Interim Errantry Read online

  If a pumpkin could have shrugged, this one would have. Then do it. I don’t mind being part of a celebration, and maybe it’ll be fun to have a face.

  The permission could hardly have been more clear-cut. Nita got up, picked up the knife again, and said, “Okay, here we go…”

  She braced herself and made the first cut, half expecting to hear a scream: but there wasn’t any response at all. “Are you okay?” she said.

  Sure. When are you going to start?

  Considering that she was standing there with the cut-off top of the pumpkin in her hand, this was reassuring. “Uh, okay,” Nita said, and got to work in earnest, scooping out the seeds and the webby bits in the middle.

  Within a few minutes she had all the pulp out and had begun cutting the face. Kit and Ronan immediately started offering helpful design tips and critiquing her cutting technique, so that Nita lost any further concern about the pumpkin’s feelings in a vague fog of annoyance at the kibitzing. “And how many of these have you done, oh great design expert?” Nita said to Ronan when she couldn’t bear it any more.

  “Pumpkins? Not a single one, I’m glad to say.”

  Kit glanced at him, confused. “Wait, I thought you guys invented Halloween.”

  “‘Course we did. The pumpkins to carve, and the candy, though, that’s new. We didn’t get candy when I was little. Just nuts and apples.”

  Nita and Kit looked at him, incredulous. “And that was all?” Kit said. “That wouldn’t get your house a whole lot of business in this neck of the woods. Might even get you egged…”

  “Different times,” Ronan said. “Different traditions. Back then people just gave the kids what we grew at home: stuff from outside was too expensive. But nowadays you lot have ruined us. We’re coming down with pumpkins and plastic Jack O’Lanterns and crappy superhero costumes.” Then he snickered a little. “You know what we used before pumpkins?”

  “What?”

  “Turnips.” Ronan started laughing.

  “Turnips,” Nita said in wonder. “But wasn’t the whole carving thing originally about putting something freaky enough in front of your house that it would scare the demons away?”

  Ronan was still laughing, but he managed to stop himself after a few moments, wiping his eyes. “Yeah. And you do have to ask yourself what poor weedy wimp of a demon would be scared of a carved-up turnip…”

  “Not that I’m sure why demons would be scared of pumpkins either,” Kit said.

  Ronan shook his head, but he grinned a little. “Some traditions don’t make sense,” he said. “No point in paying attention to them if they don’t work for you. Like the apples and nuts. Lots of lovely fiber, no question. Good for little growing kids. But I think I prefer these wee marshmallowy things.” He reached into yet another of the bags he’d been plundering and produced a screamingly yellow cellophane-wrapped chick, eyeing its packaging. “Peeps? Poops?”

  “Poops!” Kit snorted with laughter and mimed falling over sideways out of the chair.

  “Must be some planet where they poop this color,” Ronan said, examining the marshmallow chick with a critical eye. “Wouldja ever look at that shade. Think of the godawful crap they must put in these things to make that happen…”

  He popped the chick into his mouth and chewed with a meditative expression. “Revolting,” Ronan said after a moment. “Got any more?”

  “They come in orange too,” Kit said, digging around in yet another of the bags and coming up with an orange marshmallow pumpkin, which he unwrapped and tossed to Ronan.

  “Will you two cut that out?” Nita said as she finished with the pumpkin’s second eye. “It took me hours to get those right!”

  Ronan ingested the Peep-pumpkin and started going through the contents of another of the dumped out bags. “And look at these,” he said, picking out a piece of candy corn that had somehow wiggled its way into the marshmallow pumpkin packet. “Look at this thing, it’s just so much sugar and dye. All the chemicals in these, you’ll stunt your growth for sure! Here, I’ll eat them for you.”

  Nita sighed in resignation. “These peanut things are good,” she said, picking up one candy that Kit had spilled out of another of the bags.

  Ronan stared at the pale-orange object. “That’s never a peanut.”

  “It’s just supposed to sort of look like one. It’s marshmallow too.”

  “Who’re you kidding?” Ronan said. “This thing’s hard. A Styrofoam peanut, that it might be.”

