The Hatchling
“The parade easily pays three months of my overhead,” said Albin Bogan, owner and proprietor of The Gas Giant, a sprawling ten-pump facility just inside the county line that had become a tourist trap in itself, offering costumes, handmade Halloween decorations, baked goods and, for photo ops, two seven-foot resin statues: Universal’s Frankenstein Monster and a generic and rather chintzy gorilla for which Albin had nonetheless had a “King Kong” sign professionally carved.
Out-of-towners heading to the parade either knew to stop there or were delighted to find the one stop pre-parade pit stop. It made a killing.
“No parade, I might have to shut down for who knows how long.”
The other business owners who crowded the reception area lacked Bogan’s influence individually, but more than equaled it as a group—and that group was growing by the day.
“Either way, we need to know now,” called Patty Chenoweth of Main Street’s Patty Cakes.
“I appreciate your position, folks. We’re all feeling the continuing strain from last year’s unforeseeable tragedy.” Though the crowd, like villagers gathering to hunt down a wayward monster, had been put together on the fly, Mayor Stuyvesant’s response was already well-rehearsed. “It’s important to use this as an opportunity to strengthen our self-reliance, our sense of community and our commitment to patriotic values. American jobs for American workers has long been my—”
“Can we not go there right now?” Albin Bogan closed his eyes and held up both hands in a defensive posture. “Main thing we wanna know is—is the parade a go, or not?”
“It’s too late in the game for waffling, Mayor,” said Patty Chenoweth.
Mayor Stuyvesant’s nervous glance at Hollis had the assistant stepping in front of her like a bodyguard. “Mayor Stuyvesant is stretched to the limit right now trying to salvage the parade. We appreciate everyone coming out but please call and make an appointment if we haven’t addressed your specific concerns.”
There was more grumbling, even shouting, but the townies shuffled out and dispersed within ten minutes—except for one man.
Guillermo Trujillo, whose landscaping operation serviced many of the frustrated business people now making their way back to their homes and shops, stood outside the reception door, peering in from the side.
Stuyvesant had already retreated to her office, but Hollis saw the greensman and his earnest face and waved him in.
* * * *
Matilda knew her strength, fueled by vengeance, would be a fast and hot fire, and there was still so much work to do. She thanked Pan that it was close to Samhain, the peak of a pagan’s power. Her confidence and commitment as a black witch were at peak, free of the regretful misgivings she had borne for decades.
The question of whether this magic—technically baneful—was also beneficent could be argued by her estranged colleagues. As far as she was concerned, ridding the world of Nico’s gang would be good for all mankind, even if it was a mere byproduct of her burning vengeance.
As for the ceremony, without her grimoire she would have to fill in some gaps, as with the revivification spell. But that had worked well enough. She had some of the goats’ hair scrounged from her sweater and a white gold toe-ring, but these felt like paltry offerings. She would make up the difference with the pure passion of rage.
She stumbled to the massive prize pumpkin she had been growing for Winchell and patted it. Its purpose would have to change.
Unaware of the time—the umber cloud cover gave little clue—Matilda gathered sticks, dried hay and hickory leaves. She took from the burlap bag a small copper cauldron meant as a decoration but perfectly functional in a pinch, and hung it over the kindling.
Allowing herself to feel enough sadness and anger for the loss of her beloved little horned kids to renew her fury, Matilda lit the fire, and began the ritual. She mumbled ancient words she had never spoken before; hoping intention and blood would make up for clumsy enunciation.
Smoke rose from bold flames that stabbed at the air. Matilda cast in the offerings.
Blending with the firelight, the setting sun cast the fields and forest—and Matilda’s own flesh—in an eldritch hue somehow both gray and luminous.
She created a triangle of sigils in the dirt, then carved these into the pumpkin rind with her athame.
She swiped her hands through the sticky wet patches of her wounds, snarling at the pain, and patted bloody palm-prints on the massive fruit, willing her vengeance into it as she called to The Horned One.
Matilda praised and seduced The Trickster with her words, then begged his consideration. Herb-tinctured sweat stung her wounds, as she spun around and around, whispering all the while.
“Praise ye, beast and god
Blessings and beauty in thy path
Spend thy kindness upon me
Take my blood as wine
Deliver me an agent
A vessel for my wrath.”
The candles grew brighter.
She raised her hands as high as pain would allow, as high as hate could force them.
Decades of discipline held drumskin-tight. The chant, the willed vision, the intention rose. When the air was dense with a malignant ether, Matilda drew the athame from her sweater pocket, and released her tears.
She gave voice to the heartache of her loss, the shame of her humiliation. She continued to chant, to desire, to know the bloody future without doubt.
Chanting louder and faster, foregoing notions of breathing and comfort, Matilda forced herself to envision what the Fireheads had done to Amos and Argyle, what she knew they had done to others. She spoke aloud these crimes with fury and outrage. She growled and screamed and spun counter clockwise until she felt disembodied.
