A Night in the Lonesome October

by Roger Zelazny

Magical rotas sometimes strike me as instructions for lunatic scavenger hunts.

Stars swam in the Thames, and the air was full of dirty smells.

I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes.

“Vicar Roberts has become convinced there’s something unnatural in the neighborhood,” he said. “How strange. What might have led him to that belief?” “The bodies with no blood left in them, and the people with anemia, who all seem to have had vivid dreams involving bats. Things like that.”

Such times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames.

“Hard times do really bring out the revolutionary in a person, don’t they?”

“I don’t believe in giving warnings. But I give anybody two attempts on us, to discover their folly. If they do not, and they try a third time, I kill them. That’s all.”

Growing moon. Angry cat. Feather on the wind. Autumn comes. The grass dies.

And he proceeded to tell me the story of how a number of the proper people are attracted to the proper place in the proper year on a night in the lonesome October when the moon shines full on Halloween and the way may be opened for the return of the Elder Gods to Earth, and of how some of these people would assist in the opening of the way for them while others would strive to keep the way closed.