It is with no small dread that I recount the visitation which comes to me upon this night each year, with dreadful regularity—a creature I have dared not face, not even for a moment, not once in the twelve visits where it has mounted the creaking steps of my weary wooden porch. I believe it arrives near twilight, lurking somewhere close by, watching and waiting until the precise hour when I prepare to retire. Only then does it tap its small, unnatural fist upon my door. Ah, the sound—the sound of this particular knocking evokes a primal fear so profound that, though I have spent many hours answering other such knocks, rather than open the door for a final time, I cower in darkness, breath held, praying it will leave. Yet tonight, I feel something within me has shifted. I am weary of hiding from this being, weary of ceding my own home to its silent demands! A funny concept to consider for I have not once in these many years had the courage to swing wide the door and inquire of it just what those demands might be. What does it want from me? I simply can stand it no longer! I must know why it torments me so!
So, tonight, on this, the thirteenth anniversary of the onset of its onslaught of terror, I shall face the abominable porcelain doll that has come to me again and again, masquerading as though it were but another child out to trick-or-treat.
It is not merely that a child should knock upon my door after dark that unnerves me; many small hands will rap upon my entryway tonight. Tradition compels such things of children on nights like this, and I once delighted in them. I did… yet the sweetness of those delights has long since burned away, leaving naught but ashes in my mouth, for this final visitor who comes each year is different. It arrives alone, deep in the shadowed hour when all others have long since retired and the night’s chill has returned to the very bones of the earth. From our first encounter, I knew this was no child, though it wears the guise and mimics the manner of one.
Late each Halloween night, it comes when all others are safely inside, as if lying in wait for the parade of merriment to fade. It is at the precise moment I extinguish my lights that this shadowed figure appears at the edge of my porch. It knocks, and then speaks the customary words—but the whispered ‘trick or treat’ that slips from this tiny mouth chills me to the core, for the sound carries a weight of ancient, timeworn malevolence. This voice, though soft, reaches every corner of my house, no matter where I might try to hide from it. It is no voice I have ever heard before, for even with my hands pressed firmly over my ears, the susurration persists. This voice is nothing mortal—I fear it may not originate from a mouth at all, but from some defiance of natural law, the voice of an ill-intended fiend resonating from a place deep within my brain. Each encounter leaves an impression that claws at my soul, and I cannot rid myself of the dread that builds each year, nor can I resist the hand of fear that grips me when I dare imagine what might lurk beneath that ruinous ceramic mask.
I know you must think me mad—it’s Halloween night, and by all reasonable assumptions, this child is not the revenant I imagine it to be, but simply a child! And indeed, I would assume the same were you recounting this tale to me. But I assure you, this is no earthly child. I nearly believed it myself that first year, until a single glance at this visitor’s garb as it lurked on my front stoop gave me reason to pause.
That first year, with my hand touching the hasp of the deadbolt, I almost convinced myself it was just an unusually unsettling costume—a trick of my own imagination, sparked by the season. Yet there was something about its presence that gnawed at my serenity, an unease I couldn’t rationalize or explain. Each time I tried to dismiss it as merely a child in costume, my mind returned to its strange stillness, to the eerie quiet that blanketed the porch the moment it appeared. For these apparent reasons, and others I had yet to discover, my hand moved reflexively, instinctively away. Hoping my glance through the window had gone unseen, I retreated to the safety of the shadows within my darkened home.
And so began my fixation, a compulsion to understand this visitor that grew stronger with each passing Halloween. In those early moments of doubt and curiosity, as I questioned the nature of what stood on my doorstep, memories stirred—fragments from my youth, from things I’d learned so many decades ago…
If you remember, as I do, my student years at Eldertide Polytechnic University, I studied for a certificate in Marine Cryptobiology—a rather odd field, to be sure. You see, the campus where I matriculated was perched upon a series of cliffs overlooking Echo Bay, a township whose surrounding waters teemed with strange, unclassifiable entities. Having grown up near the Bay, these creatures never struck me as odd—though odd they were indeed—and the fact that both the region and the university seemed to draw minds curious for the eerie and unexplained, as if by some unseen magnetism, did not feel strange to me either. It was, simply, a matter of daily life.
The village itself is a place of whispered secrets—its waters hide creatures never cataloged by modern science, things haunting the depths beyond the reefs, which, in hushed tones, we students suspected held more than mere marine life. Eldertide did not openly teach the occult, but neither did it discourage students from pursuing esoteric studies; such interests met with neither praise nor rebuke. Indeed, the school’s occult library held tomes on death and burial, on ancient rites, and even on entities of unknown origin—a trove for those who, like myself, had an unholy curiosity about the edges of knowledge. At the time, I accepted these texts in the university’s maritime library without question.
