Day 12: Morgan Gallagher - Hallowe'en

Being brought up in Scotland, Hallowe’en has more than memories of carved lanterns and ghostly stories.  It also brings with it the smell of smoke drifting through the woods (as leaves are burned) and the cold blast of rain soaked wind on your back.  When you live in the north of Britain, you have a physical connection with Hallowe’en: it’s about the seasons, the weather.

            Hallowe’en weather is about wet and cold and a sense of the darkness coming.  It’s shivering at the bus stop as the sodden leaves slap your ankles.  It’s about coming in from the cold and hoping there is warm soup on offer.  It’s about knowledge that the cold is coming and not everyone is going to make it to spring.  People die in the cold.  Food is scarce in the cold.  Warmth is prized, in the cold but warmth is expensive in the North.  (A theme I explore in the short story Sleet Dreams, excerpted below.)

            Hallowe’en allows us to pause for thought, to accept that winter is going to be long and harsh  and to hope we’ve enough food and kindling in to keep us warm and fed until the new food grows.  It’s a season you need the cold to understand: many Wiccans in Australia swap the calendar formed in Nothern Europe around and celebrate Hallowe’en at the opposite time of year – when it’s getting cold.

            I grew up with All Hallows Eve being about dressing up and going out for sweets.   Last year my son went out with his friends and when he came home with his bag of sweet, he came home blue with cold.  He learned a valuable lesson: don’t dress up as a zombie on the East Coast of Scotland on the night that October turns to November!  I suspect this year’s costume will be thought through in terms of the season as much as the fun.  When he’s older I’ll teach him about why we think of the dead once a year, to bring ourselves back to remembering that death awaits us all and winter is when most people who are going to die, die.  Even now.  It’s a sobering thought, but perhaps comforting that even now, we still live by the rhythms of the planet, not our egos.

            People from outside Britain are often surprised to find that we dress up here and go round asking for sweets at Hallowe’en.  The USA ‘trick or treat’ is the more usual one spoken off.  Yet ‘trick or treat’ stems from the older British tradition.  We’ve dressed up and carved lanterns for generations, usually from turnips.  Turnips are like concrete and carving them can take a week or more of hard graft.  I can quite imagine the immigrants to the New World were delighted to find pumpkins: so much easier!  Many parts of Britain has slowly lost some aspects of Hallowe’en but Scotland, in particular, never seemed to lose it.   We don’t do ‘tricks’ however.  Calvinistic attitudes to children do not have them playing tricks on adults: it has them earning their supper.  To get a sweetie for their ‘poke’ (paper bag), a child has to both be dressed up and do a turn.  Sing a song or dance, or recite a poem.  The littlest and those too bashful for anything else get to stick to the verse ‘The sky is blue the grass is green, please may I have my Hallowe’en?’  Work goes into the poke of bounty and no tricks!

            We call it ‘Guisin.  Going out all dressed up.  People tend to associate it with the Guy we burn on Bonfire night, on November 5^th.  As the ‘guy’ (dummy) being burned is the effigy of Guy Fawkes who failed to blow up Parliament.  But there is no connection between ‘Guisin and Bonfire night.  ‘Guisin is a short form of ‘disguise’.  You put on a ‘guise.  Why do you put on a ‘guise?  To avert demons and the evil eye.  It’s a simple premise.  If something evil is looking for you, a bad spirit or a ghost, of the faye of the earth, you turn your coat inside out.  That way you ‘disguised’ yourself and they cannot find you.  That appears to be the origin of getting dressed up on All Hallow’s Eve: the dead are walking and so your turn your coat, make you look like someone else, to avoid.  That’s what the lanterns are for too – to scare the spirits away from your door.  The interesting thing about that is that is suggests the dead are something to be fearful of.  Not all Day of the Dead events suggest this.  In many cultures of Day of the Dead, you invite dead relatives to dinner.  You go to the graveyard, walk them home, feed them special food at the table, then walk them back to rest for another year.  It’s a nicer thought than the Northern European one, where the night the veil between earth and the spirit land slips, we’re all to be afraid of the dead.

            But I do feel weather is important here too!  No one in their right minds would walk between a graveyard and the house, and back again, on Hallowe’en in Scotland.  You’d be soaked through!  Such loving festivals of the dead usually take place in warmer climes, where flower paths can be constructed and the walk is a joyous procession in a carnival atmosphere, not tightly holding onto an umbrella, three layers of clothing on and a big hat to keep out the rain as you shiver in the wind.

            Which brings us back to living with cold to understand Hallowe’en: the moment we pause to wonder if we’ll get through the winter.  That’s the horror writer in me, writing that.  The bit that always sees the darkness in things.  You’d think you’d not need a gift for darkness to see that Hallowe’en is a gruesome festival.  But celebrating our dead, being aware of dead, is not gruesome: that’s life.  Horror writers like to point this out, all the time.  That in life, there is death.  In joy there is pain, in triumph there is failure.  People ask me how come I’m a horror writer and female.  As if being female somehow means you can’t conceive of, or describe, horror.

