As he passed huts that sold baked potatoes and popcorn and orange-glazed cupcakes, he was amazed at the harmless façade that was pasted over the celebration. What lie beneath was old and ugly, a pagan ritual of the darkest variety like slitting the throat of a fatted calf or burning people in wicker cages. But in Possum Crawl, it was not openly acknowledged. It was covered in candy floss and spun sugar and pink frosting.
This is what drew you in, Ginny. The carnival atmosphere. The merriment. The glee. The Halloween fun. Your naivety wouldn’t let you see the devil hiding in the shadows.
Moss blinked it all away. There was no time for remembrance and sentiment now; he was here for a purpose. He must see it through.
Now the evil face of Festival showed itself as parade lines of celebrants intermixed and became a common whole that crept forward like some immense caterpillar. They carried gigantic effigies aloft on sticks, grotesque papier-mâché representations of monstrous, impossible insects—things with dozens of spidery legs and black flaring wing cases, streamlined segmented bodies and stalk-like necks upon which sat triangular phallic heads with bulbous eyes. Antennae bounced as they marched, spurred limbs dangled, vermiform mouthparts seemed to squirm. Subjective personifications of an immense cosmic obscenity that the human mind literally could not comprehend.
And here, in this incestuous, godless backwater of ignorance where folk magic, root lore, and ancient malefic gods of harvest were intermixed like bones and meat and marrow in the same bubbling, fat-greased cauldron, the image was celebrated. Something that should have been crushed beneath a boot was venerated to the highest by deranged, twisted little minds.
But that was going to come to an end. Moss would see to it.
He walked on, a sense of dread coiling in his belly. Not only for what was to come, but what he carried in the case.
As he watched it all, he felt words filling his mouth, wanting to come out. Ginny had been fine and pure, a snow angel, eyes clear blue as a summer sky. He worshipped her. She was the altar he kneeled at. She had been perfection and grace and he lived in her soul. Then she had come to Possum Crawl with that little girl’s fascination of pageantry and spectacle and this place had ruined her. It had handled her with dirty hands, sucked the light from her soul and replaced it with black filth. Contaminated, she no longer walked, she crawled through gutters and wriggled in sewers.
She loved Halloween. The child in her could never get enough of it. That was how she heard about Possum Crawl’s annual celebration, its arcane practices and mystical rituals. That’s why she came to this awful place and why the best part of her never left.
But the child, Moss thought. She should have thought of the child.
As the shadows lengthened and a chill made itself felt in the air, he watched little girls in white gowns casting apple blossoms about. They wore garlands of flowers in their hair. Symbols of fertility. And everything was about fertility in Possum Crawl—fertility of the earth and fertility of the women who walked it and the men who seeded both. The crowds marched and whirled and cavorted, singing and chanting and crying out in pure joy or pure terror. It looked like pandemonium to the naked eye, but there was a pattern at work here, he knew, a rhythm, a ceremonial obsequience to something unnamable and unimaginable that was as much part of them as the good dark soil was part of the harvest fields.
Moss was shaking. His brain was strewn with shifting cobweb shadows, his eyesight blurring. For a moment, a slim and demented moment in which his lungs sucked air like dry leathery bags, Possum Crawl became something reflected in a funhouse mirror: a warped phantasmagoria of distorted faces and elongated, larval forms. The sky went the color of fresh pink mincemeat, the sun globular and oozing like a leaking egg yolk.
Barely able to stay on his feet, he turned away from the crowds that swarmed like midges, placing his hot, reddened face against the cool surface of a plate glass window. His lungs begged for air, sour-smelling sweat running from his pores in glistening beads. After a moment or two, the world stopped moving and he could breathe again. The plate glass window belonged to a café and the diners within—old ladies and old men—were hunched-over mole-like forms scraping their plates clean with sharp little fingers, watching him not suspiciously, but with great amusement in their unblinking, glassy eyes. They looked joyful at the sight of him.
“Ginny,” he said, the very sound of the word making him weak in his chest.
He saw her reflection in the glass—she was striding out of the crowds, a swan cut from the whitest linen, her face ivory and her hair the color of afternoon sunshine. Her sapphire eyes sparkled. Then he turned, hopeful even though he knew it was impossible, and saw only the mulling forms of Festivaclass="underline" the dark and abhorrent faces shadowed with nameless secrets and mocking smiles. He could smell sweat and grubby hands, dark moist earth and steaming dung.
There was no Ginny, only a shriveled beldame with seamed steerhide skin, head draped in a colorless shawl, her withered face fly-specked and brown like a Halloween mask carved from coffin wood. She grinned with a puckered mouth, sunlight winking off a single angled tooth. “It was only a matter of time,” she tittered. “Only a matter of time.”
“Go away, you old hag,” Moss heard his voice say.
His guts were laced with loose strings that tightened into knots and he nearly fell right over.
“Oh, but you’re in a bad way,” a voice said but it was not the scarecrow rasp of the old lady but a voice that was young and strong.
He blinked the tears from his eyes and saw a girl, maybe thirteen, standing there watching him with clear, bright eyes. Her hair was brown and her nose was pert, a sprinkling of freckles over her cheeks. She smiled with even white teeth.
“I will help you,” she said.
“Go away,” Moss told her. He didn’t need any damn kids hanging around him and especially not some girl dressed in Halloween garb like the others: a jester in a green-and-yellow striped costume with a fool’s cap of tinkling bells.
“I’m Squinny Ceecaw,” she said and he nearly laughed at the cartoonish sound of it.
“Go away, kid,” he told her again. “Go peddle it somewhere else, Squinny Seesaw.”
“Ceecaw.”
Her eyes flickered darkly. She looked wounded, as if he had called her the vilest of names.
Suddenly, he felt uneasy. It was as if he was being watched, studied, perhaps even manipulated like a puppet. A formless, unknown terror that seemed ancient and instinctual settled into his belly and filled his marrow with ice crystals. Again, his eyesight blurred, pixelated, and his head gonged like a bell, his body twisting in a rictus of pain as if his stomach and vital organs had become coiling, serpentine things winding around each other. Then the pain was gone, but loathsome images still paraded through his brain, a psychophysical delirium in which the horned mother parted infective black mists to spread membranous wings over the cadaver cities of men and peered down from the blazing fission of primal space with crystalline multifaceted eyes.
Then he came out of it and Squinny Ceecaw had him by the hand, towing him away he did not know where. He told her to go away, to get lost, but his voice did not carry. It seemed to sound only in his head. He gripped the silver case as if his fingers were welded to it. He felt weak and stunned.
“It’s too early for Festival yet,” she informed him.
She brought him through an alleyway and into an open courtyard. Then he was on his hands and knees, gulping air and swallowing a dipper of water she handed him from a well. It was cold and clean and revitalizing. But seconds after he swallowed it, he had realized his terrible mistake—he had drank the water, the blood, of this terrible place.