Panic (Reader Insert)

    “Trick or treat!”

    The woman gives you an incredulous scowl as she looks you up and down. After a moment, she reluctantly drops assorted candies in your pail. You thank her with unfazed enthusiasm, turning to your friends.

    “I thought she was gonna cuss you out!” one of them snickers as you all continue down the street.

    “If looks could kill, we’d be screwed,” another laughs.

    So what? Who was that lady to decide you were too old to trick-or-treat? Halloween is your favorite holiday: no relatives to visit, no gifts to buy, awesome costumes, and candy from strangers.

    You’ve already said that a million times, though, so you laugh along with them.

    You glance at the night sky. Stars pierce the inky black with a sharper clarity you can ever remember seeing before. An eerie, devious Moon hangs low in the air, orange and foreboding. Wisps of clouds move swiftly—unsettlingly swiftly—to the Moon, congregating and then fleeing at once, like thieves selling secrets. An unnatural chill slashes and sings through the night, the nip of the fading and paranormal.

    All of it brings an uncomfortable, cold anxiety to the bottom of your stomach. You’re almost certain you’ve felt it before, but any specific memory eludes you. You feel your skin tighten and your hands start to tremble as the familiar but unfamiliar sensation flushes through your blood, chilling you from the inside out. You’re terrified, you realize, but of what?

    All at once, before you can reach an answer, the warmth of the living floods through your body again, and you almost can’t remember being afraid in the first place. You blink, and the night is just another night. Just another Halloween. You return to celebrating your favorite holiday.

    Some distance away, something watches you make your rounds.

    He isn’t just watching you, of course.

    He’s watching everyone.

 

    Including,

    but not especially,

    you.

 

    No one sees him.

    They could, if they looked.

    If they cared to notice the stinging chill of the air.

    The particular blackness of tonight’s sky.

 

    If, for one moment, they let the night into their skin—

    let it strike panic into their hearts—

    then he would be revealed.

 

    They would see him.

    Watching.

    Everyone.

 

    Including,

    but not especially,

    you.

 

    “Why don’t skeletons ever go out on the town?”

    Your friends collectively sigh and roll their eyes.

    “Why,” one answers begrudgingly.

    You grin. “Because they never have any body to go with!”

    “Get out,” the driver says as the others break into groans or weary chuckles, shaking their heads.

    “It wasn’t that bad!” you laugh, much louder than everyone else.

    “No, get out,” they repeat. “This is your house.”

    Looking out the window, you realize it is. Another chuckle, and you clamber out of the backseat with your pail full of candy, careful not to muss up your costume. They cheer goodnight and goodbye, and you return the farewells. As they drive away, you take another moment to look up at the sky.

    The street is quiet, and completely dark for blocks. The candy’s gone, porch lights are switched off, decorations unplugged, and jack-o-lanterns extinguished. The long-off drone of Halloween music and stagnant parties is gone. Halloween is over.

    You aren’t sure why there aren’t any streetlights, but there aren’t. There never have been, on this particular stretch of this particular street.

    You remember when you were younger, the empty and lifeless atmosphere of the night frightened you. You remember any time you had to go out at night, glancing anxiously down the street and listening carefully for someone—or something—watching you from the shadows. You remember your parents explaining to you—irritated but patient—that there was nothing to be afraid of between your porch and the dumpster. You remember insisting that they not make you go out, offering to do it in the morning, that when you went outside at night you got a bad feeli—

    You stop mid-thought.

    The chill you felt earlier returns to you, as you look up at the black, silver-strewn sky through the branches of half-dead trees.  The Moon is higher now, but still that bizarre shade of orange and perhaps even more menacing as before. Clouds are gone.

 

    It was nights like this.

 

    The anxiety wells in your stomach again, memories close and distant flooding back. It was nights like this, when you were young, that this fear crept over you. You feel now, as you felt then, the eyes of something unknown stalking you. The sharp, electric chill slices the air with an almost perceptible ring.

    The air hangs empty, silent, and dead like that for a few long moments, and you’re unable to do anything but stand in place.

