My Halloween Story
By: Nitin Dangwal
Tags: Halloween, Short Story, Ghosts, Fiction, Fiction Writing

My Halloween Story

Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash

For a long time, I ignored my daughter’s talk about seeing angels and demons at night. These are just dreams — that’s what I told her when she persisted for my attention. What else can a father say to her daughter anyways?

Dancing dinosaurs, flying dragons, talking cats: I have heard it all before. So why angels and demons would be any different?

But then when she started saying that she had to choose one of them tonight, I couldn’t help but get involved in her foolish talks.

“Choose the angel, Diana, of course?” I said as she looked at me with her big beautiful eyes.

“But the Angel is as scary as the Demon. Both have long slimy fingers, sharp jagged teeth, and eyes that make me remember about the night when — “

“Shh,” I stopped her. “We don’t talk about that, honey.” I patted her back.

The fact that she was dreaming again was worrisome enough, but this business of seeing angels as demons? That got me worried.

“I’ll stay with you tonight,” I assured her, “then I can help you choose the right one.”

“But they won’t come if you are there. They come only for me.”

I smiled and winked at her.

“I will hide under your bed. They won’t know it.”

She flashed a big bright smile and lunged towards me, giving me a big hug. “Thank you, papa,” she said and ran out of the room to play in the porch.

After that, I didn’t think of much about it as my I got engrossed in the news playing on TV.

By the time I got up, the warm dusk had deepened into a cold silent night. I went about dinner business in the kitchen. Sometime during my time in the kitchen, I left a voice message for my wife. She was with her parents for the weekend.

I had a usual dinner with my daughter. Then we watched half an hour of the cartoons on TV, after which she kissed me goodnight and went to her room. Three-quarters of an hour went by, and only then I remembered the promise I had made my daughter.

I cleaned the table, and kitchen, brushed my teeth, and then after standing by the window for a few minutes looking at the big ghostly moon, went to my daughter’s room, silently opened the door, and stepped insides.

She was already asleep.

A fatherly smile came over my face, and I slid under the bed. All of this felt like a game to me, and I relished the talk which I will be having tomorrow morning with her about her irrational fears.

As I lay under the bed, I realized that I should have bought my phone, which would have helped me to kill time. But the prospect of getting out from under the bed and then return seems too much now. So I decided to stay put and hoped for my daughter to wake up from her dream. That way, I would catch her in the moment, proving that it was nothing but her vivid imagination.

It was in these childish thoughts that I lost track of time and began to drowse. A light veil of sleep fell over me, and I pulled up my hands behind me, put them under my head, closed my eyes and began to sleep.

I woke up with a start.

I raised my head a little and ended up bumping my head against the floor of the bed. Even though I was awake, the deep blanket of sleep still hung over me. I had completely forgotten why I was under the bed, and for a moment, a primal panic gripped me like the claws of a giant spider.

It took me a few moments, but I came out of that half-asleep half-awake state, got hold of my bearing and smiled at my fear. I looked around, trying to get the hang of the time from the light in the room. From the narrow slit of a view that my unique position offered me, I saw only darkness.

It was then I first heard a deep guttural sound, and at once a thought erupted into my head — it’s not my daughter’s voice.

I slid myself out of bed on the side of the wardrobe, chinned up from behind the bed’s edge and saw past the rumpled duvet on the empty bed towards the window. There I saw a body standing at the window, her hair phantasmal in the silvery light of the moon, wind sighing through her hair making them wave, her light cotton frock billowing, and then the same guttural sound coming from inside of her.

At that moment, what struck me most was the fact that even though the girl standing at the window, no doubt was my daughter — who else she could be? — but something unexplainable told me that at that moment she wasn’t my daughter. Something of essence that made my daughter, my daughter, was missing.

Even though I was scared, but a fatherly instinct made me get up and to check what was happening, and who (or what?) this girl was that was every bit my daughter except that key essence.

As softly as possible, I got up and began to walk in the direction of the spectral figure standing in that pale ghostly calcimined wash of moonlight.

When I reached her, I was so scared that my heart was flitting in my chest like a wild bird, and my body has covered a veneer of icy cold sweat.

I stopped right behind her.

Then, I waited for a moment, drew in a long breath and put my hands over her shoulder.

If she had moved or jerked or even twitched, I would not have been surprised. I was prepared for that. But the girl just stood still as a rock, and cold as ice. At once, my hand pulled away from her. I stood there for a moment, wiping some sweat off my face. Then I walked around her and stood next to the window, looking at her.

When I saw her, it took my breath away.

The right part of the face that was near to me was ghostly white, and the other part dark as that of a moonless night. Both her eyes were of different colours, the right one of livid colour, and the left one deep scarlet.

I gathered all the courage I could muster and put my right hand on her face. She didn’t budge. Then I put the other hand on her face, and then I realized something, that this body whatever it was had nothing to do with my daughter and it was —

Just then I felt a hand behind me, and I jumped back in a fear so strong that all the hair on my body bristled, my heart leapt in my mouth, my breathing rate off the charts.

I turned around and saw a moist hand over me, and something stuck in my throat like a bone of a fish too big to swallow, and I writhed, I flopped, I moaned, I howled, and I fell back in utter fear.

The last thing I remember was cold darkness over me that I felt was very much like dying. Just after I heard this other girl was saying something, “Papa, Papa, it was just a jo — “

But I was already blacked out to understand what she was saying.