VELVETEEN vs. The Melancholy of Autumn #3
“You don’t have many friends, do you?” asked Velveteen.
Hailey chuckled grimly. She ran her hand across the skin of her stomach and the tear disappeared, sealed up by the touch of her fingers.
“Of all the seasons, Autumn is the one that tells the fewest lies about ‘friendship,’” she said.
“Winter says ‘oh, things will get better, come warm yourself by our fire,’ and ignores all the children freezing to death in the snow. Spring says ‘we’re the kind one,’ and pretends nature isn’t red in tooth and claw.
Summer says ‘frolic in our fields,’ and turns your eyes away from the men who break their backs to bring about the harvest. Autumn says ‘try and survive me.’ At least we don’t dress ourselves up for your funeral. ”
“And again, not many friends,” said Velveteen.
“Look. It sucks that your guts are made of dried leaves and whatever. It sucks and it’s creepy and it’s not my fault.
You keep saying that the seasons transform everyone, but I visited Winter dozens of time before they decided to turn me into Frosty the Snowman.
You people turned me into a rag doll the first time I came here. ”
“Because unlike your precious Winter, we were never interested in winning you by lying to you,” said Hailey.
“You didn’t transform because you were a tourist. You weren’t property.
If you ever said ‘you know what, this is where I live now, here, forever,’ you would have changed in an instant, and you would have had no warning or way to influence what you became.
Here, we may have forced you into a starting position, but Halloween is all about the masks we wear.
We don’t care what you become, as long as you’re willing to take up the role you were meant for. ”
Velveteen was silent for a long moment, taking this in. Part of her wanted to call Hailey a liar, and maybe demonstrate why giving an animus a house with a face that could be used to hit things was a bad idea. The rest of her, though…
The rest of her was thinking about how many times she’d gone to Winter without being introduced to Aurora, or to Lucy, or to the dark things that lurked in the snow-swept woods.
They had shown her the theme park version of the holiday, and she had been willing to accept it, because she had loved them, and she had wanted them to be telling her the truth.
She had wanted someplace where she could belong, even if that place was straight out of a children’s storybook.
They had lied to her, sure. And she had let them.
“Be a haunted doll, ready to show children the way out of the darkness, if they’re good, or deeper down, if they’re bad.
” Hailey’s tone turned cajoling, trying to lure Velveteen down her own kind of rabbit hole.
“Be a scarecrow, with birds on your shoulders and husks in your hands. You could even take my place, be a pretty, smiling teen who knows all the best places to go for candy, as long as no one minds that you won’t have a heartbeat anymore.
You could choose, Vel. That’s what we’re offering you.
That’s the thing no one else would let you have. ”
“Persephone said that I was the last animus in the world.” Velveteen looked at Hailey, trying not to show how much the other woman’s words had shaken her.
“She said if I chose Spring, there wouldn’t be any more animus for a long, long time.
Forever, maybe. Because absence is a kind of balance. Is that what happens if I stay here?”
“Fuck if I know,” said Hailey. “That’s not my department.
I’ll take you to see Scream Queen, if you think you’re ready to have a conversation with someone who won’t put up with you insulting them constantly.
See? We’re the buffer. We’re here for your protection.
” Her smile was quick and almost shy, affording a glimpse of the teenage girl she’d been, once, before she’d traded her mortal life for a Halloween night that would never end.
“Without us, you’d already be a sweet treat in somebody else’s pillowcase. ”
“You know, this is the third season in a row where a woman has been in charge.”
Hailey shrugged. “That’s because here, they can be.
The Calendar Country has been run by men for a long, long time.
Why would any woman with superpowers and ambitions to match ever choose to stay there, when here, she can write her own ticket?
If I’d been a boy, I might have decided not to go with Halloween.
I would have had options. But that was a hundred years ago, and things were different then. ”
“I guess so,” said Velveteen. She looked down at her patchwork hands, and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this over with. Take me to your leader.”
Scaredy and Hailey both smiled, and both their smiles contained too many teeth. “Oh, goodie,” said Hailey. “I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
They walked through an endless autumnal forest, leaves crunching underfoot and occasionally drifting down from the branches above them, even though those branches seemed, to the casual eye, to be completely skeletal.
