All Hallows Read online

  It had been close. Night worms could be shockingly quick—had Hecksbesen not…

  “We don’t dwell on it,” Maren warned herself. It dimmed her accomplishment to remember the long road. The sacrifices piled like so many mile-markers, or those shabby crosses and fading shrines memorializing accidents unremembered outside of families filled by a hole.

  She was a frosty mother to this last, latest, and ultimately successful trio of symbionts—each chained in a pocket, each awaiting her selection of a final home and their longest phase. She had learned.

  Weeks remained to find suitable hosts, but she would see the job through. Hurrying would only invite disaster in the home stretch.

  Maren, having seen the proximity of success, had promised that this time, the souls consumed would be willing, and willing by her standards—the worms were not, she knew, terribly picky, and would latch onto the first soul they saw.

  A poor choice of source material would lead to a disastrous implant—or so Maren assumed, for a field test of that, at least, had been avoided. She might have wished such a fate on her worst enemy, but her nemesis was in parts unknown.

  “May she be in parts and pieces,” Maren said, though she was not sure she meant that—it would be exhausting to find a reliable enemy after endless vitriolic exchanges and an ongoing failure to kill each other—permanently, at least.

  “Odd to reach an ending,” Maren said, thinking less of her enemies and more of the worms.

  Having created her first legitimately soul-fed litter, Maren could share the knowledge with absolutely nobody, for the worms were valuable beyond measure. Those who had lived as long as she knew that the greatest jewels were often guarded secrets and unsubstantiated rumors.

  Some treasures—and their owners—only survived when in the hands of an anonymous collector and kept in an undisclosed location. Night worms, in short, were priceless, their very existence too dangerous to admit.

  As she had no intention of marketing her achievement or holding an auction, Maren found it her greatest impulse to constantly reassure that none of the three had been mislaid.

  Which was to say: escaped.

  Maren had seen no indication that the worms wanted to be shed of her, but that proved nothing—in their place, she would have pretended the same to generate complacency on the part of the bearer.

  Testing their location was becoming a habit. It would not escape notice by anyone who knew her well. Her fingers traveled the chains anyway.

  The health and whereabouts of her traveling companions affirmed, Maren tapped her nose with a carrot and forced her thoughts back to the bench, and to waiting, and to the seeing stone, and to the gift.

  6

  “Taking its sweet time,” Maren grumbled, the park unchanged around her, if people were change.

  She had not thought to bring a magazine, nor had she stolen a phone book, though she had visited trash cans for several blocks. In their season, the yellow stacks had once been more numerous than wind chimes on the porches of American homes, but such directories seemed to have gone extinct, removed from the shared cultural experience of an entire country.

  Unlike night worms, Maren had no mind to bring phone listings back, but the yellow bricks had been good for throwing through windows, worked as improvised shields, and searching for a Mongolian grill could pass dreary minutes spent in a miserable public park.

  “Never was suited to waiting,” Maren said, her tone suggesting she did not enjoy the admission. She could be cat-patient with her experiments in a kitchen or laboratory, but to simply sit and stare…

  “Can’t risk meditation,” she said. “Not here. I’d be asking to take it in the neck. It’s the highest madness to relax in a quiet park during a holiday.”

  She toyed with the idea of organizing her purse in broad daylight. The chore was real; the thought distressing. A minority of the contents of her purse did not take kindly to sunlight. A vocal minority. She scanned every path, parking spot, and malignant bush. No gift. No enemies.

  Maren considered the stone. More correctly, she considered why it had called to her, and why so strongly.

  She had declined opportunities to accept the gift constantly—days, weeks, months ago. The stone might have pulled at her once in the past year or two—if so, it had been as soft as lunar gravitation.

  Soft enough that Maren was not certain whether it had pulled her or not. It had been the movement of a talking-board’s planchette driven by drunken teens… or maybe—just maybe—a faded, jejune spirit. The pull had been distant enough to confuse with age-related vertigo; the stone had been weak, if it had been anything, too low on energy to tug with conviction.

