Title: Spooks, Ghouls, and Demons
Author: tinhutlady
Series: Invisible Man
Rating: children and up
Summary: Darien muses about monsters on a Halloween night.
"Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world." Of course, I'm not sure old Will Shakespeare would have said that nowadays, owing to the commercial reality of the modern Halloween. Still, it's every bit as creepy to realize that less than a hundred years ago in this country children roamed the streets on Halloween night and broke windows, burned furniture, vandalized houses, and essentially ran wild.
Kind of reminds me of that book by William Golding - you know, the one that only has a happy ending because the kids on the island are saved from themselves by the adults? Seems the adults had to come to the rescue on Halloween, too - training the kids to go door to door for candy instead of ripping the posts off of porches to use as kindling.
I guess anyone can be trained with the right incentive, even me. Here we are, Hobbs and I, running around on Halloween night in order to catch bad guys wearing masks that make them look normal by the light of day. How did I get myself into this mess? Too much history there to contemplate, but I mean it's a little eerie to chase down dark alleys for bad guys on a night like this and find all these little kids dressing up as things they aren't, pretending to be something different. Sometimes I feel I'm playing Halloween every night Ð dressing up as a good person, wearing a cloak of invisibility when the agency needs a hero, and playing law abiding citizen as long as I can Ð waiting for the boogie man to come creeping out of my eyes when I least expect him. Maybe he's been trained, too. Hobbs seems to think so, as he motions for me to follow him. How he can have me at his back when something akin to a monster still lives inside me either shows that he's the most trusting soul I've ever known, or one serious mental case.
Maybe he's a touch of both.
Actually, yeah, he is.
Still, as we creep down this dark path, hearing the faint doorbell rings and cries of "trick or treat!" in the distance, part of me keeps checking my wrist for a red snake, or looking for an excuse to snatch a glimpse in a mirror to make sure I still have normal eyes. On a night like this, it's only prudent.
After all, Emily Dickinson said, "One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing material place," and she knew what she was talking about, even if she didn't have a glandular demon hiding in her head.