Hell House

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

-William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"

***

It started the night that members of the church board argued over whether or not to stage a Hell House for Halloween.

It was unseasonably hot for mid-September, and the meeting room was small, and having so many bodies in the space made it hotter still.

Nobody dared open a window for fear of the plague of mosquitos outside, so instead all 13 board members sat and sweated and many wished they could just adjourn and go home, but Bathsheba Gibbs wouldn't let anyone leave until she'd had her say.

Gibbs, vice principal of the town high school, wanted the Hell House. The first time she brought it up, earlier in the month, the reaction was lukewarm, but she had a surefire method for winning over converts: She kept bringing it up at every meeting, and everyone else knew that the only way to ever really and truly get her to stop talking about anything was to ultimately capitulate

Standing up in her seat now (even though everyone could hear her perfectly well sitting), Bathsheba assumed all of the authority of an Old Testament Noadiah or Miriam as she talked, each word a virtual pearl straight from the mouth of Moses.

"What I want to know," she said, "is why so many of our board members—who are SUPPOSED to be dedicated to the spiritual wellbeing of this town—are so eager to let our young people cavort in sin every 31st of October.

"The things that go on in public streets on Halloween night—we might as well be surrendering them all up as burnt offerings for as much as a bunch of backsliding pagans we all act like one night a year."

When Bathsheba talked she tugged at the sleeve of her shirt while emphasizing certain words. The result was that almost every outfit she wore had one cuff practically in tatters, while the other one remained nearly immaculate.

She looked every single other board member in the face one by one. A few looked perceptive; others resigned. All looked sweaty.

The last person she addressed was Nathaniel Bradbury. Seated with a pitcher of water in front of himself, he maintained a practiced expression of neutrality. Bathsheba looked like she was trying to make him burst into flames with her stare, but Bradbury showed no outward signs of perturbation.

Once upon a time, Bradbury ha been the very pastor of the church. Five years ago he stepped down after Bathsheba led a campaign for his removal, on the grounds that he bought a lottery ticket at Drummond's Grocery every weekend, and gambling was unbecoming of a community leader.

He'd refused to also give up his spot on the church board, which was independent of his duties as pastor. Town gossip had it he'd be out of there in six months' time too, but on he'd stayed, sitting right across from Bathsheba at every meeting and seeming to dip her fiery words into the cooling pitcher of ice water at his elbow as he listened month after month and, eventually, posed his own equally cool responses.

Beads of moisture glistened on the side of that pitcher now as Bradbury rubbed his chin, barely raised his voice and said, "Now Vice Principal Gibbs, what's so sinful about Halloween? It's just a holiday."

"I BEG your pardon?" said Bathsheba.

Several people in the room paused, expecting to hear a dramatically timed clap of thunder and lightning as she shot up in her seat again, but none came and they had to settle for the storminess of her opinions instead.

"The word holiday means 'holy day,' but there is nothing holy about Halloween," Bathsheba said. "If this day is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy: Satan's!"

The name provoked a stir from almost everyone in the room. Heartened, she plowed on:

"Halloween is a time for the gathering of evil. I'll tell you who doesn't think Halloween is all fun and games: Satanists, witches, devil worshipers, pagans, and idolators! The lukewarm and the ignorant think Halloween is just harmless fun, but the vortexes of Hell are opened on our streets every year, and I for one don't want our children and teenagers out there on a night when witchcraft is going on."

And then she drew in a sharp breath, to indicate all the more things she could say but didn't. Ex-Pastor Bradbury assumed the expression of a person who has just been kicked in the knee repeatedly but wants to remain polite about it for reasons unknown.

"Well I recall I always enjoyed Halloween as a child, and the children in town seem to enjoy it just as much today, and I don't see that it hurts anyone," he said.

And of course this was precisely what Bathsheba had been waiting for, because Bradbury endorsing Halloween was as good as a signed affidavit form the devil himself, as far as she was concerned.

They were not a very big church. They lived in not a very big town. But in their own way, everyone assembled tended to think of themselves as people burdened with resolving very big questions.

And questions like this demanded dynamic leadership and thoughtful interrogation. With this in mind, one woman raised a hand halfway up and said, "Well I don't know about vortexes of evil or any of that. But what I want to know is what exactly is a 'Hell House?'"

