Storytellersunplugged

– Jeffrey Thomas

The first signs of Halloween manifest themselves long before the last day of October, even before autumn has actually begun. Candy and costumes, decorations and other paraphernalia prematurely line the shelves of stores, more out of anticipation of money to be made than of the holiday’s mystical pleasures. But as the days shuffle on and the nights grow progressively cooler, the atmosphere thickens like a gathering fog. It’s a fog still imbued with magic, these many years since I was a trick-or-treater. Now I’m a father, and through the holes of my son’s mask I experience the night vicariously. My son Colin has of course been growing increasingly excited as the days tick by, now with only seven left to go. A final week. I can hear Colin in the bathroom as I write this; it sounds like he’s filled the sink as he likes to do, splashing in it with his toys, giggling away. His love of monsters must be genetic. Perhaps his Creature from the Black Lagoon figurine has drowned another unwary victim.

It’s late, but let him play, just so long as he doesn’t awaken my new wife Hong. I looked in on her a few minutes ago and she has turned in early, her long blue-black hair spread across our pillows. Halloween is a new concept to her, a bit mystifying, a little morbid and uncomfortably scary. Good. That is how it should be. I wish it were so new to me…but again, I can experience that newness vicariously through her.

This is the time of year that I break out my cassettes of old radio plays, programs such as BLACK MASS (a reading of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”) and SUSPENSE (Orson Welles starring in “Donovan’s Brain” and Robert Taylor in the nightmarish “The House in Cypress Canyon”). I savor the warmth of my coffee and the warm smell of a pumpkin spice candle as the chilly air scrapes loose leaves across the outside of my house like brittle ghostly claws. During these final nights, I plan to sit and watch horror movies, hopefully “Night of the Living Dead”, drinking mulled cider, alternating between salty fist-fulls of popcorn and sweet candy corn. I am a horror writer, and Halloween is my holy day. I will renew my vows to my nighted profession. I will commune with the collective imagination of humankind, the wonderfully irrational anxieties we dread but embrace. I will immerse myself anew in the wonders and delicious terrors I was baptized in as a child younger than Colin is now.

I hear Colin giggling in the livingroom. As involved as I am in my writing, a process that always transports me, I didn’t even see him pass by. Unfortunately, he must have woken Hong, after all, because I can hear her moving about in the kitchen. My dog Tia just growled at her, but I call out for her to stop it. The big Akita does that sometimes, when she wakes up from her own nap and sees someone near her unexpectedly. Well, I can’t get angry at the chaos to be expected in my home. It’s something I’ve had to learn to work around. Though I work best when I am alone and the house is quiet, I can’t always have it that way. And like I said, once I really get into the alchemical process of fiction writing, I feel transported…the real world melts away around me.

Halloween achieves a similar effect for me. On that transcendent night, the clinical cold edge of reality becomes as frayed as the hem of a specter’s burial shroud. We can adopt new personalities, formed from plastic or greasepaint, that might reflect or liberate hidden fantasies about ourselves, aspects of ourselves that remain submerged from view on the mundane 364 other nights. And our neighbors, our fellow townspeople, become unrecognizable to us in turn. We become more distrusting of them than we already are. Who knows what sort of face will greet us, the next time we are summoned by the rapping of bony knuckles to open our front door. Oh, it’s all about anticipation, isn’t it? Anticipating what demons will come to haunt our doorstep. What treasures we will amass in the plastic pumpkins we tote like severed heads. The anticipation of these final seven days…

Will this week inspire me to new heights of writing? I don’t know. Even if it doesn’t milk an extra quantity of nectar from my muse, every Halloween I have experienced has nourished that muse, has cumulatively brought forth its many midnight blooms. They are not flowers that open only on that one enchanted night – but they will lift themselves eagerly higher on their stems for the breadth of those precious hours.

No doubt wondering what I’m writing about, Colin is standing behind me now and resting a hand on my shoulder. It is very cold, from his playing in the sink water. I see his reflection in the computer screen and he is wearing the skeletal zombie mask he will don for trick-or-treating this year. Nice try, Colin. A chip off the old block, this kid.

From my stereo speakers, the doomed Robert Taylor says, “My arm is horribly swollen and turning black…”

I hear Hong whispering in the kitchen. Maybe she is talking to the dog. She steps into the threshold to my study. In an attempt to frighten me, she wears the skeletal zombie mask Colin plans to wear this year, her long hair framing its ghastly features. Oh…wait…so there are two masks, then. Very clever, my family, but they are trying to scare a man whose head is filled with scares every night of the year.

Well, my writing spell has been broken, but again, I can’t resent these people whom I love. These distractions are to be expected. But as I smile up at Hong, and come back to the here and now, I recall that Colin is spending the night with his Mom at her boyfriend David’s house. It can not be his cold hand resting upon my shoulder. And my wife Hong…Hong is in Vietnam right now, staying at her father’s house, not in my house tonight, not even in this country.

The thickening fog has closed on my house, churning outside my windows. Those claw-like leaves scrape more insistently. The icy grip tightens on my shoulder, and the figure in the doorway wavers slightly as its black skull sockets gaze at me through its curtains of hair – not sleek and blue-black, but gray and matted, with brittle autumn leaves snagged in its cobweb-like strands.

Halloween has come early this year.