What October Brings

Spider Wasp Tim Curran

Moss pulled into town at 4:15, his anxiety spiking as he stepped from the car, a tall knife blade of a man with a face scraped hard by life. His flinty eyes sat in craggy draws, taking in the town, the festivities, the throngs of people that wriggled in the streets like spawning salmon. Place was called Possum Crawl, of all things, a lick of spit set in a bowl-like hollow high above Two-Finger Creek in the very shadow of Castle Mountain. Lots of pastures and trees, hicks towing hay wagons outside town.

This was where The Preacher had gone to ground and Moss was going to find him, drag him kicking and screaming out into the light.

Sighing, he stepped out on the board sidewalk, checking his watch and lighting a cigarette. He carried only a heavy silver case. What was inside it, would be for later.

“Festival,” he muttered under his breath as he stepped down into the street and merged with the mulling crowds of the town. “Festival.”

That’s what they called Halloween up here in the yellow and gold hills of Appalachia. Maybe it was about tricks and treats other places, but here in this dead-end mountain town, it was serious business. Festival was not only a harvest celebration, but a time of seeding and renewal, a time of death and resurrection.

The streets were a whirlwind of people, a scattering of autumn leaves blowing down avenues and filling lanes and clogging cul-de-sacs with thronging bodies, conflicting currents, human riptides of chaos. No one sat still. It was almost as if no one dared to.

Moss could feel all those bodies and minds interlocking out there with grim purpose, a rising electrical field of negativity. One thing owned them, one thing drove them like cattle in a stockyard, and tonight they would meet it.

He walked down the main thoroughfare, beneath spreading striped awnings. Blank faces with sinister dark eyes watched him, studied him, burned holes through him. It made something inside him writhe with hate and he wanted to open the briefcase, show them what was inside it.

“No,” he said under his breath. “Not yet, not just yet.”

Not until they were gathered and not until he saw the face of The Preacher.

He avoided the herds as best as possible, taking in Festival. Vines of dangling electrical cords drooped down like snares to capture the unwary. Orange-and-black cardboard decorations leered in every window. Corn shocks and wheat sheaves smelled dry, crisp, and yellow like pages in ancient books. And the pumpkins. Oh yes, like a million decapitated heads, orange and waxy and grinning with dark pagan secrets.

As he passed huts that sold baked potatoes and popcorn and orange-glazed cupcakes, he was amazed at the harmless façade that was pasted over the celebration. What lie beneath was old and ugly, a pagan ritual of the darkest variety like slitting the throat of a fatted calf or burning people in wicker cages. But in Possum Crawl, it was not openly acknowledged. It was covered in candy floss and spun sugar and pink frosting.

This is what drew you in, Ginny. The carnival atmosphere. The merriment. The glee. The Halloween fun. Your naivety wouldn’t let you see the devil hiding in the shadows.

Moss blinked it all away. There was no time for remembrance and sentiment now; he was here for a purpose. He must see it through.

Now the evil face of Festival showed itself as parade lines of celebrants intermixed and became a common whole that crept forward like some immense caterpillar. They carried gigantic effigies aloft on sticks, grotesque papier-mâché representations of monstrous, impossible insects—things with dozens of spidery legs and black flaring wing cases, streamlined segmented bodies and stalk-like necks upon which sat triangular phallic heads with bulbous eyes. Antennae bounced as they marched, spurred limbs dangled, vermiform mouthparts seemed to squirm. Subjective personifications of an immense cosmic obscenity that the human mind literally could not comprehend.

And here, in this incestuous, godless backwater of ignorance where folk magic, root lore, and ancient malefic gods of harvest were intermixed like bones and meat and marrow in the same bubbling, fat-greased cauldron, the image was celebrated. Something that should have been crushed beneath a boot was venerated to the highest by deranged, twisted little minds.

But that was going to come to an end. Moss would see to it.

He walked on, a sense of dread coiling in his belly. Not only for what was to come, but what he carried in the case.

As he watched it all, he felt words filling his mouth, wanting to come out. Ginny had been fine and pure, a snow angel, eyes clear blue as a summer sky. He worshipped her. She was the altar he kneeled at. She had been perfection and grace and he lived in her soul. Then she had come to Possum Crawl with that little girl’s fascination of pageantry and spectacle and this place had ruined her. It had handled her with dirty hands, sucked the light from her soul and replaced it with black filth. Contaminated, she no longer walked, she crawled through gutters and wriggled in sewers.

She loved Halloween. The child in her could never get enough of it. That was how she heard about Possum Crawl’s annual celebration, its arcane practices and mystical rituals. That’s why she came to this awful place and why the best part of her never left.

But the child, Moss thought. She should have thought of the child.

As the shadows lengthened and a chill made itself felt in the air, he watched little girls in white gowns casting apple blossoms about. They wore garlands of flowers in their hair. Symbols of fertility. And everything was about fertility in Possum Crawl—fertility of the earth and fertility of the women who walked it and the men who seeded both. The crowds marched and whirled and cavorted, singing and chanting and crying out in pure joy or pure terror. It looked like pandemonium to the naked eye, but there was a pattern at work here, he knew, a rhythm, a ceremonial obsequience to something unnamable and unimaginable that was as much part of them as the good dark soil was part of the harvest fields.

