Chương 148: Chapter 169: The Mash

A scream climbed into a squeal and then broke apart into breathless laughter. The stuffed wolf's head snapped twice more at the partygoers, its eyes flickering red, and then it withdrew into the hidden passage. I danced about in a circle as the giggling baroness and her brave escort moved further down the corridor, clutching each other when a ghoulish laugh emerged from the ceiling. I followed along, dancing in circles in the air, sucking a lollipop and soaking up the ambience.

The candles here were magical instead of flame, and part of that was for safety around loose fabrics in confined spaces. Partly it was because they were cued to flicker in sequence, leading the way down the hallways so our guests would know they're going the right way. And then, at a designated spot, they all go out at once and plunge the hallway into darkness. The baroness's scream once again squeals and then peals with glee.

I channel void so that I glow from within, my skin luminous white like a ghost floating behind them, but I haven't been hiding myself from them so far and they've gotten used to my presence. By the light coming off of me, they can see the fake cotton cobwebs that are lowering around them, descending from a frame in the ceiling attached to a pulley system. They laugh and swat at the "webs", and then scamper on.

It's a lot scarier in the dark by itself, but I tagged along with this group because they seemed a little more scaredy-cat than most and I wanted to break the tension just a little. An actor in a horrific mask lunged out with a "grr!" that was just affected enough to water down the scare. I had coached them on this to get it right. Making it just a little silly, just a little mockish, helped put the fun back in it. We could be trying to really scare people. But we were using the scares to have fun.

I followed them through, and any time it looked like the timid twosome was about to get a genuine spook I was there to take the edge off and pop the bubble. Over and again they leaped in startlement and clutched at each other, laughing through the aftermath. They walked out through a curtain of paper skeletons, reeling with giddy delight, laughing and holding each other, and I zoomed out and about, stopping by the candy dishes to grab a paper-wrapped gumdrop before I toured about.

My flying antics were part of the show here, people pointed and called out to me in passing. Over near the Mad Science corner, a phonograph was reciting the story of the hook-handed man attacking the young couple in their carriage at night, a recording of my voice that played on a loop thanks to a minor script that kept the handle turning. I touched down there and answered questions, and there were many.

Some came through looking dazed, too much to take in, but I like to think my energy was infectious, bringing people into the spirit of the event. And oh the costumes! Everyone has had months to think of their costumes. Millstrong looks like a half-man beast, expertly-applied cosmetics blending wolf and man together, with shredded clothing and ragged claws. There were no legends of werewolves here until I started sharing them, but he has taken to it with a will.

Junia is a cackling crone of a sorceress witch, warty nose and all, with a bag full of bright-green candy apples that are all marked with a caramel skull and crossbones. Cousin Bruce looks like a maddened barbarian with fanciful tattoos painted on and a great flint axe that I had to take the edge off of because he actually brought a sharp weapon to a gala. Cousin Petty wore a tax collector's uniform and she wore it with style.

Tiviti was circulating alongside them, regaling one and all with gruesome stories of her hunts along the border and the strange magics of the monsters. She wore her hunter's leathers and would sometimes playfully "attack" the "monsters" around her. With her standing head and shoulders above anyone who's not wearing stilts, it was easy for me to find her in the crowd.

I made sure I wasn't flying to fast or hitting too hard when I crashed into her from behind, wrapping my hands around her shoulders and hugging her tightly. I have invented glomping.

"Hi!" I called out cheerily.

"Thanks for making this party so great!" Petty looked up at me critically.

"How much sugar have you had?"

"Too much," I acknowledged easily.

"But that's the spirit of Halloween!"

"Sugar," Bruce said.

"And spooks. And masks. And laughter. And pumpkins," he was counting off on his fingers.

"And, apparently, whatever an 'abandoned strip-mall' would be. How many things are the spirit of Halloween?"

"I'll let you know when we run out," I giggled, and squeezed Tiviti a little more. She reached up and patted my shoulder with one hand, pressing me closer to her for a few seconds before turning me loose.

"This is almost like no harvest festival I've ever seen," she said, shaking her head.

"Remarkable."

"Almost no other?" I prompted. She smiled a bit.

"Well, there was one harvest festival I saw that was actually very much like this. But your version is fun, not tragic and haunting." I gasped, and flew around in front of her.

