Halloween People

Started Oct. 31, 2001

Chapter the First

There was a thin layer of frost on the vine, giving it a ghostly sort of pale sheen. That was the first thing he noticed. Not the pumpkin, but the vine. There was frost on the pumpkin as well, a cliche brought to life, but it was the vine that caught his eye. The frost particles were hackles on its skin, flecks of winter dusting the autumn green.

Where was he?

A field, a barren field, a... pumpkin patch? Yes, that’s what it was, though the pumpkins had been picked over by the Halloween hoardes; only a few stray stragglers remained. Stragglers like the pumpkin in front of him, seeming to glow a deep orange beneath its layer of frost.

No, it wasn’t glowing, that was the light reflecting on the frost. He looked up at the sky, and a thin layer of overcast had parted ever so slightly, allowing a few stray patches of sun to wink through; one of these errant sunbeams had found its way down to the pumpkin patch, and was working its magic on the pumpkin before him.

He looked around. This was an enormous pumpkin patch; it seemed to go on for acre after acre. He looked for a farmhouse, but there was no structure or construct visible anywhere. The pumpkin patch was edged on all sides by more fields, tall fields of corn. Something was wrong with that, he thought. Something was wrong...

After he’d phrased the problem, the answer appeared. The season was over. Halloween was imminent. The corn should have been harvested, the cornfields should be as barren as the pumpkin patch.

Well, "should be" and "is" were two different issues. Jason Galligan didn’t know much about farming. Maybe this was some sort of mulch corn, some sort of late-season corn, some sort of... mutant monster corn, he didn’t know. Maybe these were the fields of the world’s laziest farmer. The Harvest Procrastinator. Whatever the reason, there was corn in every direction and not a road to be seen.

But he had to have gotten in here somehow. And he would have left tracks. He turned around. No footprints. None at all. Was the ground too frost-hardened? No, there were footprints where he was standing. Strange. It was like he just appeared here. Out of nowhere.

In fact, the whole thing was strange. If he walked here, how come he didn’t remember doing so? If he appeared here out of nowhere, or was dropped in by UFO or even helicopter... how? Why? And why hadn’t this even struck him as unusual until right now?

Dream. This was a dream. Of course. A very real, very detailed dream, but dream nonetheless. Cornfields too late in the season, arriving without traveling, not recognizing weirdness as weirdness... all characteristic of dream states.

He looked down at the pumpkin, and saw something else he should have noted. It was nearly perfect. Fat and round, with just the right degree of squat; its ridges well-defined and perfectly spaced; a thick jut of frosted vine sticking straight out of the center of what would, when carved, serve as its lid. He smiled. Yep, dreaming, all right. No way in reality anybody would have passed this baby by.

He bent over and grabbed ahold of the vine, about six inches from the gourd. The vine was cold to the touch, and its tiny frosted spines tickled his skin. A very sensational dream this was, Jason thought, very palpable, very real. He put a hand in his pocket, and wasn’t very surprised to find a jackknife. He pulled it out, and opened the largest blade.

The vine parted easily beneath the knife’s blade, meaning either that the knife was extraordinarily sharp or that dream-pumpkins didn’t have vines of the same tough constituency as real-world pumpkins. He should know, he’d cut enough of them. Halloween was his favorite time of year, and he loved making the trek out to the local "pick ‘em yourself" pumpkin patch and liberating a half-dozen or so. Jack O’Lanterns. Halloween. He loved ‘em. He was a Halloween person.

Well, he knew what to do next.

The flesh of the pumpkin didn’t give way as easily as the vine had. But the feel of the knife slowly chugging through the thick pumpkin rind was somewhat satisfying. Jason tugged his knife forward with sharp up-and-down motion, gradually turning its path inward upon itself as he brought the cut around to make a full circle, a circle which, upon completion, he lifted off of the gourd, utilizing the short stretch of vine still attached at the center of the cut circle as a handle. Inside of the pumpkin were its "guts", a juicy, sweet-smelling mass of large pale yellow seeds and stringy orange pulp. Jason looked into the pumpkin. A spoon would be nice. He looked around, wondering if he could somehow control the course of the dream and materialize a nice large metal spoon, which he could use to scoop out the inside of the pumpkin. But nothing appeared, so he shrugged and rolled up his sleeves.

