4

Even before she opened her eyes, Helene knew that something about this place seemed familiar. Her first breath stirred a memory in her mind of something musty and organic and strangely maternal, like wet cobblestones drying in the sun, or a nursery in disuse, but as quickly as she became sure of it, the feeling vanished again. She was just left with moss pressing against her nose and sticks jamming themselves into her knees and her palms.

When her eyelids did flutter open, it caused no immediately discernible change in her ability to see; the air around was quite black, with some bare light falling from a dark sky above, but not enough to walk by. Her heartbeat was thunderously loud in her ears, and as she sat up she found herself quite lightheaded. She knelt unsteadily and held her forehead in her hands with a feeling of deep despair. What on earth had happened?

A light crack of leaves at her side made her jump; she couldn't see the perpetrator in the darkness and for a minute almost tried to scramble to her feet and run, but a second later she felt a tug at her skirts and a soft brush against her hand. She blinked in the darkness with a feeling of rising apprehension in her throat, which was suddenly released as the little shape at her side gave a curious, "Mrrwr?"

"Cat!" she breathed, reaching out a hand and finding his tail whipping around her wrist as he tried to rub against her. She found his chin and began scratching vigorously. "Oh, thank goodness! I'm so glad you're alright, I -" She paused as her hand traveled toward his ear and she found her fingers running across cold, sticky fur at the base of his skull. "Oh, no…"

A small whiff was all it took to confirm that it was blood. "Oh, Cat," she whispered to him, finding his sides and lifting the stout tom into her lap. "I'm so sorry. I should never have let you come." The cat purred into her ear; despite the blood loss, he was acting quite healthy. "I'll never let Mrs. Hall chase you away from the kitchen window again. And I'll bring you a can of fish every night," she promised. "I don't know what's happened tonight and I don't want to know, but let's go home."

The cat said, "Brrrm."

Helene's eyes were finally beginning to adjust to the darkness. It was becoming more and more clear that she had not left the woods, with tall, gaunt trees still surrounding her on all sides, but something about the area seemed wrong, and she certainly was no longer in the graveyard. She stood slowly, brushing dry leaves and needles from her hands and skirt, and tried to look about. Though she dreaded staying in the woods any longer than necessary, perhaps she would have to wait for sunrise to make her way back home. She knew that the town lay to the east, but which direction that was she couldn't determine in the darkness, and the moon was quite gone. The cat next to her made a small noise.

…Wait a minute. The moon was gone?

Helene turned her eyes upward, her view unimpeded by a thousand bare tree branches reaching toward one another across the canopy. There was no moon in the sky where it had, just minutes ago, shone bright as day, and neither were there any stars dotting the black above. The atmosphere seemed tinged with a strange green glow, but that must have been a trick of her vision in the dark. She shook her head. The cat mrowled at her again from the area around her ankles, rubbing a sticky ear against her skirt. She didn't bother to admonish him. Blood on her clothing was certainly the least of her problems now.

For all her fears of being left exposed in the woods until morning, the forest did seem extraordinarily quiet. No bird nor bat nor cricket nor wolf was chickering at her through the darkness; no breeze stirred the leaves, and the air smelled like a mausoleum. When a tinder-dry branch cracked beneath her heel, she realized with a sinking feeling what it was that had seemed so wrong when she first scanned the clearing – the forest of a few minutes past had been wet with autumn rain. "Where on earth am I?" she asked aloud, struggling to maintain composure for an audience she knew she didn't have.

"Merrow," the cat said, catching a claw in her skirt. She reached down to shoo him, but he swiped at her as well and turned in a small circle, his pupils wide in the darkness and his ears flat against his head. "Mrrrrw."

She turned her head as a small noise reached her ears – a crashing and cursing sound from between the trees a few dozen yards away. She froze with a feeling like ice water dribbling down into her stomach. "Is it him?" she breathed to the cat. He hissed.

Helene stepped backward and snapped another branch heavily beneath her foot; she didn't know whether the man had heard, but her nerve quite abandoned her then and she bolted away to stumble behind the nearest tree, shaking like a leaf. She pushed her back against the trunk and took a deep breath, pressing a hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. The footsteps were drawing closer, a heavy, limping, dragging noise rattling the debris on the ground.

