Halloween Haunts: I’m Old Now and Halloween was Better Once… Really by John F.D. Taff

Ok, you know, it’s true what they say about growing old. Yes, about the aches and pains.  OK, yes, about the fossilfication of your music choices.  And, sigh, yes, also about the general jadedness about life and jaundiced viewpoints about…well, let’s not stray too far, here, shall we? Also part of growing old is a distressing tendency to digress…

No, what I’m talking about here is how those of us who are older—and at 50 years old I count myself amongst them—have a tendency to view our past as some sort of privileged golden age that was there only for us, bypassing those poor souls that came before and generally being ruined by those who came after. Now, I don’t cotton to most of that talk (and, Jesus, I just freaked myself out by using “cotton” as a verb), but there is one thing that I think those of my generation can lay a special claim to, and that’s Halloween.

Halloween, when I was a kid, was phenomenal. It is the memory of pillowcases filled with candy, of the rare freedom to run around your neighborhood without parental supervision…and at night. It was the sweat-filled Ben Cooper plastic Spider-Man or Batman mask, with the elastic string that got stuck in your hair and the cheap plastic costume that had to be put on over two t-shirts and a sweater because mom always said it was cold out there.  It was staying up late and getting home late and stretching out in bed organizing your candy and eating sugar until you thought your entire body would begin to vibrate.

It was the smell of fall, with wet leaves and dead grass, the cold tang of winter in the air. Most years, at least where I grew up, it also smelled of ozone…it was either actively raining or just finished raining or getting ready to rain.  It smelled of candle wax and matches, of tea lights inside carved pumpkins, the flickering flames scorching the orange pumpkin flesh underneath the hollowed-out lid.  It’s the ashy smell of fireplaces and bonfires and toasted marshmallows sandwiched between chocolate and graham crackers.

It was the taste of chocolate, always the taste of chocolate. The blandness of white candy cigarettes and powdery pink baseball card bubble gum, the tang of Smarties and Sweet Tarts. I will forever link the taste of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups with Halloween.  But more, too.  It was the taste of candy apples, apple cider and candy corn, of circus peanuts (gross) and Mary Janes (also gross), Bit ‘O Honey (strange), Oh Henry!, nonpareils (also strange), and Pixie Sticks (like kid cocaine).

So what’s different today, you might ask? Sure the costumes have given way to more elaborate things, more Disney creations, more rubber masks, more little girls inexplicably dressed as whorish versions of any number of monsters or princesses.  And the candy tastes have changed somewhat, moving toward Skittles and Starburst and Warheads.

But I think, ultimately now as I look back, it was the safety of it, the safety of fear that made it different than it is today. Up until the hovering helicopter parents (and the always reliable religious fundies) stepped in, Halloween was, by and large when I was a child, thought of as safe. And it was.

Oh, sure, there were a few of the “razor blades in apple” stories, but who actually encountered that? A few of the “don’t eat homemade treats” warnings, but by and large, it was safe.  There was no X-raying candy hoards or trick-or-treating through malls or in discrete, private group functions.  People felt safe within their communities to let their kids roam free for a night and face their fear of the unknown, as little and unreal as it was.

Fear was there, sure, but it was the safe fear of monsters and ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. It wasn’t today’s more real fears of children being hurt or kidnapped, poisoned, or the rather ironic fear of the holiday leading some hapless children into a lifelong worship of Satan.  No, the fears were simple because they weren’t of the real world variety.

Back then, Halloween was like a good Saturday afternoon monster feature. Close the blinds, turn off the lights and watch the movie and get scared out of your wits.  But then, at around 3:00 p.m., open the blinds, let the sun in and forget everything that just made your blood run cold.  And go on with your regular life.  Halloween was like that, then.  A brief respite from normal life when you could let your little fears out to play for a while, then bring them back in and close up shop until next year.

It seems as if this Halloween is gone, never to return. And that’s a real loss, I think.  So many golden-tinged memories of my childhood are gone but on hard reflection seem to never have really been that way in actuality.  But Halloween…oh, that memory I think is accurate.  And its loss makes the world a little less interesting, I think…for kids, at least.  For me, definitely.  But then I guess it’s us adults who ended up ruining the holiday anyway.  Adults suck.

