Summer's End Read online

  Summer’s End

  A Halloween Novella

  By

  Lisa Morton

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright © 2013 by Lisa Morton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-03-7 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-18-1 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-04-4 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941617

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: October 4, 2013

  Cover Design: Denise Daniel

  Cover Art: Harry Morris

  Edited by: Norman Rubenstein

  For the real-life Ricky,

  who knows better than to leave me alone at Halloween

  Endorsements

  “With her new novella, Summer’s End, Lisa Morton achieves something rare, arguably unique: she creates a genre that can be defined only by this piece of work. This challenging, exhilarating, darkly-humored, heartbreaking work is hands-down brilliant, the best work she’s ever done; it’s been a long time since the boundaries between the book and its author have been so expertly blurred, trapping the reader in the oppressive , nerve-wracking gray area between. Don’t start reading with any preconceived notions about horror or storytelling because they’ll be shredded into confetti and scattered to the dark winds. Just steel yourself for a reading experience that will rival any other piece of work you will encounter this year.” – Gary A. Braunbeck Bram Stoker Award-winning author of To Each Their Darkness

  “In Summer’s End, Lisa Morton has created something so strikingly unique that it stands alone in the genre. All writers pull their work from inside themselves, but Morton has literally put herself inside the work, and she has pulled it off so beautifully, so seamlessly, that it does not read like fiction — it reads like an account of actual events. Her extensive knowledge of her subject and her impeccable skills as a writer and storyteller are combined in a wicked and delightful potion that gave me real goosebumps, real chills, and reminded me that horror fiction can and should frighten the hell out of the reader. Summer’s End is a thin volume, but it is a formidable achievement. I’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.” – Ray Garton Author of Live Girls and Meds.

  “Samhain, says Lhwyd, is compounded of Samb, summer and fhuin the end: this is a false derivation…the Druids taught that Samhain at this season called the souls to judgment; hence Samhain was named balsab, or Dominus mortis, for Bal is Lord, and Sab death.”

  Charles Vallancey, “Of Allhallow Eve” from Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis Volume 3 (1786)

  “General Vallancey, though a man of learning, wrote more nonsense than any man of his time.”

  London Quarterly Review, April 1818

  October 31, 2012

  Almost Midnight

  My name is Lisa Morton. I’m one of the world’s leading authorities on Halloween. And this year I discovered that everything I thought I knew, was wrong.

  October 20, 2012

  It’s been less than two weeks since the world started to fall apart.

  During the third week of October, I received an e-mail with the subject line “Samhain query.” Of course, I get a lot of e-mailed questions this time of year: Requests for interviews, reporters searching for illustrations for Halloween articles, someone trying to identify and appraise an odd Halloween collectible. This year I had a new Halloween history book out, so I was trying to set up book signings. I’d even been invited to sign at a store in Salem, home of America’s own homegrown witch-hunting tragedy, although they couldn’t find me a place to stay; hotels there book up a year in advance for the October festivities.

  But, two things stood out about this e-mail: The first was that it asked not about Halloween, but about the holiday’s ancient Celtic forebear. The second was that the sender’s address ended in “ucla.edu.”

  I clicked on the message and read:

  Dear Ms. Morton –

  I’m a linguistics professor at UCLA specializing in Latin, and I’m currently working with a team from Ireland to translate a manuscript discovered in a recent archaeological dig. The manuscript was written mostly in Latin, but was believed to belong to an Irish Druid circa 350 C.E. It includes numerous references to Samhain, many of which I’m frankly having difficulty making sense of. I found your book The Halloween Encyclopedia in the campus library, and you seem to have extensive knowledge of Samhain. Your bio says you’re in the Southern California area, so would you be open to a meeting? Thank you. My contact information is below.

  Sincerely,

  Dr. Wilson Armitage[1]

  I checked the e-mail headers to make sure this really had come from UCLA, because otherwise I would have smiled and dismissed it as an early Halloween prank. The Celts’ Druids—essentially their priest caste—were notorious for passing all of their lore verbally; they didn’t believe in writing anything down. To have a Druid “manuscript,” then, was virtually impossible. And in Latin? There had been cases of Celts who had integrated into Roman society and become quite adept in Latin, but they were from the Gaul tribes of continental Europe, not Ireland.

  But, if this was real…

  Scholars frankly know little about the Irish Celts, and less about Samhain. What we have are the tantalizing bits passed down in legends transcribed by early Catholic missionaries. Stories about heroes who fought malicious sidh, or fairies, on Samhain Eve[2]. Horror tales involving hanged corpses that returned to vengeful life on that night and asked for drinks, which they spit into the faces of those who were foolish enough to supply them, causing immediate death to their benefactors[3]. Romances about princesses who turned into swans on October 31st and who flew off with their true love[4]. There were suggestions that the Celts had celebrated “summer’s end” (the literal translation of “Samhain”) with a three-day long party of drinking, feasting and horse racing. One debate raging among those who study Halloween questions how much our modern holiday owes to the Celts. Some believe that the festival has a completely Christian history, and that its grimmer aspects derive from the November 2nd Catholic celebration of All Souls. Myself, I fall largely on the side of “summer’s end”—I think Halloween unquestionably inherited some of its lore from Samhain, like belief in supernatural forces being prevalent on the evening of October 31st, or the notion (held mainly by the old Scots) that fortune-telling was likelier to be successful if performed on All Hallows Eve.