It was there that I first learned of the Victorian mourning doll, in a study of the funerary customs of obscure sects, through a text as fragile as it was forbidden. These dolls were designed to resemble children claimed by illness, their painted eyes shut in eternal sleep, their porcelain faces a chilling echo of the dead they represented. Families kept these creations as vessels of grief, dressing them in miniature burial attire, sometimes even weaving in locks of the deceased’s own hair. This Victorian obsession with preserving death extended into these eerie effigies, grotesque yet hauntingly lifelike—surrogate children, icons of loss bearing an uncanny resemblance to those who had passed.
Seeing a child in such a costume—black lace, a sallow face beneath an ebon bonnet—filled me with indescribable dread. And the mask! The mask was spidered with cracks across the frail ceramic, each fracture snaking outward from every corner toward two hollow epicenters. For where the porcelain doll should have had painted, sleeping eyes, the mask was broken away, revealing only sockets of endless void. There were no eyes inside—only a darkness that seemed to stretch on forever, sending a chill through me as deep as the waters of the Bay. I realized, with overwhelming dread, that this figure was not simply dressed as a mourner, but as one of the dead itself, a haunting, voiceless reminder of the lengths to which people have gone to defy the cruel separation of death.
Don’t you see? The very idea of the garb itself was not merely ghastly, but far too morose a theme to have been chosen by any ordinary child. And yet, it wasn’t until the following year that I began to take note of the many other unsettling characteristics of my strange visitor.
It was that second year that I first noticed the unsettling quiet that arrived with him as he set foot upon my sagging doorstep. I am nearly seventy-eight now, and in the time since my retirement, as the years advance, I have lost some of the knack for repair I once valued in my youth. Certain deteriorations to my home now lie beyond my ability to remedy—chief among them the rotting boards of my front porch. Throughout the evening, the warped wood would groan beneath the feet of each visitor, even the smallest child causing the boards to bend and creak as they pressed against the rusting nails, their protest echoing faintly throughout the house. But not with this child.
Yet when he mounted the steps, slowly and carefully in the darkness, he somehow avoided every groan and whine of the weathered planks. That year, I remained near the door until he had gone, watching as he tread upon the fallen leaves blanketing the path below the final step—not a single leaf crackled or broke beneath his scuffed, dark leather boots. The eerie quiet that seemed to surround him did not depart when he finally disappeared into the night; instead, it lingered for hours, so prolonged and absolute that the only sound remaining was the faint ringing of tinnitus in my ears. For a brief time, I feared I’d gone deaf. Only when I dared to climb the stairs to my bedroom, hearing the creak of my own weary joints, did I feel a strange, fleeting sense of relief.
It wasn’t until the third year, when he arrived at my home once again, that I realized what startled me most about this child, whose unsettling behaviors hadn’t changed since the initial Halloween his dubious shadow first fell over my doorstep. His unnerving outfit was exactly the same each time. I don’t mean merely that he wore the same haunting disguise year after year, though that is true as well; rather, the vestment itself, already ripped and worn by decades before I first laid eyes on him, had not changed at all. Given its original state, it should have long since rotted into unwearable rags, yet to this day, it remains frozen in the same state of disrepair. The dark wool of his filthy frock coat is caked with the same crusted mud as in years before—no inch of it clean, a horrid canvas of smears and stains.
There are particular stains etched in my memory: one, the size of the skinless skull of a wild cat, near the bottom on the left; another, a clot of moist dirt smeared across the right lapel, lumpy and bulbous with dimensions similar to those of a spider’s egg sac swollen with an unhatched brood. In all these years, not a speck of this misshapen clot has dried or crumbled away of its own accord. It remains. Each year, every stain remains precisely the same as I remember them, for they are permanently etched and continuously relived by my mind through the lens of my horrific sleeping memories.
Every inch of the garment’s bottom hem is frayed, yet by that third year, I noticed it hadn’t deteriorated further as one might reasonably expect and this fact has remained true ever since. Black lace is gathered at the end of each of his sleeves. It is moth-eaten, riddled with extra holes–crude apertures that were never woven by any lacemaker–yet these unintended gaps in the lacework have grown no larger. A cravat, as dark as a handkerchief that has been used to absorb a pot of spilled ink sits about his neck, its ends ragged and threadbare, with the very same loose threads dangling, as though awaiting a hand to tug them apart. And yet, in all this time, no hand has done so; they hang just as limply, at the same length, as they did on that very first Halloween.
