November Day

Content warnings: Physical violence, substance use, coarse language

Carey can't bring himself to look away from the buzzing fluorescent overhead. The only other thing to look at in the gray-walled room is his bloody hands, and looking at them makes it all real. And he'll have none of that.

He startles when the door opens and catches a brief look at himself in the one-way window. He looks like he's been trampled by a horse.

It's the tired detective, Brady, who comes through the door, two steaming paper cups in hand. She puts the cups in front of each chair before she sits heavily in the one across from Carey. He fixates on her tie so he doesn't accidentally see himself over her shoulder.

"I wish I could say that we're booking you, but my partner still isn't convinced. He wants to go over your story again." She takes the lid off her cup and sips in a grating way that lets Carey know she's irritated. So is Carey.

"I don't know how else to confess to murdering someone. You're making it much more difficult than it looks on TV." Carey reaches for the cup in front of him and when he glances down he stops cold again. He must make some kind of face, because the detective sighs. His eyes find the fluorescent again, the one that's slightly dimmer than the rest.

"Personally, I think you look guilty as hell. But there's no body."

Carey watches the detective in his peripherals. Brady leans back in her chair, takes another slurp off her coffee.

The door opens again, with much more enthusiasm this time. The handle bangs into the wall and they both jump, Carey sending the piping hot coffee over his knuckles. He hisses in pain but stops himself from wiping his hands. The police already sent off a sample of the blood on his hands to be identified, but he doesn't want to tamper with evidence.

It's the wired detective, Shepherd, at the door. He pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket and tosses it across the table at Carey.

"Brady, we got the results back." He's slightly out of breath, like he ran from the fax machine to the interrogation room, and rocks on his feet impatiently while Carey dries the table top. Brady eyes him wearily, but says nothing. Shepherd's face is ready to explode.

"It's animal blood." He says with a toss of the folder. He must do this a lot, because it lands squarely in between Carey and Brady. Carey doesn't even realize he's making a move to grab the folder until Brady snatches it away with a guarded look.

She stands with her coffee in one hand, results in the other, and Shepherd takes her seat. He drums on the table with open hands, wearing a grin from ear to ear. If it wasn't such a sincere smile, Carey would feel even more unnerved than he does now.

"Specifically, it's horse blood." Shepherd holds Carey's eyes hypnotically, talking to Brady but talking at him. "Take us through your story again."

Carey finally drops his gaze down to his blood crusted hands. Where the coffee washed away some of the evidence, his knuckles are an angry red from the burn. Last night — is it tomorrow yet? — comes to him in flashes, just like it did when he first came into the station to confess. He shakes his head to get the images out.

"Mr. Finn," Shepherd starts, his tone surprisingly soft. It draws Carey's gaze back up to the detective's, the enthusastic smile replaced by a sympathetic expression. It's the distinct lack of pity that lowers Carey's defenses.

"I believe you've been victimized tonight, and it's our job to make sure that you get justice." Everything about Shepherd is disarming, from his soft brown eyes to his cherubic curls and matching beard. His soft blue cardigan in place of Brady's suit and tie help too, and Carey knows this must be their regular routine with suspects.

Still, what Shepherd said about Carey being a victim instead of a perpetrator brings hot tears to his eyes, which stings especially in the swollen left one.

He's tempted to look at the flourescent again, but Shepherd is so much warmer. He even makes the room feel less cold.

Carey flicks a glance over to Brady, who wears an entirely unreadable expression. Where Shepherd's face is broad and round, Brady's is sharp and tight like a fox. She has the manila envelope tucked into her armpit, regarding Carey over her coffee.

He takes a breath and conjures the beginning.

Halloween night. Carey and some work friends take the 9 p.m. train to Dublin, ultimately towards a forest rave east of Eden Creek. The train is nearly empty, most of Dublin is headed out to San Francisco.

They share the dregs of a flask between the five of them as they hoof it towards the regional park. It's after sundown, thankfully, so the air is slightly cooler than it was during the day. The lack of marine layer always gives Carey that uncanny valley feeling that makes him want to turn heel right back home to Oakland.

Carey feels the music before he hears it, a rumble from deep in the earth. They crest a hill and come down into a ravine. Carey's surroundings turn from dark to darker as they enter a sprawl of trees. His back prickles the way it does when someone is watching you.

Between the trees, he sees human faces in the darkness. He stares until he realizes they're attached to human bodies as well. All at once, they arrive.

