A full moon shone brilliantly down the wide street. It settled on the autumn leaves, which lined the dry streets, mingled with the children and glazed over the eyes of adults, dragged out into the open by duvet ghosts and toilet roll mummies and ketchup zombies. The adults huddled in small groups of three or four, no more, against the moderate cold and the high spirits that carried on the wind like bunting strung out along a procession. The kids were running from house to lamp-lighted house, laughing and swinging buckets of brightly coloured sweets, which jostled around their tiny prisons, gasping for air. I could just about remember being one of them, a long time ago. Grandma always said I held onto my youth, and I guess memory is just a side effect. Grandma said a lot of things.
I don't think any of these adults remember. Being kids, I mean. Happy. Sure, they can act happy, ask about the mortgage, how the kids are doing. But I don't think they ever really truly feel like the kids they own, not really.
The moonlight shone gently on the children's faces. It was tender and warm, not like other nights. The spirit of Halloween was well and truly out that night, and wafted on the air like sweet perfume. The adults backed away from the stench. They stayed on the far side of the road, letting the children dance their own way down the street, knowing they'd get cold in a few hours and then it would be 'time for bed, sweetie' and 'a school day tomorrow'. I wandered for a while between the two, a minute or an hour I can't remember, floating down the river between the two islands as a mere observer, where the moonlight neither touched nor feared. It was then that I noticed the house.
A few houses down I saw a great gap in the sea of children, as if they were propelled away by some sort of invisible force of nature. It was there that the trees struck the ground like wooden lightning and the moonlight and the heavens quivered at the thought of contact. It was not a wide house, but tall. Tall and thin, like some malnourished giant that gave up eating children to sit down and watch the magpies until it finished decaying. It was not a threat, just focused on it and its dying, yet still the children kept away, as if some unspoken secret loomed over it.
As I approached, more shadows slithered out of the empty space and I saw more clearly the twisted forms of the building, as if it were trying to imitate the sharp bends and edges of the trees around it, much like a child or a madman would. There was something oddly familiar about the way it stared into the distance, at nothing in particular, like it knew nothing and everything all at once, and needed only but a glimpse into the very workings of my soul. I was suddenly besieged with the most racking headache, and out of the pain surfaced a memory, one that time and my own aging had almost forgot.
"See her there? That's Mother Mary, my dear. You'll do well to respect her," Grandma croaked, her voice out of use from so much using.
"Who? Who do you see Grandma?" I didn't recognise this second voice at first. It was much younger and... innocent... I had almost forgotten it as my own.
I remember Grandma looked at me then, her face a vast labyrinth of wrinkles much like the bark of an ancient oak tree. She muttered something, I know not what, and gave me this knowing smile, like she had defied the constraints of time and was looking right at me, right then, not at my younger self, but into my own eyes as if she were palpable right in front of me...
The spell was broken by a sudden tug on my coat. In my stupefied haze I could have sworn I saw that damned building contorted into the same omniscient smile, but my gaze was tugged away by a small figure covered in a white sheet. It was a child, and I asked it what it was doing in the middle of the road, flooded with darkness now, more so than I had ever seen it. It asked if I had a lolly and I said no, sent it on its way.
Once I had gotten rid of the child I glanced back up at the house, and was greeted with a dim light emanating from one of the windows. Something looked out of that window, and I say something because I felt it in my heart that no living thing could survive in such a place, and more a moment our eyes locked.
I slowly became uncomfortably aware of another presence, not from the house but behind me, slowly spreading out on all sides, and as the figure retreated from the window I turned around to where the adults had been lingering just moments ago.
Under the hoods they were sullen, faceless.
