VELVETEEN vs. Trick and Treat #3
Hailey took a huge and greedy handful before elbowing the motionless Vel in the side.
“You have to take at least a piece,” she said.
“If you don’t, you’re shaming the hospitality of the household, and that can open them up to all kinds of nastiness later on.
There are rules. Even here, there are rules. ”
Vel reached out and cautiously took a single piece of candy. The wrapper crinkled under her fingers like dead leaves. She slipped the candy into her pocket.
“This isn’t a social visit,” said Hailey, as Trick lowered the bowl. “Your husband home?”
“He’s with Mischief, trying to calm her down,” said Trick. “She’s terrified you’re here because it’s time for one of us to go.”
Hailey sighed. “I told you we’re not going to start trying to replace you until she’s come of age. You have years yet. If she’d grown up here, she’d know that I don’t lie about things like that.”
“I know,” said Trick, stepping to the side to let them into the house. “But she didn’t grow up here, and we have to live with that. Enter as you will, there is no danger here.”
“There is now,” said Hailey, and stepped inside.
Trick waited for Vel to enter before shutting the door and putting her bowl of candy on a nearby table. Then she turned, looking at the velvet-clad superheroine frankly. Finally, she beamed, offering her hands.
“Velveteen,” she said, and there was a warmth in her voice that Vel had never heard there before.
“It’s so good to see you. Oh, don’t look so surprised.
I know we were never friends, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t followed your career with interest. You had to be something special, if you were being courted by three out of the four Seasons. ”
“This is her last night,” said Hailey. “She chooses a holiday home by midnight, or she’s back to the Calendar Country, and she may never darken our door again.”
“So soon?” Trick’s eyes widened. She gave Velveteen another look before smiling, this time sympathetically. “You must be awfully warm in all those rags. Would you like a place to change?”
“As long as all I’m changing is my clothes, please,” said Velveteen.
“The bathroom’s right through there,” said Trick, indicating the hall. Velveteen—Vel, she was still undecided; she could still be Vel—nodded understanding and appreciation before heading quickly out of the living room, leaving Hailey and Trick behind.
The bathroom was surprisingly ordinary. The fixtures were shaped like bones, and the wallpaper was a cheery mix of candy corn and skulls, but the light was bright, and there were no cobwebs.
Vel smirked to herself as she removed her frilly doll dress and began unzipping the sack that had been her Halloween skin.
Trick and Treat might be home for good. That didn’t change the years they’d spent in the Calendar Country, or the impact those years had had on them.
Then the false skin dropped away, and Vel stopped thinking about wallpaper or regional traditions. All she could do was stare at her reflection, and blink back the tears that were threatening to overwhelm her.
She was still wearing her costume. Even after everything she’d been through, everything she’d become, once it was stripped away, she was still wearing her costume.
The burgundy velvet was torn in places, tattered, bloodstained, bleached by time and sun.
Not all the blood was hers. The bandages that had been intended to keep her from bleeding to death were gone, and when she poked her fingers through the hole in the side of her leotard, she found smooth, fully healed skin.
There didn’t even seem to be any scarring.
She choked back something that was neither sob nor laughter.
How about that for a medical plan: be snow, be flowers, be a rag doll, and you, too, can survive a life-threatening injury without any unsightly reminders.
“Vel?” Hailey’s voice was accompanied by a knock at the bathroom door.
Vel jumped, whipping around to face the noise.
“Hey, I know you’re probably all excited by having, like, internal organs and a vagina and stuff again, but we don’t have much time.
Come out as soon as you can, okay? We need to get this done. ”
Vel took one last look at herself in the mirror, took a steadying breath, and gathered her discarded Halloween husk in her arms before opening the bathroom door.
Hailey was gone. Vel walked down the hallway to the living room where Hailey was waiting, seated on the couch between an uncomfortable-looking Trick and Treat.
The Halloween Princess smiled wistfully at the sight of her.
“Look at you,” she said. “All bright and battered and half-starved. We’ve ridden you hard, haven’t we?
But don’t worry. This is the last sales pitch, and then the last trial, and then, boom.
” She hooked a finger in her mouth and pulled it out again, making a popping sound.
