[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Halloween has long been believed a time of convergences, of bleeding and seeping and creeping—a twilight time. It is when the daylit world of humanity is co-mingled with the shadow world of the unknown and the unsettling.

But for some people, it is the human realm that is the darkest, the most alien and the most threatening. Some are relegated to the role of the outsider, cast irrevocably as monsters for any slight divergence from the expectations of wider society.

Is it any wonder, then, that in time, some choose to embrace that role, to throw themselves headlong and laughing into the relative paradise of darker pastures?

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Halloween Special: Gloaming.

(Dark, discordant electric guitar music)

NARRATOR

Kev really tries not to fall asleep in geometry – truly, he does. Is it his fault that it’s the last class of the day, and it’s so damn boring? Mr. Wenzler’s voice drones on and on, with no trace of enthusiasm, lulling him into sleep, and before he knows it, the teacher’s pudgy, hairy hand is slapping down on his desktop and scattering the dream that had just begun to coalesce behind his eyes.

His face beet-red behind an iron-grey mustache, Mr. Wenzler demands that he go up to the whiteboard and finish the theorem. Wenzler always makes a point of calling Kev by his full name, which he hates.

Kev does his best not to show it, but his ears burn as he trudges in front of the dozen other students to work through the theorem. For once, he is almost grateful that this shitty school in this nowhere town is so small, but he also shares this class with the two people he has the biggest crush on.

Just my luck, Kev thinks.

Katie is a willowy girl, with auburn hair and hazel eyes, a galaxy of light freckles under her octagonal-framed glasses. Long ago, before Kev’s best friend Mike had moved away, she had played Pathfinder and Warhammer Fantasy with them, and ever since he had been in love with her.

The other would never even glance his direction. Lee is a star on the football team, which makes him pretty popular but does not quite protect him from the occasional ethnic slur against his Korean ancestry. But he is everything Kev is not – masculine, attractive, socially, athletically, and academically skilled in all the right ways.

So when Kev stumbles over the theorem, and Wenzler’s voice cracks like a lash across the silent room, Kev wants to crawl inside himself and die. He cannot meet the gazes of the other students as he moves to his desk at the back, but the teacher once more stops him, insists that from now on, he take one of the empty desks near the front.

It’s not fair, he thinks, I get good grades in this class.

When the school bell rings, he practically runs out, racing to escape the shame but finding it has clambered into his chest, hollowed it out, and nested there.

He sits at the back of the bus, as usual. His home is the third to last on the route, far from town. Pulling out a battered copy of The Silmarillion from his backpack, he begins to read it through for the third time, doing his best to ignore the other kids.

He keeps trying, even when one of them turns and starts pulling bits of cooled popcorn from an oily brown paper bag in their lap, and throwing them at Kev’s downcast head.

It’s Jake Holwood, another star from the football team. His father owns land in both the Dakotas, and has profited handsomely from oil extraction in the north. Usually, Jake doesn’t even take the bus, instead preferring his sleek black F-150, but apparently it’s in the shop. The rumor that’s been floating around school is that Jake crashed it on a night of heavy drinking with his friends, following a victory in an intense rivalry game.

Softly enough that the driver will not hear, Jake begins to call to Kev in a singsong voice, starting with the epithet freak and then graduating to the feminizing and homophobic slurs that Kev has endured many times before.

Kev tells him to get stuffed, and then Jake throws the entire paper bag at him, spraying popcorn detritus all over his book and the back seat. The kids nearby shout, whoop, and laugh, and the bus driver does take notice now, yells back at them to settle down and that they will have to clean that all up before they disembark.

Lips curling in a knife-sharp smile, Jake asks Kev if he heard, says that he’d better get to work.

Kev does, hating to give Jake the satisfaction, but knowing that if it isn’t picked up by his stop, he’ll end up doing it anyway. He is always the one to take the blame. Perhaps it’s his long, dark hair. Maybe it’s his perpetually black-painted fingernails, or his musical and artistic tastes, or his quiet manner and habitual reading.

Regardless, for some reason, he has always been singled out as the source and instigator of all disturbance.

Picking up the popcorn, his thoughts return to Mike and to Charlie White Bear, who had occasionally joined them for a gaming session. Kev wonders if he will ever see either of them again, and feels a dark certainty rise like a stone wall in his mind that he will not.

Reaching out for one of the last outlying pieces, he only just manages to snatch his hand back before one of Jake’s boots stomps down viciously.

Nice reflexes, Jake says with feigned nonchalance, trying to hide his annoyance at being outmatched. Kev considers a cutting reply, swallows it instead. Warily, he finishes cleaning up, then gets back into his seat and waits for the ride to end, putting on his worn-out headphones so that he can pretend not to hear anything further.

