Michael Rowe [Rowe - October

Praise for OCTOBER

Michael Rowes talent shines through in this terrifying story of social persecution, black magic, and desire gone horrifically wrong. Readers will immediately identify with the story of Mikey Childress, and theyll hold on for dear life as Mikeys search for acceptance and a dream of love drag them across a jagged terrain of brutality and indifference. With October, Rowe taps into the primal terrors of a teens life, exploring the loneliness and misery of an outcast who finds his only salvation in a vicious, dark place.
Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The German and Down on Your Knees

October is the kind of horror novel a lot of adults needed when they were kids. Michael Rowe understands that while it gets better for some people, not everyone can afford to sit back and wait if they want to survive. A powerful and powerfully frightening tale about making hard choices in the name of survival, and what those choices cost. Because becoming who you are really means making a deal with the Devil. And sometimes, the Devil is the only one who really understands.

Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

OCTOBER

Michael Rowe

an imprint of ChiZine Publications

For John Larson

And in memory of John Sumakis, aka David Thomas Lord

There are spirits that are created for vengeance,

and in their fury they lay on grievous torments.

Ecclesiastes 39:33

I would die for love, Mikey Childress thought, as he lay on his bed in the airless heat of his bedroom. Yes, I would die for it.

Sweat made his black Misfits t-shirt cleave to his skinny torso like a second skin. Mikey rolled over on his stomach and buried his face in his pillow, closing his eyes. In the red darkness there he called forth a familiar waking dream. He contemplated love. Not sex necessarily, just love. Just not being alone. That would be the key.

Mikey conjured the sense of a warm body spooning into him, his narrow shoulders pressed against a stronger, larger upper chest, of arms encircling him from behind. They would be the sort of arms that could throw a football in a perfect arc, the sort of arms that hang insolently out the drivers-side window of a carsinewy biceps and thick, capable forearms that ended in hands that were rough from sports, strong and capable and authoritative. He imagined his lower back and ass pressing into a solid pelvic basin and the hungry, pressing swell of desire he would find there. He called forth a pair of powerful legs, one of which would be thrown possessively over his own thigh, pulling him into the fully conjured body he now imagined claiming him with an irrevocable desire he didnt want to resist, even if he could resist.

He ground his pelvis into the mattress of his confining single bed, finding familiar comfort in the sensation of pressure against his groin.

What could be sweeter?

Mikey sighed as he imagined laying his head gently against the base of the phantoms hard clavicle. He dared to imagine the solid knob of an Adams apple against the back of his head. The dream-arms pulled him in closer, making him feel as weightless as an autumn leaf. He sighed again, holding the sorcery of the moment, knowing it would vanish the instant he opened his eyes and let in the cruel light. He closed his eyes tightly, summoning the incubus with all his might. With the intensity of a prayer, or a spell, he willed the invisible to become visible, gave it flesh and muscle and heat. And love. Endless, everlasting love.

Someone to love me, someone to hold me, someone to protect me. Someone to be all mine. Yes, I would die for it. If I met the witches tonight, Id tell them I would kill for love.

In August, in a small town, there is still peace for a teenage outcast like Mikey Childress.

An outcast can still choose his companions in August and is, for the most part, subject only to his own demands. He can make his own hours. Hell would begin again in a few short weeks when school resumed. At that time he would again be subject to schedules not of his making and companions not of his choosing, and the daily dread that had to be endured beyond the point of being endurable.

The town of Auburn dozed at the foot of the cliffs and ravines of the Niagara Escarpment under the heavy August sky like a stout country dowager in a rocking chair, one who had gathered the rich southern Ontario farmland around her like a quilt in order to ward off an imaginary chill. Wedged between Milton and Campbellville, Auburn thought of itself as a self-contained universe and was smugly proud of what it considered its separate identity. It had a population of 3,200 souls, and few of them would want to live anywhere else. Main Street ran the length of the downtown core, such as it was, and was lined with shops, the post office, the library, the town hall, and the offices of the local paper, the AuburnGazette.

In the residential section near downtown, the streets were wide and deep, the houses set back from the road on good-sized lots under an arching cathedral of poplar, elm, and maple trees. Most of the houses dated from the nineteenth century and were done in the classic southern-Ontario style of muted red brick with white gingerbread trim. The lawns were well-tended, the walkways bordered with shrubs and flowerbeds. In the summer, the somnolent green haze carried on it the sound of lawnmowers and the scent of fresh-cut grass and flowers, In autumn, people in Auburn still burned leaves in the backyard while the town constable looked the other way, and the smoke drifted generally, mingling with the scent of ripe apples and chilling dark-earth harvest from the farmers fields outside of town.

It was a town that prided itself on its rectitude. Able-bodied men worked and provided for their families. Those women who didnt stay home with their children worked in town and were considered unfortunate. There were four churches in Auburnthe Catholic St. Benedicts, the Anglican St. Michaels, and the Lutheran St. Martins. The fourth, the Assembly of Christs Holy Stripes, was a rogue fundamentalist sect founded by an ex-con and self-proclaimed pastor named Kelvin Cowell. The Holy Stripers, as the assembly was referred to in town, met in a converted industrial warehouse on the outskirts of Auburn for three-hour services Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, and their brand of Christianity was harsh and pitiless.

Mikey had lived in Auburn his entire life and felt he could account for every bruising minute of those seventeen years. He knew there was a world beyond the town because hed read about it in books and magazines and on the Internet. Hed seen that world on television and in the movies as well. He knew it was a clean place, one where people like him didnt get beaten up nearly every day at school, or after school when the bullies, who roamed like packs of callow teenage jackals, had a freer range of territory in which to hunt him and more time to plan how best to torture him with the least chance of getting caught.

In the world beyond Auburn, people like Mikey didnt get slammed into lockers nearly every day until purple contusions bloomed on their chests and upper arms like pulpy grapes. They didnt get their heads forced into toilets that were then flushed, producing a terrifying sensation of drowning as the victim took in water and shit when he screamedonly to be pulled up brutally by the hair at the last minute, coughing and sputtering, to the sound of coarse, brutal adolescent male laughter. On good days it didnt happen twice, and on great days the toilet was flushed before the dunking.