He opened the door just far enough to hand out the candy and in a bland voice said: "Here you go, my little witch." That last part just slipped out somehow.
"Thank you," she said under her breath, under a thousand breaths of fear and experience. So did it seem.
She turned away, and as she descended the porch steps her broom clunked along one step behind her. An old, frayed, throwaway broom. Perfect for witches. And the kind perfect for keeping a child in line. An ugly old thing kept in a corner, an instrument of discipline always within easy reach, always within a child's sight until the thing became a dream-haunting image. Mother's broom.
After the girl and her mother were out of sight, he closed the door on the world and, having survived a tense episode, was actually grateful for the solitude that only minutes ago was the object of his dread.
Darkness. Bed.
But he could not sleep, not to say he did not dream. Hypnagogic horrors settled into his mind, a grotesque succession of images resembling lurid frames from old comic strips. Impossibly distorted faces painted in garish colors frolicked before his mental eye, all entirely beyond his control. These were accompanied by a series of funhouse noises which seemed to emanate from some zone located between his brain and the moonlit bedroom around him. A drone of half-thrilled, half-horrified voices filled the background of his imagination, punctuated by super-distinct shouts which used his name as an excuse for sound. It was an abstract version of his mother's voice, now robbed of any sensual quality to identify it as such, remaining.only a pure idea. The voice called out his name from a distant room in his memory. Sam-u-el, it shouted with a terrible urgency of obscure origin. Then suddenly—trick or treat. The words echoed, changing in sense as they faded into silence: trick or treat—down the street—we will meet—ashes, ashes. No, not ashes but other trees. The boy walked behind some big maples, was eclipsed by them. Did he know a car was following him that night? Panic. Don't lose him now. Don't lose him. Ah, there he was on the other side. Nice trees. Good old trees. The boy turned around, and in his hand was a tangled web of strings whose ends extended up to the stars which he began working like kites or toy airplanes or flying puppets, staring up at the night and screaming for the help that never came. Mother's voice started shouting again; then the other voices mixed in, becoming a foul babbling unity of dead voices chattering away. Night of the Dead. All the dead conversed with him in a single voicey-woicey.
Trick or treat, it said.
But this didn't sound as if it were part of his delirium. The words seemed to originate from outside him, for their utterance served to disturb his half-sleep and free him of its terrible weight. Instinctively cautious of his lame leg, he managed to wrest himself from sweaty bedcovers and place both feet on the solid floor. This felt reassuring. But then:
Trick or treat.
It was outside. Someone on the front porch. "I'm coming," he called into the darkness, the sound of his own voice awakening him to the absurdity of what it had said. Had the months of solitude finally exacted their strange price from his sanity? Listen closely. Maybe it won't happen again.
Trick or treat. Trick or treat.
Trick, he thought. But he'd have to go downstairs to be sure. He imagined seeing a playfully laughing shape or shapes scurrying off into the darkness the moment he opened the door. He'd have to hurry, though, if he was to catch them at it. Damn leg, where's that cane. He next found his bathrobe in the darkness and draped it over his underclothed body. Now to negotiate those wicked stairs. Turn on the hallway light. No, that would alert them to his coming. Smart.
He was making it down the stairs in good time, considering the gloomy conditions he was working under. Neither this nor that nor gloom of night. Gloom of night. Dead of night. Night of the Dead.
With that odd sprightliness of cripples he ambled his way down the stairs, his cane always remaining a step ahead for support. Concentrate, he told his mind, which was starting to wander into strange places in the darkness. Watch out! Almost took a tumble that time. Finally he made it to the very bottom. A sound came through the wall from out on the front porch, a soft explosion it seemed. Good, they were still there. He could catch them and reassure his mind regarding the source of its fancies. The labor of walking down the stairs had left him rather hyperventilated and unsure about everything.
Trying to effect the shortest possible interval between the two operations, he turned the lock above the handle and pulled back the door as suddenly as he was able. A cold wind seeped in around the edges of the outer door, prowling its way past him and into the house. Out on the porch, there was no sign of a boyish trickster. Wait, yes there was.
He had to turn on the porchlight to see it. Directly in front of the door a jack-o-lantern had been heaved forcefully down onto the cement, caving in its pulpy shell which had exploded into fragments lying here and there on the porch. He opened the outer door for a closer look, and a swift wind invaded the house, flying past his head on frigid wings. What a blast, close the door. Close the door!
"Little buggers," he said very clearly, an attempt to relieve his sense of disorder and delirium.
"Who, meezy-weezy?" said the voice behind him.
At the top of the stairs. A dwarfish silhouette, seemingly with something in its hand. A weapon. Well, he had his cane at least.
"How did you get in here, child?" he asked without being sure it really was a child, considering its strangely hybrid voice.
"Child yourself, sonny. No such things where I come from. No Sammy-Wammies either. I'm just in disguise."
"How did you get in?" he repeated, still hoping to establish a rational manner of entry.
"In? I was already in."
"Here?" he asked.
"No, not here. There-dee-dare." The figure was pointing out the window at the top of the stairs, out at the kaleidoscopic sky. "Isn't it a beauty? No children, no anything."
