Let the night come

[Trigger warning: violence, mentions of distressful deaths]

Oh, let the night come!

Mania stood in the centre of the wide, empty field and rubbed her hands together. Her long fingers with their extra joint slid over each other like dead eels. All Hallows’ Eve was her favourite night of the year, the truest of nights, the only night. It was an unboxing of freedom in the endless sprawl of unnamed years, unfolding and deep, she could feel a scream well up in her drainpipe of a throat and gurgle its way from her sharp and ruined mouth. Leaning back she threw the scream high and knew it would be dismissed as the howling wind, and that made her happy. Very happy. She would be invisible. She would uproot herself from this spot, as she did every year, unshackled at last, and inflict herself wherever she could, as unrelentingly as she could.

As the sun slipped behind the horizon like a drowning man slips beneath the water’s surface, so the last tendrils of light split the sky in blood red and petrifying orange, an open wound at the gate of the gods. Mania drew a ragged breath into her hollow rib cage at the obvious omen. Drew another. Another. Raised her hands to the sky, grasped at the magic in the air, the shackles around her feet disintegrating and shrinking away.

Oh yes, let the night come…

***

A woman walking her dog along the edge of the field at dusk would remark at how wonderfully artistic the evening was. The mist obscured everything but the tips of the trees and hedgerows, and the stillness was mesmerising. Pastel colour skies and orange clouds were a sign of good weather to come.

But this field felt cold, wrong. Her dog refused to move a step further, pulled the lead back towards home and whined. The woman pulled her coat around her, the mystery of the morning broken. She turned and followed the dog back towards the town and found herself casting backward glances as if she was being followed.

***

Helen threw the pumpkin innards into the bucket under the table and slapped the lid on it.

“No, Russ. Now stop asking.”

“But muuuum…”

“But mum nothing! You cannot wear an actual pumpkin on your head! Why do we have to have this argument every year? I suggest you go and put your actual costume on before I keep you in and make you answer the door and hand out sweets all night!”

Russ slumped his shoulders, sighed a defeated “huuuuurgh,” tilted his head back and dragged his knuckles across the kitchen. For a twelve year old he had some attitude!

Helen muttered under her breath, “…seem to understand…” threw more pumpkin into the bin, “so heavy… mess in his hair…” flung the spoons into the sink, “toddle around like a top-heavy fool…” She didn’t know why he loved Halloween so much anyway. Why any of the kids did. Stupid holiday, commercial rubberisation of your wallet and good for nothing but nightmares for years to come.

Helen set a candle alight inside the hollow pumpkin, the paring knife on the chopping board at the centre of the table. Turning off the kitchen light, she examined her handiwork.

“Pretty good. Just a bit off here…”

Helen didn’t do Halloween. Russ always had nightmares after Trick or Treating, the costumes that everyone wore seemed to do their job, even if they were cheap and obvious and from the seasonal aisle in the supermarket, surrounded by assortments of bloods, make-ups, zombie cologne... But every year he insisted, and every year Helen would run into his room as he would jolt awake in the early hours of the morning with a rasping breathy throat from screaming in his sleep. Russ never seemed to remember what it was that frightened him in his dreams and awoke looking confused and dazed. And that frightened Helen far more than any costume ever had. She always told him that Halloween things weren’t real, tried to soothe his fears, but the nightmares kept coming.

Russ was hurtling down the stairs, the doorbell singing.

“Ryan’s here, Ryan’s here!” He chimed. He flung the door open, slammed it behind him, and he was off down the garden path. Ryan’s mum waved to Helen from the street. Back by ten, as per usual.

A few minutes later the door swung open.

“Russ, did you forget something?” Helen came round the corner into the front room and froze.

Swaggering and teetering in the candle light of the pumpkin on the porch was a woman. Not particularly tall, draped in rags and covered in blood. She was doing a very good impression of the undead and she smelled like hell.

“Must be that new special effects stuff,” Helen thought.

“Hey Jasmine, what a great costume, you had me going for a second! Nice stench, oosh!” The figure dragged a foot over the threshold. “Here you go, don’t eat it all at once, and save some for Ryan!” The figure dragged the other foot forward, broke stance and giggled. “Thank you Russ’s mum!” She scooped a handful of sweets, a gush of wind blowing her garb aside as she pranced her way across the lawn, revealing sparkly silver trainers. Helen laughed and closed the door.

***

Mania was at the edge of a lawn. It was midnight, or thereabouts, she didn’t keep time, the air did that for her. She stood out in the open, nobody could see her unless she wanted them to. This house was where she always started, because it is where they always started, at first blood. She watched a young boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, run down the garden path and join his friend on the street. The friend’s mother waved. How quaint. Mania floated across the grass and peered in the window. Just the woman. That dowdy woman who never believed. Year after year she flouted the laws of this night, her measly single pumpkin keeping no devils at bay, a middle finger stuck sky high, a poor substitute for the roaring fires of the 1700’s.

Would she never learn?

A young girl in full costume ran up the garden path. Mania drifted up behind her. The girl reached the door and switched to a shuffling gait, pushed the door open. She and the woman inside exchanged words and the girl laughed. As she reached forwards to the sweet bowl Mania breezed past her and into the house, upstairs and sat, watching, waiting, in the hallway window. She loved hearing the confusion in this woman’s voice as people generously complimented her on her decorations. Plural.

