Halloween Is For Lovers Read online

  HALLOWEEN IS FOR LOVERS

  By Nate Gubin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Nathan M. Gubin

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2011

  Nate Gubin Publishing

  303 Columbus Ave.

  Boston, MA, 02116

  www.Halloweenisforlovers.com

  First Edition

  Dedication

  For Shacey.

  Epigraph

  Lovers are a conspiracy against the world.

  Emma Harrison

  Into the chasm gaping we.

  —Bauhaus, "In the Flat Field"

  Prologue:

  A Humble Confession and an Excuse for What Follows

  I didn't write this.

  For those of you who know me, here's exactly what you're thinking.

  Who wrote a book? Seriously? No, wait, that guy? Really? No way. You're joshing me. That guy can write? I didn't even think he could read. He's just a sometimes sober handyman who has somehow leveraged his debonair good looks and self-deprecating modesty into a comfortable life. How on earth could he fill a couple hundred pages with any sort of coherent narrative?

  Here's what happened. I was taking one of those late Monday morning hangover naps in the back of a housepainter's van. The drop cloths, if folded properly, make a nice firm sleeping mat not unlike a futon. Here's a little trick: fill a plastic shopping bag full of crumpled-up newspaper, and voilà, an adequate pillow that is easily recyclable. It was the Monday after a Halloween weekend that started on a Thursday night and didn't end until bar time the following Sunday night–Monday morning. I spent the better part of All Hallows’ Eve drinking Jack Lords, aka Hawaii Five-O’s (Hawaiian Punch and vodka), with a guy who was four feet ten and a half inches tall—officially a half inch taller than the legal cutoff for being a little person. I can attest to this because he passed out once on the front lawn of a house we were working on and I used a tape measure to get the official measurement. Quick word of advice: if you're reading this and you're a little person, think twice about dressing like a fire hydrant for Halloween, getting drunk and chasing dogs while screaming obscenities and trying to pee on them. Funny in concept, not so funny when executed.

  I was a little too old to be partying like this. Thirty-three and living in a rented room of a half-built house. Walls but no doors or trim ... Truth be told, I was sleeping in a buddy’s unfinished basement on a borrowed mattress held off the damp floor a few inches by oak shipping pallets. I had invented an interior decorating style I coined "bachelor tostada": a scattering of dirty clothes, pizza boxes, flattened Hamm's beer cases, magazines and various other wayward slacker flotsam, built up in layers, topped off with shredded Colby cheese. The bottom mantle would compress over time and I was pretty sure that someday I could drill down and extract that layer and use it as a fuel source.

  I wasn't sure what I was doing with my life. I went to college to work in advertising but nobody was chasing me down trying to give me a job. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what the jobs in advertising were. After five years of college, all I really had was a vague dream about what my office might look like. It would have a surfboard in the corner and a guitar hanging on the wall. There would be a black-and-white poster from an avant-garde French film like La Jetée taped to the door along with a Post-it note that read "Don't Think!" If anyone can tell me the job title that fits this office description, please get in touch with me.

  I also coined a term for my love life. I referred to it as "Happy Hour." As long as the affection was cheap, I got my fill from the appe-teaser menu. And I wasn't picky; if they were out of the wings I'd eat the jalapeño poppers. Throw in a twelve-ounce tap beer and give it all to me for three dollars. Now that's love, but only until 5 p.m. and not on Fridays.

  There was a special girl but I messed that up. I'm not going into it here but I messed that up about as bad as someone could mess something up. When failure to commit, but not enough courage to let go, mixes with alcohol and anger, et cetera, et cetera.

  We were painting the inside of a luxury condo for a failed theater maven–turned–interior designer who demanded perfection done quickly and as cheaply as possible. As far as I could tell, his only joy in life was critiquing other people’s best efforts in front of wealthy clients with statements like, "Oh my God, did you see the finish on the banquette? It's hideous, the whole thing looks like Vegas in oak. I'm having them redo it ... for free."

