Gwendolyn Kiste

The September Ceremony

 

 

The last day in September was an auspicious one for the family. Fall was upon us, and with it came the seasonal preparations of the estate.

 

First and foremost, cobwebs were draped from the chandelier, and live spiders accompanied the decor. As usual, the creeping creatures spun the most luxurious white lace wherever we missed a spot.

 

Scissors shredded any sections of the curtains that weren’t already ragged, and one by one, my pale progeny removed hinges and handles and other accoutrements from the bureaus and dressers in all the bedrooms.

 

When we were done, the house was a decrepit mess—and far more superb for it.

 

As every year before and every year for as long as the family endures, the abiding sense of macabre merriment sent our skeletons—both the ones beneath our skin and the ones beneath our floorboards—all aflutter.

 

“If only my bones could already be in the crypt,” Carolyn the youngest said as she tossed shriveled leaves onto the vintage rug in the parlor. “Then I wouldn’t have to do so much work.”

 

Smiling, I served her a more than generous portion of blackbird pie and beckoned all three of my daughters to the table. “Death will happen soon enough, darling.”

 

“No, it won’t,” she said and huffed. “If I’m particularly unlucky, I could live in this meat package another eighty years.”

 

“Be grateful we can carry on the family traditions.” Anjelica plopped into a seat, and a lovely cloud of dust puffed from the upholstery like a spritz of perfume. “If it weren’t for us, this whole property could be torn down and replaced with some tacky retail plaza.”

 

The oldest at sweet sixteen—sweet as cyanide, of course—Bebe shooed a plague of rats from her chair. “Mother? If this place is razed after our deaths, can we haunt the shoppers and shopkeepers?”

 

“Yes, love,” I said. “But let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that. I’d hate to think of the chandelier being replaced with fluorescent lighting.”

 

Carolyn shuddered. “A Black Friday indeed!”

 

My beautiful daughters—their long hair as dark as their glorious little souls—tittered and conspired over dessert.

 

Yes, the end of September had indeed arrived.

 

We finished the plates of pie, and after picking feathers from between our teeth, we set about the final preparations. Bebe took the cloaks, and I gathered enough candles to illuminate any cemetery in the world. Fortunately, we only had to light one: our own family’s cemetery, which was packed to the top soil with shrouds and sepulchers. 

 

“Does everyone have their slips of paper for the ceremony?” I asked, and the girls nodded jovially before we departed for the backyard mausoleums.

 

Anjelica skipped across the dead grass, the sun vanishing between the trees like a bashful spirit. “I can’t wait to see Grandma!”

 

“I don’t want to see her at all,” Carolyn said with a scowl. “She’s had almost a full year to visit, and she hasn’t attempted to haunt us. Not even once.”

 

“Perhaps she thought it too vulgar,” I said. “Your grandmother always was the primmest of the family.”

 

“Too prim to visit her grandchildren?” Carolyn shook her head. “I don’t care if I never see the old lady again!”

 

At that, an eldritch mist floated through the cracks of the sagging pillars and proceeded to pursue Carolyn around the yard. The nine-year-old giggled like it was a most splendid game and raced from one end of the graveyard to the other.

 

“You can’t catch me, Grandma!” She shrieked and galloped in circles around Anjelica who just rolled her eyes and kicked a headstone.

 

“Who dare disturb me?” a voice demanded from the ground, and the two younger girls howled, eager to outrun both a ghostly fog as well as a curmudgeon of a ghoul.

 

“When’s father arriving?” Bebe studied me, her light eyes a perfect match to his.

 

“Soon,” I said, though she knew I was lying.

 

Even though the ceremony was a sacred occasion, my husband was a terrible bother when it came to dates and times. Door-to-door sales isn’t as easy as it used to be, particularly in the bloodletting racket . So many regulations these days! And so difficult to smuggle his sanguine goods past customs.

 

“Are we ready yet?” Carolyn scurried past me, the mist still in fast pursuit. “Grandma keeps getting in my hair!”

 

Anjelica stomped her foot. “I don’t want to start without Dad!”

 

“Well, we can’t wait any longer.” Bebe tossed her sisters their brown cloaks.

 

“I’m not wearing mine,” Carolyn said just because she could.

 

I sighed. “That’s fine. It’s more symbolic than anything.”

 

“You should respect tradition,” Anjelica whispered, and the mist swirled in agreement. “You don’t want bad luck, do you?”

 

Carolyn grumbled and pulled the dark velvet around her face. The cloak was too big, but like her siblings before her, she would grow into it.

 

I set my burlap bag of supplies on the nearest burial vault and donned my own garb, which was royal blue to separate me as leader of the group.

 

“I wish mine was that color too,” Carolyn muttered, and her sisters hushed her.

 

I lit a row of candles. “Have each of you practiced your parts of the invocation?”

 

They nodded. A wolf on some distant hill cried in refrain, and it wasn’t even a full moon.

 

Bebe rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe we’re incorporating modern technology into the chant this year.”

 

“We need to stay timely,” I said. “Otherwise, we become anachronisms, and the whole thing falls apart.”

 

“I guess,” Bebe said, twirling a strand of glossy hair around her thin fingers. “It just seems so... crass.”

 

“Any other objections?”

 

Besides the ghoul still complaining about Anjelica “vandalizing” his headstone, everyone was quiet.