  Whatever the reason for this new urgency—or malfunction—the prism had not pulled like this for years, jerking like a leashed animal choking itself over a sniff of the competition (or a potentially amorous companion).

  Maren had thought the stone lacked motivation. She’d decided that ages ago, although she had not put it aside, for, like her necklace of spoons, she believed it would react to an extreme.

  Had it?

  “Hard to say,” she said. Maren patted her arms and tapped her head like a ripe melon. Did the stone sense her demise? Must she eat or die?

  “Balderdash,” Maren offered. “Walked how many miles today? Didn’t die once. Fit as a fiddle.”

  As with herself, she kept the cloudy prism in good maintenance. Also like her body, the stone had offered quality service alongside its inevitable decline—an understandable drop-off, for the stone’s wane coincided with Maren ignoring its every alert for decades.

  “Worse than a beeper,” she said, picking a hunk of carrot meat from her teeth. The stone had buzzed and pulled and warmed endlessly, at the start. It had proximity alarms to the gift—any gift, making it insufferable in a crowd. It had a smooth pull around others of her kind. It had shaken with summons to meetings—no snooze button, either. And, of course, it delivered a special, deep-seated tug to her intestines whenever it detected Uriah Lee.

  “I am not at the beck and call of the universe. I was busy.” She remembered Dottie’s family—her daughter, their excuses—and Maren made a sour face at the unconscious resemblance.

  “My cause was legitimate.” She took an aggressive bite of carrot and canted her head to evaluate the resulting sound, stuffing grubby fingers into her mouth. She was relieved to find the carrot had cracked, not her incisor.

  Maren put the question of the stone’s motives from her mind. It was not a senseless object, but it was of a low intelligence. The prism acted less feminine and more like a man: petty and pouting and always rushing off, or asking her to.

  A battered chrome flashlight had given her similar problems. She’d carried it since it was new in a packet—this explained the dents and a diagonal line halving the lens—but, much as with the stone, the flashlight had a switch that would work a thousand times in regular conditions. She kept it for emergencies, and because it looked remarkably like the handle of a light saber, and because it was reliable: the flashlight was sure to fail her during an outage.

  Perhaps the stone had become like that chrome Eveready. In the wet and dark, she could shake and swear at the flashlight, blindly replace crusty alkaline batteries, scratch at corroded contacts with tooth and nail, bang on the shiny exterior—and to what avail?

  She would sit in the soot, nod-off, and wake to find a feeble beam of yellow light projecting from the unit.

  A year ago, Maren had taken a claw hammer to the flashlight during a thunderstorm in which she and the lightning had raged together. The reflector had been a disappointment, as it was a cone of chrome-look plastic, not mirrored steel. She’d thrown the pieces of the contraption into a moldy hatbox to be incinerated.

  “What was the lesson in that?” Not to rely on the inventions of men—or, just as likely, to trust nothing.

  But the stone had pulled her, and pulled hard. She had not endowed the flashlight with anything magical, nor upgraded it beyond
what were advertised as superior batteries that cost twice as much and lasted about the same—a poor management of her funds, considering she had never needed the flashlight when it worked.

  Maren rubbed carrot-stained fingers on her blouse. As she’d already reminded herself, overthinking a problem could break an otherwise accurate prediction, and she had walked too far to take failure with good sportsmanship.

  She would accept that the prediction was true.

  The pull was usual enough, if she dismissed half a century of the stone’s reduced capacity. It might have repaired itself. There was no gain to being jaded.

  Slippage, though—that she could review. The prediction would not be altered simply by wondering when it would be—soon, else she would be out of carrots, and patience, and feel the fool for wasting an hour on a day with no time to spare.

  “When, then?”

  In practice, any prognosis relating to a slip should involve basic math, though a great deal of it—and the great beauty of mathematics was that it had obeyed itself since the commencement of creation.

