HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: An Excerpt from the Novel Servant
by Patrick R. Field
Gladys greets me in her usual loud, delightful soprano shrill, “Hello, Mitch! Happy Samhain!”
“What is Sahween?” I ask.
“Samhain is the original name for October thirty-first in the Gaelic calendar, the festival celebrating the end of the harvest. and the beginning of the darker days of the winter.
Halloween is a combination of the pagan word Samhain and the Christian observance of All Hallow’s Eve. The pagans believed that this night was when the veil between the world of the dead and the living was the thinnest, whereas the spirits of the dead walked among the living.”…
…“Good, you are both wearing black and covering your arms,” she states. She then heads toward the dining room, with us following behind her carrying various cloth bags. Gladys does not stop until we’re in the kitchen. Prompted to put the bags on the kitchen table, she empties the contents onto the table.
Pulling out various jars, velvet-covered boxes, and then a mortar and pestle, Bucks jokes
lightheartedly, “What are we preparing tonight, a witch’s brew?”
Without missing a beat, Gladys answers, “Yes, well, sort of…the ingredients are certainly used to cast spells in the Wiccan religion, but we’re going to use them to ward off evil if we encounter it.”
Buck’s mouth drops. Picking up where he left off, I respond to Gladys’s statement, “Evil?”
“Oh, it’s just a precaution…don’t worry, boys, Auntie Gladys knows what she is doing. We just don’t know what we’re going to find down there, and I would rather be safe than sorry.”
Gladys begins to pluck various roots, flowers, and grains from the jars, and place them into the mortar, grinding them into a fine powder with the pestle. From a clear bottle with a glass stopper, she pours the oily contents into the mortar to form a paste.
My curiosity finally getting the better of me, I ask, “What’s in your ‘concoction’?”
“Snaps and snails and puppy dog tails,” she chortles, a devilish smile beaming across her face as she continues uninterrupted. “I’m teasing. It’s your typical combination of magical plants…Mug wort, Wormwood, Mandrake, Sage oil, and a little Belladonna. Don’t want too much of that—we don’t need a hallucinogenic tonight. I have a feeling we’re going to see quite a show.”
“We’re not gonna eat that, are we?” I exclaim, after hearing the list of ingredients.
“No, silly, we’re going to wear it, on our faces. To trick anything nasty we might find down there that we’re not part of the living,” Gladys explains.
Instantly, Buck and I look at each other, our faces reflecting the same thought: “What the hell did we get ourselves into?”
She then opens the three velvet-covered boxes and pulls out three identical necklaces made of fine silver chains, with a round globe-like cage at the end that’s about three inches in diameter. Picking up one of the necklaces, she springs a catch on the cage, and it opens. Opening another of the boxes, she extracts what looks like a light brown carrot that is split at one end into two identical roots with two smaller roots sprouting from the other end. The root looks like the body of a miniature person. “This is Mandrake root, a very powerful plant we will wear around our necks in these necklaces to protect us,” Gladys explains while she demonstrates how the small root fits into the cage, closing the cage to contain the human-looking root.
“Oooh, jewelry,” I titter nervously.
Gladys looks at me and smiles, condoning the light-heartedness of my comment, as she encloses the mandrake root in the last of the necklaces. Opening her carpet bag, she extracts three large black scarves with embroidered symbols in white thread along the edges, similar to the scarf Gladys wears during a séance. Handing a black scarf to each of us, she demonstrates how to fold it, drape it over our shoulders and tie it around the bases of our necks. The scarves remind me of large cravats, the white symbols bold and stark against the black uniform we are suited in. Gladys then dips her finger into the gray paste from the mortar and delivers the next set of instructions.
“When we cover our faces with this mixture, it camouflages our skin so that spirits cannot see we’re human. We’ll be virtually invisible to them. This, with the dark clothing and the protective symbols in silver spun white thread, is our best chance of observing without being recognized. Buck, honey, please bend your neck.”
Buck does as instructed, not resisting this request, or even asking one of a myriad of questions I know his little scientific brain is conjuring. She then smears the paste across Buck’s face: a large stripe across his forehead, two vertical stripes on either cheek connecting to the stripe crossing the forehead, and then a final stripe across the chin connecting to the vertical
stripes, forming a square around his face. Buck’s face is effectively covered in the grayish-green salve—only his eyes, nose and mouth can be detected on his face. Gladys repeats the procedure on my face and then her own. With our camouflaged faces and dark clothing, we
look like we are going into a nightly battle.
“All right, boys, we are in for quite a trip tonight. Samhain is a sacred day to the mystical community as this is the night when the veil is the thinnest between the dead and the living, the hours when piercing this veil is the easiest… and we have many that are waiting from the other side. Lead on, Mitch.”…
…“This is an altar.”
Turning, I watch as she slowly moves to the altar. In an almost trance-like state, her outstretched arms, extended hands, and fingers are inching toward the altar’s smooth surface. Touching it, her eyes close slowly. Then, without warning, a violent force pushes her hands away from the edge of the altar as if the altar’s rock was carved from conducted electricity.
Recovering from the shock, still standing close to the altar, she turns to Buck, who is standing behind her.
“Buck, hand me the white candle in my bag and the box of matches.”