***

Russ returned at ten, as predetermined. He was excitable as usual before sleep at Halloween. But after much cajoling, soon his head was on the pillow and his eyes were drowsy and half closed. Helen pulled the door to his room almost shut, and Mania would extend her hand and seal it, drawing magic from the semi-sleeping boy. His heart rate would slow, his breath would become shallow, his limbs static and his brainwaves reduce until he was all but dead, and this is where Mania would hold him in suspended animation. She stretched herself out on the ceiling above him, floating and gazing at his innocent face, how easily corrupted he could be. The air thickened, her throat opened and she let out a hellish scream, one that she knew Russ would be able to hear in his dream land. She knew he would run, and so he should. The demons were on their way.

***

Russ was in a wasteland. It was dark but he could see, the trees were sticks protruding desperately, rudely from the ground and the wind was all but horizontal. Flecks of fire ripped through the air, the putrid, heavy, dragon-breath air. He turned around and around but it was wilderness in every direction. Fear thrilled through him, cold and acidic. Suddenly the wind dropped, silence scuttled in every direction, and then he could see a scream hurtling at him from the side, dragging thunder behind it like a carriage drawn by startled horses. The scream he could never outrun, the scream that flung him into a hollow rock and pinned him there, his pyjamas stuck to him with sweat.

Mania jumped form the thunder carriage, no longer in ragged clothing with her face mangled. She appeared in the mortal world as she had died: brutal, stifled and abandoned in a field. Now, between the waking world and the realm of sleep, she appeared as her rightful self, that which the gods had sent to shed the blood of demons who wished to corrupt the innocent and inspire the corrupt. This wasteland was a place no living thing should be brought but for centuries these young beings had been dragged here, one by one, and only under the soft blanket of night could they be tucked back in their beds.

Mania felt a presence behind her. She drew her sword from the scabbard on her back and spun, slashing and twisting and thrusting. Blue lightning crackled from the blade and water dripped from the hilt.

Flesh parted and stitched together, demons laughing and catching at her boots, her cloak, her tunic. Raising her sword to eye level she let out a scream and stabbed the blade straight though the eye of the demon. Its bat-like wings flapped feebly and fell off, slapping the floor. Endless streams of winged demons rose and fell, each ending in pieces on the dusty floor. Mania heaved her sword, dripping and sparking. She glared around, anticipating another attack.

“Come on, then! Where are you, you coward! You disgust me!”

A rock rolled across the ground, left a tiny track, rolled forward and stopped at the toe of a boot. Mania lifted her eyes. It was herself. The Imitation grinned at her. But this mouth was wide, too wide, and the eyes were dead and glazed. Fire sprung up from the hands and a sword was nowhere to be seen. Mania took her chance and slashed at the hands: they fell to the floor and started to burn the sand into glass as a hurricane whipped around them, at the eye of the storm.

“Do you really think you can protect every dream from us? We work miracles, we feed imaginations and the wretched are revealed.” The Imitation’s voice penetrated the empty space where air should have been, lifted her stumps as hands grew, long and bony, like Mania’s mortal form. “You are tainted: you can never return to your beloved gated heaven, nor your people. You must choose and as always, I hope you choose wrong.”

The Imitation stared into Mania’s eyes. The darkness behind them was crippling and for a second she saw the living death of every being that could dream: the destruction of trust and endless wakeful nights filled with horror and longing and clinging to life and the fruitless search for love. She saw all the fear, the wasted life, the diseases the mind could invent and conjure up. Nothing survived. The mind was turned into the wasteland in the waking state. It would not survive.

Mania was overcome with anger, could feel it coursing through her veins like spooked racehorses, freight trains. From the corner of her eye she saw Russ stuck to the rocks. He looked fearful and blind, not able to see her and she was glad of it. He was coughing on the ash in the air, the fire from the severed hands creeping closer and closer, licking at the bottom of his pyjamas. He opened his mouth to scream.

But Mania felt the scream emit from her mouth: lunging forward she thrust the sword deep into the Imitation, the water flooding around them and extinguishing the fires. Darkness fell, the wind fell still around them and the stillness became darkness itself. She let out a final yell: the sword slipped up to the hilt, lightning electrified the flood plains they now stood in. The Imitation rasped a breath, looked at Mania in fury and betrayal and vanished, back into the Otherworld. Mania fell to her knees, exhausted. Every other night she could only watch as this grisly ritual unfolded, she was useless, helpless as the children in their nightmares. But tonight she was victorious, and they would never know.

A part of her had died with the bodies of all these creatures, they didn’t choose this and they were bound to relieve it as long as she was bound to defend. She sat back on her heels and rolled her head sideways, towards Russ. He had disappeared, and she smiled, knowing that he was in his bed with his mother running in, and with the breaking of the seal around the door Mania reappeared in the field, the sky turning a dusty pink, purple and blue as the sun rose.

The air was thick, the shackles knitted themselves over her feet once more. She felt the world close in around her as she lay out on the grass, motionless and hollow, praying for night to come.