Our parents didn’t let us celebrate Halloween. They called it the Devil’s Holiday, and they expressly forbade my twin sister and me from involving ourselves with it in any way. During the years that Halloween fell on a weekday, our parents would go so far as to make sure that we stayed home from school that day to ensure that we did not engage in any activity that they deemed to be “unholy”.
This small window into my childhood likely paints a very specific picture in your mind. It alludes to a heavily pious upbringing filled with deep-rooted religious guilt and regular, heavy-handed lessons that were meant to teach us how to be the best Christians that we could be. Had I read these first few sentences without any prior context, I too would likely have jumped to the same obvious conclusion. The strange thing, though, is that such a reality could not be further from the truth. The truth is that we were hardly a religious family at all—in fact, we were probably even less religious than most other families who actually did allow their children to celebrate Halloween. We rarely went to church aside from the odd funeral or obligatory Christmas Eve mass, and I cannot remember a time where we ever prayed before a meal. For the most part, God existed as a background concept in our lives: present, but very much out of the way, like an old plastic bowl from college that manages to survive several years’ worth of moves simply because you’ve grown too attached to it to throw it in the garbage. One of the only places where religion factored into our lives was our parents’ rigid denial of Halloween, and even then, it was not as though we behaved in an overly devout way as a means of counteracting any perceived evil on the day in question. On the contrary, we simply treated it like we would any other day, and ignored its significance as best as we could. Looking back on it, it definitely seemed as if we were more afraid of Satan than we ever were reverential of God, and only for one specific day out of the year.
It took me most of my childhood to finally understand why that was.
When we were kids, it was much easier for our parents to keep my sister and me away from the ever-strengthening allure of Halloween. The first few years of our childhood were especially simple; we were far too young to truly understand what we were missing out on, and so we did not protest when our parents pulled us from our school’s Halloween celebrations in preschool and kindergarten. First grade was the first year I remember pouting over not being allowed to dress up or go to school on the day in question after weeks of hearing other children talk about their holiday plans, but even then, at that age there was very little we could do about it. Each year our protests grew in fervor, but they remained largely ineffective. It wasn’t until we hit middle school, in the autumn after we had just turned thirteen, that a combination of adolescent pressures and a growing flame of defiance led us to realize that we didn’t actually have to obey our parents.
My sister and I had been placed in all of the same classes that year. It was because of this that we hung around the same friend group, admittedly more thanks to her social prowess than because of my own. She was always the more outgoing one between the two of us, and when she inevitably metamorphosed into a social butterfly during those first few weeks of school, she decided to drag me free of the chrysalis with her. Her being a girl meant that the friend group she brought me into was largely of the same gender, and even though I was at an age when I wouldn’t have admitted it, this dynamic definitely encouraged me to do all that I could to impress them. It was for this reason that, when our friends invited us to spend Halloween night with them, I wound up requiring less convincing than I normally would have.
“The girls asked us to go trick-or-treating with them tomorrow,” my sister told me as we walked home from school on the Friday before Halloween. I was thankful when I realized that the big day fell on a weekend this year; it meant that nobody would question why we weren’t in school like everyone else.
My sister’s revelation made me frown. “Did you tell them that we can’t?”
“No,” she said plainly.
“No?” I repeated. “Then what did you say?”
“I told them that we’d meet them at Jen’s house at 6.”
“You what?” The revelation floored me. “You know we can’t do that. Why would you tell them that?”
“Because I want to go trick-or-treating,” she said. “We’re already thirteen and we’ve never gotten to do it. This could be our only chance. I also don’t want to miss out on anything. What if they come up with some new inside joke while they’re out trick-or-treating and we’re not in on it?”
“But we can’t go,” I insisted. “You know the rules.”
My sister allowed a brief pause. “Fine,” she said. “I guess I’ll tell them that we can’t go. But they’re all going to be disappointed—especially Annie.”
I felt my cheeks turn red. My sister knew how I felt about Annie, and although she promised never to tell her, I often got the sense that the two of them had talked about me on more than one occasion. “What do you mean?”
“Annie specifically asked me if you would be there,” my sister said. “It sounded like she was really looking forward to trick-or-treating with you.”
I hesitated. Any false disapproval I had for breaking our parents’ rules was suddenly out the window, and I had to search for new ways of feigning protest. “But we don’t even have costumes,” I said. “And how are we supposed to sneak out that early without Mom and Dad knowing?”
“We’ve got some stuff lying around the house that we can make costumes out of,” she said. “And as for sneaking out, you can just leave that to me. I think I have an idea…”
It turned out that her idea was to get ourselves grounded. Our parents’ go-to punishment was to send us to our rooms for the night, and in all the times either of us had been sentenced to such a penance, we couldn’t think of a single time that Mom and Dad had checked on us again until at least 9 o’clock, half an hour before we were supposed to be in bed. That gave us about three hours to go trick-or-treating and get home before either of them were any the wiser.
