What October Brings Read online

  What October Brings

  A Lovecraftian

  Celebration of Halloween

  Edited and with an introduction by

  Douglas Draa

  Celaeno Press

  2018

  Contents

  Introduction

  Doug Draa

  Hallowe’en in a Suburb

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  Uncle’s In the Treetops

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Down into Silence

  Storm Constantine

  The War on Halloween

  Cody Goodfellow

  That Small, Furry, Sharp-toothed Thing

  Paul Dale Anderson

  Waters Strangely Clear

  Alan Baxter

  The House on Jimtown Road

  Ran Cartwright

  Spider Wasp

  Tim Curran

  The Old Man Down the Road

  Arinn Dembo

  The Immortician

  Andre E. Harewood

  Nyarlahotep Came Down to Georgia

  Nancy Holder

  A Night for Masks

  Brian M. Sammons

  No Other God but Me

  Adrian Cole

  Inheritance

  Ann K. Schwader

  Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You.

  John Shirley

  Cosmic Cola

  Lucy A. Snyder

  Hell Among the Yearlings

  Chet Williamson

  Summer’s End

  Erica Ruppert

  Copyright Information

  Introduction

  What does October Bring? That’s a very good question. I know Beggars Night, at the very end of October, would bring us treats. This was one of Halloween’s many aspects that make the 31st of October so special. Halloween isn’t just about receiving treats. Halloween is also a chance and a possibility. A chance to thumb our collective noses at death and the great unknown, and a possibility, even if for only one evening a year, the curtain separating this world and the next might be drawn back just far enough for us to catch a glimpse of what is waiting for us on the other side. Or using Mr. Lovecraft’s phraseology; we might get to meet The Lurker at the Threshold!

  I mentioned treats earlier. And that’s how I see this collection. I loved all those candies. B-B Bats and bite-sized Baby Ruth bars were great, but those little foil-wrapped Reese Cups were my favorites. And you, the reader are exceedingly fortunate to be holding a literary version of one of those foil-wrapped Reese Cups. On the outside though, instead of foil, you have a beautiful Daniele Serra cover to catch your eye and give you some hint of what awaits you between the covers. Of course you won’t find a diabetic coma-inducing mixture of Chocolate and Peanut Butter between those covers, but I can promise you though, that you will still find two great tastes that taste great together; H. P. Lovecraft and Halloween!

  Every story in this anthology has been written a current Mistress or Master of the macabre and Lovecraftian. No voice is alike nor are any voices similar. This means that each story is to be savored as an individually wrapped and uniquely flavored Halloween treat. Each one sharing only a seasoning of Mr. Lovecraft’s essential Saltes.

  So now that the nights are getting longer and the season of the witch draws nigh, turn down the lights and prepare yourself to enter a world of dreams, fantasies and horrors.

  Enjoy!

  Doug Draa

  Nuremberg

  August 2018

  Hallowe’en in a Suburb

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,

  And the trees have a silver glare;

  Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,

  And the harpies of upper air,

  That flutter and laugh and stare.

  For the village dead to the moon outspread

  Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,

  But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep

  Where the rivers of madness stream

  Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

  A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves

  In the meadows that shimmer pale,

  And comes to twine where the headstones shine

  And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

  For harvests that fly and fail.

  Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change

  That tore from the past its own

  Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r

  Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne

  And looses the vast unknown.

  So here again stretch the vale and plain

  That moons long-forgotten saw,

  And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,

  Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw

  To shake all the world with awe.

  And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,

  The ugliness and the pest

  Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,

  Shall some day be with the rest,

  And brood with the shades unblest.

  Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,

  And the leprous spires ascend;

  For new and old alike in the fold

  Of horror and death are penn’d,

  For the hounds of Time to rend.

  Uncle’s In the Treetops

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Yes, I can tell you about it.

  It was in the Leaf Falling Time, when Uncle Alazar was in the treetops. He could come close to the Earth then, out of the midnight sky. You could hear him among the upper branches in the forest, sometimes skittering like a squirrel, sometimes hovering there, his wings buzzing and fluttering like those of some enormous insect. Whose uncle was he, precisely? There were stories about that, often contradictory. I’d been hearing them all my life. He was one of us, one of the Burton family, though whose brother and how many generations back, was not at all clear. He dwelt among Those of the Air. He spoke to the dark gods. He had gone to them, out into the night, and had never come back, not really, only able to return halfway like that, and was utterly transformed, beyond humanity altogether. Sometimes we Burtons heard him whispering to us. He reached into our dreams. My father had heard him, in his time, and my father’s father, and his father; though not my mother, because she was only a Burton by marriage and there was something about the true blood that went back for years and years … but I digress.