  We weren't painting that morning, we were hanging suede wallpaper embossed with just a hint of Nordic-style mountain flowers. It was pretty in small doses but on all four walls of the master bedroom it felt like you were inside one of those oversize designer handbags that the girls with the big sunglasses are fond of.

  It was the wallpaper that made me nauseous, not the hangover, I swear. Regardless, I retired to the back of the van for a late-morning nap.

  Unknown to me, or I was so hungover it didn't matter, a bucket full of rags soaked in lacquer thinner shared my little nap nest. The fumes elevated along with the morning sun and I fell into a deep slumber in the tightly sealed van. Napping like a vodka-soaked baby in a Chinese chemical factory, I dreamt the most spectacular dream.

  So I confess, I didn't write this. It was a dream. I just wrote it down as best as I could remember.

  The EMTs that picked me up that day used a bunch of fancy doctor words. One kept saying methyl ethyl ketones and swelling of the encephalon and permanent drain bamage.

  I'm not sure if I'm remembering that last part right. I was going in and out of a silky haze, legs and arms feeling heavy, sharp taste of metal in my mouth, sweaty skin sticking to a vinyl gurney.

  Just a white softness, a euphoric limp floating from one fume-filled fever dream to the next. A sweeping waltz into the fog and through the gates and into the Kingdom, where this tale played out before my very eyes.

  Professor Tweed

  Professor Tweed was proud of his Scottish heritage. No matter the season, he was dressed neatly in wool trousers and a requisite walking jacket made of a woolen cloth flecked with colors. During the autumn months he supplemented his teacher's salary by leading evening walking tours of local cemeteries and lecturing on the origins of Halloween. He made a good salary at the college, but he was saving up for a new riding mower and the tours paid cash.

  On weekend nights, his tours were typically attended by rowdy youngsters chugging caffeine-infused alcohol out of king-size cans. They mistakenly expected something a little more spectacular than an old guy meandering through a graveyard, talking. A guy with an axe stuck in his head or a zombie jumping out from behind a tree would have better met their expectations. At the very least, Tweed could have swapped out the walking jacket for a leather trench coat like the one worn by Crow or Hellraiser or even Neo. But there would be nothing of the sort. Often, when they found out they were going to be walking slowly through the cemetery and learning about sixteenth-century Britain, they asked for a refund.

  On the Wednesday night before Halloween weekend the attendees were more subdued, mostly middle-aged couples in fleece and comfortable walking shoes. Tweed led them up along the tree-lined street of the old and wealthy little village to the church on the hill. A small cemetery was planted next to it, an iron fence around its perimeter. "To keep someone out ... or to keep something in," he intoned as they walked past. Next he led them to a small gate and paused. "A portal from the land of the living to the ..." On cue, he caught himself and then stared coldly into the dark graveyard. "They say it's bad luck to name it." He pushed the gate open and offered the path to them. "Follow me into the beyond, if you dare."

  Huddled into a nervous flock, the group moved slowly among the gravestones. Puddles of fog filled the shallows and continued to swell as the professor lowered his voice and peered gravely into the gathering gloom. "The ancient Celts believed that on Samhain the border between this world and the otherworld became thin." He stopped and faced the group. "Excuse me, let me rephrase that, they believed the dead"—he lowered his voice into a creepy dark howl—"could reach back through the veil into the land of the living, oooo-eee-ooo ... Spirits rising from the dead and walking among the living ... And the wailing and moaning."

  He turned and slowly marched on. The group now resembled a funeral procession. "Just a veil of fog separating the living from the dead, allowing spirits, both harmless ... and harmful ... to pass through."

  A chubby man shuffled out of the group and fired up his camera. The digital chime shook everyone from their trance.

  "Please, sir, not here, not on this night,” Tweed protested. "I pray of you, do not disrespect the dead. Not for their sake ..." Feigning fright, Tweed looked from side to side. "For yours."