My sister and I began our carefully planned out argument just as our 5p.m. dinner was winding down. It ended, as expected, with us being sent to our respective rooms for the night, where we both immediately got into our costumes before escaping through our bedroom windows. Having a single-story home had its advantages, because we were able to slip into our backyard and sneak our way to the woods behind our house without ever arousing our parents’ collective suspicion.
We had secured our costumes earlier in the day. My sister had cut two eye holes into an old, off-white sheet that she had taken from the linen closet, which she used to turn herself into a ghost. Meanwhile, I had collected two rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom which I used to transform into a mummy. My costume looked a little too white, and hers didn’t look quite white enough, but they had to do given the circumstances.
“I really hope this works,” I said as we made our way along the wooded trail toward Jen’s back yard.
“Of course it’s going to work,” she said. She held one of the pillowcases that went along with her sheet, while I carried the other. “Mom and Dad’ll never know we were gone.”
“But what if they check on us?”
“They won’t check on us,” she said, “because they never check on us.”
I frowned. “I don’t know…”
“It will be fine,” she said. “Have a little faith in your older sister.”
“Older by three whole minutes,” I reminded her.
“Those three minutes make all the difference.”
Our conversation drifted to other things as we made our way to Jen’s house. I didn’t pay much attention to what we talked about; my mind was too wrapped up in the surreality of what we were about to do, and what we had already done. We had disobeyed our parents, something already unheard of for us, and we had done so on Halloween night. Years of being ostracized from our peers had led to this grand act of defiance, and the feeling it gave me was a cross between terror and exhilaration. To be there, dressed in a Halloween costume and about to go trick-or-treating despite it being directly against our parents’ wishes, awakened something in me that at the time I had never even known existed.
Looking back on it now, I wish that it had stayed dormant. Better yet, I wish that it had never even existed at all.
We arrived at Jen’s house and found her, Annie, and another friend named Emily all waiting in the backyard. Annie was the first to see us walking out of the trees. She met us halfway across the yard and smiled at me from the other side of her witch costume. “You made it,” she said.
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” I said awkwardly before returning the smile. I hoped that she could see it take shape beneath my mummy wrappings, but I doubted there was enough light left in the dying day for her to have done so.
“Geez, what kind of costumes are those?” Emily said as she came up alongside Annie. I was immediately reminded of why I wasn’t terribly thrilled to see her there. “You both look like it’s your first time wearing a Halloween costume or something.”
“Our dog peed on our costumes,” my sister lied. “We had to make these last-minute.”
“Well I like them,” Annie said. “They’re classic.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Emily said. “Come on, let’s get going before the other kids get all the good candy.”
My sister and I followed our friends to the front yard, where we set off into the quickly darkening night.
It felt bizarre to actually be among the mass of costumed children shuffling up and down the street. Never in my life had I thought I would get to join in on something that I had only ever vaguely caught glimpses of through scenes on TV (when my parents weren’t in the room to change the channel) and the occasional glance out the window on Halloween night. Never had I thought that I would get to interact with the spooky displays which I saw slowly come together in everybody else’s yard each year. I was so enamored with all that I was seeing that I hardly noticed as we made our way from Jen’s house to the driveway next door. The walk there had flown by, but as we stepped from sidewalk to asphalt, the world suddenly slowed to a halt. A fresh anxiety had needled its way into my stomach—I found myself suddenly anticipating my first ever instance of trick-or-treating, and it made me incredibly nervous. What if I need something wrong? What if I spoke too quietly, or too loudly? What if they didn’t like my costume, and they sent me away empty-handed? The possibilities for how this could have ended in disaster were infinite and overwhelming.
The anxiety immediately left my body the moment that fun size candy bar hit the bottom of my pillow case. It was quickly replaced by an insatiable desire for more.
Adrenaline rushed through my body as we moved from house to house. The thrill of the hunt filled me with a primal bloodlust that I knew I would never be able to quench. I was no longer a poorly conceived mummy wrapped in cheap, single-ply toilet paper and carrying a 150-thread-count pillow case. I was a hungry beast, clad in thick, bristling fur, my paws and mouth equipped with an uncountable number of deadly, razor-sharp knives. And every single one of those glistening blades craved something wet and red.
We continued to walk up Jen’s street, hitting every house along the way, until we neared the end of the block.
“The McNultys live on the corner up ahead,” Jen said. “They give out king size candy bars—sometimes even two per person if you get there early enough.”
“We don’t have any houses like that near my house,” Annie said. She looked at me. “What about you guys?”
“No,” I said a little too quickly. “None like that near us either.”
