A Night in the Lonesome October

by Roger Zelazny

Somewhere on the long, long walk home an owl passed us, riding the chill breezes on motionless wings. I could not tell whether it was Nightwind. There were rats about the bridge, and I did not know whether Bubo was one of them. 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.

My peregrinations took me past the church;

Does anybody really care about a hungry cat, except for a few friends?” “Maybe that’s all anybody ever has, no matter how the big show is run.”

“Not to Needle.” He chuckled again. “That’s true, isn’t it? I can almost hear him crying, ‘This is not funny!’ Then gulp, and we’d all have the last laugh.”

I breathed the smells of woodsmoke, loam, and rotting windfall apples, still morning-rimed, perhaps, in orchard’s shade, and saw a high, calling flock V-ing its way to the south. I heard a mole, burrowing beneath my feet….

“Yes, and he did have it out from its hiding place today. Whenever he feels particularly depressed he says that it cheers him up to ‘go to the shores of Hali and consider the enactments of ruin’ and then to contemplate the uses he has for it all.”

“I saw him one night, departing that first crypt. I’d hidden myself on a tree limb, to watch it happen. He seemed to ooze up out of there as if he weren’t really moving any muscles, just flowing, the way Quicklime can do. Then he stood there a moment with his cloak flapping about him in the wind, turning his head, looking at the world as if he owned it and was deciding what part of it would amuse him just then. And then he laughed.

“Et cum spiritu tuo,” I

“I think I’m done with the Game. He was a good man. He took good care of me. He cared about people, about the whole world. What’s that human notion—compassion. He had a lot of that. It’s one of the reasons he drank a lot, I think. He felt everybody else’s pain too much.

I could see it now, like a black tornado, surrounding Jack, settling inward. If it entered him completely he would no longer be in control of his actions.

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

Overhead, growing in strength, the older, wiser moon paced me. I’d give her a run for her silver.

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.