Page 35 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

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 banister 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 rag doll 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.