by Joseph Fink
“Well, isn’t that a nifty costume,” the old woman wearing a witch hat said to her, and poured out her entire bowl of candy into Esther’s bag.
“Whoa,” Esther said.
The woman winked. “Little bonus for having the best costume of the night,” she said as she closed the door.
Every door she went to, people were so impressed with her costume. She was getting more candy than she had ever gotten, but her bag never got any heavier. It felt basically empty, but when she opened it, it contained a bottomless pit of foil-covered chocolates and neon candy wrappers.
Mr. Gabler was out on his front porch. He waved to her, and she waved back.
“Oh, hi there, Esther,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Gabler.”
“Having a good Halloween?”
“Yes, Mr. Gabler.”
“Well, I’ve got something that’ll make it even better.”
She sighed as he picked up the red plastic bowl he kept his usual Halloween toothpaste in. But this time he pulled out a giant chocolate bar, so big that she wasn’t sure how it had fit in the bowl.
“Oh wow,” she said, taking the bar from him. It was as heavy as a backpack full of textbooks, but as soon as she dropped it into her bag, the weight disappeared. “That’s a little different from your usual.”
“I don’t think it matters here,” Mr. Gabler said.
“What do you mean by that?”
Mr. Gabler laughed. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t think it matters here. Come back anytime you want another.”
He leaned back and looked up at the sky. His face became suddenly terrified. There was orange light on his skin. She followed his gaze. Nearly the entire sky was taken up by a huge, orange moon. She heard violent, crashing waves.
Then she was on to the next set of houses. The people in her neighborhood had really gone all out on their decorations. There were complex pumpkin carvings, the usual crude faces replaced with photorealistic portraits and entire horror movie scenes carefully carved and then brought to life with the flicker of a candle. Even houses that usually merely left a porch light on now had fake graveyards, full of fake skeletons and propped-up mummies. She wondered how Mr. Winchell, the neighborhood King of Halloween Decorations, felt about the new competition.
But she didn’t have to wonder for long, because the next house was Mr. Winchell’s, and he had earned his title once again. His yard seemed to be ten times as big as it used to be, acres of dense Halloween decorations sprawling out in every direction. There were entire fake villages, full of heavy-browed, scowling townsfolk, watched over by crumbling ancient castles whose lords lived eternal, unnatural lives. There was a dark forest, in which glowing eyes blinked on and off in the fog, and from which echoed the howl of fearsome beasts. And what had once been a few pieces of plywood set up in a crude tunnel was now an entire hedge maze leading to his front door.
She made her way through the hedge maze, deliciously spooked by the whispers and movement she could hear on the other side of the hedges, of the shrouded figures she could see disappearing around corners right ahead of her. All of this set to the music of her favorite horror movies, not played over a recording, but live, an entire orchestra somewhere in the massive yard.
Finally she made it to the door and knocked. “Trick or treat,” she said as the door swung open with a lovely, ominous creak.
“Esther!” Mr. Winchell said. As usual, he was not dressed up. He liked to dress his house in costume, not himself. He poked his glasses back in place and waved proudly around him. “I was hoping you’d come by. What do you think?”
“It’s amazing, Mr. Winchell. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’ve outdone myself this year. This is the best it’s ever been. I had so many new ideas, and they all flowed so easily.”
“How did you even manage to put it all up on your own?” she said.
He frowned. “You know, Esther, I don’t remember.” He shook his head. “I just don’t remember.”
They stood in silence for a moment. There was something that both of them could almost recall, but neither of them could quite put their finger on what it was.
“Well, it’s incredible,” she said finally, letting go of whatever that distracting thought had been. The tension in Mr. Winchell’s face broke.
“Yes, I’m very proud. Thanks for coming by. Oh, and I almost forgot.”
He reached over and hauled up a huge sack of candy.
“Incoming!” he said, and poured out the entire sack into her bag. The candy flowed, and flowed, and flowed, but her bag didn’t get any heavier.
“There,” he said, once the sack was empty. “That ought to do it. See you next Halloween, Esther.”
“See you, Mr. Winchell.”
Somehow she made it back to the street without having to pass through the lengthy maze again. She couldn’t understand exactly how she had done that, but it didn’t seem important.
She looked into her bag. She had never seen that much candy in one place. It was probably time to call it a night. How fun trick-or-treating was. She would never give it up.
As she headed home, she saw a girl standing on the sidewalk, gazing forlornly down the street.
“Sasha?” Esther said.
Sasha turned. Her face was wet, and her eyes were puffy. It looked like she had been crying for hours.
“Have you seen my mom? She was supposed to pick me up here, but she hasn’t come by.”
Esther looked up and down the street and realized that she hadn’t seen a single car the entire time she had been out.
“No. But I’m sure she’ll come soon. Do you want to wait at my house?”
“That’s okay,” Sasha said. “I’m supposed to wait here, I think. I think I’m just supposed to keep waiting. I think I’ve been waiting a long time.”
“Are you alright?” Esther touched her arm with concern. Sasha nodded, but the tears kept flowing.