Despite the frost the seed-mass wasn’t intolerably cold, just comfortably cool against his fingers. He was grateful for this, knowing how tightly the liquidy pulp could cling to the fingers. As always, the seeds and their entangling pulp proved difficult to remove from the rind, tending to cling together loosely and squirm through the fingers; a double handful of seeds and goo became, by the time the hands had left the pumpkin, barely a palmload. But slowly and patiently he worked at it until, several slimy minutes later, he had managed to remove virtually all of the seeds and most of the pulp, with only a slight cobwebbing of dripping strings remaining of the pulp.

Wiping his hands on his pants, he picked up his jackknife. Dropping same, he wiped his hands again, more thoroughly, and again until the remaining slick pumpkin coating his fingers had been mostly removed, and the remainder had dried, allowing him once again to get a grip on his knife.

He had never been one for the planned-out sort of pumpkin, the kind with intricate designs delicately and painstakingly carved into its flesh. Though such carving could look impressive once lights were dimmed and candles set aflame, something of the character of the pumpkin was lost. The design forced itself on the pumpkin. Jason rather preferred to allow the pumpkin’s face to emerge on its own, for the pumpkin in a sense to choose its own personality.

And the fact that it always did was a marvel to Jason, especially since he stuck entirely to tradition when carving his pumpkins: two triangle eyes, smaller triangle nose, big wide cut smile. Nothing fancy, no encumberments; no pupils, no teeth, no ears. But within that spartan design a wide variety of personalities had managed to manifest themselves in Jack O’Lanterns past - pumpkins by turns sinister, sincere, good-natured, secretive, shrewd, silly.

It was the eyes, generally, that determined the personality of a Jack O’Lantern. Two perfectly formed, perfectly spaced, perfectly balanced triangles would give you a good-natured, happy pumpkin. However, working freehand, perfect eyes were almost impossible. So it was with this current pumpkin; there was a slight list to one of the eyes, and Jason could tell right away that this was going to be a mournful little guy, smiling despite himself, smiling despite all of the sorrows of the world.

He removed the small triangle for the nose, a triangle that came out despite Jason’s intentions as slightly small for the face, which accentuated the melancholia of the eyes. He made the smile wide, if narrow (running out of face, unfortunately), and as jaunty as possible; but the effect was still that of a haunted pumpkin, smiling through his pain.

Jason held the Jack O’Lantern up, admiring his work, getting a look at the pumpkin personality that he had just created. He smiled an unhaunted smile. He liked this pumpkin, in all its tragic glory. He wished for a candle, just to see what it might look like when illuminated, but the dream-gods weren’t forthcoming. Well, perhaps he’d find one before the dream was through. One never knew.

So, what next? Well, he’d created a traveling companion, so it seemed that some traveling was in order. Things seemed to be pretty much the same in every direction, but he had been facing one way when he’d arrived, so he saw no reason not to continue in that direction. He tucked his new friend under his arm and stepped forward.

Unlike some dreams he had dreamed, in this one stepping forward actually brought him closer to his selected destination. Other dreams might find him walking and walking without making progress (call it the "Tantalus effect"), but in this particular dream basic Newtonian physics seemed to apply. Notwithstanding the fact that he seemed to have apparated here from nowhere. But that’s dreams for you.

As he continued walking it occurred to Jason that the dream he was having... no, having didn’t seem like the right word... ahh, "participating", the dream that he was participating in seemed to be one of the most realistic and involved in his recollection... not in terms of the detail given to his surroundings, no, he was used to realistic dreams... but in terms of the amount of thought he was able to devote to it; the amount of thinking he was able to do, within the context of the dream. He was aware of the dream, very aware, and equally aware of his place and position within it. That seemed unusual, though he rarely remembered his dreams to the extent that he could say for certain that he’d never had one like it before; perhaps he’d had whole flocks of ‘em that consisted entirely of him musing about his ability to think within them. He doubted it, but couldn’t rule it out.