  There’s another camp, however, which holds that Halloween is little more than a pagan festival renamed; fundamentalist Christians go so far as to condemn the holiday as a celebration of “Samhain, Lord of the Dead.”[5] What the fire-and-brimstone preachers don’t know is that their “facts” stem from the fanciful work of one Charles Vallancey, an eighteenth-century British engineer who was dispatched by the government to survey Ireland. He fell in love with the Irish/Celtic language and culture, and
spent most of the rest of his life collecting information, which he transcribed into a massive opus (pretentiously) called Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis. Except…Vallancey was frankly an arrogant fool. He was obsessed with the notion that the Celtic tongue could be traced back to Indo-European roots, and in his quest to find connections he frequently disposed of the facts. He somehow decided that all of the other scholars (and there had already been many even by 1786, when his Collectanea was published) were wrong, and that Samhain had not been a new year’s celebration and in-bringing of the harvest, but was rather a day of judgment when the Celts offered sacrifices to their dark god “Bal-Sab.” Vallancey’s books found their way onto library shelves around the world, next to volumes that both reiterated and decried them, and so Vallancey inadvertently created a strange alternate history of Halloween. By the 1990s, some American church groups were calling October 31st “The Devil’s Birthday” and they consequently banned trick or treat. I wondered if they were simply miserable people who didn’t want their kids to have any fun, either.

  So now I had been presented with what could potentially, possibly, change our understanding of Samhain and perhaps finally lay the ghost of Vallancey to rest. My schedule was pretty booked, but I had a rare free night tomorrow, and my significant other, Ricky, was working on a movie that was shooting down in South Carolina (he’s an actor, and is most well known for his performance as “Henry the Red” in Army of Darkness). I answered Dr. Armitage and told him I’d be happy to meet tomorrow to discuss his project. He responded within minutes, suggesting a time and providing his UCLA office address.

  At least Armitage was legit, and he wasn’t likely to be the kind of man who could be fooled by a scam. What would I find out? Was Samhain mainly an administrative function when the Celts extinguished all their home hearths and relit them with an ember from a fire kindled by Druid priests (for which services they were duly taxed)? Was it really a three-day kegger? Was it possible that human sacrifice had been performed?

  I was twenty-four hours away from finding out.

  October 21, 2012

  Evening

  Wilson Armitage turned out to be one of those college professors who you knew had girls fighting to sign up for his classes—he was maybe 35, with a charmingly ragged haircut, a quick smile, and clothes straight from Urban Outfitters. His office was more old-fashioned than he was, full of language reference books and stacks of papers and jars of pencils; only one small laptop on the desk offering evidence of the 21st century.

  If I liked Wilson immediately, I was less sure about the man with him: Thin, fifty-something, with narrow features and a perpetual scowl. Wilson introduced him as Dr. Conor ó Cuinn, the archaeologist who had overseen the excavation at which the manuscript had been found. He’d flown over from Ireland with the actual artifact, which UCLA was still in the process of scanning. Wilson did most of the talking, but Conor never stopped staring at me. It occurred to me to wonder if he simply mistrusted women. Or perhaps American women?

  Wilson started by offering me a chair, then turned his laptop around to let me look at pages of the manuscript while he talked. The photos on the screen showed a continuous scroll, broken into frames for scanning, with edges chewed and uneven; the parchment or vellum was covered in neat handwriting that I just barely recognized as Latin. The scroll had been wrapped in oiled cloth and laid within a metal box with sealed edges—a box still clutched by the bony fingers of a long-dead female corpse. A poor farmer in Northern Ireland had discovered the remains while digging peat blocks out of a bog. Fortunately he’d had enough sense to call the authorities, who’d brought in ó Cuinn. The excavation had been brief—there’d been nothing else at all in the bog—but the scroll was remarkable. The author had been named Mongfind[6], and claimed to have been the last of the Irish Druids.

  “Well, right off the bat, something’s odd,” I said, “that’s a female name, and most of the Druids were men, although there are isolated historical recordings of female Druids.”

  The two professors exchanged a quick glance, and then Wilson smiled. “You’re going to be in for a few surprises, I think. According to this…exactly half the Druid caste were women, and they were essential to the Druid rituals.”

  I couldn’t even answer, not right away. Half the Druids were women? “How do you know this isn’t a fraud?”

  Wilson shot a glance at his Irish companion, who nodded back to him. “We’ve got everything from carbon dating to Mongfind’s body to confirm this.”

  “So you think the body you found this with was Mongfind herself?”

  “We believe so—Mongfind mentions several…uh, peculiarities of her body that matched up to the corpse found in the bog. We’ve even got autopsy results on the body confirming how she died, how old she was, and what she ate for her last meal. And of course, Dr. ó Cuinn is a highly regarded specialist in his field. No, the evidence is incontrovertible.”

