Not On My Patch: a Young Wizards Hallowe'en Story Read Online Free PDF

“Not exactly,” Helen said. “We can discuss technique later—”
    “What is with your earrings??” Nita said. She leaned close and peered at one of them, a fuzzy bobbly looking thing hanging from Helen’s earlobe.
    The earring promptly opened two small eyes, flicked out two small ears, and unfolded two perfect, delicate, fingery wings. Nita jumped in surprise, and then burst out laughing while the tiny bat gazed at her upside down.
    “That’s just sick,” Ronan said in complete admiration. “Most people keep their bats inside their belfries…”
    “We have these tiny little ones up in the mountains in California,” Helen said. “ Makal , my people call them. We’ve got caves full of them on my tribal band’s lands: sometimes in the evenings they follow me around when I’m up there doing shaman work. And if they feel like hanging out with me afterwards…” She chuckled. “On a night like tonight, why would I argue?”
    “Hey there cousins,” Nita said, tickling one of them behind the ear. It peeped at her and closed the wings up; a second later so did its counterpart hanging from Helen’s other ear.
    “So step upstairs and have a look around,” Tom said. “We only get a chance to do this once every six years or so, and Carl’s really pulled out the stops this time. Leave your stuff behind the table: Helen’ll take care of it for you.” He eyed Nita’s pumpkin with interest. “Something new in the way of accessories? You can leave that too if you like…”
    “No,” Nita said, “I’ll hang onto him.”
    Tom and Carl both raised their eyebrows at the pronoun, but neither commented. “Right this way, then,” Carl said. “Try not to scream more loudly than our other guests…”
    The next half hour or so was a tour de force of flapping giant bat-shapes, half-seen clammy things with too many eyes that leapt at you from closets or dropped on you from the ceilings, sudden vistas of bottomless pits where no such pits were possible, claws that grabbed, beastly teeth that snapped just in front of your nose out of the darkness, webs that brushed across your face, hissing black demon cats with glaring eyes and fur that stood on end and sizzled with sparks, tentacles that suckered onto you and creepily clung, and dreadful wet moldy smells that you didn’t want to know the source of. Nita screamed as often and loudly as any of the others— even Ronan got caught off balance this way several times— and knowing that clever wizardries were behind about half these effects, and friendly alien wizards were behind the other half, didn’t help at the time. It was all about staging, at which Tom’s script work made him expert. Your own too-suggestible mind, in tune with the archetypes associated with the horror genre and many old myths, did the rest. Nita finished the tour exhilarated but surprisingly wrung out; and while Ronan and Kit went through it again, and Dairine paused downstairs to have a drink of some ominously bubbling and smoking fruit punch, Nita took Jackie out into the relative peace and quiet of the back garden.
    She sat down on the edge of the koi pond and got her breath back, listening to more screams floating down from the upstairs of the house, and to the sound of her pulse starting to slow down at last. After a little while a tall shape came out the back door and made its way over to her through the shadows. “So tell me,” Carl said, “how’s it look?”
    “Really great,” Nita said. “I didn’t know you two were so into this.”
    “Well, why not?” Carl said. “If you spend all the rest of the year fighting the serious Powers of Eeeeevil, then sometimes you just want to spend a little time enjoying the harmless kind of spooky stuff. Keeping the old traditions alive…while making it plain that fewer and fewer of the old ploys the Lone Power used have so much fun scaring us with will work any more: not for anything serious. Sure, it comes up with new ones all the