Every eye in the room rolled back to Bathsheba, but in this case Thomas Garrett—the town's longtime district attorney, now retired, and the senior-most member of the church except for Ex-Pastor Bradbury and Bathsheba herself—sprang to answer instead. "Well it's a very wholesome exercise," he said.

Rather than stand, Garrett assumed a relaxed posture, leaning halfway back in his chair, dabbing the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, and steepling his fingers over his stomach as he spoke, a pose that he'd perfected over 37 years in the county courthouse.

"I was at a Hell House in Belle Glen six years ago, and I'll testify it was extremely beneficial for the community, especially the youngsters. How best to describe it? I guess you could say it's something like a haunted house—but one that's done in the service of righteousness. 

"You get a place all fixed up to look gruesome and spooky like the pit of Hell, and you get some actors from the community theater or such costumed like all the devils and imps, and you charge $10 for fundraising purposes, and you take the kids through and show them all manner of eternal torments."

The woman with her hand raised (it was still raised) looked suitably horrified. "Well how does THAT help anyone? Vice Principal Gibbs, I thought you just said you were against all of that kind of thing?"

"But you see when we do it—or like the folks out in Belle Glen did it with their church—it's for the purposes of a moral lesson," Garrett leapt to add. "The actors do skits about the sinful and immoral lifestyles that lead people to Hell and, you know, it scares the kids straight."

"AND it keeps them somewhere safe on Halloween," Bathsheba added. "Instead of gallivanting off dressed like Lucifer and collecting cyanide-laced candy from molesters."

"Churches all over the country do this sort of thing now, and I daresay we're behind the times not doing one ourselves," Garrett added. "I've got a friend in Woodborrow who's old hat at these and can be our creative director for a very modest fee. Honestly, there's no reason not to do it. We've got to be realistic about the times we live in."

Ex-Pastor Bradbury took a long time pouring himself a glass of water. Keeping his eye firmly on the pitcher the whole time, he said, "So what kind of 'sinful and immoral lifestyles' do you think we should be subjecting our kids to at this Hell House of yours?"

"Oh, the usual," Garett said. "Abortion, promiscuity, homosexuality, premarital, uh, this and that. Drugs I imagine Drinking—underage drinking that is—and social media—"

"Gambling," Gibbs added, loudly.

Everyone watched to see if Bradbury would spill his water. He didn't.

Waving a hand, Garret added, "And other things I'm sure, you know: Hollywood, socialism, false religions, boys becoming girls. Maybe—"

"Witchcraft?"

The voice came from the corner. Everyone turned.

Alexandra Updike sat apart from everyone else, in an antique chair that lived in the meeting room and as far as anyone knew was as old as the church itself. She hadn't said anything all night. She didn't say anything most nights.

Even now, she maintained eye contact with the embroidery hoop in her lap, seemingly fixated on that rather than the meeting. Nevertheless, like always, when Alexandra talked, people paid attention.

She was 40 (everyone thought), a widow, and well known in the town. A member of almost every public body she could join, she was leader of none but noted for her quiet resolve, and while she wasn't exactly well liked, by and large people in town respected her. More importantly, they listened to her.

Listening now, everyone leaned forward as words crossed her embroidery hoop on the way to their hears: "You said something before about witchcraft, Vice Principal Gibbs?"

For once, Bathsheba took a minute to reply. "Well yes, I did. You know there are over a million people practicing witchcraft in America today, and the government doesn't stop them. And in the bigger cities—"

"What I meant is," Alexandra said—and now she did look up, and suddenly more than one person decided that the hot, crowded little meeting room actually seemed unseasonably chilly tonight—"these things that will be going on in this Hell House of yours. Since you're so concerned over it, I assumed you'd want something said about witchcraft too." She paused. "To warn the children, of course."

Bathsheba looked like she was weighing two different loads in a scale, but didn't know what any of the numbers meant. Eventually she said, "Yes. Yes, I think that would be very appropriate, all things considered."

And she nodded in a way that made her bangs bounce.

Nodding back, Alexandra said, "That being the case, I think Vice Principal Gibbs' idea is a very good one. This town absolutely needs a Hell House. Halloween wouldn't be complete without it."

