“You’ve come for Festival?” the girl asked him.
“Sure, kid. That’s why I’m here.”
He realized he had set down the silver case. She reached for it, perhaps to hand it to him, and he cried out, “Don’t touch that!”
She jumped back as if slapped. He shook his head, wanting to explain there were reasons she should not touch it. But in the end he did not speak. Perhaps, he could not speak.
“Do you live here?” he asked, mopping sweat from his face, pulling the case close to him so that it touched his knee.
“Yes.”
“Do you know The Preacher?”
She looked at him for a long time. Her mouth did not smile and her pert nose did not crinkle up with sweetness. He sensed something old about her, something in the shadows behind her eyes, a forbidden knowledge. She studied him suspiciously as if he was playing an awful trick on her.
“Do you know The Preacher?” he asked again.
“Yes, yes, I do.”
“Where can I find him?”
“You have come to Festival to meet The Preacher. Many do,” she informed him. “Many, many come but they are not like you. You are special, I think. You are one of the few and not the many.”
Tell her, he thought then. Tell her all about it so she’ll know. Tell her about Ginny, about how fair and pure she was until she got stained dark by this awful place. Tell her how she came for Festival and stayed forever. How she left you with the baby. Tell her how you came after Ginny that night and dragged her back to the city. How she squirmed like a snake in the backseat until you had to tie her hands behind her back with your belt and gag her with your handkerchief so she’d quit screaming obscenities about the Great Mother who seeded the world, reaping and sowing. And how first chance she had gotten, she slit her wrists, dying in your arms and spewing madness about the Mother of Many Faces who was Gothra.
But he didn’t tell her about that. Instead, he just said, “Tell me about Halloween. Tell me what it means to you.”
The girl sat in the grass not far from him, a brooding look coming over her features as she began to speak. “It is not Halloween here. It is Festival, which is much older. It is a celebration of harvest, of leaf and soil and seed,” she said as if by rote. “The Mother gives us these things as she gives us birth to begin and life to enjoy and death to take away our suffering. Once a year we gather for Festival. We celebrate and give back some of what we have been given. It is our way.”
Although the degenerate truth of what she said was not lost on him, he refused to listen or accept any of it. He had heard it before and did not want to hear it again. “You should go home now, go to your parents.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. They disappeared last year playing festival.”
“Get the hell away from me, kid.”
Then he’d elbowed past her, making his way up the alley and to the main thoroughfare, whatever it was called in a pig run like Possum Crawl. He moved through the crowds like a snake, winding and sliding, until he found a bar. Inside, it was dim and crowded, a mist of blue smoke in the air. He could smell beer, hamburgers and onions that sizzled on a grill behind the bar. The tables were full, the stools taken. Men were shoulder to shoulder up there. But as he approached, two of them vacated their places.
Moss sat down and a beer was placed before him. Nice, that. Didn’t even have to wait for service. It came in a frosted mug. It was good, ice-cold. He drained half of it in the first pull, noticing as he had outside that there were no women. Outside, there were old ladies, yes, and little girls, but no teenagers, no young women. And in here, not a one.
Funny.
As he sat there in the murky dimness, thinking about the silver case at his foot, he had the worst feeling that he was being watched again. That everyone in that smoky room had their eyes on him. Sweat ran from his pores until his face was wet with it. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and didn’t even recognize himself. He looked dirty and uncomfortable, rumpled like a castoff sheet, his face pale and blotchy, pouchy circles under his eyes that were the color of raw meat. There were sores on his face that he was certain had not been there the day before. His guts turned over. His hands shook. His head hurt and his gums ached. Again, he felt waves of nausea splashing around in his belly and he felt the need to vomit as if something inside him needed to cleanse itself.
Moaning, he grabbed the case and stumbled back out of the bar. The sun had set. Shadows bunched and flowed around him like pools of crude oil. Faces seemed to crowd him, pushing in, eyes bulging and hands reaching, fingers brushing him. The crowds surged and eddied, hundreds of pumpkins carried on shoulders like conjoined heads. Scratchy Halloween music played somewhere. High above the town, the mountains were dark and ancient and somehow malefic. Their conical spires seemed to brush the stars themselves.
He found a bench and fell into it, gasping for breath. The apprehension was on him again, the neurotic, skin-crawling feeling that there were things going on all around him that he could not comprehend. Possum Crawl, goddamn Possum Crawl. It was like onion, layer upon layer of secrets and esoteric activities that you could never know nor understand even if you did. The unease flowered into terror as the darkness and silence seemed to crowd him. The sense that he was in an alien place amplified and he heard voices muttering in tongues that were guttural and non-human. In the glow of streetlights, he saw rooflines that were jagged and surreal. Castle Mountain above seemed to shudder. Fear sweated out of him as his brain whirled and his stomach rolled over and over again. He shivered in the night as a delirium overwhelmed him, squeezing the guts out of him until he became confused, not sure where he was or even who he was. The night oozed around him, thick and almost gelid.
He stumbled away, cutting through the crowds, getting turned around and around, hearing a high, deranged wailing and then realizing it was coming from his own mouth.
He was propelled in conflicting directions, taken by the crowd and carried along by them until he fell free into a vacant lot strewn with the refuse of Festivaclass="underline" paper cups, streamers tangled in the bushes, dirty napkins and broken bottles and cast-aside ends of hot dog buns. He lay there, face in the grass, until he calmed and a voice in his head said, I will not submit.
He sat up, lit a cigarette, thinking about Ginny and the night he had taken her from this madhouse of a town. As fevers sweated from him, he was not even certain it had happened. He was no longer certain of anything. There was only this awful place. The night. The cigarette between his lips. He touched the silver shell of the case and his fingertips tingled as if his hand was asleep.
The Preacher. He had to find The Preacher and do what was right, do the thing he had come to do which was becoming steadily convoluted and obscure in his brain. He began to fear that his memories, his mind, his very thoughts were being stolen from him. Shaking with panic, his identity fragmenting in his head like ash on the wind, a stark image of Gothra floated in his brain, rising, filling the spaces he understood and those he did not—a great monstrous insect, a primeval horror that was part spider-wasp and part mantis and wholly something unknown his feeble brain could not describe even to itself. In his mind, he heard what he thought was the insect’s voice, a buzzing/croaking chordal screech. I am here. You are here. Together we shall bring evil and madness into this world and make it our own.