The TALES TO TERRIFY podcast is celebrating their one-year anniversary, and help do that they've come out with a brand new anthology featuring stories by Gene Wolfe, Joe R. Lansdale, Weston Ochse, Margo Lanagan, and more ... As part of a blog tour to promote this anthology, here is a Halloween-themed guest post by one of its editors, Lawrence Santoro. And be sure to check out the contest and the end, too. Enjoy!
I
NEVER DRESS FOR HALLOWEEN
by
Lawrence Santoro
by
Lawrence Santoro
I
haven't dressed for it in damn near half a century. I annoy friends, show up at
their costume parties as, "what the hell’s he supposed to be?"
"Ah…a
depressed writer?
See?
To me, Halloween smells like mothballs.
Every
year the first whiff of apple cider or the whisk of dry leaves waded-through or
wind-drifted against whatever door I live behind at the time starts it. But in
deepest October, parties, leaves and cinnamon-cider aside, I catch a scent of
phantom camphor in my life and feel a dry wool ghost brush my bare skin. And
there I am: in the attic at 831 North Fourth Street, Reading, Pennsylvania,
delving for Halloween.
831
was built at the turn of the old century. It’s nothing special. Like most
houses in that railroad town, it was red brick with a slate roof. Bigger than
most, older than the shotgun row-homes on the half-streets where my friends
lived. And 831 had a fake Tudor half-beam attic above the second floor.
It
was a scary place in which to be young and invent your world. My best friend,
Pete Reinhart lived up the way and across from Charles Evans cemetery. He
bragged about guts, living near the dead and all.
Not
much to be afraid of. Evans was a rolling green forest, dark mossy trees and
brown hills going to seed. It was filled with soot black mausoleums, tall
granite memorials and the iron-spiked flags of the war-dead. In summer, Evans
was a great place to pack lunch and go read, leaning against cool granite in
shaded heat. In winter it had the best sledding hills in the northwest corner
of the city.
No,
831 was scarier than Pete’s graveyard neighbor. Our place had a house-long
cellar lit by three hanging bulbs with and a wooden coal bin the size of New
Jersey at the front. When we moved in, Fall of 1947, 831 had a gas-fired
water-heating 'coil'. The thing had to be lit and extinguished manually; turn
the cock, listen for the his, strike a spark and hope it didn’t blow.
In
the cellar’s near-dark, the coil flickered, hissing just beyond the octopus-arms
of the furnace. The damn water heater waited to kill. You never went out–not to
a movie, not anywhere—and left the coil on. A constant check went back and
forth, mother to daddy, daddy to me, me to Pop-pop, "you turn the coil
off?” “Did YOU?” “You turned it off, right?"
The
coil--and shining black water bugs, mice, smells of mold and rot and noise s
not accounted for, and bad bad darkness, all that was below.
On
the living floors, the house whispered constantly. Walking from room to room,
boards cracked in places where feet were not. Alone afternoons, distant rooms
sighed. Small things chattered in the walls.
Gas jets, capped and dead,
covered softly with decades of paint, poked from the same walls where, from
time to time, zillion legged critters coiled forth and oozed down to disappear
into the baseboards. Hallway chandeliers shivered and clattered in the stillest
air. Several parts of the house had external wires ending in big rotary
switches that showed bare copper. Daddy always said these circuits were cut
from the mains—he did it himself, damn it.
Mother
nevertheless always stopped, perked, listened, entering these rooms, alert to
faint crackles of electricity from those dead lines.
Finally,
daddy ripped the damn things off the walls and plastered the holes. There!
(Halloween,
Larry, get back to Halloween)
Halloween
began in the attic. The attic was up the stairway at the end of a dark
second-floor side-hall, a place dad never re-electrified and which remained,
consequently, always in ambient dark. At the top of the attic steps, a
wide, mullioned window overlooked our yard, the back alley, the yards of my
friends Davey Brown -- a Seventh Day Adventist always somewhat depressed
because the world was ending soon -- and Terry Hebhardt -- who did shitty things
because he was going to get beat up for something he did or didn’t do, anyway.
