Velveteen vs. The Seasons Page 20

  “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 pl
ace 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.

  “Don’t growl at me,” she said. “Hailey does this shit all the time. She’d make a great superhero. We’re all about the dramatic entrances. Tell Scream Queen I’m done fucking around and being tested. I have a solution that works for us both.”

  The great beast dwindled, drawing back into itself, until the little boy in the homemade cat costume was standing in its place, watching her through narrowed eyes. “You were supposed to be a hunt and a chase and a kill,” he said accusingly.

  “And now I’m not,” she said. “Sorry. Not my problem. Tell Scream Queen it’s time.”

  “Tell me yourself,” said Scream Queen, stepping out of the trees. Her arms were full of dead roses, and her eyes were full of shadows. She looked to Scaredy. “Run along, little boy. This isn’t your place and it isn’t your problem, and if you didn’t get your moment in the sun, well, that’s too damn bad.”

  Scaredy Cat glared, but he was smart enough not to argue with the woman who controlled his season. Sullen, he turned and walked away into the wood. Scream Queen looked back to Velveteen.

  “Well?” she said. “I warn you, I don’t have much patience for grandstanding. There’s only room for one prom queen in this wood, and it’s me until someone bigger and badder comes along.”

  “I’m not grandstanding,” said Velveteen. She sat down on the branch before easing herself down to the ground. Human flesh and blood broke a lot more easily than ragdoll floppiness. “I just didn’t want to come down until the big bad whatever the fuck Scaredy actually is was gone. What is he?”

  “The thing children fear when they walk in the woods. Fewer woods, less fear, less reason to have something that dangerous running free. It’s almost midnight, little girl. What do you have to say to me?”

  “I want to go home.” The words seemed somehow fragile, small, like they belonged in a different sort of story. A rabbit-eared headband wasn’t so different from a red hood, not really, and there were wolves in this wood. Velveteen squared her shoulders, refusing to shrink in on herself, and looked Scream Queen in the eye. “I want to be able to be Velma Martinez, not just Velveteen. I want friends, and a bed, and a chance to live my life on my own terms, not because the story says so. I want to be myself again.”

  “I see. You realize that by saying this, you’re denying me my treat, and I’m within my rights to trick you.” Scream Queen’s smile was toothier than it should have been. Whoever handled Halloween’s orthodontia must have been making a fortune. “What’s to stop me keeping you past midnight, and making your choice a foregone conclusion?”

  “Did I say I wasn’t giving you a treat?” Velveteen snapped her fingers. Something else dropped from the tree and moved to stand beside her.

  It wasn’t a woman, although it was shaped like one: it had two legs, two arms, a torso, and a smiling muslin mask of a face. It crinkled when it moved, like dead leaves crunching together. It wore a frilled dress, like all good dolls did, and as it turned its blank button eyes toward Scream Queen, it was impossible to avoid the sensation of being watched.

  “See, I was in Halloween when I learned that if I animate something that’s supposed to be a superhero, it gets their powers. Dolly here is supposed to be me.” Velveteen looked at her creation. “Dolly?”

  The rag doll waved her hand. A corn jenny scurried out of the woods on cornhusk legs, pressing herself against Dolly’s ankle. Velveteen turned back to Scream Queen.

  “She can watch the corn for you,” she said. “You don’t need me.”

  “And when you stop animating her?” Scream Queen asked.

  Velveteen shook her head. “I already did. This is Halloween. She’s a living doll. Your narrative says she won’t die until she’s done her job, and it’s her job to protect the corn. You can let me go.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Scream Queen, and stepped closer. “Last chance, hero. Stay or go?”

  Velveteen looked at the doll she’d made from her own shed skin. Looked at the haunted wood around her. And finally, reluctantly, looked back to Scream Queen. “I want to go home,” she said again.

  “Very well,” said Scream Queen. She snapped her fingers.

  Velveteen collapsed. The rag doll remained standing.

  Scream Queen raised an eyebrow. “She was telling the truth, huh? Well, then. Let’s take care of this, shall we?”

  She waved her hand. A door formed from the branches of the nearby trees. Together, Scream Queen and the doll hoisted Velveteen’s body and tossed it through, into the void beyond. Then, still together, they walked into the trees, and Halloween, went on around them, eternal as only a holiday can be.

  *

  First there was no door and then there was a door, a paradox of a thing, standing unsupported in the middle of a suburban lawn. The door opened against the wind—a wind that was too cold, a wind that smelled like blood. There was a long pause, like the world was waiting for something, before the body of a woman tumbled out of thin air and collapsed on the grass. She lay there, motionless, unaware of the world around her.

