Introductions were made all around. “What brings you two out this way?” Kit said.
“Well, you know how people get about black cats this time of year,” Rhiow said, and sat down and yawned. “Either you have to stay sidled for a few days to keep from attracting attention to black cats in general and giving some ehhif bad ideas…”
“Or you have to stay in,” Hwaith said, stretching fore and aft and sitting down next to her. “So boring. So we got out of town. Urruah and the twins are handling the Grand Central gates for the evening…”
“And when Tom and Carl told us what they were up to this year, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll come by and add some atmosphere,’” Rhiow said. “Controlled circumstances, after all. We go where we’re needed…”
“You guys don’t fool me,” Kit said. “You just have fun being someplace where wizards are doing magic out in the open for one night in the year.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” Hwaith said. “Bad enough that so much of this planet has to be sevarfrith. When one of the cultures has a night when you can come out and sing on the rooftops a little, interventionally speaking… who’d miss that?” He chuckled. “Anyway, they’ve really knocked themselves out— you ought to go take the tour.” He looked over his shoulder toward the front windows, which were all curtained with something that let an eerie blue light shine through.
“Will do,” Kit said as the two cats vanished back toward the house. The four wizards made their way back up to the walk again and headed for the door and the steps up to the porch.
“Do my ears deceive me?” said a voice from inside the door, which had what appeared to be some kind of alien skeleton nailed up spread-eagled on it. Out of the door came lurching someone in classic Frankenstein’s Monster makeup of the Boris Karloff vintage, every detail complete right down to the giant heavy shoes, the jacket with the too-short sleeves, and the bolts in the neck. But the face under the makeup was Tom Swale’s, and Nita couldn’t stop herself from laughing at the sight of one of their Advisory Wizards in something so different from his usual jeans and polos. “It is you guys! Didn’t know if we were going to see you tonight.”
“How could we miss this!” Kit said.
“Well, just glad you could take time out of your busy schedules,” said another voice from behind Tom: and there was the normally very buttoned-down Carl Romeo in a frayed and apparently bloodstained business suit that had seen far better days, and some of the most realistic ghoul makeup that Nita had ever seen. Carl leaned out the door and peered at the sagging candy bags. “You folks have plainly been making out like bandits. Come on in, release your burdens for a while and have a look around.”
They all filed in, pausing at a table by the front door, where visitors were exchanging admission tickets and getting their hands stamped. Behind the table sat a gorgeously witchy-looking woman wearing a slinky glittering deep-purple dress with black lace appliqued over it in a spiderweb pattern, and a matching long veil or mantilla in the same spiderweb lace.
“You haven’t met this lady,” Tom said. “This is a cousin of ours from out west. Helen Walks Softly: Kit Rodriguez, Nita Callahan. And from a little further out of town, Ronan Nolan…”
Hands were shaken and everyone quietly said dai stihó, for there were nonwizards wandering around the ground floor, looking at static displays of scary stuff. “Your eyes are seriously cool,” Kit said in complete admiration. They were those of some big cat, a lion maybe, large and golden. “Contacts?”
Rhiow and Hwaith burst out laughing. “Not exactly,” Helen said. “We can discuss technique later—”
“What is with your earrings??” Nita said. She leaned close and peered at one of them, a fuzzy bobbly looking thing hanging from Helen’s earlobe.
The earring promptly opened two small eyes, flicked out two small ears, and unfolded two perfect, delicate, fingery wings. Nita jumped in surprise, and then burst out laughing while the tiny bat gazed at her upside down.
“That’s just sick,” Ronan said in complete admiration. “Most people keep their bats inside their belfries…”
“We have these tiny little ones up in the mountains in California,” Helen said. “Makal, my people call them. We’ve got caves full of them on my tribal band’s lands: sometimes in the evenings they follow me around when I’m up there doing shaman work. And if they feel like hanging out with me afterwards…” She chuckled. “On a night like tonight, why would I argue?”
“Hey there cousins,” Nita said, tickling one of them behind the ear. It peeped at her and closed the wings up; a second later so did its counterpart hanging from Helen’s other ear.
“So step upstairs and have a look around,” Tom said. “We only get a chance to do this once every six years or so, and Carl’s really pulled out the stops this time. Leave your stuff behind the table: Helen’ll take care of it for you.” He eyed Nita’s pumpkin with interest. “Something new in the way of accessories? You can leave that too if you like…”
“No,” Nita said, “I’ll hang onto him.”
Tom and Carl both raised their eyebrows at the pronoun, but neither commented. “Right this way, then,” Carl said. “Try not to scream more loudly than our other guests…”
The next half hour or so was a tour de force of flapping giant bat-shapes, half-seen clammy things with too many eyes that leapt at you from closets or dropped on you from the ceilings, sudden vistas of bottomless pits where no such pits were possible, claws that grabbed, beastly teeth that snapped just in front of your nose out of the darkness, webs that brushed across your face, hissing black demon cats with glaring eyes and fur that stood on end and sizzled with sparks, tentacles that suckered onto you and creepily clung, and dreadful wet moldy smells that you didn’t want to know the source of. Nita screamed as often and loudly as any of the others— even Ronan got caught off balance this way several times— and knowing that clever wizardries were behind about half these effects, and friendly alien wizards were behind the other half, didn’t help at the time. It was all about staging, at which Tom’s script work made him expert. Your own too-suggestible mind, in tune with the archetypes associated with the horror genre and many old myths, did the rest. Nita finished the tour exhilarated but surprisingly wrung out; and while Ronan and Kit went through it again, and Dairine paused downstairs to have a drink of some ominously bubbling and smoking fruit punch, Nita took Jackie out into the relative peace and quiet of the back garden.
She sat down on the edge of the koi pond and got her breath back, listening to more screams floating down from the upstairs of the house, and to the sound of her pulse starting to slow down at last. After a little while a tall shape came out the back door and made its way over to her through the shadows. “So tell me,” Carl said, “how’s it look?”
“Really great,” Nita said. “I didn’t know you two were so into this.”
“Well, why not?” Carl said. “If you spend all the rest of the year fighting the serious Powers of Eeeeevil, then sometimes you just want to spend a little time enjoying the harmless kind of spooky stuff. Keeping the old traditions alive…while making it plain that fewer and fewer of the old ploys the Lone Power used have so much fun scaring us with will work any more: not for anything serious. Sure, it comes up with new ones all the time…”
“But laughing at the old ones still gets under Its skin.”
“Way under,” Carl said, “since it really, really hates not being taken seriously…” He looked back at the house. “But who doesn’t like being safely scared, occasionally? Pleasantly scared, by something that can’t really hurt you?” He grinned as an eldritch howl came floating out one of the upstairs windows, accompanied by the shrieks and then the laughter of small children. “It starts getting you used to fear… so when you come up against something really scary, you can cope a little better.”