Every inch of him is filthy, from the small, tilted black top hat down to his breeches, as though he’d spent his day clawing his way up from an ancient crypt. And he very well may have, for he brings with him a rank odor of petrichor and decay—a stench that calls to mind freshly turned soil and dead and rotting things that one might find in a grave, freshly disturbed.
Stop. What have you agreed to do? You’ve agreed to listen to what I have to say about the presence that has visited me these many years, without interruption. And yet, once again, you feel compelled to interject? I know well what you think, for you have already attempted to convince me that these experiences are naught but illusions, mere specters of a weary mind. But I am telling you, I have seen this thing with my own eyes, felt the sourness of my own intuition as it sets the bile in my stomach churning. I am aware that old age has changed me; I am no longer the man I once was. My mind occasionally falters, it is true, and thoughts sometimes slip from their rightful place, but these confusions pass as swiftly as they come, like clouds across the moon. You cannot continue to seize upon that one isolated incident—one stray moment when, yes, I forgot Leonard had passed, and for an instant believed I was not alone in this house. But do not compare that to misplacing a pocket watch or a set of house keys.
Will you not heed my words? I forgot he was gone in a fleeting confusion—one moment alone. I remember his funeral with vivid clarity. It was a Thursday, and the sky was dark with storm clouds, though not a drop of rain fell. And I remember each painful detail of his burial, though you’d dismiss my account as the ramblings of an elderly muddle-headed old fool. Let me finish telling you of this revenant that comes to me yearly, spreading its torment upon my doorstep. The cacodemon that haunts me is not some fancy of my mind, and I’ll not consent to have you send a nurse here to meddle and murmur about me when I am perfectly capable of my own care. Enough of your interruptions—when I have recounted to you the horrific aspects of this manifestation, I will tell you precisely what I intend to do about it. And afterward, I will hang up this call, for I will hear no more rebuttals, no more advice or admonishments regarding the supposed feebleness of my old age from my own cousin, who, let me remind you, has for his entire life been four years my junior. You are of an advanced age as well, Walter, lest you forget that. I am beginning to remember the reasons we’ve spent so much time estranged and with that recollection, I am very much regretting that I’ve taken your call.
Now, if you would let me resume, I would tell you that it took several of the years that followed before I came to note the unbearable feeling of cold that I’ve felt each Halloween since that first—tonight now thirteen years past. It may have taken until the seventh or eighth year before I was able to attribute the arrival of the inescapable chill that heralds his presence, descending an hour or two before the normal children return home from their evening of frightful holiday fun. For many years before it became of note, I had attempted to quell the frigid drafts I attributed to the typical seasonal temperature dips of October’s evenfalls by lighting the furnace or even bringing dried logs from the pile outside in for the fireplace. Once or twice, I even lit the stove and sat before it, the pilots burning with the gas turned up to the highest levels. Each of these attempts accomplished little to nothing, and the air everywhere around me remained as icy as the clutch of the reaper.
It was not until after many years of fruitlessly seeking solutions that might resolve these silvery atmospheric shifts that I realized there was no stopping myself from shivering as I sat before a searing log or a scorching oven’s naked flames…there was to be no effective force to banish this chill from the air because this chill did not arrive upon the air but on the fingertips of this creature’s unseen claws, deposited in a hole those claws had scratched into my soul. This molestation of glacial winds was never coming from without. It had always come from within, radiating out from me and into my surroundings.
Halfway through the night, I unconsciously began to notice that those children who visited where freezing as well, and I began to suspect I was the cause of that symptom. I watched as their breaths formed normal ghosts upon the air, and by the time the moon was high, their exhalations were as thick as fog resting on the surface of a frozen lake. My own breathing, I found, was just as dense. I don’t know why it took me so many years to discover it, but I learned after watching all of the conventional childrens’ chilled respirations at my door, by stealing furtive, fearful glances through the entryway curtains, that this malevolent beast not only did not shiver at the cold the way that its peers had done (if, as you continue to insist on my misplaced rationality, that based on its size and stature children are its peers at all.)—there was no cloud of breath. I learned on that night so many Halloweens ago that this thing did not seem to breathe at all.
With the advent of this epiphany, in the many years that followed, I decided I had seen well enough of this entity. Cultural traditions, and the joy that this time of year once brought me, still compel me to ignite the guiding lights that lead to my front door, and to pass treats into the buckets, bags, and pillowcases outstretched by every trick-or-treater who knocks—every trick-or-treater except that one. For what must now be five years, in the moments immediately after extinguishing the porch lights, I retreat quickly to the basement, where I proceed to cower until it leaves. Like you, I too have questioned the rationality of my behavior, the absurdity of my reactions to what might seem to be just another child, out for an evening of annual spooky fun. It would be easier to accept that I suffer from paranoia, or perhaps even the onset of dementia, if not for one undeniable fact: since the year I ceased glancing through the windowpane at it, this demon has begun knocking for longer and longer periods of time.