"You have to tell me!" I gestured, and three more pieces of candy flung themselves over into my hands while I gestured her to elaborate her anecdote. She told the story in a sort of rough way, clearly not used to telling tales outside of gory war stories, and she tried to tone this one down some. Millstrong wandered over to listen in, and kept interrupting her to insist she stop censoring herself. At his urging, she started playing it up, and quickly became so exaggerated that it looped back around to being funny.

She had even brought her weapons. Unlike many of the guests whose costumes involved dangerous parts, I did not move to secure or blunt her edges. I could trust her in this party, carrying her sword and magic accessories. Glancing over to the mezzanine, I could spot Licard and Kimothy chatting amiably up there. They were worrying and upsetting the other guests up there, which amused me a ton.

Licard was the spitting image of the legend of Backteeth, horribly distorted and ferocious, dressed in stained rags, with broken chains and snapped ropes dangling from his massive form, and his crazed smile pulled all the way past the molars. Kimothy was wraithly, floating and transparent and wavering in the air. Kimothy was converted into pure mist with his powers, and so looked entirely like a phantom.

Licard had used his flesh of clay technique to sculpt himself into a monster, but he just told everyone around that it was a clever costume and refused to tell them how it was done. They both seemed to get a similar childish glee out of giving the other guests just a little extra spook, seeming just a little more authentically monstrous than the other costumed guests and special effects.

After Tiviti finished her story I hugged her again and flew over to the mad science lab, which now had an unusually large knot of people there staring at the machines. I landed, and started chatting about the inventions and what they did. And then, with a wink, I curved the levin energy and started shaping it, spinning it, lashing it from hand to hand. I flung it up into a series of glass tubes that lit up with colored neon, glowing in eerie shapes and colors.

Then I turned and gave it one last flick, sending it back to the machines. The electricity flowed off my hands and into the arcing auras, and I added one tiny flicker of compressed air to make a tiny rumble of thunder through the area. My audience jumped and gasped, then there was a round of applause before I challenged them to bob for apples, and I whisked away towards the dance floor. The band here was smaller, a dozen musicians, and they were playing entirely in minor keys with slower tempos.

I found Quarl, Rabert and Yheta all standing nearby and chatting amiably, and I insinuated myself easily enough without seeming to play favorites. Other than Yheta, they all seemed to understand that I needed to keep a visible distance. There was a time and a place to mingle with conspirators, and this party was kind of a gray area for that.

"Gentlemen, thank you for attending," I said, with a hostess's curtsy. Rabert bowed back, he was dressed in regulation Nhullit finery but his face was done up in corpsepaint. My hired staff had instructions that anyone who showed up without a suitable costume would be offered a face-painting to make them the shambling undead. Rabert had apparently thought that he need not perform masquerade for us, and now was conscripted to the undead.

"Lady Harigold," he said, straightening.

"You are ever a source of novelty." Quarl was almost half-covered in serpents that looked extremely real until I was very close. Some wrapped around as constrictors, but also plenty of smaller ones that hung by their fangs from his flesh. It was horrifyingly realistic and people went to great pains not to brush up near him.

"I'm seeing some real influences from that jungle. A lot of darkness and danger. It's a very interesting theme, and if anyone had asked me I would have sworn it would flop." Yheta nudged him with an elbow. It was a careful gesture, using one of the few clean areas of his costume. Yheta had decided on a very low-effort costume but made up for it with gusto.

He had worn old and unfashionable clothing that normally would never be seen at a society event so near to Fashion Week, but had doused himself in a full bucket of the fake blood I had set out. He was about three-quarters covered, and grinning through the sticky crimson mask.

"You should have faith. I have to keep telling people- nobody understands how seriously Meadowtam takes its parties."

"Kind of you to say," I demur, quirking a smile.

"Now then, I'm going to go do some flights over the corn maze and startle some folks, then it'll be time for intermission. Enjoy the party!" I notice in passing that despite all three of them carrying highball glasses, Yheta is the only one with alcohol in his. The other two are drinking virgin mocktails, and I approve. If Yheta was a much more clever man, I would not be so worried that drink would dumb him down too much. But on his best day he's barely clever enough, and this is not his best day.