There's no bonfire going, not even a lit cigarette, because of the Spare the Air alert. Instead there are color strobe lights, hooked up to a generator, and lots of blinking vape pens. The music which had been muffled, now ricochets off the trees around them. Jordan, Carey's fellow dishwasher, waves over her girlfriend Rose.

She greets Jordan first and the rest of them by offering a bump of cocaine off of her pocket knife. Carey goes first, because he worked a double shift.

They all branch off from there to explore, with a few 'see you tomorrow's between clopeners.

Carey heads toward the music, ready to let his senses be overwhelmed for the night. Half the crowd are in costume, the other half still in work clothes. He's jostled and spilled on a few times. He thanks his nonslip shoes out loud, which doesn't matter because it's too loud for anyone to hear him.

He dances with more than a few people and does more drugs with most of them. He finally looks up at the trees, like his brain just remembered they aren't in the city. The lights beam up from the forest floor and the branches are twisted limbs reaching for him. Carey closes his eyes and breathes, but now there's too many people touching him.

He lets them cycle him out of the middle and out to the crust of the crowd. Someone in a Ghostface cowl holds a bottle to his lips and uses their other hand to tip his head back. Carey lets the alcohol burn down his throat. When he chokes a little bit, the bottle and Ghostface are gone as smoothly as they showed up.

It's after that, when he moves to the edge of the treeline where he can see the party and the valley, that he meets Spencer.

Something about Spencer makes Carey stop in his tracks on his way out to find a tree to piss behind. His body isn't angled towards Carey at all, but he's looking right at him. Carey can feel it.

Maybe it's the liquid confidence, or Halloween magic, but Carey's shoulders pull back and he heads straight for him. He doesn't know his name is Spencer yet, or much about him really at all. Except that he is frustratingly familiar. Probably a regular from work or something, Carey thinks, but then another part of him thinks that's not right, either.

Carey leads with an open hand like you're supposed to. Spencer regards it and him with his big, unblinking eyes, magnified behind his thick glasses. He finally reaches out and shakes Carey's hand with all the gusto of a dead fish.

"You see something you like, man?" Now Carey's sure it's the liquid confidence. "I'm Carey."

"Looked like you were on a mission, Carey." Spencer is obscured by the long shadows of the trees, not quite in Carey's same reality.

"Can I have your name?" Carey asks. His bladder reminds him of said mission, but far away. Like it's alerting him through a wall of cotton.

"No, but I'll tell you what it is." Spencer tells Carey he can call him Spencer.

The back of his head buzzes at this response, an old memory crawling around deep inside his brain. He says something like 'nice to meet you', but he can't help his head from turning away from Spencer's face.

He's looking back through the trees again, the lights still flashing against the canopy of tree branches that gnarl and weave together. Getting back to the party part of this night would only take Carey a minute or two. And even though he's pointed in that direction, he can't seem to get his feet to move.

Carey looks back to Spencer and lets loose that pee he'd been holding. Where Spencer's very pale, very human head had been a moment before, there's now a giant horse head regarding Carey with its massive prey eyes. The warmth in his jeans shocks him into startling backwards, but he only gets a step back before he stops himself.

It's a mask. Of course it is, has to be. The rest of Spencer is still human.

"That's not fucking funny, dude. You're a sicko." Carey feels himself laugh in relief. Still, though, the hairs are standing up on the back of his neck. Those eyes are too real, too familiar.

"You want to go for a ride?" Spencer's giant horse head gestures towards the valley.

Carey's nodding yes before he can stop himself. And then Spencer is gone. In his place is a huge, black horse. Carey's never ridden a horse before, or even been this close to one, so he kind of flops his torso against the horse's side until it kneels. Carey gets his top half up, and then a leg over. He's barely situated before the horse lurches into a full gallop across the valley.

"And then I woke up on the ground, covered in blood." Carey finishes. Brady is leaning against the far wall, in the shadows that the overhead lights don't reach.

Shepherd gives Carey a patient smile.

"You're missing some details, Mr. Finn," Shepherd starts.

Carey looks at himself in the one-way window over the detective's shoulder, his eyes sunk into the purple and green of the bruises that mottle his face.

"I was on the horse for hours, I think," He knows he's fighting against the memory, but he doesn't know why. He did a bad thing, and now he's confessing. That should make him feel better, at least a little bit.

"You were high, drunk, and you lost time. How did you end up covered in blood?" Brady's done with her coffee. Carey let his get cold.