Three years ago, it continued to rap on my door for half an hour, then for a full hour the year before last. After what I experienced this previous Halloween, I’ve decided I can no longer afford to react in terror to this creature’s endless demands, for you see, it continued to knock and knock and knock—its unignorable, thunderous whispers of ‘trick or treat’ echoing from the back of my skull—for two full hours. Yes, for two hours, it went on, unceasingly knock, knock, knocking at my door, calling out ‘trick, trick, trick—treat, treat, treat’ with that endlessly echoing silent voice. This relentless torment left me helpless and sobbing on the cold concrete of my basement within ninety minutes. Don’t you understand? I just can’t take it.
If this lich’s patterns hold, it stands to reason that this year I will be forced to endure four hours or more of its voice resounding inside my mind as I lie helpless on my basement floor. So, I have reached a simple conclusion: I will finally allow it to do what it has come to do, if only because then—at long last—this ordeal will be finished. Tonight, I shall face this wretched tormentor, and once I learn what it is, I will give it whatever thing it desires, if that alone will compel it to leave my door and never return.
The trick-or-treaters will be here soon, Walter, and so I must take my leave of this conversation. I would wish you a pleasant evening, but once again, you have teased away whatever cordiality I may have spared for you. May you have the very night you deserve, cousin.
As the hours have aged past tonight, I find the resolve I had assured myself of earlier in the day wavering. Steeling myself for what must be done, I begin to carry out the plan I swore to follow, regardless of fear or hesitation.
With a long, bracing breath, I extinguish the porch light, casting the house’s exterior into complete darkness, leaving only the weak blue light of the swollen moon. Moving carefully, I make my way through each room, seeking out and smothering every source of illumination, allowing the thick, oppressive shadows to gather and swallow me whole. I bury the bedside clock beneath a pillow, cover the oven’s glowing display with a thick towel, unplug the microwave—banishing every glimmer, every whisper of light. This is my fate, my descent. I will not face this persecutor in glaring light; I will sink into the gloom and meet it on its own ground.
Navigating blind through the darkness, I reach the kitchen and drag a heavy wooden chair to the door. I settle into it, feeling the wood’s unyielding hardness against my back, setting myself to wait as silence, thick and nearly tangible, spills from the shadows.
Slowly, I notice a shift in the air. That dreadful chill, once distant, awakens anew, plunging even deeper into what I can only imagine has replaced my blood with something icy and otherworldly. Though the furnace ought to keep the home’s warmth at bay, each breath now leaves me as a ghostly plume of mist hanging in the air.
A rattling sound disrupts the stillness, subtle at first, until it becomes an irritating, grating noise. I only realize its source after some moments—it is my own teeth, chattering, perhaps from the glacial air or from terror itself. Whichever it may be, I remove my dentures, placing them warm and wet in my lap, quieting this unconscious sound.
The minutes stretch with unbearable slowness—ten, fifteen…twenty. By the twenty-fifth minute, irritation begins to replace fear, twisting itself around my already frayed nerves. Have I truly allowed myself to surrender to some imagined terror, a figment of my own mind, as Walter implied earlier? Is this creature no more than a specter haunting the shadows of an aging psyche?
Just as I am about to leave the chair, ready to abandon the vigil, a soft, deliberate knock echoes through the house, freezing me mid-step.
For a moment, I wonder if I only imagined it—a fanciful trick, the first sign of a cracked cognition. And then, another knock—one soft rap after another, each sinking into me like the slow tolling of a funerary death knell.
I turn slowly, heart pounding, each beat a frenzied attempt by the organ to liberate itself from my ribs. Cold, stiff fingers reach toward the deadbolt, pulling it back, and then find the knob. With a final, trembling exhale, I pull the door open.
There it stands, waiting for me just beyond the threshold. For the first year since this torment began, I am facing it directly, rather than from behind my curtained window and for the first year in many long years, it is silent. It is barely more than a shadow, cloaked by the moonlight and the shade of the oaks, as though enveloped by a darkness that pulses with its own malignancy. The figure is slight, and as my eyes adjust to the gloam of nearly midnight, I make out a strange fabric clinging to it—cloth woven of cloth as dark as tortured souls, absorbing every trace of illumination in the surrounding darkness and snuffing it out. The edges of the garment shift and waver, blurred and jagged, as though it were wrapped in shadows so dense they fray into the air, spectral wisps drifting with a will of their own.