Again Bathsheba's expression was one of wonder crossed with suspicion. But this gave way to triumph soon enough, as the muttering and stirring of all the others seemed to cross a meridian and come down now firmly on her side.

Alexandra said nothing more, taking up her embroidery again. Keeping it in her lap, nobody else saw what she was making on the cloth: hex marks, pentacles, warding signs, and some other sigils that had no names...

They took a vote. It was almost unanimous. The only one who hadn't cast a vote yet was Ex-Pastor Bradbury. Every board vote had to be unanimous; nobody could go home until all 13 members voted the same way. Over the years, more than one person had just resigned as a way of breaking an impasse.

By this time the pitcher in front of Bradbury was empty. More than one person in the room imagined the former pastor's bladder must be holding back something akin to Noah's Flood, and wondered at his stamina.

Still saying nothing, Bradbury looked at every other person one by one with his cool blue eyes. Yes, he had stamina. But he also knew when to quit.

So with a shrug and a nod, he gave in. It wasn't a verbal vote, but everyone decided it counted all the same: the Hell House was on.

The final minutes of the meeting dissolved into a general hubbub of planning, speculation, and collaboration, with all manner of suggestions flying about where to hold it, who to hire, how much to charge, and which sinful exuberances they should preach against most strongly to the kids who came.

In the midst of all the tumult, few people took any notice of one seemingly peculiar proviso: somehow, Alexandra convinced everyone that she should have sole creative control over the parts of the Hell House dealing with witchcraft, and that nobody else involved with the planning should have any oversight of her work.

By the time all the church members turned into their beds that night (the ones that did go home to their own beds, that is...), none of them really remembered Alexandra's insistence on that point. In fact, none of them remembered her saying much of anything during the meeting at all.

But Alexandra remembered.

Arriving home just before midnight, she parked her car in the driveway of her undersized house that sat on an oversized lot (nearly overgrown with the ambitions of her garden), made her way up the winding front walk, and opened her front door, inciting a small flurry of excitable felines to come running. Alexandra was almost always fostering several new cats at once, though she almost never kept any of them in the end.

As soon as they were all mollified with sufficient feeding and attention, she retired to her den, the smallest room in the house, and also the most private, lacking any windows to the outside.

There, on the mantlepiece, was her altar. In the middle of it, surrounded by feathers, eagle stones, rings, amulets, censures, dried herbs, roots, phials of sulphur, salt, and spider silk, small brass bells, and animals' teeth, sat her late husband's skull, preserved as carefully and lovingly as she could manage, with the exception of the single word "Urian" burned into the brow bone with the red-hot tip of an iron.

Stripping naked, Alexandra stood in the middle of a circle on the floor. The room was dark, so she lit the candles—one of them sat on top of the skull itself—and then she set the censure burning too, inhaling the smoke of the incense and letting it buoy her thoughts to the places where they could accomplish the most.

Halloween was six weeks away. She had work to do.

***

Weeks passed. Alexandra was in the middle of a phone call the day she spotted Lily Rougemont lurking on her porch, peering through the windows before she rang the doorbell.

It was a sunny afternoon—still unseasonably warm in early October—and the sunlight glinted off the gold highlights in Lily's red hair. Sitting at her kitchen table with phone in hand, Alexandra signaled for her to come in, but also to keep quiet as she did.

Lily eased the screen door open and slipped into another chair at the table. Alexandra put her phone down on the red and white checked tablecloth and, with a nod in Lily's direction, switched the call over to speaker.

"Hello, Vice Principal Gibbs, are you still there?" Alexandra said, leaning into the phone. "I think we got cut off for a second."

"Yes, I"m still here," said the voice in the phone, sounding like a tinny squawk. "But you sound a million miles away all of a sudden."

"Oh you can't get rid of me that easily. I was just asking—since you know so much about it, and since I'm researching for the Hell House—just what is it that witches do at Halloween? For the—I think you call them 'gatherings of evil?'"

Grinning, Lily had her pencil and reporter's notebook in hand.

Bathsheba said, "You know, the usual things. Heathenry and wickedness."

"Right, but more specifically? Again, for research purposes; I want to make sure the Hell House is VERY authentic. For the children's sake."