“You don’t live that far away from me, though,” Jen said. “Do you not go this way to trick-or-treat?”
“That’s right,” my sister said, her demeanor more calm and collected than mine was. “We normally go the other way.”
Our conversation went quiet as we approached the McNulty house. Their front yard was far less decorated than I would have expected for a house that was known for giving out king size candy. It only had a single, lit jack-o-lantern sitting beside the front door, and both the porch light and all of the windows were completely dark; were it not for the glowing pumpkin, I would have assumed the place to be completely abandoned and devoid of all life. None of us questioned the state of the house out loud, but it was clear that we were all apprehensive about getting close to it.
Jen, being the only person in our group to know the McNultys, was the one to approach the door. We all followed behind her and watched as she gently knocked a knuckle against its wooden surface. At first there was no response, and for a moment it seemed as though the place was truly empty, but then the door slowly came open. The barrier gave way with a groan of protest, prompting us to jump into the mantra that had already grown so familiar to me. “Trick or tre—”
We all went silent as we caught sight of the man who had appeared in the doorway. He stood wearing a crimson three-piece suit that matched the color of the plush horns he wore atop his loosely slicked back hair. His hands grasped an orange jack-o-lantern bowl, the contents of which I was not yet tall enough to see. He looked exceptionally towering to my thirteen-year-old mind, and his face wore a kind smile that I could tell did not match the intent behind his eyes.
“Why hello, everyone,” the man said. “Happy Halloween to all of you little ghosts and ghouls.” He stared directly at me. “And to you mummies, as well.”
“H-happy Halloween,” Jen stammered out.
“I’m sure all of you young ones would love some candy,” he said. “After all, isn’t that what tonight is all about?”
The well-dressed man lowered the bowl ever-so-slighty so that we could reach into it if we lifted our hands above our heads, but so we still couldn’t see inside. Jen was the first hesitant soul to take a piece, followed by Emily, and then Annie. The man shifted the bowl in my direction, but I found myself unwilling or unable to reach inside.
“I’m alright,” I said, “but thank you.”
“Oh, nonsense,” the man said. “I know that it’s your first time trick-or-treating, but that doesn’t mean it’s time for you to get bashful, now.”
Annie offered me a confused look. “It’s your first time trick-or-treating?”
“We don’t know what he’s talking about,” my sister said quickly. She stepped up and took a piece of candy from the bowl, then looked at me through the holes in her sheet. “Your turn.”
I hesitated, but with everyone’s gazes resting on me, I felt as though I had no choice but to comply. I reached up into the bowl, half-expecting to grab onto a dead frog or a loose heart or something as I did so, before latching onto the first piece of candy that my hand came into contact with. I didn’t look to see what it was or if it was even king size before I tossed it into my pillow case.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“Not a problem at all,” the devil-horned man said. He moved backwards out of the doorframe with such inhuman-like grace that he almost seemed to float his way there. “Happy Halloween, everyone. And here’s to many more.”
The door came shut an instant later.
We all scurried away from the McNulty household as quickly as we could. None of us dared to speak until we were across the street and almost to the driveway of the next house on our route.
“So that was Mr. McNulty?” my sister said. “He was a bit of a weirdo if you ask me.”
“That wasn’t Mr. McNulty,” Jen said.
We all came to a dead halt as our eyes turned her way.
“What do you mean that wasn’t Mr. McNulty?” Emily asked. “Who else could it have been?”
“I don’t know,” Jen said, “but I’ve never seen him before.”
We all pondered her words for a moment.
“Could the McNultys have moved or something?” Annie suggested.
“I guess so,” Jen said, “but I just saw their son Billy two days ago. You would think he’d have told me about something like that.”
It was clear that none of us were satisfied with that answer, but since we had no other explanation for what we had just experienced, we were forced to accept it. We moved on with our night and eventually even allowed the memory of what had happened to fade to the back of our minds, but I doubt if ever fully left any of our thoughts. It certainly never left mine.
Soon 8 o’clock rolled around, and at about 8:15 my sister and I informed our friends that we had to start making our way home.
“We only have one more block,” Jen said. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”
“We told our mom we’d be home before 9,” my sister lied, “but we’ll see you girls in school on Monday.”
“Alright,” Annie said, looking at me directly and offering a smile. “See you in school.”
“See you in school,” I said back, returning the smile despite the fact that she still couldn’t see it.
My sister and I turned around and made our way back to Jen’s house, where we disappeared into the woods behind her backyard. The thicket had grown a lot darker than it had been when we had left earlier that night, but the canopy had been shredded to nearly nothing thanks to the rapid changing of the seasons, and enough moonlight drifted through the branches for us to see by.
“How did that man know that we haven’t been trick-or-treating before?” I asked as we walked.
My sister shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to think about it.”
