HALLOWEEN 1959

It was close to midnight. The full moon was obscured by clouds and yet a sliver of moonlight shined down on Armitage Cemetery. The graveyard was constructed on a vast plot of land that was surrounded by curvy hills and a black pitchfork gate that served as the entrance. Richie O’Neill was surrounded by tombstones, the typical and unimaginative half-oval shaped ones and the super fancy tombstones with statues of angels that were made when rich people died. The creepy sound of owls hooting echoed in the darkness. The bright colors of Autumn were hidden away in shadow. Night made the empty branches on the trees look like gnarled and twisted arms that were ready to reach out and grab you.

It reminded Ritchie of seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the movie theatre with his friends when he was younger specifically the part where Snow White gets lost in the dark forest of trees with scary faces. Did the trees around the cemetery have evil faces on them? No of course not, but still it was just one more reason for Ritchie to dislike Halloween. He and his friends didn’t even like trick r treating that much, he would rather spend the night playing football. Maybe that was why Ritchie and his friends were so quick to latch on to the idea of splitting up and playing chicken in the cemetery.

“This is so stupid,” Ritchie grumbled in his thoughts.

Mist drifted around him and the graves as a gust of chilly autumn air blew past Richie making him hold himself as he shivered. It was getting late and all of their parents were probably wondering where they were. Ritchie was wearing the makeshift pirate costume that his parents had tossed together at the last minute, a red bandanna wrapped around his fuzzy crewcut, a black and white striped t-shirt and an eye patch held together by a fragile string of elastic. Ritchie felt ridiculous and disrespectful wandering around on top of dead people in a crappy pirate costume. Trying to see how long they could last in the cemetery after midnight didn’t make him or his friends brave it made them dumb. Richie was already cupping his hands around his mouth ready to shout out the names of his friends. It was time to wrap up this year’s Halloween and trade candy with one another back in the safety of their homes.

There couldn’t have been a worse time for Richie to hear what sounded like crying coming from behind him.

The hair on the back of Ritchie’s neck shot up. Was that the sound of one his friends crying? If not then who else was here and why did they sound so upset? Lifting the black felt eye patch over his left eye, Richie thought that he saw the silhouette of a boy his age standing in the mist with his face buried in their hands.

“Frank? Billy? Is that one of you fellas over there?”

The sobbing stopped and the crying boy looked up from his hands as Richie moved towards him to get a better look at whoever this was. Once Richie got closer to the boy he saw that it wasn’t one of his friends, heck it didn’t even look like anyone Richie knew from school not even if he was their younger brother or something. Richie saw that the boys eyes were wet and red like he had been crying for hours. He had short black hair that seemed to be wet reminding Richie of how his own hair looked whenever he came out of the shower.

The most evident thing about the kid was that was wrapped in a dirty white sheet. To think that Ritchie had thought that his pirate costume was lazy. Meanwhile, here was this kid who had settled for the minimum effort of a bedsheets ghost costume! Maybe he was upset because he was worried how his mother would react to him coming home with a bed sheet covered in mud. That made about as much sense as anything to Richie.

“Who are you?” The boy asked sniffing back tears. He seemed jus as surprised to see Richie as Richie was to see him.

“My name’s Richie, I came here with my friends. We wanted to see how long we could stay in this cemetery before on Halloween before one of us you know, buk buk chickened out,’ Richie grinned as he clucked and flapped his arms like a chicken trying to cheer the kid up.

“I want my Mom,” The boy croaked.

Richie made a sour face.

“Boy, oh boy,” he thought to himself in the same tone used by his father whenever he said “Jaysis Mary’n Joseph!”

Whoever this kid was he sure was a real crybaby! It was extra bad too because the boy looked to be around Richie’s age. If you reached sixth grade and you still cried for your mommy every time you fell down and scraped your knee you’d be known as a sissy forever. Didn’t this kid know anything?

What was a scaredy cat like this doing in a cemetery in the first place?

