He was too old for trick or treating. He knew it.
“Alan,” he told himself, “This is ridiculous. You’re 80 years old. What are you doing?”
But he’d discovered a terrible and attractive thing since Doris had died, lost in the empty wilderness of Alzheimer’s: he no longer felt in complete control of himself. This was true not merely in the myriad ways that age steals our faculties, a thief too stealthy and vacant of scruples to even show its filthy face. No, he didn’t feel just that he’d lost a measure of self-possession; he felt, on occasions, that something had taken the reigns.
God? He supposed it was possible, although after what God had done to Doris Alan thought the wizened old bastard could go fuck himself.
Another curious thing: Alan had never realized just how much he’d shrunk in his golden years until he bought the costume at Wal-Mart. It was a kid’s costume, for crying out loud, and here he was fitting into with no (well, little) problem. He stood before the hallway mirror and looked at himself, a white wrinkled old vampire, one who’d slept too long in a full bathtub, perhaps.
“What are you doing, old man?”
He didn’t know. It scared him. He didn’t know, and he didn’t feel he could do otherwise; that urge in him that was not quite a voice insisted he do this.
“Trick or treat,” he said to his reflection, and his voice broke.
He turned away with a sigh and waited for the sun to bed down for the night.
***
Something older than Alan Pemberton, something almost as old humanity itself, made the rounds in Shanks, Mississippi.
It hadn’t been to Mississippi in some years, although years weren’t much to it. The thing, which had forgotten it’s name at least a thousand years ago, had been spending most of it’s time in foreign lands, feasting on the endless buffet of fear and avoiding the few others of it’s kind left. It had given some thought to returning after the attacks in 2001, of eating it’s way through nightmares from New York to California, starting at Ground Zero, but it knew there would be others of it’s kind there, younger and stronger than it, and so it had refrained.
But it could only do for so long. It had missed this, it’s favorite holiday, for too many years. It missed eating up the myriad small terrors and regurgitating them forth as black nightmares. It missed the screaming pleasure this alchemy brought it. Any of it’s kind could simply eat fears; to reshape them, that was . . .
Well, that was art, was it not?
The creature knew that others of it’s kind did not hold to this; if they found it, they would kill it. So it was careful. It had been careful for over a thousand years now.
It drifted down Picayune Street in Shanks, sniffing the ether for the tastiest dreads, the most savory shivers.
It found:
Kendra Taylor, going door to door as a pumpkin with her little brother Kenny dressed like a scarecrow. Both bags bulging with candy. It smelled her fear of boogens--unidentified by her father, but thought of as tall, lumpy men without faces in the backwaters of her mind--and the ancient creature gleefully found that fear and ate it and vomited out something more specific: a terror of her father. The creature planted this black little seed back in her mind, sure that it would blossom in time.
It found:
Ronald Curry, sitting in the living room watching Alien on the tv, drunk already on cheap beer. Ronald wore only underwear and a t-shirt too small for him; it was an unseasonably warm night. He watched Sigourney Weaver wake up in her skivvies and something in him stirred. He looked at his wife, who was handing out candy at the door and making sure to only open it a crack so the kids did not see Ronald in all his glory, and something else in him stirred. The ancient creature found Ronald’s poorly hidden fear of women and vomited it back tenfold. Ronald shook his head, got up, and locked the door. What followed was not new in the Curry household; the level of savagery was. Wanda Curry would discover the hitherto unknown environs of the Hinds County Community Hospital Emergency Room after the festivities wore down.
It found:
Susannah Orton, who was not handing out candy this year, who was not watching penny dreadful horror films on her small tv, who was not celebrating the light side of darkness. Susannah Orton did not know what to do with the emptiness in her heart and head. The divorce was final a full year now. She’d thought that something would’ve filled the spaces. Not so. She felt marooned on a small island, able to view her children and friends only across a constantly widening sea, the continent of the wider world drifting away from her. The old thing saw this and joy lit up its unseen body. It saw Susannah’s fear of years of stretching isolation, it swallowed this slowly, savoring the bitterness and desolation, and what it hacked up was horror so awful it knew she would not be able to bear it for even a few minutes. It was right, as it had been for centuries. Susannah Orton was overcome by a dread so pitiless and complete that she did the only thing she could think of, the only way that seemed likely to keep her company on her black little island. She took a large knife from the kitchen and went into the bedroom of her oldest, Kyra, and slit her throat. Kyra did not make a sound save for one surprised gurgle. Susannah then went into the room of Byron, sweet little Byron, asleep in his bed and stuffed with candy. She plunged the blade into his fragile chest. He never awoke. Smelling the death stink of her children, Susannah Orton went to the bathroom, drew a hot bath, and eased herself into the hot water. She then dug rough trenches up the insides of her forearms with the knife and bled all her isolation away. The ageless thing approved heartily.
It found: small phobias and bitter little frights and skittering anxieties, all awakened just a bit on this night of spooks and masks, and it fattened itself on the fear, it poisoned a hundred dreams, it soured a thousand hearts, it loosed a million Halloweens into a million heads.
And then it found something new.
It found Alan Pemberton.