As it lifts its head to look up at me, the shadow of a blackened top hat slips away to reveal its face—and God help me, the face! What stares back is an eyeless mask of rough, unpolished bone, stark white against the shadows, its surface marred by fractures that crawl like veins across the cheeks and brow. The sockets gape, wide and cavernous, each a dark void that seems to reach endlessly inward, as though drawing in all light and life. Within those hollows lies an ancient, unspeakable emptiness that feels as if it might have sentience and breathe on its own without the need of the substantiation of a corporeal body.
The creature tilts its head ever so slightly, a slow, deliberate movement, and I become aware of the foul, unsettling air that clings to it—a scent dry and old, like parchment hidden away in damp, forgotten tombs, mingled with a faint rot–a repugnant putridity that fills the air with an unsavorily sweet decay.
My breath fogs in the cold air between us as I stare into the mask’s depths. My hands are as cold as death itself, yet I find the strength to raise one of them, fingers trembling as they brush the fractured edge of the mask. The terror I feel at this touch is indescribable, a churning horror so profound it defies language—nay, further departed from language, it defies understanding entirely—a dread that unravels the very fabric of my sanity throbs from my fingers, following down my wrist, into my arm and then thrumming with the beat of uncertain doom throughout my body. Every instinct within me screams to flee, yet my hand seems to act of its own accord, gripping the edge of the mask and lifting it, so slowly that the act stretches into eternity.
The moment seems to continue onward and time becomes elastic and pulls away forever.
And then I see.
I don’t know what I expected to discover but it certainly wasn’t the very thing I behold staring back at me in the dark. The face I look upon is a face I know but it appears to hold a weariness and exhaustion I don’t remember it to have shown me previously. There is a quiet bewilderment somewhere behind the skin that I neglected to notice when last I gazed upon this face within the mirror…
It is my own face, though it looks not as I remember it to be. I run my fingertips beneath my own eyes and feel the bags beneath them. I never knew my eyes to be so devoid of joy and to carry the weight of such bags beneath them, but I know that this thing which is staring back at me, pale, hollow, and leached of all warmth is indeed the truth—my truth. I can feel every crag of wrinkle and every sag of jowl that I see upon my own face, with my own hands. As any light that may have previously remained inside of my eyes fades away as the recognition of these truths dawns on me. My own eyes, now fully dead of joy, usefulness or purpose gaze back into themselves and I see and acknowledge the emptiness within them—there, lurking somewhere behind them is a fathomless confusion that hides away and has been hiding away, a harsh truth ignored until this moment. With a heavy finality, I see myself as I must truly be–as the thing I have become—drained of life—a hollow shell—empty—useless…
As I stare at the child that stares back at me with my own face, through my own hollow eyes, a lifeless smile pulls at its cracked lips and that smile slowly twists into a deathly rictus. But—but wait! This is reflection of the emotions of my own face is it not? Why then does this wicked grin strike such a chord of horror within me to set my pulse to race once again at the pace, the erratic arrhythmic tempo it beat with prior to the revelation of this truth? This revelation that befell me with a sense of sorrowed calm.
I don’t understand! A moment ago, I gazed upon what I knew to be the truth and in the next moment, something about the face has morphed into something else entirely! That is not a smile that my lips have ever smiled!
My heart seizes, and the boy, dressed as a broken Victorian Mourning Doll removes his top hat, and holds it before him as if it were the Halloween treat pail of an ordinary young person. Only then do I hear the ancient sound of the voice I have dreaded all night to be forced to hear as it slithers not just into my ears, but into my mouth, my nose, my eyes—it slides its way through my every open orifice and coils itself as an unwelcome visitor might disregard its host and make itself a home within my mind—an ancient low, hollow whisper rattles through not just my head, but every organ in my body muttering, “trick or treat” and the face before me—the smile on the face which is mine, but also mine no longer continues to grow inexplicably and preternaturally ever wide…
The sound of the words becomes an endless echo that reverberates and sears my consciousness with its inexplicable incandescence, burning white-hot and bright until it vacillates suddenly, dissolving rapidly into something gelid and tenebrious. The sound stretches, twisting to defy comprehension before it evolves abruptly from its nebulous state of disarray into something recognizable once again.
Laughter.
It is endless and soulless and quietly, it fills the night.
The realization of the mistake I’ve made comes to me suddenly and as I attempt to stumble backward and away, the looming darkness closes in from all around to consume me and the laughter resonates within my thoughts in a crescendo that grows ever louder.