Perhaps this was what he’d heard described as a "lucid dream". That made sense. Well, he thought to himself, if this be lucidity, then I’ll make the most of it. "What do you think about that?" he asked his pumpkin friend. But the gourd was silent.

Forward he stepped, one step beyond, on through the field, on toward the corn.

It seemed to almost step forward to greet him, that wall of corn did, when he’d finally reached it. Pale green it was, touched with a tint of gray. The stalks stood tall, waving in the breeze, but they were also waning; the season had ended, and they were near death, hanging on at the edge of decay.

He looked at the corn stalks, an almost solid wall of vegetation standing before him, towering over his head. The corn had been planted closely together in rows less than a foot apart, and there wasn’t a clear pathway through it. But, he reasoned, it would bend to let him pass, it was corn and not bamboo. He looked behind him once, just to make sure that there wasn't';t a road somewhere that he might have missed, and, seeing none, stepped into the corn.

The rustle made by his passage into the verdant sea startled him, not so much by its volume as by its very unseemliness; the still silence of the October morning (for he knew without wondering that it was October here, in this dream-state), the constant low rush of the cornstalks whisking their ears together in the shallow breeze seemed almost ripped apart by the sudden harsh rustle of his entrance amongst the brittle husks.

He kept walking forward, though swallowed as he was by the tall and vast cornfield he had no idea where he was going; his visible world consisted entirely of corn, corn, corn. He looked at the ears as he brushed past them, and noted that they were rather small - decorative corn, not cob corn. He supposed that, were he to stop and pluck an ear from its purchase, he’d peel off the layers of leaf to reveal a nest of deep red or dark purple kernels, rather than the more familiar and prosaic yellow-white of the "butter and sugar" corn that he’d bought so many times from roadsides stands in the country...

Hmm. The thought occurred that he might well have taken the occasion to inquire about the proper harvest time for corn. Then he’d know.

The corn seemed to cover a lot of ground, and maneuvering between the stalks was wearying, made more so by the bulk of the pumpkin beneath his arm. More than once he wondered if he hadn’t wandered into some sort of endless loop in his dream-circuit, a walk in the corn that would just continue on forever and ever, at least until he woke up...

Ah, well, there were worse ways to spend a dream-state. The weather was invigoratingly crisp, the scent of just-over-the-edge corn was intoxicating, and the company was outstanding - his mind, and his carved friend. From time to time Jason Galligan would stop and lift the sorrowful fellow from the crook of his arm and simply enjoy the pleasure of his personality, so clearly evident in set of his features. Jason had carved many pumpkins in his lifetime - hundreds, perhaps - but he had never given one of them a name. To do so would have seemed to him almost insulting; a pumpkin’s personality was carved into its face. Its features were its name; any verbalization of same would be unnecessary, redundant, and contrary to the essence of pumpkinness.

So, he’d look his buddy in the eye, flash him a mirthful smile, and say to him, "What do ya think, Pumpkin? How’s this adventure going so far?" Or maybe, "Think we’re ever getting out of this here corn, Pumpkin?" Or even "Don’t you think it’s pretty strange for a grown man to be having a conversation with a pumpkin?"

The pumpkin never answered, of course, this didn’t seem to be that sort of dream. One thing he did notice, when he said the words "grown man", was that he didn’t seem to be a grown man any more. In fact, he seemed to have stepped back into a post-adolescent body; he was a sort of archetypal version of himself now, a perpetual teen.

Which was fine with him. He seemed full of boundless energy and a fiery curiosity. He wanted to see what was on the other side of the cornfield, dammit! Let’s go, dream-world! C’mon! He laughed as he recognized that the realization that he had regressed physically into his late teens had caused him to regress emotionally as well. It was amusing, the way dreams could play with you.