“I’m fine, I think. Or I don’t know what to think. Is this right? Is this how it’s supposed to be?”
“Sure,” Esther said. “What could be wrong about it? Look how much fun everyone’s having.”
She gestured at the houses with their brightly lit decorations, and the groups of trick-or-treaters moving between them, laughing, with buckets full of candy. But instead she found herself gesturing at a dark and churning ocean. She was on a tall cliff made of black rock, next to a dead tree. The moon took up most of the sky. It didn’t seem possible that the moon could ever be that big. She looked over the edge of the cliff and felt dizzy. Nothing terrified her more than that ocean below, and whatever lurked within it. This was not an ocean on Earth, she knew. Whatever unimaginable creatures lived in there had never been seen by human eyes. She could feel the hunger, not from the creatures, but from the water itself. It wanted her to fall, it wanted her to splash, it wanted her to drown.
“Where is this?” she screamed, turning back to Sasha. Sasha wasn’t there. Esther was on her street again, alone. Her house was right there, on the corner. A laughing pack of trick-or-treaters ran past her.
“This is the best Halloween night ever!” one of them shouted.
And it was, wasn’t it? She felt happy again. She didn’t know why she would have ever felt otherwise.
Contentedly, she went up her front steps and through her front door. Her dad was at the piano, and her mom was in the living room.
“Hi, sweetheart,” her mom said. “How did it go out there?”
“It was so fun!”
“That’s great, just great,” her dad said. “Hey, want to hear something?”
He started playing a song. It was the same song he had been playing on the saxophone, but it had been expanded upon. He added counterpoint with the left hand, and another section that balanced out the rapid melody of the first part with slow, simple harmonies.
“I wrote that,” he said. “That’s a song I wrote. It finally came to me.”
“It was so
good, Dad,” she said. It really was.
“I love it when he plays that song,” her mom said. She looked even more relaxed than before. The recliner was all the way back, and her mom’s expression was a haze of happiness.
“Hey, don’t you want to get out there?” her dad said.
“Get out where?” she said.
“Trick-or-treating, of course,” her mom said.
“But I was just . . .” She looked down into the bag. It was empty. And she remembered that it was Halloween, and she was about to go trick-or-treating. She got so excited. This was her favorite time of the year.
She felt a weight in her hand and realized that she was holding a weird gray rock. I know this rock. It’s really important to remember what this rock is. But she couldn’t, and so she dismissed the thought and slipped the rock into her pocket.
As she went to the front door, she looked in the hall mirror, and gasped in awe. This was her best costume yet, by far.
In the mirror, she was an entire crowd of ghostly children. There were more than one of her, with different horrifying faces, transparent bodies, dressed in old-fashioned school uniforms. She didn’t know how she managed to make herself look like more than one person, but it was extraordinary. She had outdone herself.
Waiting outside was an older woman. It took a second for Esther to recognize her, because she was livelier than Esther had seen in years. “Grandma Debbie!” she called.
“Oh, Esther,” Debbie said, taking her hand. Grandma’s skin was dry and warm. “Isn’t tonight wonderful? Isn’t it the best night of the year?”
“It absolutely is.” It seemed wrong to Esther that Debbie was here. “Grandma, you haven’t taken me trick-or-treating in years.”
“I know, I know,” said Debbie. She smelled like candy corn and smoke. “We need to make up for lost time. Come on!” She pulled at Esther’s hand.
Everyone who answered their door was impressed with her costume and told her so. Debbie waited at the sidewalk, beaming, and then together they would look at what candy Esther got and debate its merits. They walked by Mr. Gabler’s house. He wasn’t out, but his chair and his red bowl were. The red bowl was full of water. The water smelled like seawater. Esther put her hand in and swished it around, but there was nothing, so they continued on, her hand dripping as she walked.
Then they were on to the next set of houses. The people in her neighborhood had really gone all out on their decorations. There were fully acted out scenes, performed by hundreds of actors, in nearly every yard. Even houses that usually merely left a porch light on now had been rebuilt into tall and teetering Victorian mansions, with ghostly pale faces staring bleakly from the windows. Grandma Debbie oohed and aahed with gusto, pointing at each house as it came and saying “Esther, look!” as though Esther hadn’t seen. She wondered how Mr. Winchell, the neighborhood King of Halloween Decorations, felt about the new competition.
But Mr. Winchell’s yard did not disappoint. His yard stretched for what looked like hundreds of miles. On one end was a full-sized mountain range in which tall, hairy creatures with hard black eyes roamed, tossing ice boulders down on screaming climbers. By the house there was an aquarium in which a shark swam, and a squid the size of a passenger plane, with a single eye staring out with furious hatred at the world. It was the biggest and most frightening animal Esther had ever seen.
The usual plywood maze had been replaced by a train, a steam locomotive hauling old-fashioned passenger cars.
“Go on,” Grandma Debbie said. “I’ll be waiting right here.”
The train carried Esther for hours across mile after mile of scenes and scenarios Mr. Winchell had created for Halloween. The train was a ghost train, full of ghost passengers who stared out at the landscape with hollow shadows where eyes usually are.