Buck, who has been carrying her bag throughout this journey thus far, does as he is told. Gladys takes the candle and lays it on the edge of the altar. Repeating the same incantation she used for the séances, she lights it with a match.
“We need to join hands around the candle,” she instructs.
I am feeling a little apprehensive about what we’re about to do. Namely, participating in a séance on Halloween night, in a secret subterranean cellar, around an altar that was used for some kind of cult-like religious ceremonies. But we have trusted Gladys to guide us on this trek through the metaphysical world thus far, so why should we stop trusting her now? Buck and I, standing next to the longer sides of the altar on either side of Gladys, grasp her closest hand and then enclose our hands across the surface of the altar to complete the circle around the candle. Gladys begins the séance.
“Jedidiah, if you’re here, answer our questions as you have before using the flame of the candle. Jedidiah, is this the place where you died?” The flame of the candle in the breezeless chamber bends strongly and unmistakably.
“Jedidiah, were you murdered in this place?” The flame sputters again, even more violently to the point of being extinguished.
“Jedidiah, were you killed by your father, Ezekiel Sheppard, in this place?” To our surprise, the flame remains still. “Jedidiah, were you killed by Ezekiel Sheppard, your father, in this place?”
Inexplicably, a phantom breeze extinguishes the flame completely. Within seconds, the flame reignites. Then the brightness in the chamber darkens as if the collective light from the torches were being covered with shades. We nervously look around the chamber, anticipating what is to happen next.
Then it begins. A white translucent mist slowly materializes in the air above the middle of the altar. The threads of the mystical void forming from the atmosphere in the chamber, draining and collecting the energy needed to form from the torch-lit room. A mass of mist floats above the candle and our enclosed circle and extends toward the other end of the altar. The mist encompassing the air above the altar, gathering more translucent fibers to increase its length and width, begins to model itself into a recognizable organic form: the torso of a man. The ethereal torso amassing more ectoplasmic substance, sculpts the metaphysical strands into the shapes of rudimentary shoulders and hips and developing arms and legs.
Fully formed are the appendages, the upper limbs lying next to the ghostly torso; the manifesting figure is lying down, floating above the altar. The presence resembles that of the male anatomy. However, the whitish threads around the midsection of the body are not developing into male genitalia, but something that is not anatomical. With contours that are knotted and folded, the structure is unlike human skin and viscera. The figure is clothed in something like a loincloth, covering the groin and the buttocks. Simultaneously, rapidly multiplying strands of ectoplasm stretching from the base of the shoulders form layers of the neck region. Projecting further, the milky white filaments transform into the shell of a human skull. As the skull base is applied with more layers of ethereal fibers, the facial features of the head begin to emerge. The translucent hair sprouting from the crown of the skull cascades to the shoulders. The smooth, unwrinkled skin covering the face is that of a youth. As the ghostly facial features refine, the face of a beautiful young man with generous lips emerges. This face is familiar to me, to us. We have seen it in numerous black and white photographs from the Sheppard family album and internet news clippings: it is the face of Jedidiah Sheppard.
The fully formed apparition of Jedidiah Sheppard clothed in a garment that barely covers his midsection, is lying still, as it floats above the altar in suspended animation. The ethereal sculpture of a stunningly handsome youth waiting. Suddenly, the otherworldly body is convulsing, the chest heaving, the eyes wide open, and the mouth agape, stretched to its limit. The facial features reveal pain; the ghostly figure is screaming in pain.
Abruptly, streams of ectoplasm resembling blood spurt furiously from a narrow cavity in the chest, oozing across and down the sides of the torso. It is a horrible sight. The body lies motionless as the ethereal blood cascades across the corporeal being. Then the body returns to its unblemished presence, lying still as before, in repose.
Within seconds, the convulsions occur again, with the face conveying pain and fear and, as before, the ghostly blood explodes from the chest and across the torso. It is as if a video recording was being repeated. This ghastly act repeats itself several more times. Is he
trying to communicate something that we are not seeing? Then the repetitions stop. Jedidiah’s spirit remains floating above the altar. Motionless.
A powerful wind rushes into the chamber suddenly, blowing against us and the torches as it whips the flames into a frenzy. Jedidiah’s floating, peaceful body dematerializes quickly, and within seconds, the torches are extinguished. We are completely thrust into darkness except for the weak light of the candle.
In the middle of the chamber above the benches, a glowing mass of energy begins to manifest, sparks of light crackling from the center, radiating outward into many sharp points, the glowing form becoming more solid as it assumes an asymmetrical star-like shape. The mass of energy resembles the dark, amorphous shape that Gladys drew during the séance. It is not Jedidiah, but the other force that came through, the force that does not want us to communicate with Jedidiah.
Gladys, startling me, yells, “Turn your flashlights on. We need to leave now!”
After 25 years teaching Anatomical Sciences and Neuroscience, Patrick R. Field is pursuing his passion of spine-chilling fiction writing, a unique blend of scientific knowledge with supernatural storytelling: The Malevolent, The Bedfordshire Warlock and Servant. Up next, Blood Crystal, a paranormal M/M romantasy in the OBX involving pirate lore and blood magic.
Servant was published in May 2023 by The Wild Rose Press and the haunting that happens to the married couple is based on true events that have occurred in my home in the Northern Poconos to myself, my husband and various guests. Suffice it to say, we have had some interesting breakfast conversations.