When the bus finally stops beside the little rural lot where Kev and his mother live, Kev emerges, feeling utterly depleted. The wind-battered mobile home rests under the shade of three hackberries, the only visible trees upon the miles of surrounding pastureland, occasionally broken by fields of corn or soy.

He goes inside and finds his mom sitting at the tiny kitchen table, midway through what he guesses is her third can of Budweiser. She smiles at him as he sits across from her, asks him gently how his day went. He lies and says it was okay, repeating a familiar ritual.

She asks him if he’s planning to dress up tomorrow, and it’s only then that Kev remembers tomorrow is Halloween, that there is in fact a costume contest this year for the holiday.

He says he hasn’t decided yet, even though he is certain he won’t, feels like he’s got enough of a gravitational pull for derision without inviting more of it.

His mom asks if chicken and pasta sounds good for supper, by which she means frozen tenders and blue-box macaroni. Kev shrugs and says that sounds fine. She rises, a little unsteadily, and begins the meager preparations for their overprocessed meal.

Watching her, he thinks as he has many times before, that is his deadbeat father ever returns, he will kill the man for what he has put Kev’s mother through. Raising a child alone, in a rural community where sometimes the neighborly smiles are just a mask for judgmental murmurings, has worn her already strained spirit thin. Kev cannot remember a time since he was ten that his mother has worked fewer than two jobs.

Feeling another wave of hopeless exhaustion flood through him, Kev stands and goes to his cramped bedroom. Hooking up his old secondhand Gibson Flying V—the most expensive and most thoughtful gift his mother has ever given him, and one he still treasures dearly—he slings the strap over his shoulder, summons thunder to drown out the dark whispers behind his thoughts.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

In the morning, he surprises himself by choosing to dress up after all. The idea had sprung fully formed into his mind in the instant of waking, infused with the knowledge that all of the elements were at hand. For their erstwhile band, Gloamingwood, and in the years of tabletop gaming before that, he and Mike had acquired props that they thought elevated their immersion and then their stage presence. Kev had kept those, even though both the band and their weekend gaming sessions were now forever relegated to the past, perhaps as a way of remembering a period when there was more happiness in his life.

He composes his costume: a Grim Reaper-like concoction of black robes and hood. But instead of the usual face, he chooses instead a wolf-skull mask, and in place of the scythe he carries a heavy, intricately carved walking stave his mother bought for him long ago at a touristy trading post near the Black Hills—another relic from better times.

His mother, bleary-eyed from a mix of alcoholism and overwork, brightens when she sees him in a way that almost breaks his heart. Flashing her rare and beautiful smile, she claps and dances excitedly, saying that she loves his costume and that it is very spooky.

Despite himself, Kev feels a warm golden glow swell around his heart and radiate out through his body. As he leaves the house and walks toward the dirt road, waits for the yellow bus to arrive, he feels a strange and wondrous sensation of lightness, of possibility, that he cannot remember ever having felt before.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

When they reach the school, some of the students also applaud his costume—but only those that didn’t ride the bus, do not know what face lies behind the mask. When classes start and Kev is forced to reveal himself, the appreciation for it suddenly evaporates. At ten o’clock, when everyone who wore a costume gathers in the gymnasium to display their costume for the contest, he receives not a single vote.

This doesn’t surprise him, not really, but that wonderful inner light his mother’s visible joy had kindled has diminished now to the barest of flickers.

A thought keeps coming to him, as he sits through his classes: a remembrance of how much he loved Halloween as a small boy. It had felt like a magical time, eerie and even frightening, but always in a thrilling and fun way—perhaps because, deep down, he had always known that he was safe.

He misses that depth of emotion. He feels numb now, deadened, capable only of veering between grey hopelessness and dark anger.

But then, over lunch, as he sits at the usual lonely corner far from his fellow students, Katie sits not so far from him. Offering a brief smile when he looks at her in surprise, she says softly that she likes his costume.

The inward glow rekindles.

Afterward, as the lunch period draws toward its close and the students congregate in the common area or linger around their hallway lockers, he finds Katie standing with a small group of her friends. The others look at him in mute distaste and disperse when he draws near, but Katie remains. His heart hammering, Kev summons up his nerve and asks the question that has been burning on his tongue ever since she sat near him, asks if she would ever want to catch a movie with him.

Sorry, she says, I can’t date someone like you.

Kev recoils, the words hitting him almost as palpably as an open palm. He had been prepared for rejection, even expected it—rejection is the reaction he is most familiar with. But the casual cruelty of that phrase someone like you had taken him totally off-guard. His mind automatically translates it into the names that have been hurled at him for years: freak, queer, fag. He had always thought that Katie was different, kinder and more open-minded than the other students, shaped more sympathetically by her less-than-popular interests and slight social ineptitude.

