VELVETEEN vs. The Melancholy of Autumn
Velveteen opened her eyes to find herself staring up into the rafters of a house that should probably have been condemned five minutes after it was built, just to prevent this inevitable future.
The wood was dark with water damage and mold, rotted cleanly through in spots.
Thick, filthy cobwebs covered the entire edifice.
Velveteen was more than reasonably sure that they were holding the whole place up.
Clean the house, watch it fall down around your ears.
This was the Autumn country. There was no place else that it could be.
The slant of the roof and the single small, round window, like a ship’s porthole, told her that she was probably in the attic of this particular haunted house, which made sense; attics were where the broken toys went.
She had visited Autumn before, usually in the custody of Halloween, which was the season’s dominant holiday. She knew their sense of humor.
Breathing slowly and evenly, so as to keep herself from freaking out, Velveteen lifted her hand off the bed and raised it to the level of her eyes.
As she had expected, she no longer had skin in the human sense; instead, she had threadbare brown velvet, patched with swaths of brighter fabric.
One of her fingers was gone. Not missing: gone, leaving her with a four-fingered hand that would have been easier for a seamstress to stitch together. Her arm was more of the same.
Despite the apparent lack of bones, she didn’t feel floppy or formless as she sat up and examined herself further.
Her tail was attached to her ass, naturally, a tuft of cotton fluff that she couldn’t see, but presumed would be distressingly white.
Speaking of her ass, it, like the rest of her, was sewn out of the same material as her hand, and arm, and costume.
She was, for all intents and purposes, anatomically incorrect.
“Even fucking Santa Claus left me with a goddamn vagina, you autumnal pervs,” she muttered, and stood, casting around until she found a cloth-shrouded shape that could be taken for a full-length mirror, if she cocked her head and squinted.
Walking was more difficult than it normally was, but easier than it should have been, considering that she was now an ungodly combination of a scarecrow and a life-sized creepy doll.
After being made of ice and rooted to the earth, it was getting easier to roll with the punches.
The mirror showed her what she was expecting to see: her own face, somehow rendered perfectly in cloth and canvas, crowned with a pair of brown velvet ears lined in pink satin.
They had wire inside to keep them upright.
When she bent them, it didn’t hurt. When she pulled them, it did.
There were rules to being a living doll, apparently, and she was going to need to learn them as she went.
Halloween would never be kind enough to supply her with an instruction manual.
Velveteen sighed, lowering her hands. “Fucked-up times way too many to count,” she said bleakly, looking at her reflection. Last season. Last temptation. She could do this. She had to do this.
If she could survive one more season, she could go home.
* * *
The exact relationship between the Seasonal Lands and what they call the “Calendar Country” is a matter of some debate in academic circles, where it is believed that a better understanding of the Seasonal Lands will lead to a better understanding of the world in which we live.
If the Seasonal Lands were created by the needs of the Calendar Country, what created the Calendar Country?
Are the worlds symbiotic, or are the Seasonal Lands magical parasites, drawing sustenance from the flesh of a universe they have no business intruding upon?
The conversation has been going for years, but became both louder and more vicious after the fall of The Super Patriots, Inc.
, which had previously controlled much of the dialog surrounding the origins and impacts of superhuman abilities.
If the Seasonal Lands are symbiotic, runs one argument, then it stands to reason that it is within the public interest to keep them healthy and well-supplied with the heroes they require to remain stable.
The records of Velveteen’s childhood encounters with the residents of Halloween, combined with the documented powers and careers of Trick and Treat, both known to have originated in the Autumn, makes a compelling argument for this position.
Without a strong connection between the Seasonal Lands and the Calendar Country, it seems likely that both worlds would suffer.
According to the other school of thought, which holds that the Seasonal Lands are parasitic, and do not give anything the Calendar Country cannot survive without, the suffering that would follow a severing of that bond would actually be the process of our reality healing, recovering a measure of its equilibrium and beginning to return to normal.
