Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

He shook his head so violently his eye patch slid down to his cheek. Kate laughed and dropped the candy into his pumpkin. On the instant, the pirate ran off like a cannon shot for saner quarters. She called after him, “I hope you find your parrot!”

A little ways down the road, under a streetlight, an old, old man was watching, his hands buried deep in the pockets of a coat that might have fought at Verdun. As the boy ran off, the old man walked nearer, stopping at the same spot where the little pirate had stood for so long before his fateful decision to go up the walkway. The old man tipped his hat. “You set to bothering the young ones there?” he asked.

“Can I help you?” Kate asked, stepping back slightly toward her shadows.

The old man took off his hat. His wisps of white hair shivered in the wind. He held his hat like a bowl. “Trick or treat?”

“Where’s your costume?” Kate took a half step back toward the light.

“Right on my face!” the old man said. “I’m a genuine Egyptian mummy, ten thousand years old and falling to pieces right before your eyes. You got any magic tannis root in that pot there?”

Kate regarded him sidelong, her arms crossed. “Reach in and see.”

“Oh, no. Not after what I just saw. My heart couldn’t take the strain, I’m afraid.”

“That is a pity,” Kate said, and tossed him a candy bar. He caught it in his hat and slipped it in his pocket.

“Much obliged, Miss Kate,” he said as he put his hat back on.

“That’s trouble,” she said. “How do you know my name?”

“Well, there’s the convenience of putting it on that poster there.”

“That poster,” she said, “is older than you are.”

“And besides that, you’re about the only thing this town has talked about since you moved in last month. It’s behavior like this — plus having a tail, I suppose — that’s done it all, you know.”

Kate half-smiled. “So it’s Halloween night, and you know my name. That gives you quite an advantage. But who are you?”

The old man tipped his hat once more, and said, “Name’s William Wildhawk.”

Kate laughed, surprised, delighted. “No, it isn’t!”

“Of course not. But it sounds like the sort of name a fellow ought to have when the woman he’s talking to has a tail, doesn’t it?”

“It does indeed,” she said, and her tail arched upward with pleasure. “But what brings a man named William Wildhawk to my doorstep on such a night as this? Surely not free candy bars. With a name like that, you need dragons to slay.”

The old man looked around, as if Kate might have a dragon waiting in the shadows on a leash. “No, not me,” he said. “I doubt I have anything that would slay a dragon. Why, do you know where one might be found?”

“I used to,” Kate said, a faraway look coming over her face. William glanced at the poster of Doug the Dinosaur Boy, a tyrannosaurus in a schoolboy’s tie and short pants. Would he be the sort of thing that counted for a dragon in this mechanized day and age? he thought.

Kate shook her head. “But I think he’s most likely moved on by now.” Far away, something howled. It was certainly a dog. It couldn’t possibly be a wolf. It couldn’t possibly be a lonely timber wolf keening over its empty belly. The wind cut through the thin places in the old man’s coat. He shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself.

Kate forced a smile. “You should think about getting yourself home soon, William. It’s Halloween, and things will be coming out to play soon. This is a night for haunts and fairies.”

William winked. “Goblins, too?”

“What!” gasped Kate, in tones of deepest mortification. “A goblin, me?”

“And where else would a tail like that come from?”

Kate huffed. Her tail flicked indignantly. “From my mother’s side of the family. And you watch your mouth, or you’ll be a toad come morning.”

“Your mother had a tail, too?” William asked.

“She had a nicer tail than I, but she took better care of it. French shampoo, German vitamins, and plenty of exercise.”

“And what about her mother?”

Kate looked down at William for a long time. Her tail was stiff and still. “My grandmother’s tail was the world champion. She could serve tea with it. She even traveled around with a carnival for a while. That’s where all the posters come from.” She stepped down off the porch, standing on the first stair, her hands on her hips, her tail slowly arching. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

William shook his head. “No. But I saw her once, just once, when her circus passed through. I must have been, oh, twelve. Around there. That was the last year before I was too old to let my friends know that I still liked circuses and too young to know that they all felt the same way. In fact, that was the last circus I ever went to, till I had kids of my own and a good excuse. And I was just on my way home that night, licking the cotton candy off my fingers, when I saw the Lion-Tailed Girl herself in front of the old freak show tent, working the crowd for their last dimes.”

Kate jumped down onto the grass in the midst of her posters, landing on her feet without a sound. “Ladies and gentlemen!” she called out to an invisible crowd, and though she did not shout, still every word rang down the street and around the corner. Her voice circled around William’s ears and would not be ignored. “Ladies and gentlemen! Every one of you knows the wonders that God made in the six days of Genesis. But have you seen what his hands made in those same six nights, in the dark, when no one was looking?”

She strode over to a poster filled entirely by a mass of swirling darkness, with two large eyes in the midst of it. “Have you seen our famous Black Widow, the most horrifying perversion of nature in history? She’s inside, just a dime away.”

Kate’s fingers slipped into a jacket pocket and came back up with a thin dime flashing, rolling over her knuckles. “Have you seen the real refugee from Oz, our own Jack Pumpkinhead?” She pointed to a poster of a huge, smiling, orange, empty-eyed face. It must have been a mask, because it looked exactly like a tall, thin man with a pumpkin for a head.

“They’re all inside, and it only takes a dime to see them, just the skinniest coin of all, slap it down and walk on in.” Kate hopped back onto her porch and flung her front door open wide. Darkness gaped inside. “If you walk away now, you’ll wake up in the night, in the dark, and wonder what it was you missed. But you can see it now. For one dime. Just one — thin — dime!”

Kate froze in a theatrical pose, both hands pointing into the darkness inside her house. William had watched it all with misty eyes. He shook his head.

“You are her spirit and image,” he said. “You are that.”

Kate relaxed and leaned against her porch railing. “So I’m told.” She shrugged. Her tail drooped.

“You know,” William said, “I always wondered what was that Black Widow’s ‘perversion of nature’ that was so horrifying.”

“You mean you didn’t go in?”

“No. I spent my last dime on one of the games. Throwing baseballs at milk bottles.” He reached into one of his deep pockets and pulled an ancient flattened rag doll into the light: a lion with a mangy mane and a windup key in its back. “I won this for knocking them over three times in a row. I named him Raleigh. He used to play a little song when you wound him up.”

“What was the song?” Kate asked.

“I don’t really remember anymore. It was. ” He closed his eyes, and, after a moment, began to hum. He hummed a tune that was somehow melancholy and jaunty at the same time: the sort of tune you might want to hear after a long, bad night, in the blue, foggy light, just before the sun rose. Finally, he gave up. “But it wasn’t really like that at all. Oh, well. It’s a funny thing about music, isn’t it? You can still feel what it sounded like, years and years ago, even if you can’t really remember how it went.”