VELVETEEN vs. A Disturbing Number of Crows
Once again, Velveteen woke to find herself staring at the rotting rafters of a decaying house.
There was a bat sleeping there, suspended upside-down like a little velvet sachet.
As she watched, it woke, yawned, stretched out its bony wings, and launched itself into the air, flying silently out the open window.
Velveteen sat up, and looked down at herself, more out of habit than anything else.
Her skin was still a patchwork landscape of brown velvet and patterned swaths of whatever fabric had been handy when she needed to be repaired; looking at the patches carefully, she could see that they corresponded to every serious injury she’d ever sustained in the course of her heroic duties.
The body had remembered, even when there had been no scars, and those old battle wounds had translated themselves onto the thing she was now.
She still wasn’t wearing any clothes. As a living doll, she supposed she didn’t really need them.
That didn’t stop her from feeling naked.
No sooner had the thought formed than the closet door swung open, revealing a lacy, tattered black dress hanging on the inside.
Like her skin, it was patched in places, with bat-patterned orange cotton, green-and-purple muslin, and even a few swaths of brown velvet, rescued from the rag bag that had never really existed after her injuries had seen it trimmed away.
Like Spring, Autumn was spinning a whole past for her, making it like she’d always been here.
“Hailey said I would get to choose for myself what I wanted to be, assuming I decided to stay here,” she said.
Scream Queen wasn’t in the room—not unless the matriarch of Halloween could turn herself invisible, which was a thought Velveteen didn’t exactly feel like dwelling on—but the odds were good that she knew everything that happened in her season.
Persephone and Aurora both had. So Velveteen glared at the ceiling for a moment, hoping it would get her point across.
Then she got off the bed, and walked to the closet, and took the dress.
It fit like it had been made for her, which made sense: it had been made for her, called out of the substance of the season as soon as she realized that she wanted clothes.
It was more childish than anything she would have worn at home, but that made sense too, because it was a dress for the body she currently inhabited, and the body she currently inhabited was human only in the vaguest of senses.
What would have seemed awkward and wrong on her normal figure was…
well, still wrong, but more creepy than awkward.
“I never wanted to be a terrifying murder doll, you know,” she said. The room did nothing to indicate, one way or another, whether it did, in fact, know. Velveteen sighed. “And by the time I get out of here, I’m going to be talking to myself constantly. This just gets better and better.”
With the bat gone, she was alone in the room. Velveteen glared one last time at the mirror on the wall, and turned to head for the door. Time to find Hailey again, and find out what, exactly, her last period of service was going to entail. One way or another, this was coming to an end.
* * *
Since the connection between our world and the Seasonal Lands became clear, steps have been taken to try to match those individuals known to dwell in the individual seasons with the people who they may have been prior to their choosing a life of metaphor and symbol over one lived in the normal manner, one day after another, leading inevitably to death.
In some cases, the origins of these figures are shrouded by both the time since they were first encountered, and by the distinct possibility that they are titles as much as individuals.
Take the man we now know as “Santa Claus.” It was a shock when he first appeared at the 1953 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, descending from the sky in his reindeer-driven sleigh, distributing presents to all the individuals who had come to watch the floats go by.
He was accompanied during that first appearance by a slender, blue-skinned man who we would all come to know as “Jack Frost,” and by a beautiful, icy woman who answered only to the title “Snow Queen.” All three represented figures from folklore and myth, although Santa seemed uncannily similar to the images commissioned by the Coca-Cola company in the 1930s.
While no earlier images exist of his companions, there are sketches and paintings of “Santa Claus” going back centuries.
Comparison of these images seems to suggest the existence of at least three individuals using the name “Santa Claus,” following each other sequentially.
What happened to these earlier Santas? How were their replacements chosen, and how were they groomed for their jobs?
What of Mrs. Claus? If new Santas are chosen following the death or retirement of the old, it would stand to reason that those new holders of the holiday office might well want to bring their own wives, their own families, into the Seasonal Lands.
Or is theirs a marriage of mythology, something which cares nothing for the individuals involved, but only for their place in the story?
The daughter of the current Santa Claus, Jacqueline, is rumored to have been adopted, which would fit well with her role in the holiday, but does not clarify the nature of his wife’s connection to either him or to the season itself.
If there are this many mysteries about Santa Claus, whose own child has been a frequent visitor to our world since she began her association with the heroes code named “Velveteen” and “The Princess,” then it must be acknowledged that the mysteries surrounding the other denizens of the Seasonal Lands are even deeper and more difficult to untangle.
Take, for example, the rumored ruler of Halloween, the never-seen, rarely spoken-of “Scream Queen.”
According to those individuals who have traveled into the holiday and returned with skins and sanity intact, Scream Queen is the one who chooses the treats, decides the tricks, and sets the traps.
It is her word that keeps the terrifying mechanisms of her holiday in motion.
But who is she? Some of the earliest accounts of Halloween as a place, dismissed at the time as flights of fancy and outright lies, mention a woman who stood shielded by the corn and watched over all.
The name given for her, however, is “Halloween Princess,” a role which we now know to be held by Hailey Ween (a girl whose origins are, as of this writing, still unclear).
The physical descriptions for this Halloween Princess do not match the descriptions given of Hailey Ween: Hailey is Caucasian, blonde, sixteen.
The Halloween Princess in the older tales is African-American, black-haired, somewhere in her twenties. Her given name has never been recorded.
It seems reasonable to assume that whoever the Scream Queen is, she is not Hailey Ween, and while she may have been the Halloween Princess once, she has long since moved past that role. What she is now, we have no reasonable way of knowing.
* * *
As before, the stairs creaked but did not give way as Velveteen descended; as before, the banister squished under her fingers, like she was gripping a rotten, slippery rat’s tail rather than a piece of curving wood.
There were fewer cobwebs this time, probably because she had already walked through so many of the damn things that the spiders were working overtime to get them back in place.
She kept her head held high and tried not to focus on the distant feeling that the house was breathing all around her, that if she opened enough doors she would eventually find the one that concealed a broken, beating heart.
“You’re supposed to be mine, you know,” she said, addressing the air.
Halloween was definitely going to be the season of talking to herself.
“That’s why you have a face: so you can be mine.
So it would be awesome if you’d stop working quite so hard to creep me the fuck out, okay? Okay. Glad we had this talk.”
It might have been her imagination, but it felt like the air lightened after that.
She smiled to herself as she finished her descent, and stopped at the bottom, smile fading.
She was feeling triumph because…what, exactly?
Because she’d managed to convince a haunted house to be a little bit less haunted, at least in her direction?
Her powers fit best in Spring. She had been cultivated by Winter.
Autumn had always done its best to push her away in the process of pulling her closer, but at the end of the day, she fit best in the season of dead leaves and jack-o’-lanterns.
Maybe she could have grown up to be a perfect spirit of some other Season, but those were the versions of herself that had never been allowed to exist. She was who she was, and who she was was the sort of girl who was better equipped to yell at haunted houses than she was to hide eggs or fill stockings.
The thought was unsettling enough that she finished her walk to the front door in silence, opening it to reveal the graveyard outside, and Hailey and Scaredy once again having a picnic on a fallen tomb door.
They both raised their heads and looked around at the sound of her footsteps on the porch.
Hailey offered a brief salute with a piece of pumpkin bread.
Scaredy wrinkled his nose into something between a snarl and a sneer, and went back to shoving gummi worms into his mouth.
At least Velveteen thought they were gummi worms. All things considered, she didn’t want to ask. “Do you people not have homes?” she asked instead, crossing her arms and glowering in their general direction. “I’m not running a flophouse here.”