"Oh. Well, naturally they're casting all sorts of spells and conjurations, and putting curses on unsuspecting people. They have orgies and the like, and sometimes they even have sex with real demons. Necromancy and blood sacrifices, of course. And they have to dedicate at least three people's souls to Satan."

Lily bit her pencil.

"And they put all kinds of curses on the Halloween candy," Bathsheba continued. "Even the stuff you buy at the store, a lot of the time witches have prayed over it before it gets there. I won't even buy candy at all during the Halloween season, it's not safe. When you bring something cursed into your home it's a covenant for all sorts of—"

"How very interesting," Alexandra said. "And how do know all this?"

"Sad to say you learn terrible things working in a high school these days. Occultism is rampant in the student body, and I've personally counseled girls who became witches and boys who became warlocks and later wanted out. It all started with that Harry Potter business you know. I spent nine years trying to get that out of the school libraries."

"Yes, I remember reading all about that in Lily Rougemont's column. Well thank you for your help, Ms. Gibbs. I'm very much looking forward to Halloween."

"You're welcome, dear," Bathsheba said. And then, seemingly as an afterthought, she said, "What exactly are you—"

Alexandra hung up. She and Lily looked at each other for a moment and then, unable to hold it any longer, they burst into laughter.

"Halloween witch orgies," Lily said after a minute, "imagine that."

"Well it's not as if you're completely innocent on that charge, is it?"

"We were all young once. Anyway, I guess this means I don't really need to ask what I came over here for: When people told me you were working on this Hell House business I didn't believe it, but now I walk right in on you in the middle of plotting the very deed."

"Don't tell me you're putting this in the column?" Alexandra said. One of the foster cats jumped up on the table and she shushed it off, then compensated by scratching it behind the ears.

"A lot of people in town are very upset about it," Lily said, also scratching the cat. "Pastor Bradbury—"

"Ex pastor."

"All the same, he's been—pardon the phrase—raising hell about it. He's got half the town up in arms to boycott it, and he's even arranging an interfaith prayer vigil on Halloween night to condemn all of you. And then he says he's personally going to take all the kids in town trick or treating himself."

"How's he going to have an interfaith event in a town with only one church?"

"He's got folks coming from as far away as Law's Summit. It's going to be quite a ruckus. But that's not why I'm here, I'm asking why YOU of all people would go along with Bathsheba's nonsense? It's practically medieval."

"I wasn't around for the Middle Ages, so I suppose I'll just have to take your word for it," said Alexandra. "But if you need a quote for your column, just say that I'm very interested in the morally righteous upbringing of our town's children, and I'm sure Vice Principal Gibbs and Mr. Garrett and Pastor Usher—they've got Pastor Usher going along with this too?—will do a wonderful job with this...let's call it an 'ecumenical exercise.' And you can print that."

"All the bullshit fit to print," Lily said, still scribbling in her notepad. Then she closed it, put the pencil down, leaned back in the kitchen chair, and said, "All right then, suppose you tell me what you're really up to, off the record?"

"Off the record, I'm putting razorblades in caramel apples for Halloween. It's my way of correcting children's diets."

Lily gave her a long-suffering look. Alexandra shrugged in response.

She'd known Lily a long time; much longer than anybody in town had any reason to suspect. Whereas Alexandra survived by working very hard at not being noticed, Lily was always at the center of things.

But she was careful to never be an instigator of anything herself. An observer, a chronicler, even a gossip—but never an actor. It was a game she played well, and Alexandra respected it, even if it meant that sometimes Lily couldn't be counted on for help when it counted the most, and other times that her help was almost as bad as anyone else's opposition.

Still, she knew that there were certain confidences even Lilly wasn't willing to break. Assuming a more serious expression, Alexandra said, "Do you want to know what I'm really doing? Off the record, like you said?"

"I wasn't even here today," Lily said, and put her pad in her jacket pocket.

"Oh if only that were true," said Alexandra. Then, rising, she said, "Come with me."

Without a word, Lily followed. They wet back to the den and the altar there. Lily had visited many times before, especially in the years after Van, Alexandra's husband, had died, a time when Alexandra had needed more help than she'd ever been used to asking for, and a time when, in Lily's opinion, she had become a very different person than she was when Van was alive, although she was always careful to keep this opinion to herself.