lurked in the snow-swept woods. They had shown her the theme park version of the holiday, and she had been willing to accept it, because she had loved them, and she had wanted them to be telling her the truth. She had wanted someplace where she could belong, even if that place was straight out of a children’s storybook. They had lied to her, sure. And she had let them.
“Be a haunted doll, ready to show children the way out of the darkness, if they’re good, or deeper down, if they’re bad.” Hailey’s tone turned cajoling, trying to lure Velveteen down her own kind of rabbit hole. “Be a scarecrow, with birds on your shoulders and husks in your hands. You could even take my place, be a pretty, smiling teen who knows all the best places to go for candy, as long as no one minds that you won’t have a heartbeat anymore. You could choose, Vel. That’s what we’re offering you. That’s the thing no one else would let you have.”
“Persephone said that I was the last animus in the world.” Velveteen looked at Hailey, trying not to show how much the other woman’s words had shaken her. “She said if I chose Spring, there wouldn’t be any more animus for a long, long time. Forever, maybe. Because absence is a kind of balance. Is that what happens if I stay here?”
“Fuck if I know,” said Hailey. “That’s not my department. I’ll take you to see Scream Queen, if you think you’re ready to have a conversation with someone who won’t put up with you insulting them constantly. See? We’re the buffer. We’re here for your protection.” Her smile was quick and almost shy, affording a glimpse of the teenage girl she’d been, once, before she’d traded her mortal life for a Halloween night that would never end. “Without us, you’d already be a sweet treat in somebody else’s pillowcase.”
“You know, this is the third season in a row where a woman has been in charge.”
Hailey shrugged. “That’s because here, they can be. The Calendar Country has been run by men for a long, long time. Why would any woman with superpowers and ambitions to match ever choose to stay there, when here, she can write her own ticket? If I’d been a boy, I might have decided not to go with Halloween. I would have had options. But that was a hundred years ago, and things were different then.”
“I guess so,” said Velveteen. She looked down at her patchwork hands, and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this over with. Take me to your leader.”
Scaredy and Hailey both smiled, and both their smiles contained too many teeth.
“Oh, goodie,” said Hailey. “I thought you’d never ask.”
*
They walked through an endless autumnal forest, leaves crunching underfoot and occasionally drifting down from the branches above them, even though those branches seemed, to the casual eye, to be completely skeletal. Strings of carved turnips and tiny jack-o’-lanterns were twined throughout the wood, each containing a tiny candle. Their light was small individually, but was collectively enough to brighten the night, turning into something akin to a dusky, twilit day.
“Scream Queen was Halloween Princess for about three hundred years before I came along and took over the job,” said Hailey, stepping around a muddy hole that bubbled and rippled with unnatural life. “She was more than ready to pass the pointy hat. It was a good role for her when she was younger, but as she aged, she wanted something with a little more gravitas.”
“Wait,” said Velveteen, glancing over her shoulder at Scaredy. He was swatting at the falling leaves, more feline than boy, and more monster than either. “I thought Scaredy was the guardian here before you came.”
“He was,” said Hailey. “Back then, the Halloween Princess was the big candy apple, and Scaredy Cat was the guardian. Things had been shifting away from him for a while, and he’d been losing power. That was how Scream Queen knew that things were about to change. She needed to take on more darkness, to keep things balanced, and she needed to pass her name to someone who had a little bit more light.”
The thought of Hailey as someone with “a little bit more light” was unsettling enough that Velveteen walked in silence for several minutes, thinking about it. It didn’t get less disturbing. “Where do Trick and Treat fit into all this? Where are they?”
“Around.” Hailey flapped her hand vaguely, indicating the forest to the left. “There’s a whole Halloween city here, did you know? How could you, we’ve never taken you there. Anyway, it’s a nice little suburb full of nice suburban monsters, and it’s where most of the people who stumble into Autumn these days wind up. Trick and Treat have a lot of good press from their time gallivanting around in your world, and that daughter of theirs, yeesh. She’s like the poster child for why raising your kids with no sense of their heritage can backfire. They’re living out there until Mischief can be properly socialized into the holiday, and while they’re at it, they’re serving as sort of PR for the people who pass through. ‘Look, Halloween cares so much about your safety that we have real superheroes patrolling our streets,’ that sort of thing. Besides, the season developed a couple of thematic supervillains after the jerks went off and got themselves identified as heroic. They need to mop up their own short-sighted mess.”
