Trick-or-treaters are the worst.
That’s always been my view on the matter, anyway. Annoying little gremlins parading from door to door all night, shrieking and yelling, dressed like the little monsters they are, begging for sugar to further fuel their mayhem and hullabaloo. What a holiday, right?
I never cared for Halloween much as a kid either, but it got progressively more and more irritating the older I got and the more distant I became from childhood. I have never once handed out candy to trick-or-treaters or even left a bowl out for them, and I’m proud of it. As far as I’m concerned, Halloween is a stain upon society, and the sooner it disappears, the better.
It’s always been easy enough to shut off all my lights and sit in the darkness watching TV in order to drown out the din from outside. When you think about it, it’s pretty absurd that I have to change MY behavior, that I have to be the one to take action if I want to avoid everybody else’s madness. But it is what it is, and that’s what I do. Most people get the hint from the darkened house. Sometimes I do get oblivious trick-or-treaters at my door anyway, but I’m usually just able to ignore them until they leave.
I remember last Halloween well. How could I ever forget it? I was sitting in my living room, watching an episode of some crappy old sitcom. Every so often, I could hear the shrieks of children in the distance over the dialogue from the TV, and the noise grated on my every nerve.
In my experience, trick-or-treating usually starts to die down after 9:00, but it was exactly 9:19 that night when a knock on the door broke through the laugh track of whatever mediocre show I was watching.
Annoyed, I resolved to ignore the sound, but a few moments later, another knock came, followed by another, and then another. I gritted my teeth and remained in place, but the knocking continued for what must have been a full minute, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore.
Anger surged in my chest as I rose and stomped toward the front of the house. I threw open the door, prepared to give some bratty kid a piece of my mind. But instead of a vexatious child, empty eye sockets greeted me, hollow pits in a grinning bleach-white face.
I let out a small gasp and stumbled backward, reeling from the sight. It was a skeleton- a whole skeleton, about the same height as me, standing on my porch. My first thought was that it was a decoration someone had left there as a prank, but then it moved, taking a long step into my house and shutting the door behind itself.
I couldn’t even speak. Was this some sort of animatronic? It didn’t look or move like one. It looked like a real, honest-to-God human skeleton moving around as naturally as a living person would.
As my mind tried to process what I was seeing, it took me a moment to realize it was moving toward me. I turned to run, but its long, bony fingers caught me by the collar of my shirt.
I don’t have an exact moment-by-moment recollection of what happened next, which is probably for the best. I experienced pain beyond pain, suffering beyond description. I don’t think there is any earthly way of fully articulating the depths of horror the skeleton subjected me to. I am fortunate that I only remember flashes of it.
I remember those cold fingers digging into my neck, then wrapping around my spine and pulling hard until nothing but white-hot agony filled my mind. I remember my head smacking hard against the ground. I remember staring in horror at a collapsed pile of skin and meat on the floor in front of me, a thing that had once been my flesh, still swaddled in my clothes.
I remember watching the skeleton get on its knees and start carefully crawling into that mass of meat. I remember it dragging me by my legs out to my car, wearing my flesh and shifting its shoulders uncomfortably as it tried to make its new meat suit fall into place and look natural. And I remember watching from the bottom of a pit as it shoveled dirt on top of me. My skin was still rippling and settling into place on its new occupant, but right before the dirt covered my eyes, I remember thinking the thing was starting to look less like a horrifically mangled corpse and more like… well, like me, like the way I had been before this.
It took me a while to figure out how to move down there. Frankly, it shouldn’t have been possible given the state I was in, and the pounds of dirt packed in all around me made it exceedingly difficult on top of that. But gradually, I started learning how to make my fingers twitch. With practice and focus, I was soon able to wiggle an arm, then a leg. I didn’t have much else to do down there. I was alone in total darkness, with suffocating pressure constantly bearing down on me. I heard nothing but the shifting of the earth and the scrabbling of worms.
But eventually, I was able to start moving through the dirt. I don’t quite know how. With all that weight on top of me, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Regardless, I managed to start pushing my way through the ground, crawling inch by inch, making my way up and up and up until one day, finally, miraculously, I pushed upward with one hand and felt it break the surface.
Cool night air swirled around me as I finally clawed my way out of the unmarked grave that had held me. The moon loomed big and bright in the sky, and angry black storm clouds gathered beneath it. I stood up and looked down at my hands for the first time since I’d been buried. Dusty white bones greeted me. I touched my head and felt my smooth skull, ran a hand across my chest and counted the spaces between the ribs.
I thought I recognized the area I was in. My assailant had buried me in a forest near a highway I knew well. I started walking. Within a couple hours, I had reached the edge of the little town where I lived- where I had lived, anyway. I crept through the streets under the cover of darkness until I found it: my house, now foreclosed and boarded up. The skeleton who had stolen my body was gone.
How long had I been beneath the dirt? I soon found the answer on a newspaper rack outside the grocery store: it had been about a year. Almost exactly a year, actually: Halloween was tomorrow. And now it’s today.
I don’t know where the skeleton who attacked me has gone. He must have fled town, taking his pound of flesh with him, so to speak. He could be anywhere by now. But that’s all right. I don’t need my own meat suit back, at least not right now. Somebody else’s will do just fine for the time being.
And there are a lot of possibilities out there. There are a lot of places I could go to start this new chapter in my… life, if it can still be called that. I already made the decision yesterday to leave my little town and explore my options. I don’t know if the timing of my escape means anything, so I don’t want to wait too long to make a move, but I figure I can afford to take a look around before night falls.
Perhaps the skeleton who knocked on my door was just like me. Perhaps his flesh was stolen too. Perhaps he, too, was buried, and once he clawed his way out of the dirt, perhaps he, like me, realized he couldn’t carry on as a skeleton forever. I can’t blame him for what he did, really. It’s horrible being nothing but bones.
As I skulk through the shadows and prepare for tonight, I must say that I think I’ve had a change of heart when it comes to trick-or-treaters. They may be annoying, but now I understand that I was far too cruel to them. I should have treated them more kindly. When someone came knocking on Halloween night, I should have always answered the door.
You’ll learn from my mistakes, won’t you? Every time you hear a knock tonight, make sure you answer the door. Always answer the door.