“You here with anyone? I was just gonna start looking for my friends to go home if you wanted to come,” Richie regretted the offer as soon as it left his lips.

Frank and Billy were never going to let him forget how he let this momma’s boy turkey tag along with them on Halloween.

“ I want to go home,” the boy sniffled again this time looking straight at Richie.

“ Me too, hey whats your name anyway?”
“I-I don’t remember it anymore.”

“O-kay weirdo, come on lets get going before the ghosts come out and get us wooOOOoo!” Richie couldn’t help but smile as he wiggled his hands in a spooky gesture.

As he turned around to face the opposite side of the grave yard he briefly thought how he probably should have felt bad. This kid was spending his Halloween terrified and egging him on wasn’t going to help anything.

Still it was kinda funny, at least until Richie turned around and saw the same boy in the dirty sheet now standing in front of him.

“I’m not supposed to be here. He said he’d let me go home if I did what he told me,” the boy didn’t sound scared anymore.

“Huh? Hey, how did you get over there so fast?”

“He promised to let me go if I did everything he wanted. He promised!!” the boy’s temper was rising but it sounded like he was trying speak while gurgling water.

“Who did? What are you talking about? Knock it off, you’re not scaring me!”

“I threw up, I peed myself. I cried and I cried but he just laughed at me.”

Richie could feel the rage in every word spoken to him. Now that the kid was close in front of him Ritchie could see how the boy had done a poor job of smearing on his white face paint leaving pale crusty bumps all up his face. Why would he even need face paint for his ghost costume if he was had a sheet?
“You better shut up or I’m going to punch you!” Ritchie balled his fist and shook it in the boys direction just like he would do every time one of Ritchie’s older brothers teasing pushed him too far.

Hot tears were suddenly brimming in Ritchie’s eyes. None of this was supposed to be happening. You weren’t supposed to cry once you reached the sixth grade. This was just a gag from his friends and some other group of boys he wasn’t going to let them scare him. It didn’t matter that the closer he got to the other boy the more he noticed that the sheet covering where the boy’s legs should have been faded into the mist. It made it seem as though the boy’s feet were replaced by transparent silvery tendrils.

When he looked back up at the kid he saw that a red dot had appeared on the left side of the boy’s throat. Ritchie’s eyes followed the dot as it traced itself to the other side like his gaze was an invisible knife. The boy’s neck smiled at Ritchie as blood dripped out of his throat on to the white sheet.

Not that this didn’t stop the boy from talking.

“I did what he asked and he still didn’t let me go home! Its not fair! ITS NOT FAIR!”

Ritchie didn’t have a response for this, he felt as though his feet were glued to the cold dirt that hugged the dead below. Could it be that dead skeletal hands had risen up and wrapped their worm eaten fingers around his ankle? They might as well have, for in that moment there was nothing Ritchie could do except watch in growing terror at what happened next.

Thin strips of flesh began to peel and slough off the boy’s face to reveal the bone and muscle underneath. The soft eyes that had been brimming with tears only a moment ago were replaced with glassy doll eyes under a film of pale yellow like. It made Ritchie think of the white dot eyes on the Little Orphan Annie comics his sister Bridget read. The boy in the bloody sheet in front of him had yellow Little Orphan Annie eyes. Wet black hair shriveled and turned gray dropping from the boy’s now bald head almost as fast as the blood dripping down from the slit in his throat.

This was not the voice of a boy Ritchie’s age. Maybe once long ago it had been but what remained of this kid wasn’t supposed to exist. What spoke to Ritchie was the voice of something that had been dead for a very long time. It was dead and it was very angry.

“Take me home with you,” another rise of blood spilled out of his throat with each word.

The angry ghost of the rotting boy drifted closer to Ritchie. Tendrils of white mists seems coming from the boy’s lower half reached towards Ritchie’s face.

“This isn’t real. This isn’t happening,” Ritchie closed his eyes.

