White agony blossoms behind her eyes.
Momentarily blinded, dazed with the contents of Thali’s goblet, she hears rather than sees her mother’s robes slide to the floor. Then flat-footed, claw-scraping steps head for the cave mouth, and the pattern-gate through.
“Keep watching if you can.” Thali’s voice catches. “I didn’t.”
Her vision is already shattering, but Zill tries to hold on. There are swimmers on the other side of that gate, now, reaching through dark water to touch the shimmering lines. Her mother stretches out her own arms and leans forward. No one breathes.
Then, with a single splash, she is gone.
Daylight seeps through her eyelids like cold acid. Zill curses, rolls over, and shoves her face into her pillow, wincing at the pain this simple action brings.
Pain and remorse. No matter what she’d been trying to escape, going drinking with Thali last night (last night?) was her worst idea ever. Jack and Coke minus the Coke, not even a decent bitch session, and now she’s got the mother of all hangovers—
Mother.
The word trips a trigger in her head—or a floodgate for nightmares she’s had too little night for. Zill’s hands clutch her blankets as the image-torrent rises, sweeping her back into memory, half-lit black waters and shards of a city drowned before Pangaea broke apart. Shining swimmers with gill-fringed throats stare out at her with her mother’s face. With the face of Thali’s mother, gone last year—
Gasping, she claws herself up into the light of waking. Her bed is a disaster.
As she struggles to pull the quilt straight, her hand closes on cold metaclass="underline" some fragment of dreaming, sharp-spiked and impossible. Zill lifts it up with bloodied fingers, then carefully lowers it onto her matted hair. Into the fire still encircling her forehead.
It fits perfectly.
Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You. Hum—Hurt You.
John Shirley
Elwin McGrue was not ready for Halloween. He had not set up his sprinklers, to spray the bastards T.P.-ing his lawn. He hadn’t bought the novelty store candy—super sour and super-hot and a few with ants in it—to drop in the bags of any who persisted in tormenting him. He hadn’t yet received the mail-order recording of a vicious dog snarling and brutishly barking, which would trigger when anyone came up the walk…
It was already October 30, and he wasn’t ready. Something else was troubling him more. The new house, a hundred feet from his, across the circle at the dead end of this street—the brand-new house that no one would ever live in. It bothered him. Indeed, it seemed to target him.
“Sometimes I think you like fighting with the kids on Halloween,” said His neighbor Mary Sue.
“I don’t relish the conflict, Mary Sue”, he said, as he stood on his lawn in the morning mist.
“Certainly, you do, Elwin,” she said, locking eyes with him, matching him frown for frown as they faced each other over the wooden fence—the decaying fence she said was on his property and he said was on hers.
Mary Sue was sixty-five, about seven years younger than him, but just as stubborn. She stood there with her arms crossed, the wind stirring her long, white hair. It was a hair style she’d kept from being a damned hippy in the 1960s, he supposed. Her blue eyes were fading but could be just as chilly as ever. Secretly, he had always admired her.
“No,” he said. “It’s what happened to Andy.”
It was true. McGrue had turned his back on Halloween, long ago, because of what had happened to his grandson, and he wasn’t going to have it forced on him.
Her eyes softened at the reminder.
“He was a sweet little boy, Irwin.”
“He isn’t dead, Mary Sue.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“These kids now…they’re no better than the ones who hurt him…”
And one of those kids, McGrue realized then, was riding down the street on a bike, without his hands on the handle bars. Lon Kimble. Maybe fourteen by now, Elwin thought. Acting like a drunk teenager just to mock him and Mary Sue.
Lon had his hands up in the air, and was whooping, steering by leaning this way and that as he came to the circular cul-de-sac at the end of Skellon.
Skellon Way, with its prominent Dead End sign, followed the top of a small branching ridge, right where the road ended in an ivy grown cliff. The cul-de-sac overlooked another neighborhood street below. Some of the Skellon kids last Halloween had gotten in the half-finished new house—the house where no one was ever intended to live—and stood on the raw wood planks of the second floor throwing bric-a-brac down onto the roofs below.
This kid—Lon was his name— was one the chief culprits, making twisted faces at Elwin as he circled on his bike, look-no-hands, around in the end of the road.
“Hon, I wish you wouldn’t ride in a circle, with no hands,” Mary Sue called to him. “You’re gonna fall and break something!”
But Lon handily completed the turn, still no hands, giggling out, “Oooh, look I’m gonna fall off the bike and break my ass! Yahhhh!”
McGrue watched in hope, but unfortunately the kid didn’t take a header. Off he went, peddling and chortling down the street.
“Disrespectful little bastard,” McGrue said. “Behaving like that toward you.”
“Oh, I’m an old veteran,” she said. “I’ve got a skin like a rhino by now.” She was referring to having been a schoolteacher. She had taught Jr. High English for thirty-seven years before retiring. Teaching was something they had in common. He had taught at the same school, though he’d retired the year after she’d transferred in. He’d taught shop class before the District, in its infinite wisdom, decided that shop class was a waste of money.
He remembered a lot of good kids who spoke respectfully to him, in the early days, called him “Mr. McGrue”. He’d liked most of them.
But something was screwing kids up now. Was it cellphones? Videogames? Parents more interested in social media than their kids?
Whatever it was, the kids around here, anyway, were worse than ever.
He couldn’t afford to move away. He’d have to sell his house, which wasn’t worth much, and live in some old folks’ home, no other option. So, he stuck around, clinging like a barnacle to the ridgetop, working on little home repair projects, doing maintenance jobs part time. But now, at the end of the street, was the house not intended to be lived in, the house that buzzed and hummed and kept him awake at night. Sometimes he could feel it, the powerful field put out by the house. Microwaves, electromagnetics? Both? He wasn’t sure.
“Mary Sue—your television working okay? Mine’s getting interference from that thing.” He nodded toward the buzzing house.
“I don’t watch television much. I like to read.” She looked at the billowing fog below the ridge. “But I’m having trouble concentrating lately.”
“Me too. And it started when they turned that damn thing on, up there.”
“We were canvassed, the whole neighborhood was, Elwin. We had hearings about it.”
“I was there. But they threw me out.”
“You were unruly, Elwin.”
“There were going to put in that big cell tower a hundred feet from my house!”
“The whole valley voted against that tower.”
“So, what’d they do? They installed that camouflaged monstrosity!”
She sighed. “It looks like a house, it’s cosmetic, I guess. I don’t like it either. All the people with cell phones voted for it.”
“You?” McGrue asked, looking at her with a scowl and narrowed eyes.
The expression on his face made her laugh. “No, Elwin. I’ve got a cell phone but service before this thing was good enough for me. I guess they all wanted to get all the internet all the time on their phones, or…And there they go.”