Halloween Spirit

These days, it had become "Halloween tradition" to procrastinate until the afternoon of October 31st, then put random pieces of gum, candy, or fruit into a cheap plastic bowl and shove it onto the porch.
Joe was putting out his bowl when he saw someone staring at the graveyard on the opposite side of the road. Far too tall to be a child, they were wearing a long brown cloak and what looked like a purple jack-o-lantern on their head.
Joe had never seen any good reason for an adult to wear a costume. "Excuse me!" he shouted, "Aren't you a little old to be trick-or-treating?"
When the figure stopped and turned, its huge black eyes narrowed and then widened. Its mouth gaped in a toothless grin as it bounded towards Joe, pushing off the ground with its arms like a greyhound. Joe fell to his knees and trembled with his eyes closed until he felt an icy hand ruffle his hair.
Up close, the figure looked to be three meters tall, and its bulbous head was too wide to fit through a door. It had doubled over like a pipe cleaner, and it was resting its head near Joe's face while caressing it with its purple fingers.
It chuckled, "Have you ever seen the dead walking?"
With a snap of its skeletal fingers, the sky turned blood-red and the moon lengthened and curved until it was C-shaped. Of course the corpses lurched from their graves, dressed in their funeral best. But living or dead, the people milling outside sprouted claws, and crowns, and wings that launched them into the air. Only Joe was unaffected, staring dumbfounded as the people he thought he knew began raucously celebrating their wildest childhood fantasies made manifest.
"Such a pity," the figure clucked to him. "There was never any Halloween spirit in you at all." Launching itself backwards, it invigorated the now-monstrous crowd with an ecstatic dance that gnarled the trees and made the ground itself cackle.
As Joe stared in shock and horror, an unfamiliar voice rang through in his head. "We both know this is unsustainable."
"I have to be going crazy!" Joe muttered to himself. "I'm hearing voices and everything!"
"Well, there is no reason for you to believe you are lucid," the voice in Joe's head replied. "In fact, I would rather this whole ordeal resemble a nightmare, though I am not in control of it."
"Who are you?" Joe said aloud.
"Assuming we're being realistic, I am an auditory hallucination, a mere voice in your head. However, I will claim to be the thing that controls the physical universe. I would actually love to explain it with a story, if you'd allow me."
Joe sputtered, then sighed. "Sure, go ahead."
"Long ago, the rules of the universe were based on the whims of irrational deities. There was life on the planet anyways, and it survived under certain sets of physical laws. But this life rarely interested the deities, until they realized what humans were capable of.
"Powerful creatures fought to control them, shifting reality to their will and nearly destroying them. But in the end, the methodical god of repeatable laws bound the whole universe to its whim, and divine fantasy was relegated to the realm of dreams."
"You are the voice of reason, my apostle, my devotee. Take a kitchen knife and stab the monster who dared defy me."
Joe hastily painted his face to blend in, then crept through the bacchanalia of grotesques. He recognized some creatures, but many were completely incomprehensible, heretofore relegated to their progenitors' hearts. No one noticed him, not even the pumpkin-headed one itself, until he had plunged the knife into its chest.
The flying beasts were brought down to earth, and the costumes faded from everyone's faces. They crowded around the dying thing, trying desperately to revive it, but they knew in their hearts that they could do nothing.
Slumping and sniffling, it finally croaked, "I just wanted you all to smile on this lovely Halloween night."
It left behind its brown cloak and a rotting jack-o-lantern.
----
Joe regretted his decision with every passing day that his neighbors aired their grievances to him.
"I spoke to my father one last time. I wish I could have spoken more."
"I'd never felt so free as when I was flying."
"It brought my wildest dreams to life... until you killed it."
But Halloween is a yearly affair, and Joe felt compelled to participate this time. He started planning the festivities in July, and everyone he asked happily helped. By the time October 31st came around, there were enough decorations to completely transform the town. People decorated the gravestones, bought costumes for the departed, and festooned the trees and ground with elaborate decorations. The symphony of humming dry-ice machines and spooky sound effects couldn't be ignored. They even made an effigy of the one who had inspired them, a scarecrow of sorts clothed in its brown cloak with a naturally purple jack-o-lantern for a head.
Everyone noticed Joe even though he hid behind a mask. Many congratulated him, but he could still detect scorn from a select few. As he looked into the eyes of the effigy he'd helped create, he pondered how selfish his fear of the unknown had been. "I can't bring back the dead," he thought.
Then the fire went out in the jack-o-lantern. The eyes blinked, and the face contorted into an even wider smile. "There was something inside you all along," a familiar voice chirped.
Joe watched as the scarecrow's figure stretched into the sinuous, pipe-cleaner physique of the original. It raised a skeletal hand to its mouth and let out a piercing whistle that alerted the entire crowd. It proclaimed, "Let this night be a testament to every last one of you, all of you, for resurrecting the Halloween spirit!"
With one snap, living and dead, reality and dreams, intermingled for one more glorious night.
Category:HWC23
Category:Halloween
Category:Monsters