He told himself that when he opened his eyes the bleeding dead boy would be gone. Ritchie counted to three and opened his eyes. No such luck, the dead boy was still there and he was getting angrier by the minute.

“You already said you’d take me home. You said so! DON’T YOU LIE TO ME TOO!”

“No!” With all of his will, Ritchie broke free of his fear paralysis.

Dropping his Trick R Treat bag to the ground, all of the candy that Ritchie and his friends spent all night collecting spilled out on to the dirt. Hershey bars and Tootsie Rolls that were never going to be enjoyed littered the grave plots but Ritchie wasn’t thinking about candy anymore. Closing his eyes he charged forward just like every time he played football and braced himself for a tackle.

Charging straight ahead with all his strength, Ritchie ran right through the ghost as the angry dead boy exploded like a poof of Ivory mist. A sudden wave of arctic chill shook Ritchie’s bones as goosebumps ran up his arms and legs. A wave of dread and nausea filled his belly just in time for Ritchie to trip on a stone and fall to the ground. Scrambling for dear life Ritchie screamed as he saw the pale glowing spectre of what had once been a boy much like himself now reduced to a screaming ghost.

What had once looked like the head of a sobbing young boy now looked like a skull that had been dipped in wax. The boy’s nose and lips had rotted away and were now replaced by two moldy holes in the middle of his face on top of two rows of brown teeth that were frozen in a deadly rictus snarl. But the worst part, even worse than the slash in the boy’s jugular that was still oozing drop of blood, the boy was still crying.

Ritchie nearly puked in the cemetery right then and there but choked it down. Shaking with each sob, what had once been tears and snot were now replaced by squirming wriggling maggots and worms pouring from the dead boy’s pale yellow eyes and nostrils. The insects plopped to the dirt and burrowed back into the sacred earth where an abundance of food awaited.

The tendrils of silvery mist stretched to where Ritchie lay on the ground. In the back of his mind, the part of his brain that still comprehended what was happening, Ritchie wondered how anyone could have ever thought that a ghost looked like a white bedsheets with eye holes in it. Real ghosts were pale rotten figures with a dead human faces and silvery tendrils of mist. The ghost was still screaming at Ritchie. No words just a pained howl of rage. It didn’t sound like it was going to let Ritchie leave here alive.

Still choking down the half digested Milky Ways he gorged himself on earlier, Ritchie scrambled back on to his feet and sprinted away from the glowing monster. He had no idea where he was going, it didn’t matter just as long as Ritchie got the hell away from the ghost of the dead boy. His knees were practically banging on his chest as his feet pumped up and down faster than they had ever done before. Ritchie tried not to think about the ghost boy that might be chasing after him, he only thought about running and seeing his family again. Nothing else mattered except making it home alive. It didn’t matter how badly he wanted to go home or how wanted to block out everything Ritchie still couldn’t block out the begging dead voice of the ghost from his ears.

“Come back Ritchie! Come back! Please don’t leave me! Don’t leave me all alone with THEM!”

Next thing he knew he his hands caught had made contact with the black metal fence good thing too because he would have ran straight into the damned thing. Ritchie had no idea where the exit in the fence was but he didn’t care. Springing from the ground, Ritchie jumped up on the fence, climbed it to the top where spiky black pitchforks served as his balance. Jumping down the other side to freedom, he didn’t stick the landing as well as he wanted to and instantly felt a sharp pain in his ankles as he hit the ground. Ignoring the slight pain, Ritchie was back on his feet his pirate costume covered in dirt and grass Ritchie ignored the pain in his ankles and ran straight ahead, back into the forest of spooky trees.

Running for dear life was such a high priority for Ritchie that he didn’t even notice Billy and Frank in there ghost and Hobo costume respectively standing by one of the creepy dead trees negotiating candy trades. It looked like they had been there for quite some time those lousy chickens. So much for contests of bravery, turns out there really were monsters that hid in the shadows and wanted to eat you. A few seconds after running past his friends Ritchie didn’t stop running, he just did the only thing he could do, the only thing that made any sense that God awful night.