"…girl… of course… slippery as an eel on the platter…"

Helene was simultaneously too frightened to move and too curious not to. Naturally, it was the far more dangerous of the two impulses that won her over. She inched her nose around the trunk and peered with one eye toward the dark clearing in which she'd awoken. At its edge, she could see a large, shadowy form moving jerkily between the trees, one leg appearing to drag through the dead leaves, hardly able to support its weight. She couldn't see the man's face, but she could imagine again what she had seen for just a brief second before: a horrible grinning half-skull and skin as blue as water. He wasn't a man, certainly, but a demon or a ghoul – and the thought made her snap her head back around the tree with a shock of fright. Of course. The dead weren't the only ones out and about on All Hallow's Eve.

And all the while that she thought about this, his voice was drawing closer. "Pretty little thing," she could hear him say. "You're not going to escape from me this time. I know you're near." Helene's heart rate shot upward and her hands trembled, but she forced herself to stay still, lifting her chin to the sky so that her breathing was not so loud. "Do you remember your dress?" she heard him whisper loudly to the woods at large. His voice was smooth and strong, but somehow she was sure that she could hear a deep stress pressing at it from behind. "That beautiful dress you wore at the altar when we were wed? Oh yes, my dear, don't think I've forgotten."

The cat was growling at Helene's feet, and she jerked a foot to make him quiet. A leaf crunched beneath her shifting weight. Suddenly, she was quite certain that the man in the clearing had frozen, and she did the same. His speaking stopped. As still and quiet as she could make herself, the sound of her own breath still seemed thunderous in her ears. Momentarily, the world seemed so still that time itself might have stopped.

And then, from the opposite side of the tree against which Helene leaned, she heard in a deep whisper: "There's the problem with being alive, sweet. You're always so noisy."

The thrill of absolute horror that gripped her head and heart had no comparison. She leapt forward and landed painfully on the side of her foot, but even as she twisted to see the man's large shape reveal itself from the other side of the trunk, she was already blindly fleeing in whatever direction she thought would bring her furthest away from the spot. Leaves flew and swirled through the air in her wake, shattering in the air like sand. The pitch black revealed nothing to her at more than five feet's distance; once, twice, three times she nearly ran straight into the trunk of a tree in the swimming gloom, but each time she stumbled away to the side before impact and started in a new direction, the worst damages to befall her being the painful pressures of running on her hurt foot and the grabbing, tearing twigs of a thousand low branches.

Helene wasn't sure how long she'd run through the tilting darkness with tears on her lips and her heart in her ears, but her throat was starting to feel rough, as if it had been drug through by long fingernails, and her gait was slowing, no matter how hard she pressed on into the night. Eventually, she misjudged her step and stumbled, skirt catching on a creeping limb as she fell. She didn't care anymore. She came to a rest on her knees and leaned over to press her forehead against the bone-dry ground. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Unusually, her mind was quite empty, wiped clean by fear and exhaustion. The only thought she seemed to be able to hold onto was the idea of simply curling in the leaves and falling asleep, safety and warmth be damned. She would wake in the morning with the sun spilling through the window and the smell of breakfast in the kitchen.

But then a thought manifested itself from the creeping fog of her mind, and with it came a deep throb of swollen pain in her foot to remind her: No dream was as detailed as this. No nightmare hurt so badly. So she stood, shaking, beneath a vaulted ceiling of naked trees and gazed up at the sky. The cold black above her still seemed mixed with whorls of green and a sheen of light on the horizon.

Light.

She turned, in what direction she couldn't have said, and saw that the air beyond the next hillock seemed lit by a warm glow. Suddenly, her foot didn't hurt so badly. She crawled and then limped forward, pressing her palms against tree trunks and exposed roots on the embankment to pull her way up the hill's steep incline. The town, or some town, was close, so close that she could almost smell it. Helene Van Dort was going to survive this night, just as she'd promised herself. When she went home, she might never leave the house again.

But even as she crested the hill, half on her elbows and knees and with her palms raw from the scratch of bark, she knew that something was wrong. As she'd expected, there was a town at the base of the hill before her, but a much larger one than she'd thought. It sprawled in all directions, a mass of towering, spiraling structures in wood, stone, and bright chipped paint – overall rather more impoverished-looking than what she was accustomed to, but that wasn't the problem. Though every gas lamp on the street was lit with a cheerful greenish flame to push back the dead of night, the narrow, winding streets were quite deserted. Not a single man, woman, or child could be seen on the roads closest to her, and there wasn't a sound to be heard echoing across the buildings. It was as silent as the grave.

Helene descended the hill slowly, aware of every noise she made in the shifting scrub. The closest building to the base of the hill seemed hardly more than an outhouse, crumbling with age on a base of stone, but larger buildings shot up nearly immediately behind it, imposing in their size, spindly as the teeth in a cave. The first gas lamp she passed sputtered slightly in her presence, but kept burning merrily to show her way down the street of rough cobbled stones. The roads didn't seem made for horses or wagons. With their tight turns and thin passes, at places only a few feet wide, they didn't seem made for anyone at all.