My world. Beyond, lay the rest of Reading, red brick and slate. A mile further,
the town tipped upward till it washed like a breaking wave against the green
slopes of Mount Penn.
In
October, the mountain was red and yellow.
The
steps to the attic were always dusty. The walls of the hallway and stairs were
runneled and rough, its wallpaper bearing medieval tapist scenes of stag
hounds. Huntsmen on rearing horses, their pikes angled in a forest of
passionate tangles, worried a deer. Old stuff, dark with blood.
In
the attic, everything creaked. The floor boards were splintery soft woods, ages
of dust packed between. With even my modest weight the floors sagged. The
ancient cabinets and stored furniture nodded or quivered as I passed. Nail
heads squeaked slowly up from the wide floor planks like thunderstorm worms
that peered up from damp garden earth. No place for bare feet, our attic.
The
front windows overlooking Fourth Street were large and mullioned. The branches
of the elm canopy reached from the curb to the windows, their fingers tapped
them in the wind. There always was wind and the room always was shaded by
branches and gathered dust.
The
smaller attic room was darker. It looked across the narrow way between our
house and Cliffy Mahler’s. Into Cliffy's bedroom.
This
room was filled with time. Stacked trophies of my Pop-pop's long run as a
national skeet shooting champion. There were piles of books from his, Nanna’s,
Pop-pop’s kidhood. There were my mother’s boxes filled with fading, dying
pictures of long dead people and the scent of sachet and newsprint. And there
were trunks: steamer trunks of wood and leather panels, brass corners and
varnished hardwood ribs. Footlockers with more hinges than necessary, multiple
straps and a dozen snaps; there were wooden crates, valises, satchels whose
leather was flaking into dust from times before I was born, from the time when
my parents had been "on the road!"
Their
life on the road was piled in the corner, one box, valise, trunk, and case atop
another.
You've
come this far with me. There's something you should know. My parents were
dancers, members of the Catherine Behney Dance Company. Don’t rack your brains,
you've never heard of it before now. Behney’s was one of many companies
supported by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Arts Administration projects
during the Depression. After the New Deal died, the company became part of a
traveling carnival. My father, Rocco Vitorio Santoro, was a guy who slipped
away from home at 13 to earn his own damn way in the world. He worked a couple
years at Mother Hubbard's Candy Company, 60 miles from home, then got a job
driving truck and setting up for the Behney troupe. Trainable, he joined the corps.
Eventually, when Behney joined the carnival, he earned a few extra bucks as a
wing-walker, days, working with a barnstorming pilot who toured with the show.
When someone was injured or too drunk to compete, daddy also filled in as a
miniature racecar driver. Just as needed, you know. In addition, he met his
future wife, Fern Emma Adams on the road.
Mother
was the troupe's prima ballerina. She also was a poet who never wrote, a
painter who didn't paint, a runaway rich kid, who fled Princeton and West Point
weekends and who had given up on her own schooling a couple weeks shy of the
end of her senior year in high school. She was a sweet girl who ran to the road
from her mom and dad -- the social crème of Reading and Wyomissing, PA . On
that road, she fell in improbable, wonderful, madly focused love with this
grade-school dropout son of immigrants who, every couple days, wired himself to
the top wing of a Steerman biplane and stood out there for inside loops,
outside loops, and
Immelmen turns, who danced some and ate bugs and streaming
dirt for the crowd's thrills and the few extra bucks it brought.
On the
back-leg of a southern swing into deep Florida, they married in D.C.
The
trunks in the attic room at 831 North Fourth were filled with their road years,
the parts they brought home when they settled in Reading to become the boring
guy, the pleasant housewife they disguised themselves as for me.
Those
trunks were Halloween.