“This is the best it’s ever been,” she told Mr. Winchell when he answered the door.
He looked harried. “Yeah, I don’t even know how I came up with it. It’s so big. How did I build it, you know?” He laughed, but the laugh sounded panicked. “How did I even build it?”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
“Well, here you go,” he said, and pulled out a bag of chocolate nearly as big as he was. He tossed it to her with a grunt, and despite its size she caught it easily. “Bye now.” He shut the door.
“Bye, Mr. Winchell. Thank you.” She turned and walked the few short steps back to the street. The way back seemed much shorter than the trip there had been, but maybe she had misremembered. She took Grandma Debbie’s hand and continued down the street. As she did, she noticed unusual structures behind the houses. Long, rounded bases, and then four gigantic towers that went up and up. Her eyes followed the full length of one tower, and she realized it was a leg. The four towers were the legs of Mr. Gabler and Sasha Min, standing on opposite sides of the street, facing each other. They were thousands of feet tall.
“Huh,” Esther said. That didn’t seem right, but her brain couldn’t hold on to it, and her grandma was already pulling her forward enthusiastically.
She continued to Spindrift Court and found the house that always had the haunted house in the backyard. This house had also improved considerably. The haunted house was now bigger than the home it was attached to. There was an entire staff of costumed employees, ushering thrill seekers inside. A clown with a chainsaw ran around the line, scaring people into embarrassed giggles. She had always dreamed of visiting a haunted house like this, and now there was one just a couple blocks from her home.
“Hey,” Agustín called out. He was standing in the door of the main house, where the parents were having their grown-up Halloween party. Esther looked at Grandma Debbie, a little shy, but Debbie just patted her cheek.
“Go on,” she whispered. “I’ll be waiting right here.”
Esther turned away from her grandma and joined Agustín in the entryway.
“What are you doing in here?” she said.
“I don’t know.” He looked around at the rooms of chatting adults holding wineglasses, as though it were a mystery he could solve. “I remembered there being something wrong about this party, and I wanted to see. But everything seems fine.”
“More than fine,” she said. “Isn’t this the best Halloween ever? And it’s even better now that I’m spending it with you.”
This was more direct than they had ever been with each other, especially in the last couple years, but she was so genuinely happy to see him that she forgot to hide how she felt. She hugged him, which she had never done. He didn’t seem to know what to do, but then he hugged her back.
“It’s pretty good, yeah,” he said. “But there’s something. I don’t know.” He looked again at the party, as though hoping it would be different if he caught it by surprise. “Let’s go upstairs, see if there’s anything there.”
She followed him up the stairs. On the landing was a window. Through the window, she could see a huge orange moon. It seemed to be right on the other side of the glass. And below it was a dark ocean, so deep as to be basically bottomless. If she ever touched that ocean, even with just one toe, she would be lost forever. She would be dragged down, and down, and down.
She turned away from the window and forgot what she had been looking at, although her arms still prickled as though she were touching something frozen. “Do you like Halloween any better?” she asked.
Agustín looked back at her, his face utterly earnest. His sincerity made her heart crack a little, but in a way she found strangely nice.
“No. But it’s okay, I don’t have to. I like that you like it.”
She knew that he was right. He didn’t have to like Halloween because she did. This shouldn’t have felt like a revelation, and yet it struck her as one.
And then they were past the landing, onto the second floor. It seemed completely normal. A few bedrooms. One of which had been converted into an office.
“I don’t know, everything looks fine to me,” she said.
“I kn
ow what it looks like. But there’s more to it than what it looks like.”
He was so serious and concerned, and she felt something slip in her chest. It felt physical, an actual movement, some part of her shifting and making room for a new version of herself.
“I want to kiss you now,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She took him by the shoulders and kissed him. Then she pulled back to see how he would react. His eyes were wide, but then they relaxed and he kissed her back.
“I like you,” she said. “I mean, obviously, you’re my friend, but I like you, like you.”
“I like you too,” he said. “I think maybe I have for a while.”
“Yeah. Definitely for a while. Me too.”
“Why didn’t we ever talk like this before? Why didn’t we say that to each other?”
“I think we didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I think we were friends for so long before these feelings came, and we didn’t know what they were.”
“And why do we know now?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s different now. It feels like . . . like . . .”
“Like a dream,” he said.
“Yeah, like a dream,” she said, and leaned in to kiss him again. Now that she had done it once, she wanted to do it over and over. She maybe liked kissing more than she liked trick-or-treating, more than scary movies, more than Halloween itself, a realization that would have horrified her just a few minutes before. But when she leaned in, he was gone. She was alone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi there,” her mother said.
Esther was back in her own house. Had she been somewhere else? She didn’t think so. Now she remembered. She was home and about to go out for her favorite holiday.
“Happy Halloween,” her mom said. She was on the couch with the TV on. Esther didn’t recognize the show. It seemed to just be a continuous shot of a huge orange moon, broken by occasional bursts of static. The static sounded like ocean waves. A cold mist drifted out of the TV. Esther tasted salt in the air.
