Fiery Pen

My favorite holiday has always been Halloween. I have said it before; I have written about it before. Since I can remember, I always enjoyed and waited for Halloween above all others.

I love the fall weather and colors.

I love the crisp (or snowy) night.

I love the costumes.

I love the candy.

I love the fear and the horror.

I loved it in my earliest memories as I love it now, as I share the holiday with my children.

I also started writing when I was a child. I remember my passion truly being ignited during a writing unit in fourth grade, but I believe I was crafting miniature tales even younger than that. Even in my naive, sheltered, and happy youth, I found myself drawn to the darkness, attracted to the infancy of horror I was exposed to within my coveted holiday.

My young brain was stimulated by all the conventional Halloween imagery. Haunted houses. Jack-o-lanterns. Witches. Ghosts. Monsters like Frankenstein, vampires, and werewolves. Bats and spiders. Each year, as these images began to populate the stores, TV shows and movies, and my classrooms, my mind began to whir with spooky stories.

Each October, I remember I would start to write Halloween tales, complete with illustrations in black, green, orange, and purple. From construction and computer paper, I would self-publish my own childish horror books. I remember being filled with such joy and pride as I folder the paper into the book shape and showed my mother what I had created. A pride I would later revitalize in a mature evolution when I held my first published book in my hands.

This year, I remember that youthful tradition by teaching my daughter how to write and illustrate her own Halloween story and by taking the time to craft a short piece of festive fiction here. I could have crawled inside this one and made a home, which makes me wonder if I should not write something in the young horror fiction (a la Goosebumps) someday, but I forced myself to keep it short. Just a scary little glimpse.

Enjoy.

The Green Light

That house loomed over me as long as I remember, dark and slumped on a dismal plot of land along our walk to school, staring down at us with wide and lopsided windows like a drooping face. Everyone knew the house was haunted. The McAllister house. The murder house. That damn house. It had many names. If we walked alone, we quickened our step to a near jog until we had passed the edge of the property; if we passed it in a group, laughing conversations lulled, and all eyes cast sideways up towards the black house perched between gnarled and twisted trees.

The house haunted all of us. It was the torrid subject of village lore, its tales a crucial part of our own cultural indoctrination. We all knew how the rich father murdered his wife then stalked and killed his own children one by one inside the house. Dares to set soles of shoes on the wilted grass were defined rites of passage.

Yet it haunted Derrick most of all.

I grew up in his shadow, watching him both enamored and unnerved by the place. As if a splinter of the very structure was lodged in his brain tissue, swollen and infected under the skin where he could not reach to scratch it.

And when he disappeared, I knew where he had went. The police told our parents that he must have just run away. My mother wept, and my father turned his lips into his mouth and hung his head, and they both questioned what they had done to drive him away. But I knew he had not left us, not left me behind over any fight with our parents. I knew he had finally done it. He had finally walked through that door to see what was in the house.

With my older brother’s disappearance, his obsession became my own.

“Dude, come on!” Jacob hollered from the safety on the sidewalk beyond the dead yard. “You do this every goddamn day.”

I ignored Jacob’s irritated plea as I did every day as we walked home from school. Instead, I let my gaze stretch and lose focus, crawling up the dead leaves and grass matted down under the black trees that bent in a twisted dance, reaching until I could hear the creak of the wood on the porch and feel the cold metal of the knob on my palm.

“Dude, fuck you, Mikey,” Jacob said, his voice edging on quiver. “I’m going home.”

“He’s in there.”

“Not this shit again. No, he’s not.”

I ignored Jacob, as I always did in the shadow of this house. The mere sight of it had a captivating power over me. As if I could hear Derrick’s voice whisper wafting on the breeze from the dilapidated siding.

He was in that house. I could feel it the same way I knew he was sleeping in his room on the other side of my wall every night.

“Mikey, what are you doing?”

Jacob’s voice was farther behind me now. Growing more distant by the syllable. Startled from my trance, I turned to find him still on the sidewalk. I had wandered halfway up the dead lawn. The fear twisting his face matched the fear quivering his voice, but his features were growing more distant. I continued to walk, to mount the hill even as I looked back at his pleading. By the time I broke eye contact with him, the jagged trees had already passed over my head, and the porch boards creaked beneath my meager weight.

