Here's the text of this year's parade. I'll post the answers in a few days:)
This year the parade starts early, before the sun is even fully down. You can see the first signs of it form aroun the edges of the town, see the first balloons go up, the first skeletons on bags and clothes, the first sing song trick or treat. The parade is coming, and the town is getting ready because this year, the parade is going to be bigger than ever before.
There's a float first. Which is new. A float bearing an altar, a rock which has been hammered flat and wide and which holds a single cave bear skull. There's something stark about it, something powerful and the altar almost seems to hum as it goes past. There are cheers, some jokes, but not as many as usual. The people of the town know what's passing, and they know not to meet it's eyes or draw it's attention.
Behind that comes Pliny the Younger, excitedly discussing the relative merits of ghosts versus pagans as the monster in horror fiction with Bede, who, perhaps, looks a little shifty. Behind them the Prince is arguing with the other Prince, the one who can't seem to decide whether to be angry or crippled with grief. His features keep changing too, tall and dark haired one minute, older and stockier and blonder the next. Behind him, an old man dressed like an advisor looks daggers at the Prince, utterly failing to notice the look on his son's face. The younger man keeps pace with his father, talks like him, moves like him but is invisible. They both hate the variable prince in front of them, that much is certain, but as they pass, it becomes clear that may not be enough.
Behind them come the mad old men, the three Kings arguing over who had the worse time of it, whilst, behind them, come their victims. The drowned and the mutilated, the savaged and the left behind. A litany of lives crushed because a man with a crown had a bad day. All of them look murder at the backs of the kings, none of them are noticed.
It could be worse of course. Behind them come the Revengers and their victims, the bloody tragedies lost in the shadow of one man's pen. Or two, depending on your point of view. To one side of them, not in the parade but near it there's a shadowy figure who seems to be controlling them, manipulating them. We can't see his face, because he doesn't want us to.
He doesn't have it all his own way though. Two men follow the crowd of Elisabethan horrors, both dressed for the occasion and either hurrying to catch up with the Princes or in no hurry to get near them at all. They can't seem to agree on which one is which and one of them keeps coming up with inventions which can't possibly work, or at least work yet, but they're alive and they're unnoticed by the author. For now.
Behind them, the parade bulks out into the occult consulting detectives and the poor, mad blasted citizens of 1920s horror. People with eyes too big for their heads follow a man who appears to be talking to a cat who isn't there, and a group of terrified, innocents, clustered together either for protection or because that way the chances of someone else dying first are higher. Next to them, one man, his face not quite right, mumbles something about fungus. No one makes eye contact.
Their faces are picked out by the Electric Pentagram held aloft by the Occult Scientists. Carnacki's people have had a good year and their numbers have been swelled both by Lovecraft himself, and by a tall, precise man with a beaked nose and a long gait. The man next to him is clearly military, possibly medical and utterly unconvinced by everything the occultists do. They don[t mind and, as he passes by, you can tell, neither does he. Not tht he'd ever let his friend see that. The White Street Society follow on, trying to borrow money from them. They've not had any luck. Yet.
Behind them come the vampires. All of them. The red cloaked horrors, the feral, pallid beasts, the rank and file of the undead mixing in with their huge, primal ancestors and their smaller, glittering cousins. The sparkling vampires get some looks, a few taunts, but not many. Because the 12 figures moving behind them, and the shadowy legions they've brought with them have the stench of death to them, That unique aroma of tragedy and pain and horror and the joy of someone else's blood on your face. No one watches until they go past. No one sees the two little girls following them, hand in hand. Both look sad. One looks FED.
Behind them come the zombies, and the horde of the undead makes the vampire legion look tiny. The zombies who've come from the mall, the zombies who still have their grave clothes on, the zombies that run and the zombies that shuffle and around them, careful, frantic, fragile and human, come the survivors. The polite, harried, blonde haired man with red on him, his doomed friends, his sort of girlfriend. On the other side of the parade, an unusually similar group keeps pace with them. On one side, the friend trips. On the other, a second later, so does his twin. Behind them, the sherriff and his terrified band slope along, moving from shadow to shadow, place to place. The sherriff looks dead eyed, fatigued. He keeps rubbing one hand as though it's sore.
The mood darkens as the zombies pass but it lightens up as classic rock blares out from a pair of cars that elad the next stage of the parade. The two brothers may have different rides, and one has clearly seen better days, but they're travelling as one. In the backseat of one car sits a polite, serious looking young man with dark hair and a trenchcoat. In the back of the other, a slightly older blonde man smiles serenely, leaning forward to whisper to the driver every now and then. Every time he does, the driver looks a little more terrified.
Then come the townsfolk, not the old, traditional towns folk with their torches and pitchforks. These are the townsfolk of the new horror landscape, the polite barman with his idiot brother, the woman with glowing hands observed by two vampires, one dark, one blonde. Ghosts flicker and dance around them, and the blonde vampire in particular, in a certain light, looks drenched in blood, none of it his.
Then, of course, there's the new people. There's always the new people. The angry looking surgeon whose cheerful wife is slightly transparent, being comforted by the odd, polite, young lawyer who's explaining how technially he's not a prophet as such. The couple, busy talking about their new house, busy laughing, neither making eye contact and neither acknowledging how much their house, and the things that iive in it, terrify them.
And then there's the things on the edge of the parade. The half formed terrors. The whispers of monsters and pain and death, all waiting to entertain us. Under the bed.
But not here.
Not now.
Not yet.
Happy Halloween everyone.