  “Different kind of marshmallow…”

  Ronan bit into it anyway, and then gave Nita the kind of look reserved for some unfortunate whose senses were malfunctioning. “And why’s it taste like bananas? You people are unwell.” But nonetheless he started rooting around in the candy on the table for another.

  In the back of the house, the bathroom door opened. A few seconds later Dairine came into the dining room, and Ronan and Kit turned to look at her. “Whoa!” Kit said, and Ronan simply burst out laughing: for Dairine was turned out in the long brown overrobe and crosswrapped beige gi-like undertunic of a young Jedi. Every detail had been handled—the breeches, the boots, and even the narrow apprentice braid hanging down on one side, with her red hair otherwise tied into a short ponytail behind. Behind her came Spot, who for the occasion had applied a virtual-shapechange field to himself and now looked like the kind of little low-running droid that when it sees you coming, hurriedly does a K-turn and runs away squeaking in fear.

  Nita knew Dairine had been working on getting her costume right for days, and therefore she wasn’t above teasing her a little. “Still looks like a bathrobe,” she said.

  Dairine turned a faintly scornful look on Nita. “People who carry these are not wearing bathrobes,” she said, twitching aside the overrobe to reveal, hanging from the bathrobe’s inner belt, a foot-long cylindrical object. This she unhitched, flipped in the air, and caught while hitting its actuator stud. The lightsaber’s actinic blade instantly sprang out and sang softly in the air.

  Ronan nodded, impressed. “Now that’s a nice wizardry,” Kit said.

  Dairine gave Kit the same look. “You kidding? Who needs wizardry for this? I bought it from one of Carmela’s weapons suppliers. Light-based weapons are real popular with species that have tight-channel plasma technologies. And once you’ve got one, modding a new hilt onto the thing’s no big deal.” She flicked her wrist from side to side, and the blade sizzled and hummed in the air: she looked at it with an expression of satisfaction tinged with annoyance. “Though you won’t believe the crap I went through to get it to make that noise. Any decent lightsword’s completely silent. What kind of idiot builds weapons that let the bad guys hear you coming?”

  Nita sucked in a breath and was glad that there were none of the more rabid sort of Star Wars fans around to take issue with such heresy. “Ooookay,” she said. “Just don’t let anybody else play with that thing…”

  “Oh come on,” Dairine said, collapsing the blade and hanging the lightsaber hilt at her belt again. “It’s DNA-locked—all the basic models come with that now.” She glanced at the table and the neat rows of candy bags, now not quite so neat. “This is getting kind of messed up…”

  “Yes it is,” Nita said, glaring at Ronan and Kit. “You guys are going to get plenty of stuff once we’re out! Will you lay off this?”

  Kit and Ronan both smiled angelically at her, but showed no signs of stopping. Got to get them out of here before they eat it all… Nita thought. “Okay,” she said, “we’re done here.” She wrapped up the seeds and pulp from the pumpkin in the top few layers of newspaper on which she’d been working, took them into the kitchen and put them in the bag with the composting waste.

  “So where are you going to put it?” Kit said. “Front step?”

  “Probably…” Nita said. But as she came back into the dining room, she looked at the pumpkin and realized that it was looking back at her: and despite the carven smile, it looked a little sad.

  “…No,” sh
e said. “I’m taking him with. Dad can’t keep an eye on the front door every minute, and I don’t want him getting smashed while we’re out.”

  Kit looked at her quizzically. “You’re going to carry a real pumpkin around with us?”

  Nita studied the pumpkin briefly. “It’s not like he’s overripe. Or too heavy. I can get some rope, pierce through the sides and make a handle. I’ll take a separate bag for the candy.”

  “He?” Dairine said, bemused.

  Ronan shook his head in genial disbelief. “I’ve seen a lot of wizards do a lot of weird things,” he said, “but I’ve never seen one bond with a vegetable before.”