This close to the house, wrapped under its damp shade, I could almost feel it breathing. As if oxygen was being sucked in through the shingles and the siding, as if the house expanded and slumped, as if a gruesome thumping emanated from its dark center. I could feel its life vibrating up from my sneakers, creeping up along the tingling flesh of my legs, reaching into my very chest.

I felt home, the way I felt sitting in front of the fire with Derrick when the snow fell outside the windows of our house.
The door swung open wide suddenly, yet I was not even startled. I walked into the darkness without hesitation, the way I would walk into my own room.

The darkness swallowed me whole with a wide mouth, and I heard the door creak waning behind me. When the door slammed and extinguished all light, my comfort unnerved. I felt my fear begin to bristle along the edges of the fine hair on the back of my neck. The house grew deeper in the dark, an undulating shape formed by the rhythm of the strange breathing of the wind outside and the steady thumping below my feet.

Something heavy walked above me, footsteps shaking the air over my head. I did not dare move; I only clutched my arms tightly around myself and waited, eyes wide and reeling in the dark. Something scratched along the floorboards beside me, so close I could feel the vibrations in my feet. My heartbeat started to throb, and I think I stopped breathing as I waited on edge.

What was I doing here? I should have stayed on the cracked sidewalk with Jacob like I had every other day. I should have walked home to our empty house and watched my mother stare absently into a pot as she stirred dinner and sat with my father as he silently lost himself in the TV. Where the whole house was where Derrick was not.

No. I needed to be right here.

As I steeled myself, the loud whine of neglected hinges echoed through the darkness, silencing the other noises. The green light emanated from a door up the unforgiving staircase and sliced through the black, splitting my sight and casting hard shadows. The wider the door swung, the more light spilled down to me. It washed down the steps and got tangled in the black shape of the banister.

I followed the light. There was really no other choice. I stepped slowly and deliberately, outstretching my hand toward the banister. The wood was rough and scratched at my fingertips as I carefully began to ascend the stairs. Each board cried out under me. I just kept moving towards that light.

At the summit, I kept my eyes trained on the glowing shape of the open door as I side stepped in its direction. I allowed my hand to trail the banister, feeling the splinters steadily piercing my fingertips. As I grew closer to the opening, I became aware of something near me. The dark air changed, felt full and disrupted. I stopped moving, silencing the creaks under my feet, to hear the steady, wet sound of breathing.

The sound was right in front of me. I shielded the light to allow my pupils to dilate. As the darkness took on shape, a figure materialized against the wall, shadowed and obscure. I could only make out the reflection of the green light against the two large orbs of eyes staring at me intently.

The thing saw me see it, yet neither of us moved. Its breathing did not change though mine seemed to strangle in my throat. I waited. Waited for it to jump forward and attack me, waited for it to do anything. The two glowing spheres in front of me remained unmoved and unblinking, and the wet breathing panted in my face.

Keeping a peripheral awareness trained on the dark figure, I began to inch away. I dropped my hand to bathe in the green light and felt somewhat safer blinded by its glow. I walked until it overtook my sight. I walked until the doorframe disappeared behind me. I walked until I was temporarily lost in the green haze.

My eyes finally gauged the light and allowed the room to take shape before me. A bed slumped against one wall; a ravaged dresser leaned against another. A dead rug draped over the floorboards sprinkled in a menagerie of broken toys. A long and lanky figure folded on top of itself on the edge of that rug, pointing absently at a shattered doll with a spindly digit.

I took another step forward, permitting my hand to extend into the cold air toward the bony shoulder that seemed so familiar. Before my fingertip could make contact, it shifted, and I drew my arm back protectively.

“Michael,” it said. I knew the voice. From the very marrow vibrating in my bones, I knew the sound of it. “Michael, you finally came.”

The figure stood in front of me, growing to be a head taller than me, casting the shadow I had grown up underneath. The boy unfolded his limbs before turning to face me, the green light carving sharp shadows across the face that looked so similar to my own.

“Michael,” Derrick said, stepping towards me. “You’re here. You’re finally home with me.”

The skin on Derrick’s face stretched strangely as he smiled at me with wide eyes, reaching out his arms. I smiled back and dove into his cold chest, allowing him to wrap around me the way he would when I had hurt myself and no one was looking.

We froze in brotherly embrace. In the pit of my stomach, I felt truly home.

And the green light went out.

Christina Bergling

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