Moss was shaking. His brain was strewn with shifting cobweb shadows, his eyesight blurring. For a moment, a slim and demented moment in which his lungs sucked air like dry leathery bags, Possum Crawl became something reflected in a funhouse mirror: a warped phantasmagoria of distorted faces and elongated, larval forms. The sky went the color of fresh pink mincemeat, the sun globular and oozing like a leaking egg yolk.

Barely able to stay on his feet, he turned away from the crowds that swarmed like midges, placing his hot, reddened face against the cool surface of a plate glass window. His lungs begged for air, sour-smelling sweat running from his pores in glistening beads. After a moment or two, the world stopped moving and he could breathe again. The plate glass window belonged to a café and the diners within—old ladies and old men—were hunched-over mole-like forms scraping their plates clean with sharp little fingers, watching him not suspiciously, but with great amusement in their unblinking, glassy eyes. They looked joyful at the sight of him.

“Ginny,” he said, the very sound of the word making him weak in his chest.

He saw her reflection in the glass—she was striding out of the crowds, a swan cut from the whitest linen, her face ivory and her hair the color of afternoon sunshine. Her sapphire eyes sparkled. Then he turned, hopeful even though he knew it was impossible, and saw only the mulling forms of Festival: the dark and abhorrent faces shadowed with nameless secrets and mocking smiles. He could smell sweat and grubby hands, dark moist earth and steaming dung.

There was no Ginny, only a shriveled beldame with seamed steerhide skin, head draped in a colorless shawl, her withered face fly-specked and brown like a Halloween mask carved from coffin wood. She grinned with a puckered mouth, sunlight winking off a single angled tooth. “It was only a matter of time,” she tittered. “Only a matter of time.”

“Go away, you old hag,” Moss heard his voice say.

His guts were laced with loose strings that tightened into knots and he nearly fell right over.

“Oh, but you’re in a bad way,” a voice said but it was not the scarecrow rasp of the old lady but a voice that was young and strong.

He blinked the tears from his eyes and saw a girl, maybe thirteen, standing there watching him with clear, bright eyes. Her hair was brown and her nose was pert, a sprinkling of freckles over her cheeks. She smiled with even white teeth.

“I will help you,” she said.

“Go away,” Moss told her. He didn’t need any damn kids hanging around him and especially not some girl dressed in Halloween garb like the others: a jester in a green-and-yellow striped costume with a fool’s cap of tinkling bells.

“I’m Squinny Ceecaw,” she said and he nearly laughed at the cartoonish sound of it.

“Go away, kid,” he told her again. “Go peddle it somewhere else, Squinny Seesaw.”

“Ceecaw.”

Her eyes flickered darkly. She looked wounded, as if he had called her the vilest of names.

Suddenly, he felt uneasy. It was as if he was being watched, studied, perhaps even manipulated like a puppet. A formless, unknown terror that seemed ancient and instinctual settled into his belly and filled his marrow with ice crystals. Again, his eyesight blurred, pixelated, and his head gonged like a bell, his body twisting in a rictus of pain as if his stomach and vital organs had become coiling, serpentine things winding around each other. Then the pain was gone, but loathsome images still paraded through his brain, a psychophysical delirium in which the horned mother parted infective black mists to spread membranous wings over the cadaver cities of men and peered down from the blazing fission of primal space with crystalline multifaceted eyes.

Then he came out of it and Squinny Ceecaw had him by the hand, towing him away he did not know where. He told her to go away, to get lost, but his voice did not carry. It seemed to sound only in his head. He gripped the silver case as if his fingers were welded to it. He felt weak and stunned.

“It’s too early for Festival yet,” she informed him.

She brought him through an alleyway and into an open courtyard. Then he was on his hands and knees, gulping air and swallowing a dipper of water she handed him from a well. It was cold and clean and revitalizing. But seconds after he swallowed it, he had realized his terrible mistake—he had drank the water, the blood, of this terrible place.

“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 Festival: 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.

No, no, no, that droning, wavering squeal…it could not be a voice. He was coming apart. His mind was failing. None of it was real. He heard maniacal laughter, the sound of sanity purging itself: his own. Running back out in the street, he was absorbed by the bustling crowds that carried horrible effigies of Gothra high above them. Faces were twisted masks. The stars blinked on and off like cheap bulbs in the sky. He could smell rotting hay and blood, manure and black earth. Voices jibbered and screamed and shrilled around him. Now the festival was reaching manic, hysterical heights as what he had been feeling for hours took hold of them, too, carrying them forward like a dark river seeking the sea.

“It is time,” a voice said at his ear. “Time to meet The Preacher.”

It was Squinny Ceecaw, yet it was not her at all. The voice was too mature, all velvet and spun silk, the sort of whispering smoothness one would acquaint with experience and sensuality. Certainly, this wasn’t the kid, not Squinny. But it looked like Squinny and as her hand clasped his own, he was certain that it was. Her nearness wedged a seam of pure terror through him. He wanted to throw her off and run. But he didn’t; he marched, he melded into the procession that carried pumpkins and flickering candles. It was happening, really happening. Festival was about to reach its terrible climax. The very thing he had anticipated and feared, was about to be realized.