  “Life’s full of these little surprises,” Nita said. She fitted the pumpkin’s top back in place, saw to her satisfaction that it fitted snugly. Then on an afterthought she removed it again, shook her charm bracelet around on her wrist, and pinched one charm, a tiny lightbulb, that had a ready-to-activate spell attached to it. When she pulled her finger and thumb away from the charm again, they had a little spark of bright white light between them. Nita reached inside the pumpkin and snugged the little particle of wizard-light down into the place where she’d most deeply dug away the pumpkin’s flesh at the bottom, then put the stem-lid back on. The wizard-light shone very satisfactorily through the pumpkin’s new eyes and mouth, even in daylight. “Anybody sees that,” Nita said, “they’ll think it’s an LED. Give me a couple of minutes to deal with the handle and we can go.”

  It took less than that, as it turned out: some of the heavy braided raffia-twine that her dad used in his florist’s business proved to be perfect for this job. When it was done Nita tested the handle, found it entirely secure, and then equipped herself with one of several Halloween-themed paper shopping bags. She handed one each to the others. “You ready?”

  “All set,” Ronan said.

  “Daddy, we’re going…!” Nita said.

  “So I see,” he said, looking in again from the kitchen. “And you’ve got your phones with you if there are any problems…”

  “Don’t think there’s likely to be much in the way of problems,” Nita said.

  Her dad watched them head for the front door with a slightly thoughtful expression. Nita blushed one more time, for though her dad knew that there’d recently been some kind of status change in her relationship with Kit, she hadn’t yet been successful in explaining it to him, because she hadn’t yet finished figuring it out herself. “Don’t be too late,” her dad said: and Nita knew this was code for Don’t do anything I wouldn’t want you to.

  “I won’t,” she said: and very much hoped, as the front door shut behind them, that this was going to turn out to be true.

  The weather at least was cooperating with the local trick-or-treaters. After a few days of rain and wind earlier in the week, conditions had abruptly settled the day before into a lovely still crispness exactly right for the end of October. The trees were on the turn and glowing in the last rays of late-afternoon sun; and things had fortunately had time to dry out, so that the yellow and orange maple and oak leaves you scuffed through rustled satisfyingly instead of just lying there wet and sodden on the sidewalk.

  Nita sighed as the four of them walked down the street and stopped at the first few of their neighbors’ houses. She loved this time of year, both for the changeableness of it and the slight sense of sadness that seemed to hover over it, the world saying Oh well… as it reluctantly gave up the midyear warmth and paused for a few long cool breaths before turning inevitably toward the winter. The particular blue the sky went, the growing quiet even on windy days when the leaves came off the trees: they all mattered a lot to her.

  That changeableness seemed to have come over Halloween itself, in a way. It was a little weird to see so many older kids dressed up and taking part in the last-day-of-October ritual. But over the last few years it seemed that a lot of junior high-age, even senior high-age kids, had been getting into it. Partly it was being pitched among the kids as a way to have fun after dark with the excuse of taking care of the littler participants… though pretty much everyone involved understood that this was actually a good way to get out from under the ever-watchful parental eyes for a while. Nita knew very well that a lot of kids from school, though they’d gotten themselves costumed and acquired all the rest of the necessary props, were actually up in town snogging in the darkness behind the shopping center, or meeting in various vacant lots to get drunk. Their problem, Nita thought. She had other priorities tonight.

  After the first few houses, where everyone collected the usual little bags or miniature candy bars, they came to the McLoughlins’ house up the street. There were no lights in the windows, no light on over the front steps. “Nobody home,” Ronan said.

  “No,” Nita said, “they’re never ‘home’. They don’t do Halloween.”

  “Seems like other people have opinions about that, ” Ronan said as they walked past the house. He was noting the enthusiastic TP-ing of the big sycamore tree in the McLoughlins’ front yard.

  “Yeah,” Nita said. “And it’s gonna make a big mess all over their lawn. I think I might stop by real early tomorrow morning and see if I can get all that to sort of melt away…”

  “What, just vanish it?” Ronan said.

  “Nothing so obvious. The paper’s made to biodegrade pretty quickly, so it’s just a matter of convincing it to do it all in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks…”

  They stopped at another house and collected a couple of taffy apples and a caramel pop each, then headed off again, idly discussing the best ways to use wizardry to disguise the artificially accelerated breakdown of toilet tissue. As they got down toward the end of the street where Nita’s road crossed another one and more trick-or-treaters were visible, she caught Kit giving some of the kids down the road a dissatisfied look. “What?” she said.