  The man sheepishly tapped the camera off and tucked it into the joey pocket of his Chicago Bears hoodie.

  Tweed turned and continued. "In order to ward off the harmful spirits, the ancients started wearing costumes and masks. Not to scare the spirits, but to disguise themselves as harmful spirits. To trick the spirits and thus pass through the
night unharmed. Or perhaps appease the spirits with their costumes, honor them, treat them with respect. Trick or Treat ... I'm not sure, I think that term went on to mean something."

  The group moved slowly, carefully down the hill into the rising tide of ashen gray. "Samhain became associated with All Saints' Day and then All Souls' Day. The sixteenth-century Scots called it All-Hallows-Even. Eventually it would be shortened into what we now call Halloween."

  Professor Tweed suddenly stopped, his arm barring the group from advancing. A woman with Winnie-the-Pooh embroidered on the chest of her cream-colored sweatshirt popped a gasp. Tweed soured as he looked down the path into the forgotten corner of the graveyard, choked with overgrown thickets and entombed by ancient boughs of hickory and oak. "A night like tonight, in this place ... Perhaps we have ventured too far." His eyes grew wide as he searched into the dark fog. "Dear friends, I suggest we turn and go from this place." The group hustled up the hillside back toward the gate. "Quickly, for your sake, please get out of here."

  Tweed's voice trailed off in the lonely dark. "If you enjoyed your evening, please consider showing your appreciation with a generous tip."

  The graveyard was empty now. The iron gate creaked and clanked shut, closing in the ancient gravestones tangled in burberry. The fog swelled and hung in that forgotten corner, the coldest, darkest, most hollow corner of any cemetery. Into the deep gray of that place ... heavy steps traveled ... darkness. A hollow wind scraped through the charcoal night.

  An uneasy silence, an ominous calm. Worst of all, the sense of something massive, lurking just a few steps ahead.

  The Kingdom of the Dead

  An ancient and decaying black iron gate eighty feet high and topped with craggy brass spikes crests out of the fog. The metalwork between the spears is bent into a pictogram chronicling a newborn baby crawling to his first steps, aging into a child, then an adult, then an adult bowed, an old creature barely standing, a skeleton facedown in the weeds, a gravestone. The brief dance from cradle to grave. The gate joins an endless unsurmountable wall in both directions. As Tweed had noted in his lecture, Was this fortification built to keep someone out… or something in?

  Spreading across the gate is a black banner of cast iron with dimly polished bronze letters.

  Arrete! C’est ici Royaume de la Mort.

  Roughly translated: Stop! Beyond lies the Kingdom of the Dead.

  Centered on the gate is a coat of arms, a shield embossed with a brutish pegasus ridden by a hooded reaper and wrapped with Gothic black-letter text.

  La mort règne suprême!

  Woeful to decipher: Death reigns supreme!

  The gate has a life of its own and doesn’t care to open out. Like the jaws of an apex predator, this brass-fanged gate is fashioned to thrash souls in, its rows of menacing barbed teeth designed not to let go but to forever ingest the prey into the dark innards.

  Yet, not even a push is needed to be let in. Effortlessly, a soul can slowly drift into the Kingdom. But panic and turn, try to reverse? Needles taper to spikes, spikes to sabers. Searing hot pain and not a thirty-second of an inch of travel is permitted back toward the Land of the Living.

  Resigned to let the gate consume, each victim passes through to the Kingdom of the Dead.

  Inevitable indifference takes over, all is lost. Each limp casualty finds himself on the road everyone from the past has traveled, trudging the polished granite pavers on which everyone in the future will plod.

  There is no life on this side. There is no sign of color, only shades of gray, though that's generous; mostly there is black with a few dim swellings of that shade of gray just before black.

  There's a city down in the valley. No lights, no movement, no signs of life amid its Gothic French spires. The valley floor is a shallow pan filled with motionless dry fog.