As I said at the beginning, I’m old. Pay no attention to me.  I’ll just go eat a Reese’s and remember…

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: John is offering two e-book copy of The End in All Beginnings. Comment below to enter or e-mail membership@horror.org with “HH Entry” in the subject line.

JOHN F.D. TAFF has been writing dark speculative fiction for 25 years. He has more than 75 stories in publications that include Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Big Pulp, One Buck Horror, Horror Library V, Horror for Good, The Hot Blood Series, Shock Rock II, and three Grey Matter Press anthologies—the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror – Volume One, Ominous Realities: The Anthology of Dark Speculative Horrors, and the upcoming Death’s Realm. Six of his short stories have been selected as honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volumes over the years. His collection of short stories, Little Deaths, was well reviewed and named the “No. 1 Horror Collection of 2012” by HorrorTalk. In 2013, two of his novels were published—an historical ghost story, The Bell Witch, and the thriller Kill/Off. Grey Matter Press recently released his latest, a collection of five novellas entitled The End in All Beginnings.  You can learn more about John from his website at johnfdtaff.com, or follow him on Twitter @johnfdtaff.

The End in All Beginnings

Published by Stoker-nominated Grey Matter Press and edited by Stoker-nominated R.J. Cavender, Taff’s latest collection, The End in All Beginnings, takes the reader on a trip through five heartbreaking novellas that recount death and love and loss.

The book is available in paperback and all digital formats. For more information, visit Taff’s Amazon Author Page at http://www.amazon.com/John-F.D.-Taff/e/B005C6BZMY/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1409798454&sr=8-1.

Here’s what people are saying about The End in All Beginnings:

“Of the current breed of authors riding the wave of digital liberation, John Taff is a standout talent. Literary, affecting, chilling, and indicative of that old-school mentality meets new-school daring. You need look no further than this collection for evidence that not only is horror not dead, there are new proponents of the craft more than capable of carrying it into the future.” —Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Turtle Boy, Kin and Jack & Jill

“The End in All Beginnings is accomplished stuff, complex and heartfelt. There’s an attention to character and an access to feeling that’s very refreshing indeed!” —Jack Ketchum, World Horror Grand Master and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Closing Time, Peaceable Kingdom and The Box

“Taff brings the pain in five damaged and disturbing tales of love gone horribly wrong. This collection is like a knife in the heart. Highly recommended!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Code Zero and Fall of Night

“The End in All Beginnings is a powerful collection that journeys through the darker side of life’s loves and losses. Past anguish and pain, into realms of repercussions and oblivion.”” —Rena Mason, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Evolutionist and East End Girls

“The End in all Beginnings gathers five emotion-packed novellas from the insightful pen of John F.D. Taff. There is a circular, almost dreamlike quality to much of the material, owing to Taff’s elegant, often poetic descriptions. They mark out undiscovered country from the religious nostalgia of childhood, to psychological, demented—even monstrous—love gone awry, all the way to the realm of the dead. This collection belongs on the shelf of any true horror connoisseur.” —Aaron J. French, Editor-in-Chief of Dark Discoveries magazine and author of Aberrations of Reality

Here’s an excerpt from “What Becomes God,” the lead novella in The End in All Beginnings:

Prologue

Was it two? Or three?

I’m just not sure anymore. I can’t be sure of that.

I have dreams where there are just two, normal size, at the front, set up on biers.

I have dreams where there are three, two normal size, one to either side of the smaller one in the middle.

I’d like to believe there were actually three.

Believing that there were only two means…means…

**********

There was a time when I believed…in a lot of things.

But no more.

Belief is a terrible thing. It demands sacrifice…

Once, I was a child, and I believed, and I sacrificed a thing of beauty for the thing I loved most, my best friend.

And it bought me nothing.

Nothing, that is, except disbelief.

Here it is, then, if you want it, if you can see it.

If you will take it…

**********

First I believed I could catch the moon…

I hadn’t been asleep long when the moon exploded.

I’d entered sleep roughly that evening, pounding my pillow into submission, thrashing the covers until they could fight me no longer.

When sleep finally came, though, it was indifferent, a familiar lover’s torpid kiss.

And the dream came with it almost immediately.

I stood on the deck of my house.  Only it was the house I’d grown up in, the house I’d been born into. That house never had a deck. Being back was enough to awaken in me some dim spark of loss—of childhood, home and family, whatever pain it might have caused me in my youth.  Perhaps the fog of years or the acceptance of age dulled my mind to the sting of such memories.