 

“Then let us begin.”

 

Our fingers dug into the ground, and we each brought a handful of earth to our chest.

 

“Ancestors,” I said. “Hear us now.”

 

We tossed the soil into the air, and one after another, the visages of phantoms and demons materialized and leered at us through the moonlight.

 

“Hello, Uncle Ray,” I said to one.

 

“Greetings, Aunt Emily,” Bebe said to another.

 

“I’m not talking to you, Grandmother,” Carolyn said, her lips twitching as she tried to subdue a smile.

 

I waved to my mother whose delicate features became solid once more.

 

“October is almost here again,” I said. “We set you free from this place for thirty-one days. We set you free to wreak Halloween havoc in the name of our family!”

 

An ethereal green shot out of every crevice in the ground and the granite. Even after partaking in forty-five ceremonies, the moment still took my breath away.

 

“Let Trick or Treat be equal parts of both.” The slip of paper between her fingers, Anjelica pronounced each word with the melodramatic flair of a hammy Shakespearean actor. “Use your alchemy to transform milk chocolate into caustic cherry bubblegum.”

 

A faction of imps rotated overhead, the eerie voices intimating a calliope of out-of-tune dirges.

 

“And while taunting children with toothbrushes and floss in their Halloween satchels, do not let the adults escape your wrath,” I said, picking up the lines reserved for my husband. “Create campy, lewd costumes that in retrospect will embarrass those foolish adults who wear them.”

 

Cackles spilled into the night as if the creatures were escaping us, as if we couldn’t contain them. But we continued. We always continued.

 

“During festive gatherings, whisper into their ears,” Bebe said like a witch hunched over a cauldron. “Tempt them with ambrosia and convince them to take horrible selfies they will then post to every form of social media.”

 

The cacophony hit its fever pitch. Our kin twirled and pirouetted over us, and a kaleidoscope of fog spread along the horizon like an Aurora Borealis of the dead.

 

Carolyn stared at her strip of paper. “Mother, I don’t know what this means.”

 

The dancing demons ceased their revelry, and we all gaped at the pintsize killjoy.

 

“I thought you said you practiced.”

 

“Well, I did,” she said, her feet fidgeting and stepping on the edges of her oversized cloak. “But I can’t say it like the rest of you. I don’t know where the emphasis goes.”

 

“Give us a moment,” I said to the spirits as I kneeled next to my daughter.

 

“What’s this word?” She pointed at ‘autumnal’, and I pronounced it for her.

 

“And try stressing ‘decree’, ‘grace’, and ‘free’, okay?”

 

She nodded and inhaled. “With this summons, we... we do decree. Enjoy the autum... autumnal grace and for this... month, be free! ”

 

The spell complete, the specters catapulted in every direction, wailing with glee as they glided through the sky. It took a full five minutes for the crypts to empty, and the entire time, the power from the mass exodus was so strong that my daughters and I levitated from the rich earth.

 

My mother bid farewell to me and her grandchildren before soaring off with the Gilded Age branch of the family, fringe dresses and long-stemmed cigarettes in tow. 

 

Always last, the cantankerous ghoul climbed from his vault, shaking an antique cane as he went.

 

With all the spirits departed, the four of us mortals drifted back to the ground, our feet buried in the soil as if we had never left. 

Anjelica squealed. “That was the best ceremony ever! Ever! Ever!”

 

“It should certainly grant us good luck for the next year,” I said and collected the candles that had by now retreated to wicks.

“Did you see them?” Carolyn jumped up and down. “It was like the best fireworks in the world!”

 

“I’m glad Grandmother’s going with them,” Bebe said. “About time she had some fun.”

 

Hands grasped in a circle, the girls danced about the graveyard and sang one of the more upbeat elegies they had learned from the ancestors long ago.

 

Like every year, things felt empty afterwards. The murmurs that haunted the grounds the other eleven months had departed, and though profoundly lonely, I smiled, certain the Halloween antics would be extra morbid this year.

 

“Did I miss all the fun?” a voice asked from the rickety gate.

 

“Daddy!”

 

The girls scampered to their father and almost knocked over his hopelessly lanky form in the process.

 

“You did miss it, Dad,” Carolyn said. “Even Grandmother was here.”

 

“Oh, I’m not so sure I’m sad about missing her,” he said and glanced at me. “She never was my biggest fan.”

 

“She warmed up to you.” I strolled toward him and clasped my ice-cold fingers around his. “Warmed up the best any of us can.”

 

With whispered secrets that weren’t really secrets at all, the grinning girls returned to their interpretive Halloween dance. 

 

“I’m sorry, love,” he said to me. “A family in Romania made a last-minute order. Blood in bulk, enough to fill a warehouse. The paperwork took forever.”

 

“Don’t worry,” I said as distant church bells struck twelve. “The girls were magnificent.”

 

Hand in hand, I led him to the center of the cemetery where we joined our daughters, crooning and frolicking late into the evening.

 

After all, October was now upon us. And it was going to be a beauty.

 

 

 

 

Gwendolyn Kiste is a horror and fantasy writer based in Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies including Strangely Funny II and Whispers from the Past: Fright and Fear as well as online at DM, Sanitarium Magazine, Electric Spec among others.

 

You can find her at www.gwendolynkiste.com and on Twitter (@GwendolynKiste).