Strings of carved turnips and tiny jack-o’-lanterns were twined throughout the wood, each containing a tiny candle.
Their light was small individually, but was collectively enough to brighten the night, turning into something akin to a dusky, twilit day.
“Scream Queen was Halloween Princess for about three hundred years before I came along and took over the job,” said Hailey, stepping around a muddy hole that bubbled and rippled with unnatural life.
“She was more than ready to pass the pointy hat. It was a good role for her when she was younger, but as she aged, she wanted something with a little more gravitas.”
“Wait,” said Velveteen, glancing over her shoulder at Scaredy. He was swatting at the falling leaves, more feline than boy, and more monster than either. “I thought Scaredy was the guardian here before you came.”
“He was,” said Hailey. “Back then, the Halloween Princess was the big candy apple, and Scaredy Cat was the guardian. Things had been shifting away from him for a while, and he’d been losing power.
That was how Scream Queen knew that things were about to change.
She needed to take on more darkness, to keep things balanced, and she needed to pass her name to someone who had a little bit more light. ”
The thought of Hailey as someone with “a little bit more light” was unsettling enough that Velveteen walked in silence for several minutes, thinking about it. It didn’t get less disturbing. “Where do Trick and Treat fit into all this? Where are they?”
“Around.” Hailey flapped her hand vaguely, indicating the forest to the left.
“There’s a whole Halloween city here, did you know?
How could you, we’ve never taken you there.
Anyway, it’s a nice little suburb full of nice suburban monsters, and it’s where most of the people who stumble into Autumn these days wind up.
Trick and Treat have a lot of good press from their time gallivanting around in your world, and that daughter of theirs, yeesh.
She’s like the poster child for why raising your kids with no sense of their heritage can backfire.
They’re living out there until Mischief can be properly socialized into the holiday, and while they’re at it, they’re serving as sort of PR for the people who pass through.
‘Look, Halloween cares so much about your safety that we have real superheroes patrolling our streets,’ that sort of thing.
Besides, the season developed a couple of thematic supervillains after the jerks went off and got themselves identified as heroic.
They need to mop up their own short-sighted mess. ”
“How many people do you have just stumbling in?”
Hailey shrugged. “More than Spring or Summer, not as many as Winter. Halloween and Christmas are the big draws—naturally—and have their own dangers.”
“People who wind up in Winter when Santa’s not prepared for them are likely to freeze to death.” If they were lucky. There were wolves, and worse, out there in those endless evergreen forests.
“And people who wind up here when no one’s prepared could find themselves at the mercy of an awful lot of monsters.
” Hailey glanced at Scaredy. “Some of them are supposedly the good guys. So we set up buffer zones to try to catch the ones who shouldn’t be there.
We give them a good, enjoyable scare and we send them home with a story to tell.
It’s better than the alternative, where they wouldn’t be making it home at all. ”
“That’s a lot more compassionate than I expected from Halloween.”
Hailey shrugged. “Halloween has always been compassionate. You just haven’t been in a position to see it.”
“And you kept lying to me.”
“We did,” said Hailey unrepentantly. “We’ll do it again. But I’m not lying to you right now. Come on.” She stepped off the path and into the trees with Scaredy at her heels, leaving Velveteen no choice but to follow or be left behind in the dark Halloween wood.
“Fuck everything,” she said philosophically, and followed.
There was no path through the trees that she could see: she had to follow the trail of crushed leaves and broken branches, hoping that she was tailing Hailey and Scaredy, and not, say, the local equivalent of the grizzly bear, which would probably have chainsaws for paws or something equally unnecessary.
If there was one thing she had learnt from her time in the Seasonal Lands so far, it was that any time something seemed like it was just too damn much, someone in charge was going to think it was a great idea. The best idea. Let’s do that.
“This is Halloween,” she muttered. “They’re probably a-okay with murdering people, as long as you throw some candy around when you’re done. I bet I can find some candy. I’m good at finding candy.”