She fell to the ground and rolled, still to the left. She abandoned the chant for stream-of-consciousness commanding wails. “O Pan! See my hatred! Let it be a seed and grow! Bring me an avenging demon! An unholy destroyer! Great God of Tricks and Terror, please fill this gourd with your deviance, and my hatred! Let us birth the purest of punishers! The most unforgiving of angels!”
Did the ground rumble? Or was it the sky?
“Choke closed the conduits of goodness! Of forgiveness! Of redemption!”
She willed herself to a stand, and so mote it be. She coiled her body to draw venom from the earth into her feet, through her guts, and to project it through her fingertips into the great gourd.
Black lightning sizzled, darkening the twilight to full midnight, tracing the pattern she had carved, entering the pumpkin.
“Take whatever piece of me ye wish! Tear it away to create destruction and destroy creation! Make them pay! Make the Fireheads suffer, I beg of ye!” Matilda ran at the pumpkin and smashed her body into it, snarling as she bit the rind, rubbing her face along its edges, raping it with pure intention. “I command thee!”
Spent of all her fires of rage and visions of violence, she fell toward oblivion for a third time that day, as her own bitter sobs came to her ears with the vibration of a distant bell’s tolling.
Then the pumpkin rumbled, startling her. She scooted back.
The spell fire flared high, billowing like a miniature hydrogen bomb.
The pumpkin rocked and pulsed in time with Matilda’s unsteady breath. She wondered if what hatched from the fleshy egg would even be compatible with her worldly senses.
A crack.
An inch-wide split appeared in the rind, starting at its sapling-thick stem, plunging to its base.
Brown-orange fluid streamed out, carrying pumpkin seeds in streams of placental goo.
Matilda stood up on her quaking legs and stepped back, terrible expectancy blossoming in her breast. Yet she still mumble-chanted her will toward the thing, conscious enough to target it with her exhilarated fear and fury. Her hand went numb from her death-grip on the athame.
The split widened another few inches, onto utter blackness. The rind shifted and pulsed like maggot-infested corpse flesh.
Something like a hoarse whisper fluttered to Matilda’s ears, made them tingle and burn.
More seeds flowed out from the bottom like chunky lava.
Trembling pale fingers emerged to grasp the edge of the broken rind.
Matilda took two steps to help the hatchling and stopped. This wave of energy was more unnerving than even Nico’s.
It was all she could do, even exhausted as she was, to keep from breaking into a run, to gain as much distance between herself and—
The other hand appeared on the left side. Blue veins pulsed over spider-leg knuckles, the bones beneath stretching the ghastly skin.
A high-pitched straining sound emerged, and the pumpkin’s child peeked an eye through the abyss.
Something familiar.
With another straining effort, the rind cracked and broke with the robust sound of a toppling oak. The pumpkin’s huge halves fell to the sides.
A tall, gaunt figure—human, technically—stood naked and glistening in the firelight. He regarded Matilda with an expression of singular joy.
More than ever, Matilda wanted to run. Instead she fell to her knees, beholding the Christ of Killers in worshipful despair.
“Happy Halloween!” croaked the reborn Trick or Treat Terror, Everett Geelens, his gaze brightening as it fell upon the gleaming athame in Matilda’s trembling hand.
* * * *
“What do we do if they start slugging?” Yoshida asked Hudson, as Dennis pulled the hearse up outside the Lott house, just behind Hud’s battle-scarred Blazer. Pedro walked to meet him there in the street.
“Call the National Guard,” Hudson answered, doffing his jacket in preparation of trying to get between two angrier-than-usual punk rockers.
Hopping out of the passenger side, Stuart threw a wary nod at Pedro, and visibly relaxed when it was returned.
Pedro stepped well within Dennis’s personal space. Dennis took off his sunglasses and met his bandmate’s gaze.
“You sober or what, bro?” asked Pedro.
“Right now,” Dennis answered. “Yeah.”
“What now?”
“Try to make things right.”
“What things d’ya mean, Dennis?”
“Everything I broke.” Dennis reached into his jacket pocket for a packet of cigarettes. “All right?”
“You, man,” Pedro said, as he grasped the cig pack. “You gotta fix you. Right?”
Dennis glared at the cigs they both held in trembling grips.
Yoshida almost took a step toward them, until Hudson mumbled, “Not yet.”
Dennis relinquished the smokes to Pedro, who crushed them.
“I guess we’re gonna rumble,” Dennis said. “With some hairy-ass dirtbags, that is. And get our drummer back.”
Pedro smiled. “Damn right.”
Dennis did the same, and embraced his friend like they had just finished a brutal set in front of a rowdy sold-out crowd.
“All right,” Hudson said, visibly relaxing. “Pillow talk later. Let’s all go in and figure this thing out.”