Opening
each lid sucked the air of their years on the road from the bottoms, from between
folds of cloth, from the sleeves, legs and necks of clothes, costumes and
apparatus, jackets, boots, leather helmets, furs and goggles, silks and makeup,
hats, feathers, powders, greasepaint and stays, elastic and crinoline, crepe
hair and dry sponges, from below it all, from through the fibers, the air ran
picking up dust and essence. And through tubes of camphor crystals and
deliquescing mothballs the air picked up the scent I knew as Halloween.
Everything
from those boxes and trucks scratched my skin, smelled of age and other places
and times and covered me completely, hid me perfectly in what they had been.
The costumes we put together in the days before Halloween created a high
standard of disguise. Nobody, anywhere, knew me. Not at school before
unmasking, or in the back alley, when Dave Brown, Terry Hebhardt, Cliffy
Mahler, Pete Reinhart, saw and didn't know me until I spoke and then, “Holy
Jeeze, Santoro, that you? Christ!”
The
costumes also became something else. Something that should have been obvious to
me, but wasn't. Was not until I wrote this did I realize: Halloween put me into
their skins. My parent's skins. The skin they'd discarded to build me. Who was
I? Dressed as a Scotsman, a World War I ace? A harlequin? Was I them? Dad,
mother? Christ, no. Just me...but... Hell, no! They were—they are—my parents.
Christ,
don't you have to kill them off to become you?
Sure
you do. Christ.
When
I stopped having to dress for school Halloween parties, what was it, in seventh
grade? I never did again. I forgot the stuff that was left in the attic, then I
left home and, several years later, moved to England.
Mother
and Daddy with another couple, people I didn't know, were killed driving back
from Florida when a guy coming the other way had a heart attack at his wheel,
died instantly and his car jumped the median and dead-ended into them. Five
gone. Like.
That.
I
returned for a few months, got rid of the remnants of their lives and went back
to England.
And,
no, I do not dress for Halloween but, still, the season smells of mothballs.
END
LAWRENCE SANTORO: Award-winning writer and
narrator, Lawrence Santoro began writing dark tales at age five.
In 2001 his novella “God
Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.
In 2002, his adaptation and audio production of Gene Wolfe’s “The Tree Is My
Hat,” was also Stoker nominated. In 2003, his Stoker-recommended “Catching”
received Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s 17th Annual “Year’s Best Fantasy
and Horror” anthology. In 2004, “So Many Tiny Mouths” was cited in the
anthology’s 18th edition. In the 20th, his novella, “At Angels Sixteen,” from
the anthology A DARK AND DEADLY VALLEY, was similarly honored.
Larry’s first novel, “Just
North of Nowhere,” was published in 2007. A collection of his short fiction,
DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME, was published in 2011. He lives in Chicago and is
working on two new novels, “Griffon and the Sky Warriors,” and “A Mississippi
Traveler, or Sam Clemens Tries the Water”.
Stop by Larry’s blog, At Home
in Bluffton(http://blufftoninthedriftless.blogspot.com/), and his audio website, Santoro Reads (http://www.santororeads.com/Home.html), you can friend him on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/lawrence.santoro).
GAME: You can be one of the
lucky 10 people to win a PDF copy of our anthology. All you have to do is find
us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/TalesToTerrify?ref=hl) or Twitter
(@TalestoTerrify) and answer the following question: What scares you most? The
most creative responses will receive the coveted PDF copy and will be featured
in our second November show.
The game will end on October 31st, the book's official launch date. A like and a follow will be
appreciated, but are not a prerequisite to enter the competition.
You can follow the blog tour on
the following dates and sites:
October, 22nd: Innsmouth Free Press
October, 23rd: Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews (http://darkwolfsfantasyreviews.blogspot.com/)
October, 24th: Kaaron Warren (http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/)
October, 25th: Sci fi & Fantasy Lovin' News and Reviews (http://sqt-fantasy-sci-fi-girl.blogspot.com/)
October, 26th: Fantasy Book Critic (http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/)
October, 29th: Wag the Fox (http://waggingthefox.blogspot.com/)
October, 30th: Angela Slatter (http://www.angelaslatter.com/)
October, 31st: Graeme's Fantasy Book Review (http://www.graemesfantasybookreview.com/)
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