  Math did not change. Individual stones, however… those could slip.

  Maren tapped a half-eaten carrot against her cheek. She had calibrated her cloudy gem carefully, adjusting filters and thresholds; nominal and operational energies that directed its primitive consciousness. It had conservative tolerances to consistently present what would be—Maren disliked relying on long odds.

  Perhaps a bump too many had thrown the stone out of alignment. Peeking into the pocket of the purse, Maren clicked her tongue between her teeth. She’d left the necessary penetrating oil in a cache halfway around the planet.

  Typical.

  She tapped her nails on the stone’s exterior housing, a reinforced alloy of her personal invention.

  Maren had gone through portable phones until she’d given them up (the insurance cancelled her policy, truth be told) and she’d been aghast at the prospect of her prism similarly demolished by any assortment of short drops, minor splashes, brief immersions, or third-party accessories.

  The stone had, if anything, grown hotter than it had been—much hotter—the ends of her nails began to curl and discolor against the housing.

  Maren frowned at the necessity of reviewing the complex formula used to dictate the relationships involving power consumption and the subsequent waste products—primarily heat and a mildly toxic gas. There was a delicate balance regulating the strength of the pull, the temporal distance attempted, and projected visuals.

  The thought of the formula put Maren at the start of a fit, for the formula was not only unfinished, she was its sole author. Maren recalled jotting it on the back of her night worm monograph—but wherever that was, it was not at hand.

  Maren spent several minutes in attempted dissection, breaking one nail and charring others, swearing liberally at the prism, at herself, at algebra, and at the rugged housing, which she failed to remove.

  A carrot in her teeth, she held the stone to the sun, looked for any new veins or impurities, and declared it a victory to have broken nothing—Maren felt she had not—and, while she had also done nothing correctional, she was content that the stone was not clearly amiss.

  “Which means the gift is close. It will not travel here alone. Be presentable,” she counseled, and, finding no good reason to argue, Maren collected a number of dried twigs from low branches.

  Maren ceased foraging when she had a fistful of straight, short lengths of branches, none thicker than a writing pencil.

  Gritting her teeth at a pulse of sciatica in her strong-side hamstring, Maren bent awkwardly to peel strips of bark, skinning a first-year sapling that would be destroyed in any event, given its location. By the next growing season, any such baby trees would be slain: either torn from the ground by municipal workers or eaten alive by adventurous deer.

  Chanting a nonsense ditty composed of random oaths—some of which rhymed (others of which shocked her sufficiently to make her chuckle, thereby ruining her hope of entering a foul mood)—Maren attempted to gather her uniformly silver, wire-straight hair, found that she could lose her temper after all, and, with much pulling at her roots and swearing at the sky, succeeded in forcing the greater part of the long, broom-dry silver growth into a simple horse-tail.

  She lashed the fist of twigs into place with flexible green bark, added a binding rune of questionable penmanship, and finished with several words of power, some of them older than profanity, though they were less fun to say aloud.

  When the bulk of her hair was under control—several strands simply refused to yield, though they appeared identical to the rest—Maren rubbed her hands together with a papery sound. She began to hum, basking in the friction of unsated desire.

  Pending the gift’s arrival, what more to do?

  She could prepare the basics while she waited. Make a bit of a ritual out of what did not need to be one, but could.

  “Party for one!” she proclaimed. Her voice was stronger than she had expected. The thrill of the gift had awakened an atrophied pit in the depths of her viscera, and the sun had melted into her skin.

  Maren’s voice quavered into the one complete octave she could reliably produce at her advanced age. Her throat moved through the scale several times. She rewrapped the scarf less tightly about her neck.

  Winded and lightheaded, she sat on the edge of the bench that, to her keen nose, smelled of varnish, sealant, and the recent urine of an itinerant carrying kidney stones.

  She touched the zipper of her bulky purse as though to open it. “Who would have thought those go so well together?”

  Maren breathed more deeply to savor the scent, nodding with growing confidence. “It’s the solvent that strengthens the bridge.”