“Run!” He screamed out to the friends now far behind him.

Ritchie never turned around to see if anyone was following him. Maybe thats why he survived. Maybe.

It was maybe another half mile before Ritchie collapsed on the sidewalk a block and away from his home. A little imitation pirate exhausted from a frightful experience, huffing and puffing, his lost Trick r Treat bag and any justifiable reasons for being in the graveyard in the first place long forgotten. After catching his breath and calming down at the requests of his two buddies, Ritchie tried not to break down into tears as he recounted what happened back at the graveyard. He told them about the ghost boy, how he said that someone hadn’t kept their promise to let him go home and how he tried to grab at Ritchie. Billy and Frank stared at Ritchie uneasily still not sure if this wasn’t just Ritchie pulling their legs.

The two boys could only comfort their friend for so long that night before they had to head back home. Ritchie wanted to beg them not to go, he was terrified once they’d leave that the ghost boy would be right behind him, yelling at him for lying. Eventually Ritchie snuck back in to his house almost at 1 in the morning, his parents were asleep he could hear his Dad snoring away. All his siblings had gone to bed, Ritchie wanted to wake everyone up and tell them about the graveyard but he just climbed into bed and waited for sleep to come.

It didn’t.

Time past, and one day at a time Ritchie began to slowly pull himself together and not have the image of the boy’s rotting face be the last image in his mind before he drifted off to sleep. Ritchie did his best to go about his life, he focused on sports and his math homework and did a pretty good job of pretending that everything was okay. Before he knew it, it was already a year after Halloween and Ritchie decided that if he didn’t tell someone else what happened he’d lose his mind.

Desperate to talk to somebody, Ritchie told his parents what happened but they just thought he was making up stories for why he was out so late. His father accused Ritchie of sipping from his supply of whiskey and seemed much more enthusiastic about this than ghost boys in the cemetery. Ritchie tried telling some of his brothers about what happened but they weren’t going to let little Ritchie get the better of them.

With so many people denying his story and the insanity that came with it, Ritchie slowly began to believe them. Who knows? Maybe he really had imagined the whole thing. Maybe that was just some kid pulling a prank on him and all that stuff with his face was just another mask he threw on. Those bugs crawling out of his face were just prank toys Really good, prank toys. It was as good an explanation as any and Ritchie really wanted that to be true.

After seeing their reaction to his tale of what happened that night on Halloween, Ritchie didn’t ask his parents or any other adult any further questions as to if there had been any stories of missing kids who turned up dead in their town. Ritchie didn’t want them to think he was being morbid. Instead he put the horrible night into the back of his mind and continued on with life as the years went by.

The closest he came to really investigating the dead boy was when he was in high school. Ironic really, for someone like Ritchie who didn’t want to be viewed as morbid, it was actually Kennedy getting shot in Dallas that reawakened Ritchie’s memory of the dead boy from when he was a younger kid. With panic re-awakened in him, Ritchie actually had made it as far as the public archives in his Town’s library dating back to the 20’s and 30’s when he saw the black and white photo of the boy he saw along with a few other kids Ritchie didn’t recognize. Ritchie was absorbing the headline, words like “Town Mourns Missing Children” and “Prowler At Large” flashed before him. He was about to read the news article further when he made eye contact with the photo of the boy he recognized.

It was like running into an old friend you hadn’t in years.

Ritchie slammed the metal drawer of the news archive shut, shaking the rest of the drawer as he stormed out of the library, once again not looking back. He never went looking for information on the dead boy or the other children ever again. He never learned their names and thanked God for it. If that made him a coward so be it. If that made him a sissy so be it. Ritchie didn’t ask for this. He didn’t want this, he didn’t want any of it.