In passing I swing past the apple-bobbing tank and wick all the spilled water out of people's costumes. It's a Halloween party not a wet t-shirt contest. And I don't want credit for inventing the wet t-shirt contest anyway. Bursting out through a window, I let out a cartoonishly evil witch's cackle, the classic "eeee hee-hee-hee-hee!" before I start buzzing over the gardens and the maze. It had taken me two hours during the day to force these crops to grow in fast like this and form the right shapes.

The corn itself would be incredibly bland and under-nourishing, with a texture like wet paper. Using magic to force plants to grow faster does not work well. But they should last for a good several hours, enough to give people a chance to get lost, get spooked, get found, and get relieved. To enter the maze, everyone has to stop and listen to a story told of a living scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head, lurking somewhere around the corn.

We don't have a scarecrow in the corn, but we do have several empty stands for one, ominously tilted. It's a great attraction. Hedge mazes are a great hobby among the bluebloods of Hearstwhile, but a good hedge maze takes generations to fully develop and pretty much everyone knows their way through the major ones by now. Corn mazes can grow quicker, distort the sound differently, and have an entirely different ambience.

The scent, the rustle, the way they dry the air around them instead of the pollenic humidity of boxwood hedges, they create an experience that should be familiar but is different in so many unsettling ways. And nobody knows this one's layout, so it's a real mystery for them. People have gone through this three times already, looking for the hidden scarecrow. But joke's on them, the scarecrow is actually one of the jumpscares at the walk-through haunted house.

The guests turn a corner and 'boo' he's right there, looming. There's always the moment they expect it to move, but it does not- just a hay-stuffed set of clothes leaning against the wall with a pumpkin on top. They poke at it, and discover there's no actor inside, it won't lunge at them. There's a moment of relief. And then the pumpkin falls off and smashes onto the ground in front of them, just as the candles shut off.

The candles are magically timed to shut off just a quarter of a second after the sound so the guests can see the stringy guts of the pumpkin splattering out before it goes dark. It's one of our best scares, especially for people already primed by the maze. Then one staff member comes through with a mop to clear the mess, set up a new pumpkin in front of the hidden catch, and step back through the curtain-shrouded hidden door, and they're ready for the next group.

I've already made arrangements for hog farmers outside the city to buy a cartful of broken pumpkins. I'm enough of my father's daughter that I won't see overripe produce wasted just to entertain nobles. Not even for the sake of a Halloween party. Unnerved and unsettled, several of those nobles cry out sharp barks of fear when I fly overhead, still glowing faintly. For good measure I cackle a little more, send some wind through the stalks, and then head up to the high window that's been left open just for me.

I'm giggling helplessly by now, too amused at my own over-dramatic antics and the rush of sugar. It's been a long time since I indulged this hard, and it's definitely going to give me a headache and a sick stomach tomorrow, but I cannot care right now. I see people mustering near the phonograph, directed by the table that the caterers just set up, ice water and dry wines. People are flocking to it because the rest of the program has been a bit on the cloying side and everyone would like a palette cleanser by now.

Details like that let you steer people around and direct attention where you want it. When it works well, it's like a magician's trick, people watch what you want them to watch and never notice what you need them to ignore. I settle low, and take the needle off the phonograph to interrupt its story. A line of sigils mute the band from here, so it's become a little pocket of near-silence for people to chat. I park there in the air, making pleasant conversation with the guests.

A shocking number of people want to learn more about the death of the Cachexia. While I'm doing my 'ducal princess' bit, people rarely engage with me about my conflicts, as if those matters were coarse and inappropriate. But when I'm the hovering sorceress, blacker than pitch and wreathed in cobwebs, giggling from a sugar high and glowing in the dark, people seem a lot more ready to discuss magic and explosions and the slaying of evil.

They were really surprised to find out that killing this necromancer came after I've killed the same lich three times now. And then the band inside took a break, an intermission. I was ready, they were instructed to make Major Tom the last song of the set. And the tempo of the room shifts, the traffic patterns of the crowd. Off the dance floor now, people make their way to all the different attractions we've set up, and especially for something cool to drink.

My little station suddenly, and apparently quite by accident, became a center of attention. The Wheelhead stiltwalker moved past us, and snuffed every second and third candle, plunging our corner into an unaccustomed dimness. A catering server walked past me and handed me a lit lantern that I set on the table beneath me, before me. Underlit in flickering flames, I was ready to tell my ghost story.