He awoke quietly, surrounded by the cold and the thick
darkness and the comforting earth. He awoke to Halloween.
Excited
to fill his bag with sweet treats he rushed through the trees, their dreary
bare branches reaching toward the moon, dry leaves crunching delightfully into
dust below his small feet. Through the thick scratching briars and nettles he
ran, toward the warming lights of the neighborhood beyond, where throngs of
children in costume roamed door to door, tiny monsters on the prowl, dancing
through a beautifully dark ghoul’s ball beneath a sea of oily clouds that seductively
wrapped their long tentacles around the moon.
Gutted
pumpkins lined sidewalks and guarded porches, flickering ghastly orange,
menacingly, while their fire eyes followed him, always watching in their crazy
shifty ways. The other children laughed and ran, joyful and free, ignoring him wholly,
while snarling dogs growled ferociously at him from behind dark fences, their
razor fangs splintering yard side fence planks.
He
walked to every house, and at every door was turned back to the shadows by
blank stares and screams of terror, and always without any treats. His bag hung
limp, empty and sad at his side. His eyes shed ethereal tears down his chilled
cheeks as the last of the street’s houses yielded more of the same. Rejected
and hollowed, he retreated.
There
was but one house remaining. Forgotten, shunned, it sat dark and quiet, lurking
far back among the trees whose branches hung low to the soil, dangling noose
shaped branches creaking shrill pleas for necks to sway with them; away from
the flickering pumpkin heads and happy children, where only mist and spiders
crept about. It was old and foreboding, shrouded in decrepit desolation. He
didn’t want to go there, but he seemed drawn to it, desperate. It felt sinister
in its abandon, alive with only pain, moaning atop its hideous perch, a
monolithic nightmare of decay at street’s end, chilling to the marrow his
bones, wherever they lay. He felt as though bad things had once happened there,
terrible, murderous things. Secret things that remained hidden.
An old
man answered his weak knock. He looked down with his old eyes and saw him, and
they both brightened with smiles in the darkness. The old man motioned him
inside where soft, warm light danced happily around the faint faces of other
children, chasing his sadness away. They were like him, quiet and lonely;
broken children, whispering as if from their graves. Here in this place he had
thought he should fear, they seemed almost happy, if only for a single night. They
laughed and played and ate candy, all under the glowing gaze of the old man.
The old
man welcomed him in with a name he did not know, though knowing names was long
beyond his understanding; now that names were no more than raindrops at sea in
his mind. He asked the old man how he knew him and the old man sighed heavily,
his gentle eyes sparkling. He told him he had known him, and all the others,
for many years. He, as well as the other children, had come here to his home
every Halloween night. The old man gestured toward a small boy in a big chair
happily eating a caramel apple, explaining how he had been the first to visit
him back in fifty-one. His eyes went distant while he whispered how that had
been so very long ago. He had been a young man back then, so much stronger. The
old man looked down at him and said he had been the last to visit in
ninety-three. He had already been an old man by that time, he seemed to
apologize. So weak and tired, his reflexes too slow, his mind too feeble. After him he had turned
the lights out on Halloween.
The old
man looked around the room, naming every child present, so many names and faces
and memories. There were dozens gathered. He could never remember their names
like the old man could, there were so many. He said how they had all, every
single one of them, been so fragile when they came to him. Delicate little boys
and girls, so precious. He seemed sad and distant, somehow older. The old man
radiated a coldness then that he knew all too well, translucent in spirit,
failing in his struggling existence. He would have nearly felt sad for him had
the sudden transition not stirred a distant memory of a gleaming serrated edge,
so cold against warm flesh, the blinding pain as insides spilled elegantly from
gapping red mouths from throat to thigh, culminating in sorrowful blackness,
then a forever spectral grey.
From
within the tears that now leaked from the old man’s stark eyes, the children
saw the changing light as the sky outside softened, giving up the lovely dark.
One by
one the children fled, delicate wisps in the greying light. The old man watched
them go, returning to the woods, to their graves and bones, shallow sad places
deep in the trees, forgotten and forever alone in the ground.
The old
man bid all his little children a teary farewell. Until next Halloween.