  For better or for worse, Velveteen had come home.

  Action Dude—who hadn’t been able to stop thinking of himself that way in months; it felt like Aaron Frank had become a luxury in the days since he had been named one of the co-CEOs of The Super Patriots, Inc.—paced in front of the big picture window that made up one wall of his office. He missed the person he’d been before everything went terribly wrong, but when the call had come, he had answered, and now he was paying the price. Technically, he shared the position of CEO of The Super Patriots, Inc. with Dotty Gale and American Dream, a fact that had earned them more than a few snide comments from government pundits. “If they’re going to set up their leadership like it’s a politically correct photoshoot, how can we trust them to regulate themselves?” was one of the nicer things he’d heard, and he was pretty sure that it hadn’t been intended as friendly.

  One of the biggest conflicts he’d had with Vel when they were kids had always been over secret identities. She’d wanted to maintain one after she turned eighteen and the government stopped mandating it; he hadn’t. He’d always insisted that a proud superhuman should be able to go out without the mask, and say “Hey, I know that we may have our differences, but let’s leave them at the office when it’s time for the PTA meeting.” She’d never agreed with him, just looked at him sadly and occasionally whacked him with a pillow for being so unthinkably stupid.

  Now, years and miles and deaths and resurrections and tragedies and terrors from that level of innocence, he found himself looking out the window at the manicured grounds of the company that had raised him (complete with the deceptive blue serenity of Lake Pontchartrain, who had come home from the Princess’s castle when things began to get complicated, yet hadn’t returned to her human form in months) and realized that somewhere along the line, he’d started to agree with her. He would have loved a secure secret identity, something he could wear out of the house. He hadn’t been to Shabbat services in months. It wasn’t safe.

  Nothing was safe anymore. Not even this room, with its big glass windows and the bloodstains hidden under the carpet. Nothing was sacrosanct. And soon, the new CEOs of The Super Patriots, Inc. were going to need to make a choice. Did they let the government into their records, those careful, terrifying records kept by Supermodel, after she’d gone bad and before she’d died? Or did they refuse, and face the consequences of that refusal?

  “You’d know what to do if you were here, Vel,” he said, ceasing his pacing and leaning his forehead against the window. He wished he could go flying. Things were always so much clearer when he flew. “You’d tell me to
stop being stupid and do the right thing, and then you’d tell me what the right thing really was. Why couldn’t you stay?”

  “Because you don’t go making promises to holidays if you’re going to break them. Holidays have their own rules, and I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.” The voice was young, female, and utterly guileless. That was part of Dotty Gale’s shtick. She could sound innocent while she was ripping someone’s larynx out.

  Action Dude turned. The current avatar of the idea and ideals of Oz was standing in his doorway. There were no red spots on her silver slippers; she hadn’t killed anyone recently. That was a nice change. “Dotty,” he said. “What’s up?”

  Her expression sobered, as much as it was capable of doing so. “We just got an anonymous call from someone in Portland. It’s about Velveteen. She’s back.”

  Action Dude broke the sound barrier leaving his office.

  *

  Following the death of Supermodel and the second disappearance of Jolly Roger, The Super Patriots, Inc. entered a period of rebuilding. Their interim CEOs had been chosen, according to eyewitness accounts, by Velma “Velveteen” Martinez, who had been severely wounded in the fight against Supermodel. They had been better able to deal with government bureaucracy than Velveteen herself…or maybe they had simply failed to run quickly enough.

  Aaron “Action Dude” Frank was, at the moment of his coronation as the company’s heir apparent, the last member of Velveteen’s own hero class still standing. This may explain her willingness to single him out, although it is unclear whether she did so out of favoritism or anger. (Their relationship, and the end of same, has been well-documented in the files recording her time with the corporation.) Born the son of Daniel and Melissa Frank of Staten Island, New York, he acquired his powers through exposure to irradiated maple syrup, as did so many others with the basic “flying brick” set. Charming, attractive, and well-positioned to be the all-American superhero, he frustrated his early handlers with his calm refusal to reject his faith, continuing to attend services at the temple he had belonged to since he was a child. This may be the only corporate edict he ever chose to reject. Action Dude’s history is a patchwork of compromises, concessions, and willing agreement to whatever The Super Patriots, Inc. asked of him. Not exactly the sort of thing that sets one up to become CEO.