            I often point out I write horror not as I’m female, but as I’m Scottish.  We do dead good dark dread in Scotland.  We see life and death together.  Or at least the Scotland I grew up in, did.  Others seem to live in a more Disney version, where the Fair are wee folk with tiny voices and tinier wings.  The one I grew up with are six feet tall and have swords that will cut you in half in one stroke.  They’ll blind you for cutting down a tree.  You don’t annoy them.

            You may even turn your coat round once a year, when the veil slips, to keep them from you.

            You may want to consider that when you take your kids out ‘Trick or treating’ this year... you may want to turn your own coat too.

    
Morgan Gallagher is a horror writer in her late 40s who lives in a fishing village on the East Coast of Scotland.  She is taking part in eFestival of Words Hallowe’en Horror event.  You can find a 5000 word extract of her occult thriller novella, The Fool, here.
You can also get 25% off Fragments, which contains The Fool, during October, follow the link above for the code.   There are more Hallowe’en Horror giveaways on the site, including a $20 gift certificate at Amazon, here 

Three copies of the ebook of Fragments are available here, to get a chance to win one, comment below.    

Fragments contains two horror shorts, Sleet Dreams & Alma Mater and an occult thriller novella: The Fool.

Sleet Dreams

            Today was going to be a bad day.  All she had was some peanut butter scrapings and noodles.  It had been too wet, for too many days.  She’d three outside coats in all, as drying out a wet one was painfully slow with little heat.  Each were battered, bruised, and patched but didn’t smell and did a fair amount of work in keeping her from dropping down dead with cold, or being refused entry to the mall or the library.  But all were still damp.  She spent ages sifting through in her mind which one to go with.  Outside, the rain was turning to snow and driving into the windows horizontally.  Sleet.  She hated sleet the worse.  Snow was warmer than half snow, half rain, she was convinced.  Sleet hit you physically, like little bullets, far more raw and draining than hailstones.  Hailstones bounced off you.  Sleet clung to you, drenched you, drained you, shivered into your veins.  Sleet soaked through and down faster than anything.  She looked out at the slushy streets and the people wading through to get to work, to get home from work, to do anything to get off the street at all costs.

            If it had been just after social security day, as opposed to a couple of days before, she’d had stayed in, holding onto the last of the morning’s heat doggedly, spinning out the hours until the evening bounty arrived.  Or maybe gone to the Laundromat and relished the sultry rush of steam laden air, as she worked through her few clothes methodically.  Then rushed back to watch TV and hide, holding the warm clothes in a bag as protection against the cold as she dived back to her room.  But it was not to be.  If she stayed in the spinning disk on the meter might betray her.  ‘Sides, she needed food and had empty pockets.

            She wrapped her feet in three layers of socks and two layers of plastic bags.  She really needed to find new boots, with intact soles, but soles were thin by the time she got her feet into any shoes, and the streets long and hard.  Walking kept up her wiry strength, kept her heart pumping and her bones from growing too fragile.  Walking was life, not just for the scavenging that could be achieved en route.

            She took a deep breath before launching out the door, pulling warm air into her lungs and praying it would hold there for as long as it took to get to somewhere else.

            It was, without doubt, the worst day of her life.  Nothing had worked on any level.  It was dark again, and she was wet, frozen, shivering, and hungry.  She’d been so cold that when she’d walked past the filthy lump of rags that was Dolly, and Dolly had offered the usual swig of something foul and very alcoholic, she’d almost been tempted.  Almost allowed herself to feel the flood of warmth as whatever gut rot it was rolled down her throat and set fire to her belly.  Almost.  Her hand had stayed, and then retreated, and she’d smiled at Dolly and moved on, as she always did.  Dolly swore at her heels for being a stuck up bitch, as she always did.  But next time they’d see each other, they’d smile, and Dolly would offer the bottle.  And if she had it, Maggie would hand Dolly some food.  It was a miracle to her that Dolly somehow kept going.  No doubt she was so foul the rats were scared to nibble on her.  Maggie knew that she wasn’t so foul that some of the equally foul street men didn’t woo her for her favors.  How else was a girl to get ethyl alcohol?  There but for the grace of God...

            It was a long way back to her room.  Even now, crying silently under her breath with the cold and the effort to keep moving, Maggie couldn’t face returning.  If she went too early, the room would be cold.  She’d be locked in there waiting out the moment the radiators sprang to life.  It could sometimes take forever, it seemed, and it unsettled her badly.  Brought her hard up against the walls of her life.  No, she must get another hour, maybe two, out of today.  Somehow.  She had to eke out some comfort, somewhere, before she went back.  She had to walk into the welcoming heat, and take advantage of every scrap of it: she had to stay away just a bit longer.