Yes, it would hurt, and yes, people would probably pay the price for cutting that tether, but in the end, our world would be healthier for it.
All that they need is someone willing to wield the knife.
Thus far, neither school of thought has been in a position to put their theories to the test, something which may well have prevented their academic disagreements from escalating to outright warfare.
“When you have someone using a mechanical breathing device, and someone else swearing that it’s killing the patient, what do you do?
” asked one scholar, who elected not to be named.
“You can leave them connected, and maybe it’s making them sick and maybe it’s not, but at least you know they’re going to live.
Or you can unplug the whole thing, and pray that the person who says they’ll be better off is right.
If they’re not, and the patient dies, it’s not like you can bring them back to life by plugging them back in. ”
More interesting is the theory that the Seasonal Lands, by tying mankind to a world where myth and reality are indistinguishable, are fully responsible for the existence of magical heroes, even those whose powers do not manifest in any clearly time-related way.
The Princess, Dame Fortuna, and Jolly Roger are all unique in their manifestations, but they are all, in some way, metaphor made flesh.
Without the Seasonal Lands to continually remind mankind that metaphor is sometimes another way of saying “the thing that’s about to kick your teeth in,” would these heroes be able to exist at all?
Would breaking the tether strip them of their powers?
Would it strip all superhumans of their powers?
Perhaps these abilities are a byproduct of the connection between our universe and these smaller ones, whether they be symbiotic or parasitic.
And more, would the loss of all superhuman abilities truly be as bad a thing as it might initially appear? By reducing the human population to a single power level—none to speak of—we might finally create a level playing field, and stop the fighting once and for all.
Until the connection between the Seasonal Lands and the Calendar Country is broken, there is no way to say for sure. Still, people wonder; the discussion continues.
* * *
The room where Velveteen had awakened was empty of anything that could have better prepared her for whatever was going to come next.
The closet door creaked ominously, but there were no weapons inside.
There were claw marks in the wood under the bed.
No monster, though. Finally, Velveteen was forced to admit that she needed to leave the room if she wanted to find out what was going on.
“Look at it this way,” she muttered to herself, turning toward the door.
“This is Halloween. Halloween has always been the land of assholes. It’s not like they can break your heart the way Christmas did.
” Somehow, when she said it like that, it didn’t feel as encouraging as she had hoped.
Halloween couldn’t break her heart, but that didn’t mean it was going to be kind to her.
None of the seasons had been. Why should this one start?
The door moaned like a thing possessed when she opened it, revealing a second-floor hallway cordoned off from the empty air by a rotten-looking banister.
A flight of stairs descended from the hall’s far end, the distance between her and them choked with cobwebs.
Velveteen wrinkled her nose and started walking.
By the time she reached the stairs, the fabric of her skin was gray with grime and she was beginning to consider the virtues of taking a ride in the nearest washing machine.
At least her feet hadn’t punched through the floor at any of the many rotten spots.
She placed her hand on the banister, only grimacing a little at the feeling of the wood squishing under her fingers, and descended into the foyer.
There was no one there. That wasn’t really a surprise.
The furniture seemed to be aesthetically inspired by a combination of the Addams Family and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
That wasn’t a surprise either. Some of the dark patches on the floor looked like they could have started out in somebody’s veins.
Velveteen wrinkled her nose and stepped around them, trying to get a feeling for the layout of the house.
It was dark and oppressive. It didn’t feel like the sort of place where anybody actually lived.
Probably because nobody did. Normally when she awoke in one of the many haunted houses that studded the Halloween portion of Autumn, either Hailey Ween—the current spirit of Halloween—or her sidekick, Scaredy Cat—the prior, somewhat more dangerous spirit of Halloween—would be waiting to tell her why she had been kidnapped this time. That hadn’t happened. Why?
Because she hadn’t been kidnapped. She had come voluntarily. This was a test.