Then he realized that he had no idea how old he was in reality.

He stopped short, and spoke aloud. "Pumpkin," he said, without looking down at the companion tucked under his left arm, "I don’t remember my life. Who am I, when awakened? Where do I live, how old am I? I’ve forgotten."

The pumpkin, of course, was silent on this issue, and on many others.

"For all I know," Jason said, with a scowl, "I could really be a teenager, dreaming that he’s a fully grown man dreaming that he’s a teenager." He paused, then added, "Kind of like that ‘butterfly’ thing you see on posters; how does it go? ‘I dreamed I was a butterfly, but when I woke I wasn’t sure if I was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man’."

The breeze picked up; the tops of the cornstalks swayed in unison, and their combined rustling formed a whisper -song that rose up into the cloud-cast sky.

Jason stood and listened, then spoke again, with a sturdy irony. "’Hang in there, baby,’" he said, with a half-laugh as thoughts of posters flashed through his dream-mind in a rapid-fire torrent, snapshots of the sea, of cats, of happy warm puppies; brief snippets of quasi-poetry dealing with setting loved things free and God slogging people through the sand; commentary about the unhealthfulness of war toward living things and other children, recommendations that trucking was so beneficial that one should simply keep on doing it.

And out of that sea of memories one poster slowly took preeminence, one memory swelled up out of his mind, with a strange feeling of importance underlying it, though he couldn’t see why. It was a poster that he had seen (at a shop in the mall? in a friend’s bedroom? at a carnival, as a dart prize?) somewhere, a poster composed of fuzzy velvety material, painted in day-glo colors that were meant to be studied under the influence of black light, among other things; it was a nautical study in black and white, but the black was a black that seemed of the deepest shadow, the black of a night so dark that it seemed unlikely to ever have been seen on the near side of a nightmare, the white so alive, so extreme, so dazzling that it seemed almost living, as if the picture had been painted not with ink but with a living, shimmering blue-silver ectoplasm.

And the picture itself? It showed a ship, a tall ship, a ship of masts and moorings, sailing prow-first out of the night, out of the black velvet paper and into the room he had been standing in when he saw it... a pale ship, a ghost ship, carrying a complement of passengers off on a mystical journey somewhere far away, somewhere beyond time, beyond space, beyond destiny. The poster had shocked him, startled him, electrified him; it was a ghost ship on its way from a spectral world to a stranger one, a ship that seemed to call out to him to board at the same time as it warned him that it was leaving on a voyage that neither it nor he would be coming back from.

Where had he seen that poster? A shop? Had he bought it? No, he seemed to recall that it made him uneasy. He must have been very young; he liked to be made uneasy, generally. He thought he did, anyway.

He was a Halloween person.

And these thoughts didn’t make him uneasy, not at all. There was something liberating, something exhilarating about being out here in a magical dream-landscape, standing full-footed in a magical dream-autumn, beneath a deep gray October sky, with neither identity nor destination, no past and an unseen future... but always with the sound certainty that soon, probably too soon, he would awaken and once again be who he was.

Hopefully not before he’d seen what was beyond the cornfield.

The breeze was growing stronger. As he stepped forward it seemed as though the field was growing darker; a look at the sky above revealed why... the pale gray of the cloud cover was deepening somewhat, becoming inlaid with charcoal; the silver edges that had previously shimmered behind the shadowed clouds were fading to a ghost-white, and the deep center, where the clouds were thickest, was darkening to a thick sort of clamshell violet. The sky wasn’t stormy, not exactly, and the clouds weren’t quite thunderheads, but it did look and feel like rain was imminent.

Well, Jason Galligan liked a good rain well enough, and never worried too much about getting wet. Of course, it might get chilly, but then he wasn’t likely to stick around the dream-world long enough to contract pneumonia.