Sighing heavily, I reached forward, grasping the rough-hewn railing of the deck I never knew and looked up at the silver-white light of the moon, impossibly big and full above me.

I had touched the moon one childhood evening.

Or, rather, I’d tried…

That early summer’s evening, I had tried to catch the moon, trap it in a jar like the king of all fireflies.  I had raced through the weed-choked empty lot behind my house for hours, leaving my father slumped in his easy chair, a pile of beer cans slouching at his feet, a half-lit cigarette slipping from his drooping hand.

My mother was gone on one of her countless errands—shopping or playing cards or having dinner at one of her friends’ houses—all of which, I know now (and was dimly aware of in this dream) meant she was out with one of her lovers.  One of the men who showed up frequently at the house during the morning or afternoon—always while dad was away—to “fix the sink” or “unstop the toilet” or “work on the furnace.”

Together, they’d disappear for hours, and return sweaty and disheveled.

It would start when my dad returned home…the yelling, the throwing, the rage that echoed from the dingy walls of our small place until…

But that one evening, I’d felt larger than it all—as big as an eight-year-old boy can feel.  While I rested in the field munching on the crushed remains of a cheese sandwich I’d fixed for dinner, my breath rasping in my lungs, an empty jar sitting amiably beside me, I believed I could catch the moon.

            I believed.

Or maybe I wanted the moon to catch me, to seal and take me away in its own glass jar, still smelling faintly of whatever condiment was used on the moon.

While I rested there, my older sister, Marcia, came crashing through the tall grass.

“What the fuck are you doing out here?” she said.  I saw the inexpertly rolled white cylinder in her hands disappear behind her bare stomach, where a single roll of baby fat still curved innocently from between the short hem of her t-shirt, the low waist of her torn, tight jeans.

All of 15, she was already smoking pot and getting laid and thinking about moving on to, perhaps, heroin or LSD and communal living and free love. Marcia had come out here alone to smoke, still fearing the anger of our parents, however fossilized and impotent it might appear.

And I could tell she feared what I thought, as well.

How strange, I realize now.

But with this also came the realization that she hated me with a loathing that reminded me of the secret looks my mother sometimes gave my father.

“I’m trying to catch the moon,” I breathed, stale crumbs of bread flaking from my lips, one dirty hand stroking the smooth glass of the jar.

She stood with her mouth open for a moment, not able to laugh or speak.  Finally, “You’re a fucking retard.  Just like the old man. Must run in the entire fucking family,” she finally spat, hurtling each word forward like a striking snake.

With that, she turned away, strode farther off into the field, farther from me.

I never saw her again.

From what little my parents said about her afterward, I gleaned that she’d run away, hitched to San Francisco, joined some group of hippies. She died three years later, when I was 11 and she only 18, of a heroin overdose.

My parents didn’t bring her home to bury her, didn’t go there to attend the funeral.  Later, when I was in high school, some acquaintance of hers told me that her friends had buried her with flowers in her hair.

He laughed as if this was some black joke, watched my uncomprehending face, shook his head.

My dream-self remembered all of this, but particularly how close the moon had been that heavy summer evening.  It had seemed possible, really possible to touch it, to capture it.

I believed it.

How would it feel, I wondered, to run my hands along its grey ridges and dead dry scarps, to feel the impression of its craters beneath the tips of my fingers?

While I considered reaching out to touch it in this dream, it burst asunder like the husk of a dried, desiccated fruit.

There was a tremendous flash of light, painful even with closed eyes.  I threw my hands up to ward it away, but it did no good.  It penetrated flesh and bone and mind in one gigantic, formless pulse of light before it faded.

And it left a horror in its absence.

Where there was once one round face in the sky, there were now thousands, millions of jagged pieces, twirling and spinning in the darkness like fragments of a shattered mirror, each glittering the same argent as the former whole.

The space between these whirling shards was filled with jagged arms of purple lightning, and silvery faery dust, and the plumes of myriad explosions.

A moment earlier, and I felt I could reach out to stroke the face of the moon.

No more.

The vast space between the Earth and moon was magnified by the streamers and debris that filled the sky, seeming to come closer and closer, but never able to reach earth.

And I realized through the mist of my dream, through the veil of years that separated the me of years and years ago from this me, realized how ridiculous this childhood dream was, this belief.

No one could touch the moon.

No one.