The buildings, growing ever closer and larger as she walked, overshadowed the streets, dominating even the light of the few helpful lamps along the road. Once she approached a storefront on her left, boarded and dark; across the road and leaned against a wall in a manner which indicated they'd been there for quite a long time were several open, empty coffins. Helene felt an uneasy creep fall down her spine and into her stomach. It was a struggle to remember that even as a young lady alone on the street, she was safer here than in the woods.

It might have been a full half-mile she traveled along the winding streets before they seemed to open before her, and in the market area into which she stepped she saw for the first time signs of human habitation. In the center of the square laid scattered tables, tankards, painted leaves and the odd smashed pumpkin. A large banner was ripped and spread along the ground at the feet of a ghastly skeletal, sculpted horse; as Helene approached, she kicked an edge of the hanging outward to read the latter portion of the salutation.

MERRY HALLOWE'EN!

Pastor Galswells said that nobody who held a proper fear of God celebrated Hallowe'en.

Helene lifted her head again and stepped backward toward the base of the skeleton horse. The sky above was black and the buildings around were lit a friendly lime color; many slumped inward or forward or backward, all ceding to gravity in their own ways. A pub sat on the corner with its door open but its entrance dark. But for the pumpkins on the ground and the occasional spill of ale pooling between the cobblestones, there was no evidence that anyone had seen the town for months. She might be alone. She might be completely alone in a town with no way home, waiting for a man with half a face to drag her screaming into the night.

And in the corner of her eye, she thought she saw the horse's skull move.

With a faint strain of music beginning to reach out to her, she leapt away from the sculpture and turned. Of course the horse hadn't actually moved; it was stone, or perhaps bone, now that she looked closer, and not alive either way. Even the possibility of movement, though, was enough to turn her mind back to a horrorshow of monsters and mistakes. She was so full of worry that she almost didn't notice the drifting sound of a piano pressing its hands over her ears, and when she did, it was with an initial sense of disbelief. Music is one of the easier things to fool oneself into experiencing, but no; these ivory songs were real, and moreover, they were coming from the dark entrance of the pub, which gaped like a mouth in the great wall of the buildings before her.

Helene would have liked to hesitate and worry her options before entering, but instead she stepped forward and approached the pub door with her back straight and her chin held high. The entrance was strangely tunnel-like; a shock of soft light could be seen around a curving corner, but nothing more.

From within, the piano's music stopped.

As she took two steps onward she heard, for the first time since setting foot on the streets, someone speaking. "…go," said a raspy voice. "Geddem out, let 'em enjoy themselves. It's Hallowe'en."

From a second voice, further away, she heard, "Would be nice to have someplace to go."

She turned the corner into the pub proper, a large, dark area lit only by a single dim spotlight that focused on a piano perhaps fifteen feet away, on a dais against the wall. The shape of a man was bent over the instrument on the stage, half-sitting on the bench and half crouched to gather musical notes from their stand – a young man, in trousers and a white dress shirt with rolled sleeves. Helene felt suddenly like she'd been punched in the stomach. Tall and thin and dark of hair and facing mostly away from her, he was lit poorly by the shining light focused above him, but even in quarter-view of his face she knew who he was. She'd been looking on his painting her entire life, after all, and in the twenty years since its creation he hadn't changed a bit.

His hair was black and his eyes were brown and when he turned, his face was long and looked nothing like hers.

And his skin was blue.

"Father?" she whispered to herself.

"New arrival?" she heard in a low gruff voice from over her shoulder. When she turned, it was to see that a talking skeleton in a bowler hat was gazing down at her. When he tilted his head, his single eye rolled from one socket to the next.

"Ah. Helluva day to die," he said conversationally as Helene's vision suddenly become quite focused and flat. "An' young." She couldn't feel her feet, and her arms were limp as empty coatsleeves. With a whimper, she dropped heavily to her knees and immediately felt the black of the pub pushing at her temples. It was all too much for one day. She was simply out of screams to give.

"Don' worry about it, we'll set you up a nice welcome," the skeleton continued as she pressed her closed eyes into the palms of her hands, her hearing beginning to fail as his voice grew further away. "Scare up some friends, pull out the keg. Plenty o' reason to celebrate tonight."

I have gone mad.

His voice was almost kind. "Welcome home."