The Best Scare of All

Halloween is easily the best holiday. There is something about it. Maybe that she didn't feel like as much of a freak as she did every other day of the year. This day alone was when the freaks could come out and play. Being revered instead of feared.

Maybe that was it. But there was also this unidentifiable magic associated with a day that allowed the dead to be just a bit closer to people. She had always loved the holiday but never participated. She was a foreigner in America, and this dress-up holiday was all new to her. She couldn't wait.

She sat in front of her vanity mirror on All Hallow's Eve and mixed her paints and tints. Her makeup was grotesquely exaggerated. Her eyes were huge and her face gray and worn looking. She was transforming into a spectacular ghost. She could already imagine the horrified reactions and a smile cracked upon her face. The screams and running, oh how delicious!

She couldn't exactly pinpoint why she enjoyed spreading fear and seeing the discomfort of others. She simply had always been that way, enjoying observing what scared others. When her makeup was done, she put on a wispy white lace dress. It billowed easily with the slightest breeze of wind. Hauntingly she could walk and appear to be floating creepily at others. Her grin cracked again at the thought.

Then she sat in wait. There was nothing else to do but wait until the time of the party. The party she had always wanted to attend. A Monster Bash Ball she used to watch on tv in her native land. Her time had come to scare them all; the best scare of all the balls.

The time was 11:11PM, as she walked through the double doors that looked like they were made for giants. The people filed in if you could call them that. All the freaks and monsters filed into the ballroom. No one paid her any mind, she was just one of the many. Another ghoul.

At first, she watched from the side as people paired off and approached the dance floor to shake, rattle, and roll to the beats. It was all pretty uninspired up close. They had made it look so cool on tv. Now instead, she was only feeling a mounting need for something out of the ordinary to occur. Something spectacular.

And since no one ever provides these things in life, she would resort to fulfilling the need herself. That was what life had taught her, "do it yourself." She walked purposefully through the crowd without a break in her gliding gate. Reaching the stage, she stood before the mass of humans, looking down on them from her elevated position. Her grin was in place again, she began to cackle loudly. And no one looked up. As she laughed, she realized this and stopped short.

She walked over to the guitar player next to her and he never broke rhythm. She was standing right next to him, moved her face an inch away from his, and still, he did not even register her face.

"What's going on? Can no one see me?" She said this aloud, and her voice carried away with the wind. Gone, unnoticed. She backed away and then looking out at the crowd again, made a reckless decision. Taking a running start she hurled herself from the stage and into the mass of people.

She would make them notice her. She was falling through the air, about to crash into a man dressed as a dragon, but she just kept falling. Crashing onto the floor. The fall didn't hurt. How? What was this? None of it was adding up. Standing abruptly, she swiped her hand at a vampire trying to hit her. And her hand went through the vampire girl, never affecting her at all.

No, it couldn't be true. She knew it was. She had avoided it for so long, to the point where she believed it, that she was real. She had believed it to the point of doing this prank, the goal she had had in life that was unattainable now. Or was it?

Angrily, she grabbed a punch bowl and lifted it above her head. The people nearest saw it rise on its own accord and come crashing down on Mickey Mouse's head.

"What was that?!" shrieked someone. "This place is haunted!" said another.

"Happy Halloween," said the ghost with her grin as she glided away.

She left the shrieking in her midst and returned to the darkness of the night. The moon was high and full in the sky with gray ominous clouds streaking the blackness. Each character from each story of all of a time passed by her as she floated down the street. It was past the time for trick or treaters, she was glad. All of her memories were coming back to her. The memories of her life, the life before death. They were flashing quickly like a picture slide show.

Her life in Croatia as a wife with three children. Her obsession as a small girl to see the U.S. and understand what made it what it was to people. The curiosity that led her to come here, not in life, but to float across the sea in death. And then, somehow to forget everything she had been.

How can one forget so fully who they once were? And feel nothing but sadness at that knowledge that she didn't miss that life, she simply had forgotten it to live a new life that went unrequited when living. So now she was alive in a new way, a way that was detached and ensured she could do what she wanted. But she would be alone, always, forever.

And that was the scariest thought of all. With nothing to be done about it, the ghost carried on silently to find another thrill to distract her solitary soul.

Faintly, a sort of wailing could be heard that mixed with the wind. The only sound that she would ever emanate for the rest of time.