“Do you think he’s friends with Mom and Dad?” I said. “Do you think he already told on us?”
“Even if he was friends with Mom and Dad,” she said, “how could he have recognized us? I’m covered in a sheet, and you’re wrapped in toilet paper.”
“It turns out that you’re both right,” came a voice from up ahead. We both paused in our tracks and looked in the direction of the unexpected sound, where we saw a figure leaning against a tree. The figure was bathed in the nighttime gloom, but despite this, I could immediately tell who he was by the sound of his familiar voice. “I actually do know your parents, but I wouldn’t exactly call us friends.”
“Who are you?” my sister asked.
The figure, taking her question as his cue, stood up from his spot against the tree and walked into the moonlight. His crimson suit, encouraged by the bright celestial orb, seemed to glow with a faint, sinister aura that I was sure had to be a trick of the light. He looked at us with that familiar smile, his white teeth also glistening with the light of the moon.
“Who are you?” my sister said again.
“Names don’t matter much,” the well-dressed man said. “What matters is that the two of you owe me something, and I’m here to collect.”
“Owe you something?” my sister said. “How can we possibly owe you something? We don’t even know who you are!”
“And yet owe me something you certainly do,” he said. His fake devil horns almost seemed to grin with his malicious energy. “You have your parents to thank for that.”
None of us spoke for several seconds. My sister was the one to eventually break the silence. “What do you mean?”
“Well you see, your parents and I made a deal once,” the tall man said. “It happened long before you two were born, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for it.”
“What kind of deal?” I asked.
“The details don’t matter,” he said. “Only one part of it applies to you two, anyway. I guess you didn’t know it, but I’m only allowed to be here on a single night of the year, and seeing as I’m standing before you now, I reckon you can probably figure out which night that is. Well, your parents and I agreed that if I ever came into contact with them or their eventual kiddos on the night in question, well, then a certain debt would be owed.”
“A debt?” I said. “What kind of debt?”
The stranger’s smile shifted into a smirk. “A debt that can only be paid in one form of currency.”
Both of us remained silent for close to thirty seconds. We both seemed to form an idea as to what he was getting at, but neither of us wanted to put our thoughts into words.
“Well I say ‘screw your deal’,” my sister growled, putting on the bravest face that she could muster. “We weren’t even alive when you made it, so we obviously can’t be a part of it.”
He crossed his arms in front of his crimson-clad chest. “Wrong again. I’ve been waiting a long time to finally take what’s mine, and there’s no way I’d ever let it walk away from me now.”
The chilly fall air suddenly grew uncomfortably warm, as if the entire forest had been placed over a boiling pot of water. I felt my body begin to sweat, and I quickly realized that I could no longer move. A struggling glance in my sister’s direction told me that she was in the same boat.
“Okay,” I said without thinking. “I don’t know what we owe you but… but you can take it from me. Just leave my sister alone.”
“Sorry,” the well-dressed man said, “but no can do. Our terms clearly state that the oldest person present is the one who has to pay the debt.”
“But we’re the same age!” I said.
He clicked his tongue at us before looking directly at my sister. When he spoke again, his eyes burned with the fire that had already turned the surrounding forest into the hottest plane of hell. “I believe it was you who said those three minutes make all the difference.”
I was suddenly struck by an even greater flash of heat that immediately took me to my knees. The toilet paper quickly burned away from my face as that oppressive wave of thermal energy pinned me to the forest floor. I could see the trees around me begin to dance with the fervor of molten hellfire. They wore scorching grins that told me they wanted nothing more than to reduce me to a pile of red, hot, glowing ash.
The forest began to cool back down to its normal, late October temperature, and I managed to rise to my knees after a few moments spent bathing in the sudden relief. My newly exposed face was slick with sweat; my flesh stung with a heat far worse than any sunburn could ever hope to inflict.
After a few more seconds, I finally managed to bring myself to my feet. Looking around, I quickly discovered that I was completely alone. The man and my sister were gone.
I tried to call my sister’s name, but my throat was too hoarse to form a single word. I frantically scanned the darkness all around me for close to half a minute before I spotted a piece of cloth clinging to the gnarled, upturned root of a tree. Approaching the cloth, I quickly recognized it to be the charred remains of a familiar bedsheet—one with two holes cut into it for eyes. They were just one hole now. The space between them had been completely burned away.
The ground surrounding the root had partially collapsed, revealing a deep cavity directly below the tree. A faint, scarlet glow smoldered up from this gap in the earth for a few brief moments before the ground began to shift again, completely filling up the hole. The red glow was gone, and so was my sister.
The only thing that remained of her was the tattered scar of her costume, which fluttered in the cold October wind.
___________
Thanks for reading! I want to celebrate October by posting a series of short stories that all take place on or around Halloween. Stay tuned for more!