  ó Cuinn spoke up, and his brogue was thick and obvious, even with only two words spoken. “The tongue…”

  Armitage made a quick grimace, then added, “Of course. One of those ‘peculiarities’ mentioned in the manuscript is that Mongfind’s tongue was cut out. The body we found had been mutilated in that manner.”

  “Why was her tongue cut out?”

  Armitage took a deep breath and then said, “What do you know about the conversion of the Celts to Christianity?”

  I shrugged. “As much as anyone, I guess. Gregory the Great taught his missionaries the doctrine of syncretism[7], of incorporating existing pagan practices rather than stamping them out. All Saints’ Day was probably moved from May 13th to November 1st to help Catholic missionaries in Ireland convert the Celts[8].”

  ó Cuinn asked, “Have you not wondered why the Celts would have so easily converted?”

  In fact, I had. I figured that more often than not, conversion had been along the lines of the conquest of the Aztecs, when Cortez had ridden into their lands with a banner that read “We shall conquer under the sign of the cross” and a large force of men with superior armor, weapons, and diseases that the Aztecs couldn’t fight. “Sure, I’ve wondered that, but I figured they probably kind of bought them off with a combination of gifts and threats.”

  “According to this…” Armitage gestured at the laptop screen, “…the Catholic missionaries had studied the tactics employed by Roman troops against the British Celts, and they learned. When they were ready, they moved into Ireland with a hired army and started by slaughtering all of the Celt warriors, then moved onto the Druids. Only a few escaped; the remaining Celts converted easily.”

  “So you’re telling me this document reveals that early Catholic missionaries were basically mass murderers?”

  “Well, more in the nature of…conquerors,” Wilson said, squirming, then riffling through a stack of printouts on his desk. “Listen to this: ‘Yesterday the Catholics offered a gift of a great man built of wicker. This figure could hold fifty men, and the Catholics suggested we should tour it from the inside. When fifty of us were within, they sealed the entrance and set the wicker man afire. The rest of us tried to save our fellows, but our enemies had sunk traps in the earth, and many of our tribe died impaled on great spikes. Those of us who suffered neither stakes nor flames were forced to listen to the dying screams of our brothers and sisters.’”

  I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “This is all going to go over well with modern Catholics.”

  But bitter jokes aside, my head was spinning. Hadn’t it been Caesar who had ascribed wicker men to the Celts[9]? Yet now we had something saying the infamous giant figures were not Celtic, but had been used as a trick by Catholic missionaries…who were also ruthless invaders. “So…are you suggesting that all of the other histories…”

  ó Cuinn leaned forward, his pinched features eager. “…are false, re-written by later Christian scribes who were instructed to hide the truth.”

  “Why?” Even as I asked it, I knew the answer.

  Wilso
n confirmed. “Don’t the victors in every war write the history they want? The Catholics probably weren’t comfortable with a society in which women held half the religious offices and…”

  “And what?”

  Wilson abruptly dropped his eyes and fidgeted; he was uneasy talking about whatever came next. I looked to ó Cuinn, who slid a USB stick across the table to me. “It might be easier if you just read what Dr. Armitage has translated thus far.”

  I picked the stick up. “I can take this?”

  They both nodded, so I put it in a pocket. “Okay. But…you called me in with questions about Samhain, and you haven’t even mentioned that.”

  Nodding toward the stick, Wilson said, “Read that and you’ll see. According to our Druid priestess Mongfind, Samhain was a little more than a new year’s party. It was…” He trailed off, unsure, or simply unwilling to tell me.

  “What?”

  ó Cuinn filled in. “According to this…the Druids could perform real magic, and on Samhain they communed directly with their gods.”

  I’m sure my mouth was open as I stared at ó Cuinn; I expected him to wink, or laugh.

  He didn’t.

  October 21

  -

  October 22

  I am Mongfind, daughter of Fidach of Munster, and a devoted sister of the Morrigan. I was once the Arch-Druid of Ireland, but now I am simply the last Druid. Last night was Samhain, and I attempted to speak to the gods. I failed. When I have finished writing this, the Druids will be no more.

  That was how the manuscript began.

  I stayed up all night reading it. Wilson had translated around 30,000 words so far—he was still working through the rest—but I understood now why they’d made me sign a nondisclosure agreement before I’d left the office.

  This would change everything. Not just our knowledge of the Celts, but of the Romans, the Christians, and much of what came after.

  Mongfind began by talking about her childhood, focusing on how she’d begun training in the Druid priesthood from the age of six. She memorized thousands of pieces of history, religious ritual, law, and herbal knowledge. By the age of 16, she could recite thousands of lengthy chants, or prepare potions that would cure any disease. She described a world of golden palaces and well-fed, happy citizens, of bards who performed magnificent poems and noble warriors who fought off enemies with ease. According to her, the Celts had skilled astronomers who had already charted the solar system, seamen who regularly visited America, and farmers who could produce grains and vegetables that remained fresh through the dead of winter.