“How many people do you have just stumbling in?”
Hailey shrugged. “More than Spring or Summer, not as many as Winter. Halloween and Christmas are the big draws—naturally—and have their own dangers.”
“People who wind up in Winter when Santa’s not prepared for them are likely to freeze to death.” If they were lucky. There were wolves, and worse, out there in those endless evergreen forests.
“And people who wind up here when no one’s prepared could find themselves at the mercy of an awful lot of monsters.” Hailey glanced at Scaredy. “Some of them are supposedly the good guys. So we set up buffer zones to try to catch the ones who shouldn’t be there. We give them a good, enjoyable scare and we send them home with a story to tell. It’s better than the alternative, where they wouldn’t be making it home at all.”
“That’s a lot more compassionate than I expected from Halloween.”
Hailey shrugged. “Halloween has always been compassionate. You just haven’t been in a position to see it.”
“And you kept lying to me.”
“We did,” said Hailey unrepentantly. “We’ll do it again. But I’m not lying to you right now. Come on.” She stepped off the path and into the trees with Scaredy at her heels, leaving Velveteen no choice but to follow or be left behind in the dark Halloween wood.
“Fuck everything,” she said philosophically, and followed.
There was no path through the trees that she could see: she had to follow the trail of crushed leaves and broken branches, hoping that she was tailing Hailey and Scaredy, and not, say, the local equivalent of the grizzly bear, which would probably have chainsaws for paws or something equally unnecessary. If there was one thing she had learnt from her time in the Seasonal Lands so far, it was that any time something seemed like it was just too damn much, someone in charge was going to think it was a great idea. The best idea. Let’s do that.
“This is Halloween,” she muttered. “They’re probably a-okay with murdering people, as long as you throw some candy around when you’re done. I bet I can find some candy. I’m good at finding candy.”
She stepped out of the trees and into a broad clearing. Hailey and Scaredy were standing on the other side of it, flanking a throne that appeared to have grown straight out of the ground, all twisted roots and tangled branches. There were bats roosting there. There were bones held captive in the knotty snarl of twig and thorn and rotting trunk. And on the throne, there was a woman.
She was beautiful: there was no denying that. Her skin was deep brown, never quite shading into full blackness, although her African-American roots were apparent in everythi
ng from her bearing to the cornrow perfection of her hair. She wore a dress that would have been perfectly at home at a 1970s prom, layer upon layer of pink taffeta. Somehow, it wasn’t anything the Princess would have worn; it wasn’t a fairy tale dress. It was a horror movie dress, stolen from the seconds before the blood started flying. No: not quite. There were little red dots on the hem of her dress, some dried to a deep brown, others arterial-fresh and almost unnatural-looking. The sash across her chest read PROM QUEEN.
She was terrible: there was no denying that. She smiled like the moon coming out from behind the clouds on Halloween night, and in her eyes lingered an eternity of screaming. Her nails were bloody red and filed to stiletto points, and the bouquet she nestled in the crook of one arm was corn stalks and dead roses, ringed with tiny waxy orange berries, like dollhouse pumpkins.
“Hello, Velveteen,” she said, and her voice was a mug of hot apple cider at the end of a long night’s trick-or-treating; it was a poisoned caramel apple on an oleander stick. There was no contradiction in those things. They were simply and entirely what she was, no omissions, no lies. “I was pleased when you chose to come to us last of all. It means we still might have a chance to make you stay.”
“Scream Queen, I presume,” said Velveteen. Aurora had been cold, which suited the heart of Winter; Persephone had been welcoming and warm. Scream Queen was somewhere in the middle, a bonfire of a woman, blazing bright and burning.
“In the flesh, such as it is,” said Scream Queen. She smiled, and her teeth were white and even and very, very sharp. “I’ve been waiting for such a long time to meet you.”
“You could have come to say ‘hello’ the first time your minions decided to kidnap me.”