  Now, mind you, the village of Chorazin may be isolated, and it may be different in its customs, but it’s still in Pennsylvania, not on Mars, so we do have some things in common with the rest of the world. We have Halloween here, and Leaf Falling Time (old Indian name) is pretty much the same as Halloween, so we indeed have kids in costumes shuffling noisily through the leaves from house to house, collecting candy. They travel in groups only, and make all that noise to scare away Zenas, who was one of us once, so the story goes, but he too went into the darkness on such a night and became part of it – whether he was still alive or not was a matter of some debate – and he supposedly had long, sharp fingers like twigs, and you really didn’t want to meet him.

  It was on such a night, after the c
andy and costumes were put away. I’d gone as Darth Vader that year, my brother Joram as a vampire. We sat on our porch in the dark with our parents, my brother and I – he was ten, three years younger than me – and two very distinguished visitors, Elder Abraham, who is our leader, and his assistant Brother Azrael. They questioned Joram and me closely, and spoke to us both in a very old-fashioned way that I knew was part of the ritual.

  My father sat wordlessly, while my mother let out a little sob.

  This was a serious business. People who went out into the dark sometimes did not come back.

  “Joram,” said the elder. “Tell me in truth, hast thou heard thine uncle’s voice clearly and comprehended his words? Wilt thou act as his messenger?”

  “Yes, I will,” my brother said.

  The Elder turned to me. “And thou?”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  He reached out, and took both of us by the hand, and joined our hands together, and he said, “Then you have to go. Go now. “

  I knew the rest, and we didn’t have to rehearse it. The signs had manifested themselves. The stars had turned in their courses, as if tumblers had fallen into place in a lock, and gateways in the sky were open, and Uncle Alazar could come racing back out of the dark depths to speak to us on this night.

  It was a very special time. To our people, though not to other Pennsylvanians, I am sure, a holy time.

  My father spoke only briefly, to me, “Thomas, take care of your brother.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  So, hand-in-hand, my brother and I went. You could conjure up an almost bucolic scene, despite the spooky undertones, two boys holding hands for comfort, or so they wouldn’t lose one another, two brothers making their way (noisily at first, kicking up leaves, then less noisily) into the wooded hills beyond the town, to fulfil some ancient rite, like a confirmation or a walkabout, some passage into manhood perhaps.

  So we followed the unpaved road for a little bit, then cut across the fields, into the woods, beneath the brilliant stars, and what, I ask you, is wrong with this picture?

  There are things I’ve left out.

  The first is that I hated my brother intensely. I didn’t show it, but I’d nursed my hatred in secret almost since when he was born. I didn’t even know why at first. He was smarter than me, cleverer. My parents liked him best. When we were very young, he broke my toys because he could. He did better in school. (Ours was perhaps the last one-room school in the country, so I saw when he won all the prizes. That meant I’d lost them.) But more than that, he was the one Uncle Alazar had showed a special interest in. It was Joram’s dreams that Uncle had entered into, so that Joram would sit up in his bed sometimes and scream out words in strange languages, and then wake up in a sweat and (absurd as it seems) sometimes come to me for comfort. And I pretended to comfort him, but I was false, always false, and I held my hatred in my heart.

  This was all very distinct from sounds you heard overhead at night, that might have been squirrels or just the wind rattling branches, or a voice you heard from far off, like somebody shouting from a distant hilltop and you couldn’t make out what they said, only the wailing, trailing cry. That was all my father had ever heard, or my grandfather, or my great-grandfather, because the gods, or Those of the Air, or even centuries-lost-departed-uncles did not communicate with us all that often, and it was very special when they did. Which of course made my brother very special.

  And I was not. That was the next thing.

  I had lied to Elder Abraham. I had heard nothing, myself. Once again I was false, and to lie to the Elder like that is a blasphemy, but I did it, and I had no regrets.

  I had also promised my father that I would take care of my brother. That promise I would keep. Oh, yes. I would take care of him.

  We walked through the woods in the dark, for miles perhaps. My brother was in some kind of trance, I think. He was humming softly to himself. His eyes were wide, but I don’t think he was seeing in the usual way. I had to reach out and push branches out of the way so he wouldn’t get smacked in the face. Not that I’d mind him being smacked in the face, but that didn’t fit with what I intended, not yet. He seemed to know where he was going.

  Uncle was in the treetops. I heard him too now, chittering, scrambling from branch to branch, his wings and those of his companions flapping, buzzing, heavy upon the air.

  Joram began to make chittering noises, not bird sounds, more like the sound of some enormous insect, and he was answered from above.

  I looked up. There was only darkness, and I could see the stars through the branches, and once, only once, did I see what looked like a black plastic bag detach itself from an upper branch and flutter off into the night; or that might have been a shadow.