Numbness spreads through him. He feels like his spirit is leaving his body, pulling up and back through the tip of his skull and rising to look down on the world as an eternal outsider.

Okay, he mutters, twice. Katie looks like she is about to say something further, but then turns and walks away from him, not glancing back.

Kev feels so very cold, watching her go.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

It happens in gym, his penultimate period of the day, this thing that he has anticipated even without knowing what form it would take. After an absolutely atrocious bout of wrestling – during which the other boys have deftly humiliated him more than was necessary, but not so much as to bring the intervention of the teacher – he is washing the stink that is only partially his off his body when three of the other boys corner him in the shower.

They begin to call him all the old names, ask him what treat he’d like for Halloween. One of them begins to do a mock strip-tease in his towel, asks Kev if he likes what he says.

Kev does his best not to show the terror that is freezing his veins. He has been mocked before, hit before, but this feels like something worse, something he dares not imagine.

He sees their eyes, hard and devoid of sympathy, and that’s when he knows that he is right to be afraid.

But then the gym teacher comes through the shower room, yelling at the boys to finish up and get to their next class. And just like that, the boys disperse, leaving Kev to get dressed. As he does, he notices that Lee is sitting before his own locker, putting on his shoes. From his seat, he had to have seen and heard everything that just happened.

But Lee will not look at him, says not a word.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

When Kev steps off the bus and walks toward his home, something feels at once wrong even before he enters the little trailer house. There is no light from within, even though it is evening and the shade from the trees would mean it was dim inside.

Stepping through the front door, he calls to his mother. There is no answer. Her little red car, battered and always seeming on the verge of failure, was parked in the drive. Kev calls to her once more, feeling something hard clenching in his innards.

He finds her in the bathroom, sprawled upon the floor. Kneeling to check for a pulse, he knows as soon as he feels the coldness of her skin that there will be none. It is a long while before he stirs, his legs cramping and prickling with impaired circulation as he kneels beside her.

It feels like he should cry, or scream, or rage. He thinks that he should run to the phone, call someone even though his mother is now beyond help. His thought feeling as fragile and as rigidly inhuman as crystals, he wonders whether it was a heart attack, a stroke, some unknown complication of alcoholism. He also thinks that it doesn’t matter, because she is gone forever regardless.

He stands and paces through the house, not knowing what to do. It is on the third pass through that he notices, through the back window, the forest.

There cannot be a forest there. There has never been a forest there. But there, dark and thick in the autumn dusk, rear trees taller and mightier than any that have ever grown upon the South Dakota prairie.

And his mother stands at the edge of the trees, beckoning to him. She is there only a moment, and then she recedes into the darkness under the densely tangled boughs.

Kev thinks of the books he has read on mythology. He thinks of Samhain, the night when the world of the dead conjoined with that of the living.

Before he leaves the mobile home, he checks the bathroom once more. She still lies there, cold and pale and unmoving. He turns from her and steps out the back door, drifts across the flat pastureland toward the trees.

They whisper, and their whisper is not the usual soughing of leaves in the wind, but something more, something full of hidden meaning. He can hear them long before he reaches the grove’s edge, and when he falls under their shadow, the whispers drown out his thoughts.

Deeper and deeper he walks into the trees, into their premature night, and as he walks, he feels himself changing. Something is entering him, the liquid susurrus carrying with it some otherworldly infection that is rippling through his flesh and shivering in his bones.

Always small and underweight, he feels his limbs lengthening, his muscles thickening. He can feel the power that surges in his blood.

And now, at last, he understands the whispers, and recognizes his mother’s voice mingled among them.

Carry us. Carry us. We are the damned, we are kindred. Eat us, carry us, feed us.

And what Kev thinks is, yes, yes, I will.

When he reaches the heart of the grove—he cannot see it, so dense is the overstory there, but nevertheless he knows it is the heart—Kev knows that what entered that grove will never emerge from it again. This knowledge is a sanguine mirth that tingles in his core, that makes his arteries thunder.

Carry us among them, feed us, the whispers say.

Kev rears back his head, howls his answer into the October night.

He thinks, as stupid as those boys were, perhaps they were right, and it is indeed time to indulge himself – to go trick-or-treating. He will feed his new appetite, feed the hungry, angry dead within him, as they have never been fed before.

Perhaps he will start with the ones who cornered him in the shower, he considers, as his long and bestial body bounds out from the trees and over the moonlit grass. Or perhaps he will start with Jake, with Katie, with Lee.

He grins a grin which has never been seen in daylight, by living eyes, and tells himself that the night is long and there is no need to agonize over that choice. There will be time enough for all.

(Discordant heavy metal music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, editing, and musical arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Have a happy Halloween.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]