 

    You’re too aware of the silence.

    No rustling from the leaves in the expiring trees.

    No whispers, no signs of life at all from any of the houses.

    Only your breathing and heartbeat remain, both strangely loud and ragged to you.

 

 

    You let the night into your skin.

    Let it strike panic into your heart.

    A flash of pure black, too fast to say you see it at all.

    A figure, rising up from the shadows.

 

    Just short of your porch steps, a single drop of darkness stems from the ground to about eight feet into the air, and then widens to form the shape of a man. His back is turned to you, but you can see that he’s abnormally tall, thin, has pale skin, and is dressed in a dignified black tuxedo, complete with a top hat, black and adorned with a single golden feather.

    Who are you? you wonder, unable to trust your shuddering lungs with the task of speaking.

    The man stands a little straighter, like a puppeteer pulled a string through his spine.

    Did he hear you?

    As if to respond, the man whips around, and the blood in your face drains away almost audibly. Your mouth is suddenly drier than all the Moon as the dread shoots from your stomach through your entire body.

    He looks straight at you, in mutual recognition.

    But he has no face.

    His skin is pale. It’s snow-white, in fact. His tuxedo is black. Complete, absolute black. There is no shadow, no highlight. It’s as if the corrupted, orange moonlight that reached it kept going forever, never reflecting back into the world. He’s hardly thicker than your wrist up to his chest, which abruptly swells from his waist to his shoulders. A wide, frayed collar on his tux made his shoulders look even wider, and his disproportionately long, thin arms seem to barely hang on his body, almost disconnected. His neck is likewise abnormally long and thin, adorned with a tie, and his face is, as aforementioned, featureless. There are ridges where you can make out cheekbones, browbones, a chin, and where a nose should go, but he has no nose, no mouth or eyes. It isn’t like a skull, with empty sockets; these things are smoothed over, as if he were wearing a silk mask.

    After a small infinity of horror, he begins to walk towards you. He takes slow but long strides, and there’s something completely disturbing about the way he walks.

    Run, your mind tells you. Fight! Do SOMETHING!

    But you can’t move. His eyeless stare seems to cement your feet to the ground, and the horror paralyzes every muscle in your body. A small infinity passes before he stops just a bit in front of you.

    Then something happens. As this eight-to-ten-foot-tall spectre towers over you, the fear seems to put itself aside. You feel warmth start to return to your body, tentatively reaching through the dread, relaxing your muscles and undoing the effects of fear. Never looking away, you release a breath you weren’t aware you’d been holding.

    He grins.

    Well, he does and he doesn’t. He doesn’t because he doesn’t have a mouth. But you have a feeling both yours and not that if he had a face, it would be cracked in a wide smile.

    And you return it, as best you can.

    He moves again, quickly and mechanically, but not ominously. He bends almost in half, closing the distance between you and only coming down to your eye level. You see that his skin isn’t quite skin, but more like mother-of-pearl. Orange, green and violet light gleams from his nondescript features from sources you can’t place. He holds a small offering in his left hand.

    You break eye contact(?) for the first time, and take the gift.

    You are surprised to find it’s a business card.

    Adorned with tiny, intricate gold designs at the edges, the card is like his skin, shimmering the colors of Halloween. The type is elegant, calligraphic. It almost looks handwritten, except that it’s raised.

    Happy Halloween, it reads.

    When you look up again, he has straightened to his full, massive height, silhouetted by the half-clothed skeletons of trees and the harvest Moon.  You have a feeling of gratitude that is both yours and not. He touches slender, white fingers to the brim of his hat in farewell.

    “Thank you,” someone says with your mouth. “And Happy Halloween.”

    Then, he’s gone. You don’t blink, you don’t see him vanish, but one moment he is there, and one moment, he is elsewhere. You’re only staring at the sky again—at the prankster Moon, all bark and no bite. The mischievous stars, twinkling in stifled laughter. They got you. They all got you.

    You look down at your hand. The business card remains. You turn it in the light, and as Halloween reflects back at you, you smile a smile only the gullible can.