Halloween Haunts 2013: That Restless Halloween Feeling by John Mantooth

Halloween makes me restless.

It’s a subtle thing, a bout of nervousness that I can’t seem to quell, a nostalgic remembering, a yearning even. It’s a restlessness tied inexplicably to half-remembered details of a time when the night was different, when it was real. The images are brief, blinking, nearly faded: the wind lifting a bag and floating it across the street like a pale vapor, the shouts of the older kids as they charge through the darker parts of the neighborhood, their joy rushing out of their mouths and running ahead of them like breath-fog on a cold night, my father’s hand closed over mine, big and strong and full of the wisdom I hoped one day I’d hold in the same sort of quiet reservoir where he held his, and finally that visceral happiness, that remembered seems a kind of moving by feel, a tensing of the joints, a shuddering of a cathartic heart.

These memories fade a little each year, even as my unease grows, and I’m afraid one day the ghosts of them won’t even make me shiver or wonder or feel that sudden rush of adrenaline. One day, Halloween may become a thing easier forgotten instead of a way to outflank death at least for a little while, and I’ll be like the old man down the street whose door we pounded on long enough to rouse his shadow into the foyer where he unlatched the screen, but did not open it, to tell us he’d “overlooked it this year.”

Overlooked Halloween? We were beside ourselves. My running crew–three or four hellions who lived for this night every October–couldn’t fathom such a thing because Halloween wasn’t just a date on the calendar, it was a concept, a conceit, and yes, a communion of our child souls with the old men souls we’d possess sooner than we realized, gripping them in our knotted throats like screams we wished to swallow.

Halloween is the only night of the year when you feel it–or maybe it’s just that you can acknowledge it. Death, the truth, the inevitability of an ending. It vibrates in the air like invisible ball lightning, bouncing from you to your buddy and flashing through the night and into the sky again. There’s silence up there, vast and unfathomable, and in that silence, that heavy-breathing, joyous silence at the end of the night, there are details you notice anew: the burned-out pumpkins, another plunge and skittering of leaves, the skeleton hanged from the Miller’s tree, clicking musically in a soft wind.

The images of death meet the wide open desire to live. It’s probably why the adults are so flummoxed by Halloween. Watch them, when they’re walking behind their kids, flashlights out, tentative smiles, always reminding the young ones to watch out for cars, to say “Trick or Treat” and “Thank you.”  The kids barely listen because they’ve been swept up in the antagonistic fury of youth, the stuff that makes the night a mystery, the moon the backdrop for a flying witch, and the possibility of seeing the dead worth a gleeful scream into the satin black ether of the night.

But for me, those days have drifted away. The mystery becomes not what is in the darkness, but where the light behind me went. It was the light of youth, and it made walking through the darkness an exhilarating discovery, not so different from observing a man-eater in the safety of a zoo. Now, I feel like the old man who overlooked Halloween. It’s a date on a calendar, a holiday my kids get excited about, but something I vaguely dread because it makes me feel as if I’m missing something.

The light of youth.

Gone.

Age shows you one irrefutable fact: time does not linger. It refuses to do anything other than charge, headlong through the seasons, and the seasons remain steadfast.

Somehow you believe you’ve got an eternity of them, and death is only a rumor, but later you learn the truth of it all.

There are no walls to keep the tiger away. They were never there at all. Just an illusion.

I’m hoping as I stumble on through my forties and find the fifties and sixties, I’ll lose my fear of death again. Because it’s coming, as inevitable as the holiday that lets us glimpse it once a year. It’s coming like a great, silent cat for us all.

Halloween is a promise. A drawing down of the day into half-light and ghoul faces, crumbled tombstones and the fallow smell of death.

So what?  What to do in the face of it?

Live. Live like the child that hides inside of you. Or live in fear, and overlook the inevitabilities while you crouch behind your door too fearful to open it wide.

I think of my father, gone these many years now. I think of my mother, also slipped from me. I think of my two children, eight and eleven, their masked faces as they prepare to head into that night.

And I wait, restless again.

JOHN MANTOOTH is an award-winning author whose short stories have been recognized in numerous year’s best anthologies. His short fiction has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Crime Factory, Thuglit, and the Stoker winning anthology, Haunted Legends (Tor, 2010), among others. His collection of short stories, Shoebox Train Wreck, was published by Chizine in 2012, and his debut novel, The Year of the Storm, came out this summer from Berkley/ Penguin. Find John online at www.johnpmantooth.com.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/busfulloflosers

Read an excerpt from The Year of the Storm by John Mantooth:

Around three thirty, a noise from the back of the house woke me. I sat upright, rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to get my bearings. There was always a moment upon first waking when Mom and Anna were still here. It usually lasted only an instant, and when that instant was gone, I felt as if someone had torn a piece of my heart away. I wondered when it would stop, if it would stop.

The noise had come from the back porch. I waited, very still, on the couch for it to come again. Outside, heat lightning flashed, making the den glow pale and cold and throwing shadows against the walls.

Moving slowly and deliberately in the dark, I slipped into the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer, and grabbed a knife. Creeping around the dining room table, I had the knife raised, ready to strike, ready to go for blood if the sneaky old bastard with the oxygen tank had broken into the house. I made it to the back door that led out onto our makeshift deck, where Anna used to like to stand and sing her songs, the ones that always caused me and Dad to laugh no matter how bad our moods were. Pausing near the door, I waited until the sound came again—a shuffling of feet, a slight creaking of the porch.

Keeping my back to the wall and the knife raised, I took a deep breath, turned on the light, and flung open the door. The porch was empty.

Almost.

Muddy tracks led down the back steps and out into the yard.

I stepped outside, shutting the door behind me gently to keep from waking Dad. With the knife in my hand I felt braver perhaps than I had any right to. Following the tracks to the edge of the porch, I paused at the steps, wishing for a flashlight. The wind chimes hanging from the eaves clinked together musically and then fell quiet. The backyard was silent, thrown out ofproportion from the shadows of the looming forest.

I might have gone back in for a flashlight if I hadn’t caught a sudden twist of movement near the entrance to the woods.

At first, I didn’t believe my eyes.

Anna or her ghost—or maybe just a figment of Anna born out of my imagination—stood near a dense cluster of trees, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest, bobbing back and forth the way she did when she was in recovery mode. That was the term Mom had coined when Anna slowly started to bring herself back from an episode.

I stepped off the porch. One step onto the muddy grass and then two, keeping my eyes on her. Something—a fallen branch or vine—caught my foot, and I stumbled forward. I had to look away—just for an instant—and when I looked back up, she was gone.