  She breathed beyond the smells of the bench, seeking earth and the bounty of life under the crunchy carpet of recently fallen leaves. This process, as much as her vocal warm-up, put her in the right mindset for music.

  “This one here… this goes out to, uh… to this country girl I know… goes by the name of… Uriah Lee,” Maren drawled, affecting the delivery of a rockabilly crooner whose name she could not recall.

  Bending the tip of her tongue under her front teeth, she sang loudly, if not well…

  Nascent reward, come restore these systems;

  Hear this, good sisters, my welkin anthem:

  I cull from the land to turn back the hands…

  Truncating the final syllable, Maren closed her mouth with a click of bright orange teeth.

  “Mercy below and pity the songbirds,” she said, squinting at a pair of pygmy nuthatches that had stopped to watch, transfixed—and quite possibly horrified.

  “It has too many notes,” she explained to the birds. “That, and… did you notice the lack of accompaniment? It was Uriah who upset the echoes, not me—yet here I am, suffering that ancient grudge alone.”

  One of the tiny birds stutter-stepped around the slender limb, looking like the minute hand of a fluffy clock. It stopped when it hung precariously upside-down, chirping at its mate overhead, each bird a mirror to the other.

  “Yes, I can see how shadows could be called echoes of a kind. I don’t see how it will help my singing, but take points for creativity,” Maren said. “Tell me this, though… what an awful monster must I be, if even echoes won’t clap back?”

  If the songbirds had any further input, they were disinclined to communicate their thoughts, and, on a signal secret to themselves, flew a short way off. The more outgoing of the pair resumed its efforts to charm anyone with ears.

  Which it did, beautifully.

  The pygmy’s tune, Maren soon realized, was not drawn from the time-worn nuthatch repertoire, but rather, constituted an interpretive rendition of the lament she’d so recently butchered.

  The notes of the threnody were perfectly delivered, the bird’s sharp beak pushing emotions high and low in operatic turns; complex vocalizations swelled into trilling sustains. The nuthatch warbled mournfully at the
end, a metal tube sawing at the neck of an acoustic guitar.

  Maren held a dirty nail to the corner of each eye, honked into the fur of her scarf, and composed herself until she could heckle and shout.

  “Puff-chested hack! Contemptible diva!”

  Maren clapped as if she were at an awards ceremony. As her hands grew sore, she clucked her tongue, whistled with two fingers, and pounded recklessly at her chest below her collarbones.

  The pounding led to a tickle, an opportunity presented itself, and Maren coughed with gusto. Coughing, biting, and chewing, Maren spat the result of her exercise into the bushes.

  “My turn!” she said triumphantly, intending to one-up the pygmies with a phlegm-free refrain… and found that her voice had roughened considerably.

  “Bah,” she managed, yanking violently at her silver hair until her forehead moved several inches either direction: her features pulling wax-tight one way, crumpling like a crushed can the other.

  Maren adjusted and tightened the bundle of thin sticks at the base of her skull, muttering bitterly at everything and nothing.

  “I am not changing my tune!” she snapped at an idle thought. “Fine. I am, but it is a choice. A preference. I’ve had quite enough of gorgons and Orpheus and gloomy monodies… Brown ale beats watery wine! A tavern tune will serve.”

  Pulling a large and blackened spoon from the jangling necklace beneath her blouse, Maren closed her eyes, head bobbing, her swollen hands conducting the park’s silence during a moment of fixed concentration.

  With a clang of the dented spoon on the iron frame of the bench, Maren began a lusty, medieval catcall, speaking as much as she sang, there being no audience to impress (the nuthatches had flown at first sight of the spoon).

  Skip the bone

  Toss the meat;

  Save the boon

  Eat the sweet!

  As she placed the spoon back onto its wire, a burst of unnaturally frigid air slammed into a pile of colorful leaves from above, bomb-like, scattering papery bodies in all directions.