Now no one was singing or crying out. They marched in orderly rows. Many carried pumpkins, but many carried other things—briskets of raw beef, pork loins, shanks of lambs, other primal cuts; dead animals such as rabbits and possum and coyote. Two boys led a massive hog on a rope. Some carried bags of what smelled like rotting vegetable matter.

All of it was so strange and alien, yet so uncomfortably familiar.

Moss knew many things at that moment and knew nothing at all. He walked with Squinny, his mind cluttered, his thoughts muddled. The town was a trap. He knew that much. It had been a trap meant to ensnare him from the moment he arrived and he had stepped willingly into it this afternoon. Possum Crawl owned him now. Festival owned him. Squinny owned him. The people that walked with him owned him. He belonged to them and he belonged to this night and the malevolent rituals that were about to take place. But mostly, oh yes, mostly he belonged to Gothra and the rising storm of anti-human evil he/she/it represented. Now he would become meat and now his mind would be laid bare.

They marched out to a secret grotto beyond the limits of Possum Crawl and up a trail into the high country until the face of the mountain was right before them. And even this opened for them. They passed through a gigantic cave-mouth and into the mountain itself.

Moss began to tremble, because he knew, he knew: the mountain was hollow. Hadn’t it been this that he was trying to remember when he’d first drove into town? The mountain is hollow, the mountain is hollow. Yes, it was really just a sheath of rock and within, oh God yes, within…a high, craggy pyramidal structure of pale blue stone. It rose hundreds of feet above him, illuminated by its own pale, eerie lambency. Its surface was not smooth, but corrugated and carven with esoteric and blasphemous symbols, bas-reliefs of ancient words in some indecipherable language. The pyramid itself was old, old, seemingly fossilized by the passage of eons.

Now the procession moved inside and Moss heard what he knew he would hear—the wet, slobbering noises, the rustlings, the busy sounds of multiple legs, the chitterings and squealings, and, yes, rising above it all, that immense omnipotent buzzing, the unearthly droning of the great insect itself.

The pyramid was just as hollow as the mountain, its sloping walls honeycombed with chambers, many of which were sealed with mud caps. The women of Possum Crawl had gathered here. They accepted the gifts the men brought. No longer were they women as such, but hairless, pallid things that cared for the white, squirming grubs of the immense gelatinous insect, the Mother of Many Faces, the all-in-one, the progenitor that all in Possum Crawl worshipped for she brought life, she nurtured it, and filled the earth with crawling things and the skies with her primordial swarm.

Vermicular shapes squirmed at his feet, crawling about on their hands and knees, moving with a disturbing boneless sort of locomotion like human inchworms. He saw contorted faces and glistening eyes like frog spawn staring up at him. They touched him with flaccid, fungous hands.

And now Moss could see her—within the limits of the third dimension—surrounded by a veritable mountain of yeasty gray eggs that glistened wetly from her multiple ovipositors. She was a titanic, bloated white monstrosity, an elemental abomination that sutured time-space with her passing and whose origins were in some deranged cosm where the stars burned black. Her membranous wings spread like kites filling with wind, her thousand legs scraping together, her bulging compound eyes looking down at the offerings laid before her.

Her nest.

Yes, the Earth was her nest.

By then, Moss was on his knees, his sanity gone to a warm mush in his head. He had seen her before and she had erased his memories. Now he understood. He shivered there in her shadow. Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Oh God, he had not stolen Ginny away from them after she was indoctrinated into the fertility cult of the Mother of Many Faces. No, no, she had escaped them and they called out to him, stealing his mind, and he had brought Ginny back to them. Yes, in the back of the car, tied and gagged, he had returned their acolyte to the hollow mountain.

But she was not what the Great Insect wanted.

No, Moss was spared, his memories subverted, his will possessed, so that he might bring that which the Mother Insect demanded, the expiation she hungered for.

And now his shaking hands were opening the silver case, fumbling at the locks, working the catches, and then it was in his hands, the reeking mass of meat in the shape of a shriveled infant. The fruit of his marital congress with Ginny. The offering the Great Insect anticipated from the beginning.

It was accepted and found pleasing by her servitors.

Then Moss waited there, his mind gone, his eyes glazed with terror, his stomach pulsing with revulsion. Squinny stepped before him and said, “Your place has always been here. Your destiny is to be meat because all meat has its purpose and all flesh is to be consumed.”

The Preacher.

He did not fight when the yellow-eyed image of the girl came for him, the avatar of the Mother of Many Faces, when her barbed tongue took his eyes so that he would not look upon the holy rite of birth, the spawning and renewal. He did not even cry out when she jabbed her stinger up between his legs and into his body cavity. He squirmed, he writhed, but no more. Then gray waves of lethargy washed through him and there was only acceptance. He was tucked, not unlovingly, into one of the cell-shaped chambers and sealed in there as food. A flaccid, dreaming, unfeeling mass, he did not even flinch when the eggs began to hatch and the wriggling young of the Great Insect began to feed.