  “I’m starting to feel like a walking wardrobe malfunction.”

  “Why?” Nita said. “You look great. You heard the people at the last house, they thought you were something out of the movies! And anyway, we haven’t seen that many other pirates.”

  Kit snickered. “It’s not that,” he said. “I mean, look at them…” He gestured down the cross street at some of the other trick-or-treaters making the rounds, among whom there were a lot of long overrobes, pointy hats, souped-up broomsticks, and a positive superfluity of wands. “Half the planet’s running around dressed as wizards.”

  Ronan grinned one of those lazy superior grins he specialized in. “One day of the year, sure we can cut them some slack,” he said. “Since we dress as wizards the other three hundred and sixty-four…”

  As they continued to work the street, the four of them amused themselves for a while by counting the wizard costumes. But there were also a fair number of the usual glow-in-the-dark skeletons and bedsheet ghosts, not to mention Supermen and Batmen and winged fairies of various types, often shepherded by watchful parents or older brothers and sisters. And there were also other forms of supervision, both more annoying and less green.

  Cars were very slowly driving up and down the street in the slowly growing dusk, stopping, pausing, driving on again. “What are they doing?” Ronan muttered.

  “Curb-crawling,” Kit said, his disdain only thinly veiled. They paused on the sidewalk to watch as yet another overprotective parent in an SUV pulled up into the vacant street space between a couple of the neighbors’ driveways, let a batch of costumed kids out, waited until they’d rung the nearest houses’ doorbells and collected the expected booty, and then—once they’d all piled back into the station wagon again—drove them a few doors further down to repeat the process.

  “What the feck happens when these kids grow up?” Ronan said under his breath, disbelieving. “Will they be able to wipe themselves, you think?”

  “No telling,” Dairine muttered. “Never mind them. Here’s the Kerricks’ place, they love Halloween and they always give out a ton of stuff…”

  They stopped there,
had their costumes duly admired by the Kerricks, were given truly astonishing amounts of candy and fruit, and headed on down the street again. It was an old familiar route for Nita: down East Clinton to the cross street, Park Avenue; work up and down Park for about a quarter mile in each direction, then retrace your steps to East Clinton and hit all the houses up the length of it to Nassau Road. Then head for home, because by the time you got near there, you’d be having trouble carrying your candy bag, it’d be so heavy. If you got your second wind, you might then go out and do another run up some of the nearby side streets. Might as well enjoy this first run, though, Nita thought. Because who knows if we’ll feel like a second? Or for that matter, whether this might be the last time we do this. We may really be getting a little old for this kind of thing…

  She sighed. “How’re you holding up?” she said to the pumpkin.

  I’m all right. This is interesting. There’s a lot to see…

  “I can’t just keep calling you ‘hey you’,” Nita said. “What should I call you?”

  I don’t know. I never gave it any thought before today…

  “Well, you’re a Jack-O-Lantern now… how would Jackie be?”

  Behind her, Dairine snickered. “Sooooo predictable…”

  Nita rolled her eyes and ignored her. The pumpkin said, That’s a nice name. Jackie…

  “Jackie it is,” Nita said.

  Kit had been listening to this, and he was smiling a little behind the crooked mustache: but the smile had a slightly concerned quality to it. You know, he said privately to Nita, this could be a problem.

  What?

  You’ve given it a nickname, he said. Sometimes when we’ve done that in the past… it hasn’t worked out all that well for whatever wore the nickname. Fred… Ed…

  Nita gave him a look, not entirely sure if he was teasing her. You’re having a sugar crash already, she said. Have one of those Snickers we just got and see if your mood improves.

  He started rooting around obligingly enough in his candy bag, and said nothing further. But there was something about the way Kit didn’t immediately come back with an argument or a smart remark that unsettled Nita slightly. Even if that’s true, she said after a moment, I’m betting we could change the odds a little if we worked at it.