He heard a strange sound, a sort of dry rattling. He looked around, and saw a crow flying overhead; it had been speaking in the language of crows. Not the more formal sort of cawing speech that was the familiar provenance of chatty ravens, and certainly not the fabled "nevermore" of Mr. Poe’s reverie, but instead the everyday raspy chatter-speech of a disinterested bird, probably talking to itself. He watched the bird flap by, black against the graying sky.

There was something in the field.

He wouldn’t have seen it if the crow hadn’t have been flitting past; he wouldn’t have seen it still if the breeze hadn’t become strong enough to really give the cornstalks a good bending. As it was he only caught a furtive glimpse between the swaying arms of green. It was off to his right, maybe thirty yards away. What it was, he couldn’t speculate; it was dark, and it was tall enough to jut ever-so-slightly above the corn-tops.

Only one way to find out.

He turned toward the shape and parted the corn. It was a bit of a shame to have to cut across the rows like this, he thought; so far his passage wouldn’t have left any mark on the serenity of the field, but in order to move across these tightly-packed rows he was going to have to break down some stalks. But it couldn’t be helped. He moved toward the odd dark shape, eyes toward the spot where he had seen it, in hopes of a more defining glimpse.

As he parted the stalks and stepped toward the shape, the first spatterings of rain began to pelt the corn. He felt a stray drop touch his forehead, then another. A scent of water became highly noticeable; it was going to rain for sure, and within minutes.

He drew nearer to the figure, but, frustratingly, was unable to glean any further information as to its nature through the quick, furtive glimpses that he was able to steal between the slowly waving cornstalks ahead of him. He would see it, almost, and then the corn would sway another way and it would become concealed again. He scowled.

But then he parted the final cornstalks, and stood before the figure, and a large grin burst forth from his face. Of course. What else would you find in a cornfield but a scarecrow?

The rain began to fall a little harder, less intermittently. He could see a few wet spots coloring the jaunty straw hat on the figure’s head, and a few more on the burlap of its face. The sky, a dull gray, lurked eerily over its shoulder. The breeze struck and shivered jutting bits of straw. A crow cawed, as if signaling Jason’s arrival into the scarecrow’s company.

Jason continued to smile. "And who are you?" he asked the scarecrow, expecting no response, and receiving same. He stepped closer.

The scarecrow was reasonably well-put together; just about man-sized, with pants of denim and a checked flannel shirt, in a subdued pattern of red and gray. He was affixed to a pole, with his feet, in a pair of old boots, dangling about three feet off of the ground - which put his hat-tip, based on Jason’s quick arithmetic, at a spot almost nine feet off of the ground. That seemed high to Jason, but then the corn seemed to be the same height, so a shorter scarecrow would be ineffective at his primary function, intimidating ravens.

As scarecrows go, he was well-dressed, in fact, comparatively dapper. His jeans wore patches, granted, but these were well-sewn and made from a similar material to his jeans. His flannel shirt was worn but still intact, the colors only slightly faded, most likely due to the scarecrow’s long hours suspended in the sun. His hat even appeared to have been bought new, probably as a souvenir of some excursion to the south; it had an unmistakable aura of "Huck Finn" about it.

But his face was the most striking thing about him. It was formed out of an old burlap sack, one which at one time probably contained seed or feed - red printing could be seen just at the edge of the scarecrow’s chin - which had been stuffed with straw and given a rough face. Other scarecrows that jason had seen had been possessed of more vitality in their facial features; here the eyes were simply rough magic-markered circles, the nose a simple triangle, the teeth a simple, skeletal cross-hatching. But somehow, in the same way that a string of simple slices in the flesh of a disemboweled pumpkin could imbue the gourd with a personality, so it was with the burlap face of the scarecrow; his expression painted him as intelligent and brooding, a rain-spattered Byron of the cornrows.

The rain came down more heavily, scattered raindrops becoming less sporadic, more incessant. The sound of water hitting cornstalks became martial, like a slow snare roll played by a small brigade of marching percussionists. Soon it would turn into a downpour, and the sound would change to the staticky roar of incessant precipitation, and Jason just might need to seek shelter, even if he had to make a lean-to of cornstalks. Dream or no dream, becoming soaked in the crisp autumn air wasn’t a welcoming prospect.