***
Alan wandered the streets, not knowing why, not knowing what it was he was supposed to be doing or seeing. He didn’t think he was supposed to go ask for candy. He was sure that would have seemed like a very good idea if that was part of this, but it didn’t. He simply wandered. Small clusters of Harry Potters and ghouls and witches and cowboys and football players passed by him like clouds scudding across a night sky. They did not seem to notice Alan in his ridiculous vampire costume, and he felt some relief at that. Somehow, he felt he would stain their night. He remembered Halloweens of his youth: the sweet October air, the pillowcases of treats, candied apples, ghost stories, far more treat than trick. Doris had been more of an Independence Day gal, and Alan had loved her more for that, but he’d never given up on Halloween as his favorite holiday, even though it seemed to get darker and meaner with every year. He couldn’t watch what they called horror movies anymore; they were too real to him, they were full of the biting teeth of the world. No, but he could watch those films he’d loved as a child, as a young man, Karloff and Chaney and Cat People and The Black Cat and even, though it was one of the most disturbing, Freaks. He was still in love with All Hallows Eve. Now, at the end of his days, he thought he could let the world move on with its meanness, and he could hold tight and dear to that which had sent shivers up his younger spine.
Tonight, he was brought back to those days more than ever.
He thought it might be a fine night to die, to go out in this last warm burst of happiness rather than in the cold gray that his days had become.
The costume didn’t seem so stupid, now.
So he wandered, not knowing what he was looking for, but happy to be looking, until that other inside him rose up with force and fury and said STOP!
Alan stopped. He was at the end of the block. The street split into a T. Directly ahead lay woods thick with undergrowth and kudzu. He looked around and saw no lights on.
“What?” he asked.
Nothing. Crickets chirping in the woods, backed by peepers and the occasional nightbird.
No, not nothing. Something . . . something . . .
***
The ancient thing dove into Alan’s mind and stopped cold. There was no fear here. It sniffed and pawed and rooted, but it couldn’t find a trace of the creeps, a smidgen of fright, not a morsel of dread.
It knew what this meant instantly. And knew that it’s long days were at an end. It had been found.
Fine.
It cast out it’s many fingered mind and pulled what it could, sucked up the nightmares that were left, gathered them in it’s gullet, and steeled itself.
***
Alan heard a voice, an actual voice, in his head. Not God, no, but something.
It said, simply, THANK YOU.
Something alien slid out of him, vacated him, leaving him feeling lighter, happier, almost joyous. He felt whatever it was swell and bloom somewhere up above him. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt he didn’t need to know.
He hadn’t felt this happy in years.
***
Above Alan, forces old when humanity was young went to war. The thing that had stalked the mental waters of Shanks was full fed and strong, and its brethren that attacked it were unprepared for the savagery with which it fought them. They hacked and slashed at each other, whirling wraiths in the October sky. The battle was unseen by human eyes, but the effects were felt: fragments of nightmare, shards of unease, flew off like psychic shrapnel and wounded souls for miles. In the months to come, this part of central Mississippi would see suicide rates spike, murder rates double, and children would flood counselors and diaries with barely restrained nastiness.
These merely human concerns troubled the warring creatures not at all.
***
Alan, smiling, heard another voice.
“Hi, Pemby.”
“Doris.”
“Yes, oh yes.”
“You’re . . . You . . .” She hadn’t recognized him for almost a full year before her death.
“I still am. But we’ve got something to do.”
“Yes?”
“You’re ready to go, aren’t you?”
He looked about for her, couldn’t see her, said, “Yes.”
She appeared in front of him, fresh and bright and clear-eyed. She looked as beautiful as she had back in ‘48, when he’d married her. He remembered his costume, and hunched down in shame.
“Stop it. You’re handsome and beautiful, and you did exactly what needed to be done. Those . . . things fighting above you didn’t use you. They were used.”
“By what? God?” he croaked.
She showed him something then that made his heart fire like a racing engine. It was only a glimpse, a crack in some monumental doorway, but it revealed a light so complex and beautiful that it made all human conceptions of ‘god’ seem like a child’s drawing of the sun.
“Oh, my,” Alan said.
“We’ll go there. Together. But first . . .”
She touched him. His heart exploded and his body, still clad in the costume that had enabled him to touch his boyhood again, fell forward on the street, now nothing but cooling meat.
***
The writhing, whirring creature that had spat black poison into minds without number felt it: a roman candle of pure joy. It could not help itself. It turned toward the light with something approaching awe, and in it’s sudden stillness, was devoured by it’s younger, more advanced brethren.
But victory was hollow, was short-lived. These creatures too turned to see the light.
They could not bear it. They could not endure it. And though there were more of their kind, there would always be more of their kind, these beasts above Shanks, Mississippi, would trouble human hearts no more.
Searing stars of the joy that lit Alan exploded into the sky, flashing through and destroying the timeless dark creatures that fought there. They shredded like bad dreams before a soft kiss, and were no more. The sparks of Alan’s dying joy shot out into the night and came to earth in hundreds of hearts. And if there were a million Halloweens roaming free in a million heads, then there were as many alleviating joys, warming spears of sunlight driving into the dark corners of a million souls.
It wasn’t complete. Nothing is.
But it was enough.
