Halloweenland (12 page)

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Grant said. There was a slight edge in his voice, and he felt like reaching for his holstered .38, which, like his spare badge, he had not turned in to Captain Farrow.

“Where is the girl, Father?” he said, slowly getting up. He could feel the tension in the room, even though he knew it emanated from himself.

The priest looked up at him, and there was a tear tracking his cheek from his blind right eye. “What have I done, Detective? What great evil have I helped perpetuate? That cold creature was always about, and the police have already been here about the poor little girl Beatrice who was murdered, and the Lincoln is gone. I’m afraid the diocese will be very upset . . .”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father.”

“I’m afraid the police will be back.” Coughlin put his head in his hands and began to weep.

Grant edged away from the chair, drawing his .38, looking out into the hallway.

“Anna should never have been here.” The priest looked up, and his face was awash in tears. “I’m a priest! A man of God! And that thing was in my care for five years! Oh, I was asleep . . .”

Grant backed into the hallway and quickly mounted
the creaking stairs. There was a landing with two doors, and he opened one, a storage room, and then another, a girl’s bedroom.

He went in. There was a bed, made up with white starched tucked sheets and a light pink summer blanket. A doll that looked untouched and new was propped against the foot of the bed. The walls were bare. There was an oval rag rug on the floor and nothing else. No toys, no keepsakes. The closet was open and empty.

Grant backed out of the room and slowly mounted the steps to the attic. He could hear the priest moaning and sobbing below. There was a stained wooden door with a glass ovoid handle. He turned it with his left hand, feeling the coolness of the glass, and pushed it open, aiming the .38 in his right hand into the room.

Two skylight windows sent sharp shafts of light that fell on the floor like painted distorted yellow rectangles. There were two bodies, half in the light and half in shadow. A man and a woman, older. Sensible shoes. There were no visible wounds, but they were cold as potato salad. There was a note under the woman’s head.

Grant pulled on a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, just so that the local police wouldn’t find his prints on anything later, and picked up the note, angling it into a shaft of overhead sunlight. He read it:

HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE PADRE. LONG TIME NO SEE. HAVE GONE HOME, DON’T FOLLOW. S.

Samhain.

Grant carefully folded the note and put it in his pocket.

Don’t follow?
the note warned.

“My ass,” Grant said, out loud.

The car drove itself, which was good. There was precious little else she could do without Samhain around. Which annoyed her greatly, because she had thought her powers would be greater in this world. She had discovered, at the age of three, that she could kill—on a warm summer afternoon, as she sat in the shade of an elm tree in the tiny, secluded backyard of the rectory, a butterfly had alighted on her bare arm. She was still amazed by the flesh that enclosed her, baby pink and smooth and nearly flawless (there was a tiny mole in the curve of skin between her thumb and left forefinger, which she had not been able to wish away), and only her hair, which was unnaturally white blond, and which the fool humans who had taken care of her had cut in short bangs to minimize its effect, and the deep empty pools of her gray eyes, identified her as anything other than of the human race.

To the butterfly: she was sitting still as stone in a webbed folding chair, feeling the warmth and slight waft of breeze which brought flower and tree odors to her, when the insect, a beautiful monarch of bright orange
and black, had settled on her motionless arm. She looked down at it. It moved its wings up, down, up, down as if completely oblivious of her presence. A cloud blotted the sun, and the neatly mowed square of backyard was plunged into sudden shadow. She looked up; through the sway of elm leaves she saw a single fat white cloud moving leisurely from west to east; already the bright fringes of the sun was showing at its trailing edges. The cloud looked vaguely like a rabbit, crouched and ready to eat.

She looked back down at her arm. The butterfly had ceased the beating of its wings and looked asleep. Could a butterfly be content? This one appeared so.

The sun burst out of its cloud cover and a shaft of light fell on the butterfly, making it radiant. As if startled from slumber it took flight, turning for a moment toward the girl, who stared at it while reaching out a tentative finger.

The butterfly brushed the finger with one wing, and fell to the ground motionless.

The girl looked at it for a moment and then closed her eyes and let the afternoon wash over her.

She met the other little girl quite by accident. Sometimes she got in the black Lincoln and rode, just to get out of the rectory and away from Mr. and Mrs. Finch, the minder humans, and sometimes just to vex Samhain. She liked to do that. Though lately he seemed more distant, less his old self, less prone to jest. Sometimes she wondered about that.

The car was spacious in the back, all windows clouded by tinted glass, and it went where she willed it to. She had taken jaunts into Boston, to see what a city was like up close; but it was noisy and crowded and filled with too much antlike activity and mindless motion. And, they had gotten lost in the maze of one-way streets, until
Anna had willed,
Just go home
. That had been close to exhausting, and she hadn’t tried it again—though it did provoke an amusing tirade of invectives from Samhain, along the lines of “What if—”

“But it didn’t happen, Samhain. We didn’t get stranded, or run into a parked car, or stopped by a policeman, or set upon by hooligans.”

“But what if—!” Samhain had persisted, and then Anna had laughed in his face and told him to stop.

Which made her almost sorry for him, because he had gone into one of his funks, then, all the spunk gone from him.

So the car trips had become more localized—to a shopping mall parking lot, to watch the humans frantically purchase; to the county jail, to watch the faces going in and coming out, and playing a guessing game of who was judge, who was lawyer, who was prisoner; to the park, to watch the humans at play.

Which was where, on a warm autumn day, she saw the other little girl.