  I let Joram guide me, even though he couldn’t see. I had to reach out and clear the way for him, but he was the one who led me on, even as we descended into a hollow, then climbed a ridge on the other side. The trees seemed larger than I had ever seen them, towering, the trunks as thick as houses; but that may have been a trick of the dark, or the night, or the dream which was pouring into my brother as he chittered and stared blindly ahead, and maybe I wasn’t entirely lying after all, and maybe I really did feel a little bit of it.

  We came to a particularly enormous tree, a beech it felt like from the smooth bark, with a lot of low branches all the way down the trunk to the ground. My brother began to climb. I climbed after him. By daylight, in the course of normal kid activities, I actually was a pretty good tree climber, but this wasn’t like that at all. We went up and up, and sometimes the angles of the branches and the trunk itself seemed to twist strangely. Several times my brother slipped and almost fell, but I caught hold of him, and he clung to me, whimpering slightly, as if he were half awake and scared in his dream.

  Did he know what I intended? He had every right to be scared. Hah!

  Still we climbed, and now there were things in the branches with us, only way out on the swaying ends, and the branches rose and fell and rose and fell as half-seen shapes alighted on them. The air was filled with buzzing and flapping sounds. Joram made sounds I hadn’t know a human throat could ever make, and he was answered by multitudes.

  Then the branches cleared away, and we were beneath the open, star-filled, moonless sky, and Those of the Air circled around us now. Joram and I sat where the trunk forked, my arm around him, while with my other hand I held onto a branch. I could see them clearly, black creatures, a little like enormous bats, a little like wasps, but not really like either, and one of them came toward us, chittering, its face aglow like a paper lantern, its features human or almost human; and I recognized out legendary relative, the fabled Uncle Alazar whose special affinity to our family brought him back to this planet on such occasions as tonight, when the signs were as they needed to be and the dark, holy rites were to be fulfilled.

  Now that Uncle was here, and I had used my gibbering brother to guide me to him, I had no further use for Joram, whom I had always hated; so I flung him from me, out among the swaying branches, and down he fell: screaming, thump, thump, thump, crash, thump, and silence.

  I was almost surprised that none of the winged ones tried to retrieve him, but they didn’t.

  Uncle Alazar hovered before me, his eyes dark, his face inscrutable.

  “I am afraid my brother isn’t available,” I said. “You will have to take me instead.”

  And they did take me. Hard, sharp fingers or claws seized hold of me from every side. Some grabbed me by the hair and lifted me up.

  I was hanging in the air, with wings whirring and flapping and buzzing all around me, and yes, I was terribly afraid, but also I was filled with a fierce, grasping, greedy joy, because I had done it and now Uncle Alazar would have to reveal the secrets of the darkness and of the black worlds to me, and I would become very great among our people, a prophet, very special indeed, a great one, perhaps
able to live for centuries like Elder Abraham or Brother Azrael.

  Uncle’s face floated in front of mine, filled with pale light. He spoke. He made that chittering sound. It was just noise to me. He paused. He spoke again, as if expecting a reply. I tried to reply, imitating his squeaks and chirps or whatever, and then, suddenly, he drew away, and made a very human “Hah!” sound, and they dropped me.

  Down I went, through the branches: screaming, crash, thump, thump, thump, crash, thud. There was so much pain. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if what followed was a dream, because the next thing I knew Zenas had found me, he of the stiletto-sharp stick-like fingers, remember? He was naked, and very thin, his body elongated, almost like a snake, with way too many ribs, and his face was partly a man’s face, with a wild mass of hair, but his eyes were multi-faceted and there was something very strange about his mouth. His jaws moved sideways like those of a praying mantis or a hornet, and he leaned down, out of my field of view, and came up again with a mouthful of bloody flesh. Zenas was eating me. I felt the bones of my legs crunching. I screamed and screamed and he went down and came up again with his mouth full, and gulped it down the way an animal would, and went back for more. I knew this couldn’t be happening. It was impossible. I should have been dead by now. I should have bled to death, my guts gushing out like water from a balloon that’s been slashed open. I went on screaming and the pain just wouldn’t end. It went on and on. I pounded my fists on the ground to try to make it stop, but it did not stop.

  At one point he stared into my eyes, and I was terribly afraid that he would take them. But he just remained there, making clicking sounds as if he were speaking a language I did not know. He was there long afterwards in my dreams, with his bloody saliva dripping down onto my face, burning.

  ***

  And when I awoke, in my own room, in my own bed, I was swathed in bandages. My face was covered by something thick and heavy, but I could see out, and I could see that both of my arms were in casts and my legs were gone.

  They tell me I screamed non-stop for another six months. I had to be put in an attic. There are, in Chorazin, lots of embarrassments hidden away in attics.