When Carey invokes the horse again, all he can see is Spencer. Flashes of him on the ground, glasses askew, legs bent in ways that legs do not bend.

"We must've left the party together…" Carey labors each word, slogging through his resistance.

"Your coworker, Jordan, says she saw you leaving alone." Brady supplies.

They stare at one another, Carey at a loss, until Brady sighs.

"I'm going to get another coffee." She shoots a look at Shepherd that, again, Carey finds impossible to read. Shepherd understands though, because he leans in towards Carey almost conspiratorially.

"I have a theory about what happened to you last night, but you're gonna have to keep an open mind." Shepherd's smile is so kind that Carey nods.

"Every culture has its tricksters, right? There's a creature that's been around, probably before the vikings, but definitely helped get itself around on viking ships. It's popular in Irish folklore, it's called the púca."

Carey thinks Shepherd must be going on a roundabout metaphor, which is a departure from Brady's interrogation style. He nods slowly when he realizes Shepherd has paused to let this sink in.

"It takes the form of an animal and, on Halloween night, likes to mess with locals for fun." Shepherd's delivery of this information is factual, diagnostic.

"Spencer was definitely human, though." Carey interjects. Wherever Shepherd is going with this, Carey's ready to rein it back in.

"Right. Púca have never been recorded to take on a human form, but it may have learned a few new things since the viking days. It is a trickster, after all." Shepherd nods thoughtfully.

A flush rises to Carey's cheeks, a cocktail of humiliation and frustration. He thinks Shepherd is making fun of him now.

"How did it get all the way to California, then?" Carey folds to Shepherd's logic.

"The same way the rest of the Irish did, I suppose." Shepherd's response is so earnest it makes Carey want to scream.

"I killed somebody last night, and I can't tell you why or how but his name was Spencer and he's dead because of me." Carey is possessed by a kind of righteous indignation he's only felt before when a rude customer slips on his freshly mopped floor.

"You can't tell me how you did it because you didn't do it, Carey. You were just this púca's Samhain victim tonight." Shepherd says firmly and Carey gets the sense that the detective is an uncle or older brother in some configuration.

He wonders who Spencer might've left behind.

"Why can't you find his body?" Carey hears the defeat in his own voice.

"I've been out to the park, I saw one imprint where a body lied in the grass, that would be you, and I saw hoof prints. You didn't kill Spencer because there never was a Spencer." Shepherd's hands are open, supplicant, a subtle gesture that makes all the difference. Carey's shoulders are taught and his jaw clenched, but his anger isn't directed at Shepherd. The detective is genuinely convinced that he's innocent.

"We must have fought." Carey figures Shepherd can't dispute that fact.

"Yes, what's funny to the púca isn't always funny to us humans." The detective agrees. "The horse blood was the punchline, I guess."

Carey drops his head into his hands, presses the heels of his palms into his eyes until he sees that image of Spencer again, all broken and wrong-looking. The picture shifts, and he's looking at himself in the grass in the same way.

"Why me?" He asks.

"The púca are known to choose victims that are more easily persuaded." Shepherd replies, a little sadly.

"How do you always have an answer?" Carey looks up now, black spots dancing in his vision across where the detective sits.

"Because you're not the first, and you probably won't be the last. There are stories like yours going all the way back to the gold rush. They say that's what happened to the Donner Party." Shepherd explains.

Carey blinks at this.

"They?"

"Other detectives, like me. There's a few of them in the area. We share notes."

"So, this is like some X-Files shit?" Carey most definitely does not want to believe.

Shepherd wrinkles his nose, the first disagreeable expression he's had all night.

"Except without the federal funding." He says.

Brady comes back then.

"Mr. Finn, you're free to go. There's no evidence that you've committed a crime." She's standing by the open door and Carey realizes she's waiting for him. He stands, his metal chair scraping on the concrete floor. All three of them wince.

He looks back to Shepherd, who passes him a slip of paper and winks. Brady snorts through her nose, like a horse.

Carey shoves the paper in his pocket and shuffles out the door.

"Don't leave town, okay? We might have some… follow up questions." Brady says into his ear as he passes her. He shudders and walks into the daylight.

Outside, the sun is already beating down hot for a November morning. He remembers that he's still in Dublin.

He unsheathes the note and processes what it says on the front.

"Paranormal phenomenon support group," he mumbles, "consult for the sheriff's office."

He goes to throw it into the public trash bin when he catches movement in the corner of his eye. When he looks up at the hills far and away above him, he sees the dark shape of a black horse.