My Halloween Ideas

We, as human beings, have had certain fears engrained in us, back from long before history was recorded. Most made sense, for the time, and stayed with us through our shared desire to survive. The sound of thunder could also be a stampeding herd of beasts; the dark hid predators and other dangers; dark waters hid all sorts of creatures. But each culture has a common myth, something that we can’t explain quite as easily. We are somehow innately afraid of pale, distorted figures with sunken eyes and sharpened teeth- something that ; we can’t explain the commonality, and we call them zombies or vampires , or sometimes demons or wraiths- whatever we can do to make sense of our collective fears. But it was inescapable that something in our distant past gave us those long-repressed memories.

The thought had occurred to me in my youth, and worried me to an insignificant degree for years. Of course, I tended to be very good at worrying, courtesy of an absent father and an overprotective mother, so I never put too much stock in it. I was grown now, with a wife and a son of my own; and on this early Saturday morning, it was my son that jolted me awake with a piercing scream.

I didn’t panic, like I had when his nightmares started. At first, I’d bolt out of bed and run to his room in a panic, where I’d find him sitting stiffly upright with his eyes locked open. He’d tell me about the dream, and I’d stay with him until he was able to sleep again. We took him to a shrink after a couple of days; she called it “night terrors”, which explained his extreme reactions and its relative frequency. The dreams were always the same; there would be a man at the foot of his bed, standing and staring at him when he opened his eyes. The man was tall and pale, with large sunken eyes that seemed to pull in the light around it, and dressed in a loose black tunic that covered the entirety of his body. He would break into a wide grin when my son would startle, revealing ragged and broken teeth as he stretched an inhumanly long arm towards the terrified child. It was then that my son would find the breath to scream, and I would come. Invariably, he would tell me that the creature would scurry under the bed with a mixture of a cackle and a moan just moments before I came into the room.

The shrink told my wife and me, in expensive clinical phrases, that hallucinations were fairly common in children with night terrors; all the same, I’d humor him and check under the bed, in the closet and behind the dresser. Each time, I would find nothing, and stay with him until he fell asleep again. It had become a sort of routine; one that left me exhausted each morning, but got us through the nights. I knew that he felt far worse than I did, and did my best to be there for him. I had taken to sleeping with him some nights, and the dreams would go away for a while. But soon after I left him sleeping on his own, they would start again.

Tonight, though, was different. I took longer than I normally would in getting to his room, but sprinted the last few feet when his screams reached a new pitch. By the time I rushed into the room, he wasn’t in his bed where I expected him to be. A fresh wave of panic rolled over me until I saw him huddled against the wall, clutching his pillow to his chest and crying silently. I sat next to him and scooped him into my arms.

“Another bad dream, buddy?” I asked.

“No… not a dream. Never a dream.” He managed between heavy breaths. I kissed him on the forehead and whispered soothing, meaningless words. “The bed,” he said, simply.

I knew the routine, and crawled towards the bed to look underneath. It was empty, but something puzzled me. My child’s blanket had been pulled partway off of the bed. At first, I thought that it had happened when he climbed from the mattress, but what puzzled me was that the blanket had been pulled under the bed itself. “Did you go under the bed?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. I looked, and he was shaking his head violently in a clear “no”.  Confused, I finished my patrol, checking the closet and the dresser, and then pulled him gently into my arms. He was sticky- his pillow was soaked through with blood. I called for my wife, who was at the doorway in moments, as I laid him on the bed. She flicked on the lights as I pulled the pillow from his reluctant grasp. His young chest was covered in his blood, coming from a ragged gash just below his neck. I could see that it wasn’t deep, he’d be fine, but it looked like it hurt.

“I’ll get a cloth,” my wife announced as she tore out of the room. I knew her well enough to know that she was trying to sound calm for his sake, but that she was as worried as I was.

“Did you fall on something?” I asked.

Again, he didn’t speak, but worked his head sincerely from side to side.  We stopped the bleeding and took him to the ER; he needed a few stitches, but he’d be fine- every boy needs at least one scar or two, I reasoned. The painkillers knocked him out by the time we got home, and I slept next to him on fresh sheets.

I slept next to him the next night as well, but was awoken sometime in the night -- not to screaming, but to an overwhelming and oppressive sense of dread, as though the breath was being pulled from lungs. I couldn’t move my body, but forced my eyes to the hard right. I was greeted by a pale grinning face, with dark and sunken eyes that not only pulled in the light, but also commanded my terrified attention. It leaned in close to my paralyzed form, until I could feel the dry, colorless lips brush against my ear as it whispered in a dusty voice, “I feed on his fear; but yours is so much better.”

I knew then that I would be sustaining this creature for a long time, and remembered what the ER doctor had said that night; it didn’t mean much to me then, but I understood it now. Once he saw the injury, he seemed to know what had happened. “Hurt himself during a bad dream, didn’t he?” I answered that he had, and asked how he could have possibly known. He answered, “third one tonight.”

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4. Become Night Of The Living Dead Zombies for Halloween
5. In Need of a Babysitter a Ghost Story for Halloween