Velveteen vs. The Seasons Read online

“I couldn’t and you know it. Please, don’t be foolish, Velveteen. I have been looking forward to meeting you, and I would very much like it if you chose to stay here with us, in Halloween forever. That doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate disrespect. I’m still the Queen here. The one and only Scream Queen. Although I suppose you might be able to depose me, if you chose to stay. It would take a hundred years or more. It would be a glorious battle. The Calendar Country would ring like a bell from the force of our fight. You’re welcome to stay if that’s your intent. But until you’re strong enough to take me on, don’t disrespect me.”

  “Sorry,” said Velveteen. It was clear from her tone and her posture that she didn’t mean it, but that had never been the important part: it was the apology that mattered, not the reason it was given. “May I ask a question?”

  “I don’t think I could stop you, could I?” Scream Queen smiled again, settling back in her throne.

  “Are you an anima?”

  “No,” said Scream Queen. “I never was, not even when there were so many of you that people knew how to talk about them. I’m an empath. What I feel, you feel. What you feel, I feel. What I want you to feel, you feel. People used to call it a plaything power, something for nursemaids and women of the evening and other folks as didn’t matter. There’s nothing toy-like about the way I use my skills.”

  “I guess there wouldn’t be. Especially not here.” In the Seasonal Lands, the emotional landscape mattered as much if not more than the physical one. Scream Queen would be able to rule forever, if she felt it strongly enough. “What do you want from me?”

  “Oh, my darling girl.” Scream Queen looked at Velveteen, and the sadness of the season swept over her, dead and dying leaves, rain and cold and the rot at the heart of the late apples on the trees. Velveteen swayed. Velveteen staggered. Velveteen dropped to her knees.

  Scream Queen rose. She walked to where the young animus lay, and knelt, running a hand over the rough yarn of her hair.

  “I only want what the others got,” she said softly. “I want everything you have to give, and when you run out, I want just a little bit more. I’ll keep you if you let me, but if I can’t, well. I’ve lost out on better. I’ll lose out on worse. Right now, I just need you to serve me. Understand?”

  Velveteen moaned. Scream Queen straightened, turning to look back at Hailey and Scaredy.

  “Well?” she said. “Get her up and get her home. When she wakes up, we’ll get started.” Her smile was a dead moon at midnight, unforgiving and eternal, as her subjects hurried to do her bidding.

  “There’s so much for her to do,” she said, and no one in the season argued, and the night that never ends went on.

  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.”
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br />   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 bannister 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.”

  “Sure you’re running a flophouse,” said Hailey cheerily. “You have no bones; you live here for right now; you’re floppy; ergo, this is a flophouse.”

  Velveteen stared at her. “That’s…that’s not how words work,” she said finally. “The language police are going to come and take you away, and I’m not going to say a damn thing in your defense.”

  “Au contraire, my ragdoll fair: you’re in Halloween now, and this is exactly how words work on this side of the graveyard gate.” Hailey slid nimbly down from her tombstone perch, pausing to smooth her green and orange tulle skirt with the heels of her hands before trotting across the yard to where Velveteen waited. She stopped at the base of the porch steps, offering a shy smile upward.

  For the first time, Velveteen—who had first met Hailey Ween when sixteen was a foreign country, far away, exotic, and filled with promises she hoped puberty was intending to keep—was struck by how young she was. Hailey had been sixteen, or maybe even younger, when she had climbed out of her bedroom window and followed an avatar of Halloween into metaphor, and further onward, into eternity. She had never grown all the way up, never loved someone enough to hold their hands under a harvest moon, never known what she was giving away. Or maybe she had, and she just hadn’t seen it as important enough to mourn for.

  “What?” demanded Velveteen, more harshly than she intended. She didn’t want to be feeling sorry for Hailey. She couldn’t afford to start feeling sorry for Hailey. This was her last Season, and she. Was going. Home.

  “Trick or treat,” said Hailey, voice sweet as Halloween candy and twice as likely to conceal a razor blade.

  “What do you think I am, stupid?” asked Velveteen. “Treat.”

  “Wonderful,” said Hailey, smiling that too-white, too-sharp smile of hers before spinning on her heel and striking out across the graveyard, beckoning for Velveteen to follow. “Hurry, hurry! There’s much to do before the sun goes down, and you don’t want to make Scream Queen angry!”