"What do you mean?" he inquired with oneiric inspiration, the normalcy of dream being the only thing that kept his mind together at this stage.
"Mean? I don't mean nothing, you meany."
Double negative, he thought, relieved to have retained contact with a real world of grammatical propriety. Double negative: two empty mirrors reflecting each other's emptiness to infinite powers, nothing cancelling out nothing.
"Nothing?" he echoed with an interrogative inflection.
"Yup, that's where you're going."
"How am I supposed to do that?" he asked, gripping his cane tightly, sensing a climax to this confrontation.
"How? Don't worry. You already made sure of how-wow-wow... TRICK OR TREAT!"
And suddenly the thing came gliding down through the darkness.
IV
He was found the next day by Father Mickiewicz, who had telephoned earlier after failing to see this clockwork parishioner appear as usual for early mass on All Souls Day. The door was wide open, and the priest discovered his body at the bottom of the stairs, its bathrobe and underclothes grotesquely disarranged. The poor man seemed to have taken another fall, a fatal one this time. Aimless life, aimless death: Thus was his death in keying with his life, as Ovid wrote. So ran the priest's ad hoc eulogy, though not the one he would deliver at the deceased's funeral.
But why was the door open if he fell down the stairs? Father M. came to ask himself. The police answered this question with theories about an intruder or intruders unknown. Given the nature of the crime, they speculated on a revenge motive, which the priest's informal testimony was quick to contradict. The idea of revenge against such a man was far-fetched, if not totally meaningless. Yes, meaningless. Nevertheless, the motive was not robbery and the man seemed to have been beaten to death, possibly with his own cane. Later evidence showed that the corpse had been violated, but with an object much longer and more coarse than the cane originally supposed. They were now looking for something with the dimensions of a broomstick, probably a very old thing, splintered and decayed. But they would never find it in the places
they were searching.
Mad Night Of Atonement (1989)
First published in Grue Magazine #9, 1989
Also published in: Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory.
A Future Tale
Once more from the beginning; once more until the end. You know who Dr Francis Haxhausen was and how his disappearance affected the scientific world. There was dismay and confusion when one of the leading scientists on earth withdrew from an active life of research. And there was doubt, even anxiety, when he could no longer be reached for consultation on this or that question of urgent relevance to his former colleagues, if not to the vast body of the human race. Ah, the human race. Pacing the floors of gleaming labs, the geniuses in their long white smocks fretted about the missing man of science: they bore the stigmata of worry upon their faces and their voices grew quiet, like voices heard in the shadows of a lonely church. Rumors multiplied, panicky speculations were the order of the day. But however troubled certain people had become in the absence of Dr Haxhausen, they were no less bothered by his sudden return from a strange retirement.
He was now quite a different man, shaking the hands of old friends and smiling with a warmth that was entirely out of character. "I've been travelling here and there," he explained, though he avoided elaborating on this statement. For a time everyone kept an eye on Dr Haxhausen, eager to witness a revelation of some kind, or at least some clue to suggest what had happened to him. And how nerve-wracking vigilance can be. It was not long, however, before the inevitable conclusion had to be drawn: the unfortunate man had lost his reason, gone mad from years of overwork in the service of his calling. But perhaps there still remained some pretext for hoping that the scientist would recover. After all, he managed to avoid the constraints, which some, including members of his own family, attempted to place upon his movements. And certainly this was an achievement that hinted at the survival of some measure of his old genius. Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it—freedom, not reason—to pursue his plans for the future.
For almost a year he worked secretly, and alone, in an old, empty factory building located in an open field many miles from the nearest city. And into this building he brought a motley array of equipment—objects, devices, and machinery that belonged to quite different times and places, diverse worlds of human creation. There were of course the most modern machines and instruments of science, some of which had only come into being since Dr Haxhausen's disappearance. But there were also items of far earlier historical periods- and a few imported from cultures that would not be considered very far along the path of technological progress. Thus, Dr Haxhausen unpacked several oddly shaped vessels decorated with strange glyphs and primitive images. And these clumsy vessels he rested upon a table among elegant containers of nearly invisible glass. Then he pieced together something that resembled a dirty drainspout or an old stovepipe. And he placed it, for the moment, upon the immaculate metal surface of a computer, which was the color and texture of an eggshell.
More exotic or antiquated paraphernalia were revealed slumbering in crates and boxes: cauldrons, retorts, masks with wide-open mouths, alembics, bellows of different sizes, crusted bells that rang with dead voices, and rusted tongs that squeaked when manipulated; a large hourglass, a small telescope, shining swords and dull knives, a long wooden pitchfork with two hornlike prongs, and a tall staff with marvelously embellished headpiece; miniature bottles of very thick glass plugged with stoppers in the shape of human or animal heads, candles in ivory holders with curious carvings, bright beads, beautiful convex mirrors of perfect silver, golden chalices engraved with intricate designs and powerful phrases; huge books with brittle pages, a skull and some bones; doll-like figures made of dried vegetables, puppet-like figures made of wax and wood, and various little dummies composed of obscure materials. Finally, there was a shallow crate from which Dr Haxhausen removed a vaguely circular object that seemed to be a flat stone, but a stone that was translucent and mottled like an opal with a spectrum of soft hues. And all these things the scientist brought together within his dim and drafty laboratory: each, in his mind, would play its part in his design. Clearly his ideas about the practice of science had taken an incredible leap, though whether the direction was forward or backward remained to be seen.