That night at the graveyard was certainly the last time Ritchie ever celebrated Halloween at all, let alone went Trick r Treating. Instead, Ritchie buried himself in the sports he loved so much like wrestling and football. Years passed by faster and faster soon Ritchie had moved to Kansas for college and politely turned down invitations to Halloween parties when the holiday reared its ugly head on college campus. He always shrugged the festivities away that night by explaining that he had practice early in the morning. It had nothing to do with an itching fear in the back of his mind that never quite went away. A horrible, obviously impossibly idea that he would see the ghost of that boy again. That he would see that the ghost had finally caught up to him. Whatever his name was. Oh God, he didn’t even know his name.

Neither of them did.

Ritchie blinked and before he knew it he was married to well-intentioned but frustrating woman and was the father to a son who much preferred drawing cartoons than spending his time practicing for sports. Ritchie was very proud of his son’s different tastes but there were times when their differing tastes came to head.

The first Halloween after 9/11 happened Ritchie and his family had been invited to a costume party held by one of Ritchie’s co-teachers at the high school where he taught math. His son was so excited to go to a real costume party and was so proud his werewolf costume. Years later his son would joke with Ritchie about the tantrum he had had when he learned that Ritchie had decided to dress up as a chef for his costume. His son had been livid, why couldn’t his Dad dress up as something cool like a vampire or a zombie? Ritchie just patiently told his son that it was his choice to make and that you cant force your tastes on to others, something his son would gradually come to terms with as he got older.

Even after considering it a few times, Ritchie never told his wife about the dead boy. It didn’t matter in the long run as they divorced shortly after his son started high school. Even though he loved her the two of them were just very different people. By this point in he was drinking more often than he should have, a habit which his son unfortunately seemed to have inherited. The stress of his marriage was only part of the reason why he drank.

The main reason he was so hell bent on self-medicating himself was that he knew, deep down he knew that life after death existed. It was not the fluffy cloud heaven where good people had their wishes granted for all eternity, it was the type of endless misery that no one living or dead should ever know.

That Halloween in 1959 grew older and further away in the echoes of time but it never left Ritchie’s mind. Now, in a few weeks Ritchie would be turning seventy years old. Every morning Ritchie looked at the gray hair in the mirror and wondered how he had come to look so much like his father. He tried not to think of how his old man on his death bed had developed cataracts on his eyes and how to his eternal shame Ritchie could barely bring himself to look at his dying father because the white film on his dying father’s eyes only made him think of the crying boy in the graveyard.

Still Ritchie tried to get on with life and soon learned that being old had its own perks. It had been an enjoyable ten years of traveling since he retired from teaching math. His son was out of college with a Masters degree along with a home and girlfriend of his own. He never did tell his son about the ghost boy either, he envied his son’s ignorance of that kind of existence.

Ritchie eventually moved into in a well furbished and pristine condo that he purchased in Juno Beach so that he could spend more time with his older brother Eddie who was dealing with a bout of Parkinson’s. September of 2018 was wrapping up and soon Halloween decorations of plastic pumpkins, bats, skeletons, those fucking ghosts all would be seen all around the neighborhood. Ritchie wished he could rip all the decorations down and make everyone forget this God forsaken holiday. Didn’t they all know what was waiting for them out there?

Even though he tells himself that what happened that Halloween was just his imagination or that he was remembering things wrong, Ritchie still kneels every night at his bedside before going to sleep and says a prayer for the sake of his son, his family, friends even his ex-wife. Ritchie was well aware that he isn’t going to live forever and what terrified him above anything else in the world was what might happen after he shut his eyes for the last time. Would he see his old friend from the graveyard again? Was he even still there? Was he ever?

The older he got the more Ritchie began to better remember the final words from that Halloween from the depths of hell more clearly than he could when he was younger. It was the hysterical pleading coming from lost soul with a rotten face covered in dirt as Ritchie left them to their fate. These were the same words Ritchie that repeated in his head each night before bed . The same ending to every prayer begging God or whoever decided what happened to your soul for just one last thing.

“Please, don’t leave me.”

“Don’t leave me all alone with them.”

THE END