            The wind picked up and drove sleet into her eyes; she stumbled, and gripped the walls of an alleyway, holding onto the corner to keep her upright.  Across the road, someone fell over, and a couple of bulky figures moved forward to help.  One of the helpers went down.  The wind shrieked in her face, bringing with it the raw fury of the lakes that funneled all that cold into the canyons of the city: she had to get out of this onslaught.

            She picked her way down the alleyway, trying to find the spot where the wind no longer tore at you, the walls calming the demon.  The grabbing hands dropped and she was out of the wind’s assault.  The sleet was hammering down on her now, from above, still lethal, still deadly, but no longer being driven into her sideways.  She slumped back against the walls, no longer bothered about how filthy they might be, and tucked behind the corner of a dumpster.  A moment: she just needed a moment, and then she’d give in, try and sneak on a bus and go home.  Wrap her hands around a mug of hot water with a stock cube in it and dream of summer, watching something on the box.  Wait until she’d dried, and then thawed on the radiators.  Get herself into bed while the heat was still in the air, then settle down to listen to her radio and read a book.

            As she stood to prepare herself for the battle back out into the wind, she noticed something gray and furry, back in the shadows.  Was that a dog?  Alone, abandoned?  She moved forward.  Oh dear god, please don’t let it be a poor dead thing, abandoned here in the cold and muck.  She approached the mound cautiously; like humans, dogs were animals.  Animals required caution until you had the measure of them.  The closer she got, the less it looked like a dog, the more it looked like... a wolf?  Here?  It was hard to see, between the shadows, the falling sleet, and her tiredness.  She called to the animal under her breath, making reassuring noises.  The sleet was starting to settle in slush piles around the fur... surely it would move out of that puddle that would soon form ice, if it could...?

            She’d had to kneel down, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in her knees as they soaked in the cold.  Her hand reached forward to touch the thick pelt, but she couldn’t feel anything through her layers of gloves.  She stripped her right hand free, and touched the pelt again, gently trying to shake whatever it was awake.  Warmth flooded into her fingers, over her palms, as she connected with the fur.  Whatever was here, wasn’t dead, that was for sure.

            Shaking it brought no response.  She took her other glove off, and tried to search around to find the head, the legs, anything, that would make sense of this shape.  Her hands moved under into the slush and little daggers stabbed into her.  Ice was forming well under there.  A touch of panic prompted her to grab what she thought might be the ruff of the animal and pull it back up and out, trying to unfurl it.  It gave too easily and she fell back onto the sludge of the alleyway.  The fur had come with her, and ended up on her: it was a fur coat.  She was holding the thick collar and the lining had been revealed up to the skies; the fur side was touching down on her body.  Her butt was stinging, with both the impact and the puddle of sludge she’d landed in.  She stared at the coat in her hands, then panicked and jumped to her feet as well as she could: the coat lining was getting wet.  Without a thought, she stood and whipped the coat over her back, like a cloak: why was there a thick warm coat, lying in the gutter..?

            The warmth, the unctuous slide of heat that smoothed out over her shoulders distracted her.  The fur repelled the sleet, the cold.   She felt the chill lift and her body relax.  Even her frozen backside was warmed through.  This is why they raised minks... to keep out the thick cold.  This is why they suffocated them by putting their heads in jars... to keep the fur intact...

            She’d never bought fur, ever.  Not only had she never been able to afford it, she’d been repelled by the thought: repulsed.  Now, as the seasonal enemy that relentlessly assaulted her was beaten back and conquered... she shivered her arms into the coat, snuggled it round her.  The collar wrapped up over her head, in a hood.  The coat went past her knees.  The thick sleeves engulfed her hands.  Only her feet stayed cold but with the rest of her warm, that was bearable.  She closed her eyes and wrapped her hands tightly across her chest.

            She no longer felt cold!  She felt warm... she felt dry...she felt safe.

            She stood, her eyes closed, drinking it in.

            Her feet asked her to move.

            She opened her eyes and was a little transfixed to find herself still in the alleyway.  The sleet was still slamming down but it simply didn’t penetrate the coat at all.  Her feet, however, still stood in freezing sludge.  She looked down and shuffled them, urging the blood warming in her core to pump down and get her feet moving.  Her feet responded, and the urgency to move diminished.

            As she brought her gaze back up, she looked on what the coat had covered.  What the coat had been hiding.

            Her feet jumped back as her mouth let out a puff of silent, strangled air.  It was a body: a woman’s body.

 

**Note: There is a HUGE giveaway at the end of the month after Halloween!!! To enter for the giveaway, comment on the blogs. The more you comment, the bigger chance you have at winning!!! There will only be 1 winner, and the winner will be announced 1st week of November!!! Good Luck!!!