The Forever Halloween

 

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.