  Walking forward with only hesitation left in the heart, a soul quickly dries out inside. All the moisture evaporates from the tissues and the body sags, hollow and sad. There is no desire to turn back. Whatever organ that was, the one that energized its possessor to fight or flee, is now empty ... dissolved.

  The Kingdom wasn't always presented in a French Gothic style. Previous to its current incarnation it was South American Day of the Dead–themed: everywhere in sight were papier-mâché skeletons with ridiculously oversize skulls and nothing to do all day but wear sombreros and play the maracas. It worked for a while, but the Latin culture was fundamentally inappropriate for a society of lost souls organized around the principles of hopelessness and sorrow.

  When the Gothic style from northern France’s dark age first emerged it caught on like wildfire. The French culture’s enthusiasm for morose suffering along with its passion for fatalism was a perfect match.

  Along the narrow streets of the city there is barely a soul in sight. A few spirits here or there are milling around, leaning in an alleyway, pacing under a dead tree. None of the surprised-to-see-you, look-who's-new-in-town, let-me-show-you-around kind of welcoming. They knew you were coming.

  None of the Kingdom's citizens make eye contact as they drift among gray chalky buildings, hollow and still inside. Threadbare curtains limp out of unglazed windows. Doors are left ajar; they creak and complain when moved.

  The fashion that holds sway in town is of long, tattered robes dyed the color of dust. The frayed tails leave lazy streaks in the dusty floor. Younger women have taken to wearing their hair back in a tight bun and accentuating the dark circles under their eyes with a heavy tamp of dust.

  There are no clocks, no shops, no day or night. Every so often, the silence is rippled by distant sobs and sighs. The stench of Jean Naté perfume and mothballs stagnates in the wilted stillness.

  This necropolis is a hopeless place.

  99 Rue de Cadavre

  It was preferable to have an apartment on the lowest level of a building. Basement flats were the most prized. Top floors were despised for their views of the barren, bleak sprawl of misery in every direction. There were rumors that the Kingdom's elite lived in dark, cavernous subbasements with no windows. Most apartments were decorated to look like crypts, with sculptures of skeletal remains littered about in archaeological excavation style. Narrow grottoes lit by weak candles were the only light.

  Only the newest residents got stuck renting the top floors, and in the penthouse of 99 Rue de Cadavre sat Hugh Rudd. He hunched over a rickety table, staring at a smudged barista glass with an inch of inky black wine at the bottom. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave him sweeping views of the city in every direction, and a dome of leaded glass above him hazed the room in a dead gray wash. He sat and stared at the wine, motionless and not breathing. He tried to imagine the flat, black liquid having just a hint of red to it.

  Hugh had arrived in the Kingdom only three years before, struck down in his late twenties with a full head of simple brown hair and an average body that fit comfortably into Banana Republic's size medium. He left behind his parents, a few friends, some well-wishers and a fiancée, though technically she was no longer a fiancée at the time of his death. The wedding had been indefinitely postponed.

  The grandfather of the bride was tasked with announcing the "schedule change" to the packed church. He tried to be tactful, thanking everyone for coming, pleading with them to stay and eat, but in the end he threw up his hands, exasperated. "I just wrote a check forseven thousand dollars’ worth of salmon terrine. Unbelievable."

  Hugh leaned back in the creaky old chair and stared up at the dome of gray above him. The thick lead muntin bars made it feel so much like a cage. He never slept, nobody did. The Kingdom had no day, only restless nights to suffer from the memories of his brief time in the land of the living. To sleep was to dream. To dream was to hope. To hope was treason in the Kingdom.

  Hugh was the only child of a professional couple that split in their fifties. His father, Dr. Rudd, immediately remarried a young woman from a lower social class, a dirty blonde with moxie who had made sales calls on his cosmetic surgery practice. She sold a tissue-firming face cream made from ground-up corpse beetle excretions mixed with a fungus that causes blight in strawberry crops.