  Velveteen didn’t remember much about her brief encounter with Halloween’s guardian Spirit, but what little she did remember made her certain that Hailey was telling nothing but the truth. Repressing the urge to swear, she jumped down from the porch, her fabric knees absorbing the impact with ease, and ran after the Halloween Princess, into the cornfield beyond the yard.

  Scaredy stayed where he was, and reached for another fistful of candy. His part would come soon enough. No point in wasting a good picnic on something that he didn’t need to do.

  *

  On the other side of the graveyard was a crumbling country road, the sort of thing that’s made an appearance in a hundred horror movies and a few thousand American gothic novels. It was a Stephen King road, a Ray Bradbury road, and the second Velveteen saw it, she knew that she was not going to enjoy what came next. She stopped at the edge of the road. Hailey continued on, to the ditch on the other side, where she began unearthing a bicycle from the weeds. She looked back when she realized that Vel was no longer following her.

  “Well?” she asked. “Come on.”

  “No, thanks,” said Velveteen. “I’m good here.”

  Hailey sighed and rolled her eyes, the very picture of a Halloween babysitter trying to cajole her charges into going on a fun adventure. Everything she’d said about being the cool kid who still went out into the graveyards was starting to make sense. “You’re here to serve the Season, Velveteen, or do you need Scream Queen to give you a little reminder? Just come with me. I’m not going to hurt you. We’re on the same team this time.”

  “You’ve tried to trap me in Halloween before,” said Velveteen, finally taking a cautious step out onto the road. It held her weight. Roads usually did, but after three Seasons in a row, she wasn’t feeling very trustful about that sort of thing.

  “Well, sure,” said Hailey. She pulled the bike out of the ditch and brushed the last of the grass off of it. The frame was rusty and the handlebars looked like a tetanus shot waiting to happen, but the tires were sound and fully inflated. “I wanted to keep you, you didn’t want to stay. But this time, the rules are different. This time, you might choose us. So I’ve been ordered to play nicely, and I’m your best friend until the clock strikes twelve and you have to pick a side.”

  “What happens if I don’t pick you?” Velveteen peered into the ditch, and was unsurprised to find a second bike there, caught in the weeds. She leaned over and began excavating it, grimacing as the briars snagged in the fabric of her hands.

  �
�No clue,” said Hailey. “Hopefully, we’re not going to find out.”

  She was smiling that toothy, too-white smile when Velveteen looked over at her. Vel shuddered and went back to digging out her bike.

  Once she had it free, and reasonably denuded of weeds, she propped it up and slung her leg over the seat. Hailey nodded approvingly and pushed off; Vel did the same, and together they rode down the long, pothole-spotted country road, with fields of wheat and corn waving gently at them from either side. The landscape of Halloween changed to suit its current needs, from the Gothic to the pastoral and back again. It was not the sort of place that could be accused of being static, or boring. It was just itself, whatever that entailed at the time.

  They rode until the shadows stretched long around them. Velveteen was pleased to discover that the changes to her body—and her current lack of a skeletal system—didn’t interfere with her riding a bike. Some skills, it seemed, just crossed over.

  Hailey pulled off to the side of the road and stopped her bike, prompting Velveteen to do the same. Then Hailey waved a hand grandly at the large cornfield in front of them. “Ta-da,” she said.

  Velveteen frowned. “Congratulations,” she said, after a moment. “You’ve found corn. I don’t think that’s hard around here. Halloween seems to have a weird corn fetish, and to be honest, I find it all a little bit disturbing. Which hell, may be what you were going for in the first place. Who am I to judge?”

  “We like corn because corn is a symbol, and also because corn is fucking delicious,” said Hailey. “Corn is awesome. But cornfields…there’s power in cornfields. They’re a whole different sort of symbol. Every cornfield we have means something else. There are cornfields people get wished into and cornfields that people run away in. There are cornfields haunted by slasher killers, and cornfields with bad infestations of children with hair like silk and eyes like a crime scene. This cornfield is one of the symbolic ones. Every ear of corn that grows here represents a good Halloween experience a child had the last time our holiday actually rolled around.”