The town park was a huge flat square plot of land, with a baseball diamond at one end, a soccer field at the other, basketball courts in the middle to one side, and the other left to no sport save leisure. This was the area closest to the parking lot. There were picnic benches, and metal barbecue grills permanently mounted next to them and an abundance of trees that reminded Anna of the rectory backyard. She was tempted to leave the Lincoln, but decided to heed Samhain’s warnings about interacting with humans—until she saw something that almost startled her. A little girl, nearly her mirror image, was sitting under an oak tree alone, acting in the most curious way. She sat quietly for a few moments, then suddenly pushed herself off the ground and ran this way and that, then threw
herself on the ground. Then she slowly rose and quietly returned to her original spot.

This was too much of a temptation, and Anna ordered the car, “Open the back door,” and she got out.

She approached the other girl cautiously, and was also aware of everything else that went on around her. If the girl had a parent, it was nowhere near. There were no other children close by—the closest was a group playing basketball in the caged court forty yards away.

As Anna approached she saw that the girl wasn’t as much like her as she had originally thought—she was taller, and probably older, and her hair was ash blond and not nearly white like Anna’s. Still they were dressed similarly, in blue dresses and white blouses, though the other girl’s blouse had a red bow tied neatly at her neck.

Anna stopped short of the tree—the girl had risen abruptly and was running to the far edge of the shaded area. She bent down, looking back and forth, and then dived onto the ground.

“What are you doing?” Anna asked.

Startled, the girl got up, dusted a knee with her left hand and said, “Oh!”

“What’s the matter?” Anna asked dispassionately.

“I thought I was alone!” It didn’t sound like a lie—the girl’s face showed no fear or revulsion or any other emotion that would have sent Anna scurrying back to the Lincoln.

Silence stretched between them, and then the other girl held up her cupped right hand. She opened the palm to reveal what was hidden there.

“I’m playing acorn,” she announced.

“What’s that? Aren’t acorns just seeds?”

The girl walked past Anna and sat down with her back against the bole of the oak tree. Now Anna saw that
there was a pile of acorns next to her on the ground. She added the new one to the pile.

“Acorns is a game. You sit quietly, and concentrate very hard, and when you hear the tree drop an acorn you get up and run very fast and retrieve it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a
game
!” the other girl replied in explanation.

The other girl closed her eyes and waited—and then Anna suddenly heard a tiny
thump
off to the right. In an instant the girl was on her feet and running to the spot. She bent down and retrieved the acorn, and returned, adding it to the growing pile.

She looked at Anna. “It’s you against the tree, you see,” she said. “That’s the game.” The end of her sentence was punctuated by another faint
thump
, and again the girl ran to the spot and retrieved it.

While she was returning there was another
thump
very close by, and Anna looked down to see a fresh acorn, green and with a light brown crinkly cap, lying at her feet.

She bent quickly down and scooped it up, and looked up to see the other girl standing close by, with an excited look on her face.

“Now you’re playing, too!”

Anna stared at the acorn in her hand, and then followed the other girl back to the bole of the tree.

“Make your own pile! I’ll start you with half of mine!” She cut her acorn pile in half with her palm, and moved it off to one side. “That’ll be yours! Whoever has the most at the end wins!”

Anna looked once more at the acorn in her hand, then dropped it onto the new pile.

There was a
thump!
followed by another
thump!
and
before she knew it Anna was running this way and that, and adding to her pile.

The afternoon grew late, and suddenly the other girl stood and said, “I have to go.”

She began to walk away, and Anna said, looking at the two huge piles of acorns, “We haven’t seen who won.”

“Who cares! You can have them all—you won!” She laughed, and turned to keep walking. “My name’s Beatrice, I’ll be here tomorrow afternoon if you want to play again!”

And then she was gone, running, across the parking lot, out of the park and across the street into the human neighborhood beyond.

Anna stood for a long time, first looking in the direction Beatrice had gone, the maze of two-family houses almost on top of one another, of red and white with dark roofs, the jumble of telephone and electrical wires hither and yon making them look like they were caught in a web. The sun was dropping to the west, which meant it was at least five o’clock, probably later. Samhain would be beside himself.

Then Anna stared for a few long moments at the two piles of acorns. She noted that her own pile was wider and higher than Beatrice’s.

With only a moment’s hesitation she kicked the two piles, scattering the oak seeds, and walked to the black Lincoln.

She was back the next day, but Beatrice was nowhere to be found. She waited for an hour at the oak tree alone. An anger swelled in her, and she wanted to rip the oak tree from the ground by its roots and destroy it and its seeds. She waited another twenty minutes and then went home.

“What is it that makes these humans what they are?”
she asked Samhain that night. She was sitting in a comfortable chair in the blind priest’s office—the most comfortable chair in the rectory.

“Why do you ask?” Samhain replied slowly; there was caution in his voice.

“Answer me, Samhain,” she said, hating her little girl voice, even when she modulated it to its deepest. It was another of the prices she paid to be human in this world.

“I have been telling you for a long time that they are interesting creatures,” Samhain began.

“They are creatures, first and foremost,” Anna interrupted. “No better than any other life on this miserable planet. Beast, bug,” she hesitated before adding, “butterfly.”

“They are creatures, true,” Samhain said. “But I’ve developed a certain interest in them, as you know. They show sparks of nobility, and selflessness, and kindness, that are totally alien to their base nature.”

“I don’t understand them,” Anna said simply.

“Do you have to?”

“No.”

Anna rose abruptly from the chair and marched to the hallway and up the stairs, saying nothing more. Samhain, floating like a black wraith, the bottom of his cape moving in the breezeless room, watched after, and heard the door slam to her room.