“It’s off to the Hall of Mirrors to tell the big guns what you’ve decided.
Whether you’re going to stay with us, or leave forever. ”
“What do you think?” asked Vel.
“Me? I think you should listen to these two.” Hailey indicated Trick and Treat with a sweep of her hand. “They’re our final testimonial.”
“You’re the last animus in the world,” said Treat. His voice was low and earnest. “That’s never going to be easy. After what Supermodel did…there are always going to be people who’ll see you as a monster. People who’re just waiting for you to turn rabid and bite. That wouldn’t happen here.”
“You’ve been training or fighting or running away for your entire life,” said Trick.
She sounded sorry; she sounded the way Vel had always imagined a mother would sound, genuinely regretful for the pain that hadn’t been avoided.
“That’s not going to change. People are always going to want something from you, or think you have to be something that you’re not.
They’re never going to leave you alone. They’d leave you alone here. ”
Vel snorted. “Oh, because Halloween has been so peaceful and kind to me.”
“It can be,” said Trick. “Time is what we want it to be. For every night we spend patrolling this city and protecting tourists, we get a week with our daughter. We’ve had more time since we came here than we’d had in her entire childhood.
She’s growing up slowly because she wants to, because she wants this time as much as we do.
If you stayed here, you could have a hundred lazy nights for every one you spent working. ”
“What happens when I want to stop?” Vel asked. “Before you said that if you quit, you’d die.”
Trick and Treat exchanged a look. This time, it was Treat who spoke.
“We weren’t born in the Calendar Country,” he said.
“We started here as children and grew up because we wanted to, and our roles didn’t forbid it.
If we stop being Trick and Treat, the holiday guardians, we aren’t anything.
We’ll just fade away. You, though. You were born.
You have flesh and blood and a family. You might not be able to go back the same as you were, but you wouldn’t necessarily die. ”
“If you were me, if you had to make this choice…what would you do?”
Trick smiled wistfully. “I’d be a human girl. I’d live in a complicated, confusing world that doesn’t follow narrative rules, and I would never look back.”
Treat didn’t say anything. Hailey stood.
“There you go,” she said. “You’ve heard from me, the human who chose Halloween, and you’ve heard from the holidays who chose to be human for a while. Now it’s time for you to go and give your answer.”
“Go where?” asked Vel. Hailey pointed to the door.
It was too easy. After everything she’d been through, everything she’d done, it was too easy.
It was almost a relief, in a strange way, when she opened the door and the street was gone, replaced by an endless, fog-shrouded forest. She looked back, and the living room was also gone.
There was only the forest, and the doorframe in which she stood.
“Here we go,” she said, almost cheerfully, and stepped into the fog.
* * *
She hadn’t gone three feet before a snarl split the darkness. It was something like a roar and something like a growl and something like the sort of thing nobody wants to share a dark, creepy forest with. Vel stopped dead, feeling suddenly small and exposed.
They’d forced her to freeze her way out of Winter and fight her way out of Spring. Why had she expected Autumn to be any kinder?
Then the beast came pacing out of the gray, and she no longer had time for questions. She only had time to turn and run like hell.
It was a mixed-up thing, much like its roar: it was werewolf and bogeyman and bat and rat and most of all, great black Halloween cat.
Vel knew what it was even before it opened its mouth and laughed at her, calling mockingly, “Told you you hadn’t seen anything yet.
Told you I still had some tricks up my sleeve. Fight me, or die, doll-girl.”
Scaredy Cat’s taunts did have one effect: Vel ran faster, still clutching her husked-off Halloween skin.
She had no desire to fight the former Halloween guardian, not here, not ever.
He would chew her up and spit her out. He had claws, weapons, natural advantages.
All she had was an old costume and a bunch of… dead…leaves…
Velveteen stopped running. The answer to everything had been in front of her the entire time.
All she’d needed to do was acknowledge it.
Scaredy Cat reached the place where she’d stopped less than a minute later. He dug his terrible claws into the ground and bared his terrible teeth, swinging his head in a low arc, nose testing the ground. He could smell her. She hadn’t run. So where was she?
The rock hit him in the top of the head. He looked up, and there she was, crouched in the branches of the nearest tree. He snarled.