Then the rain faded. Jason looked up at the sky to see if the clouds were thinning, but he was rewarded merely by a view of the same sea of gray-violet cloud-cover. A lull? He felt uneasy, suddenly. There was an ominous atmosphere building up around him, one only tangentially related to the oncoming rain. Whatever he was sensing, it was darker than the deep gray of a thunderhead, and more deadly than lightning.

"Well, scarecrow," Jason said, conversationally, trying to shake the sense of the creeps marching up his spine, "The weather doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind..."

There was a sound then, a small, strange sound, from across the field. Like a hard, driving rain was peltting the corn, albeit in one lone, solitary spot a cornfield’s distance away. Jason paused, scowling. "What do you think that is?" he whispered.

He chuckled as he realized the silliness of his attempt to be clkandestine. He hadn’t expected any response at all from the scarecrow, of course; so, if he was worried about being overheard, why speak at all? It was an absurd sort of behavior.

"I’m acting crazy," he explained, to the scarecrow, to the corn, but mostly to himself.

The strange noise returned. It was still coming from a good distance away, and it was still unidentified and unidentifiable. He needed to get a better look above the corn. He needed to see what was making the noise. And there was a way to do that.

He eyed the post holding the scarecrow. It was a thick fencepost about eight feet long, with a horizontal cross-beam supporting the scarecrow’s arms at a height of about seven feet. The crossbeam was bound to the support post by a thick coil of rough hempen rope. The dream-farmer that put him up here didn’t do things half-way; the pole was set a good couple of feet into the ground, the cross-bar solidly secured to the support-post. It would hold his weight.

He stepped behind the scarecrow, reached up, and grabbed the cross-beam with both hands. Shimmying with his feet and pulling with his arms, he managed to maneuver himself up to a position where he was able to loop a leg over the cross-beam. The beam shifted under his weight; Jason quickly ycorrected for it and the arm evened out.

He moved around atop the beam until he was able to see across the cornfield, his legs to either side of the back of the scarecrow’s head. It occurred to him that this task might have been easier if he’d taken the scarecrow down first, but that was not really an option, the way he saw it. The integrity of the scarecrow and the field must be protected. It would have been wrong to do otherwise.

He lifted his eyes and scoured the horizon.

He didn’t see anything at first. But, after a moment’s watchfulness in the direction of the noise, he detected a spot of movement that contrasted with the surrounding rhythmic breeze-wave of the surrounding cornstalks. It looked like someone making his or her way through the cornstalks... he imagined that his own passage through the corn might have looked the same to the vigilent scarecrow.

Hmmm. They were coming toward him.

So who was it? Dream logic suggested that it would be a person from his past, an old friend or something. But that wasn’t the sense he was getting...

Then something else struck him. Whatever was coming was causing an awful lot of disruption. Much more that Jason had, much more than he ever would have, much more than he even could have, had he been so inclined. Whatever was coming, and Jason, without noticing the fact, has ceased to think of it as a "who" rather than a "what", whatever it was, it was large.

And fast.

He watched the corn being swept away in its path, and his nerves began to twitch. And then he noticed something else, something more imminent.

The scarecrow. Somehow its head had gotten turned, whether by Jason’s climb, or by his attempt to stabilize his perch. The face was now looking at him, its eyes meeting his. Funny he hadn’t noticed before, but then he’d been focused on the disturbance in the corn. Jason looked at the scarecrow’s colored eyes, and noted that they appeared to have been drawn in with magic marker, and that the coloring was not complete - there were bare patches of brown showing throuhg. He also noted the contours of the burlap beneath the ink, threads looping in and out of one another. He looked down, and noticed the scarecrow’s mouth...

... which opened...

... and spoke a single word, in a harsh but forceful, straw-choked rasp.

"Run!"