For months he worked with a mechanical industriousness and without worry or doubt, as though following some foreordained plan of assured success. Slowly his invention began to take form out of the chaos of materials he had united in his experiment, a miscegenation that would give birth to a revolutionary artifact, a cross-bred assemblage of freakish novelty. And the result of his labors at last stood before him upon the cold and dusty floor of that factory, and he was pleased by the sight of it.
To the average eye, granted, Dr Haxhausen's invention might have appeared as no more than a bizarre scrapheap, a hybrid of some inscrutable fancy. Dense and unbeautiful, it branched out wildly in every direction, a mad foliage of ragged metal. And it seemed just barely, or not all, integrated into a whole. Through dark hollows within the chaotic tangle of the apparatus, the faces of dolls and puppets peeked out like malicious children in hiding. Incorporated into the body of the invention, their dwarfish forms mingled with its circuitry; these figures alone, by their very presence, might have bred doubts as to the validity of the scientist's creation. And, as must already be apparent, the eccentricities of the machine did not end with a few idiotic faces.
Nevertheless, there was a certain feature of the invention that did appear to suggest some definite purpose. This was the long black tube projecting from the midst of the debris, rising from it in the manner of a cobra set for the attack. But in place of the cobra's pair of fascinating eyes, this artificial serpent was equipped with a single cyclopean socket in which was fixed a smooth disc of beautifully blended colors. When Dr Haxhausen turned a dial on the remote control unit resting in his palm, the dark metallic beast reared back its head and, with a sinister grinding sound, directed its gaze up toward a grimy skylight. For years this window on the heavens had remained sealed. But that night, through the efforts of the inexhaustible scientist, it was opened. And the spectral light of a full moon shone down into the old factory, pouring its beams into the opalescent eye of Dr Haxhausen's machine. Later, when it seemed the beast was sated with its lunar nourishment, Dr Haxhausen confidently flicked a switch on the remote control unit. And the moonlight, which had been digested and transmuted in the bowels of the beast, was now given back to its source, spewing forth as a stream of lurid colors into the blackness, a harsh spectrum which one witness later described to authorities as an "awful rainbow quivering across the night." In the doctor's own description, this was called his Sacred Ray.
With the first stage of his project successfully completed, Dr Haxhausen moved out of his secluded laboratory. His machine, along with other things, was loaded on a truck by some hired laborers. Thus, it could easily be transported from one place to another, to be exhibited before the eyes of any who would come to see it. And this is exactly what the scientist had in mind. Abandoning obscurity and breaking his silence, he once again allowed himself to be known to the world. Naturally there was a great deal of publicity, none of which was complimentary to the worth of the scientist's revelations, though some of which paid sad homage to the former glory of his delicate mind. But public reaction was of no concern to him. His task would in any case be carried out: the world was to be given notice, the annunciation made. So he continued to travel here and there: in rented halls and auditoriums of many cities, he demonstrated the powers of his machine and spread the word to those who would hear it.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he began a typical performance in a typically out-of-date movie theater in a typical town. Standing alone on stage, Dr Haxhausen was wearing an old dark suit; as if to simulate formal attire, he added a new bow tie. His hair was greased and combed but had been allowed to grow far too long to convey a we
ll-groomed image. And his black-framed eyeglasses now seemed far too large on the face of a man who had lost so much weight in the past year or so. Their thick lenses glinted in the glare of the footlights, which cast Dr Haxhausen's gigantic and twisted shadow upon the threadbare curtain behind him.
"Some of you," he continued, "are perhaps aware of who I am and may have an idea of why I am here tonight. Others of you may be curious to discover the meaning of those handbills which have lately appeared around your town or possibly were intrigued by the marquee outside this theater which touts the 'World Famous Dr Haxhausen.' Like many important events in human history, my exhibition has been somewhat accurately reported as far as its superficial aspects are concerned, yet remains sadly misrepresented in its substance. Allow me at this point to disabuse you of a few false conceptions which may have affected your powers of judgment.
"First, I do not claim to be either the Almighty Himself or His incarnation come down to earth; nor, in fact, am I one or the other of these things. Second, I nevertheless do claim that in the course of my recent travels, what the world has called my 'disappearance' I was granted certain revelations directly from the Creator and in no uncertain terms received an itinerary of action from this same source. Third, and last, I am indeed the scientist known as Francis Henry Haxhausen and not, as can be conclusively proved, an imposter. As an appendix to my previous statements, I should say that my exhibition is not the absurd extravaganza of scientific farce some have portrayed it to be, but a simple agenda consisting of a brief lecture followed by a practical demonstration of a device I have recently constructed. At no point do I attempt, either as an illusion or in fact, to work permanent damage on the body or soul of any member of my audience. That would be contrary to the Creator's law and the truth of His nature. And that is all I have to state in the way of a preamble to what I hope you will find an entertaining and enlightening attraction.