Creepypasta: Nightmare Fuel

97: I Am Halloween

I Am Halloween by Nathaniel J. Nelson

Halloween is my saving grace – the one night a year I can go outside without a mask.

I don’t want it to sound like I spend all year waiting for this day, just wiling away the hours with bated breath and anticipation; I would like to say that I have other interests, that I am able to find myself so engrossed in some human activity that I actually forget about the one day I can truly be myself.

But this would be a lie. It’s an uncommon hour that I go without thinking about the thirty-first of October, that glorious night when I can step out into the cool air and almost – just almost – feel human.

The last Halloween was perhaps my favorite.

My favorite day hasn’t been the same since this area became occupied, since the human beings with their warm skin and their innocent minds began constructing ramshackle dwellings within the imaginary borders of what was once mine.

When I say it wasn’t the same, I’m speaking quite literally: my favorite day was a different day before the humans came.

Back then, what I referred to as simply My Day took place once every year, on what the humans know as October twenty-third. A day of great power, when the walls between the physical and the supernatural grow thin and malleable. Evil was released into the world on the twenty-third of October, although such designations as months were many centuries from their creation. An insane, power-hungry beast managed to doom her entire species on that day: an October twenty-third many hundreds of years ago. I often wonder what the world might have been like if she hadn’t committed the ultimate mistake. It’s irrelevant, I always end up telling myself. Because I wouldn’t exist.

Unlike the naïve human beings who roam the streets in their speeding cars and make screaming love to one another in their shoddy homes, I have been blessed with a natural intuition allowing me to always understand how far in time we’ve drifted since our last cycle began; it is this sense that allows me to know the current year as Six Thousand and Twenty. In human years, I believe, that would be Two Thousand and Sixteen. Anno Domini, are the words they use. Words from an ancient language. Ancient by their standards.

But I digress. It was the Halloween of Six Thousand and Nineteen – or Two Thousand and Fifteen – that was my favorite.

My Day had always been the twenty-third of October. When I was alone here, I would slip out to the surface and enjoy the rush of power as I was joined by my fellow creatures of the night. I would walk, aimlessly and without direction, as the others whipped around me. Some were burdened with deformed, hellish shapes, cursed to roam in the shadows of the earth, safe from humanity’s leering eyes. Others were no more physical than the wind itself, and only visible to my eyes because of the power that courses through every living creature on the night of the twenty-third. Still others were beyond form, beyond comprehension – no more than forgotten memories, drifting from mind to soul, despairing in their acceptance of eternal suffering.

Some have believed that I may end up like them. I have no intention of proving them right.

When the humans came and settled down, they scared away my friends. Any human child would find the notion ridiculous: an army of the supernatural, the nightmare of the most disturbed, frightened away by innocent human beings. But it happened this way. The humans didn’t come alone – they brought their single most disturbing, most wicked power of all: the power of denial.

Human children spend their time wondering what it would be like to share the powers of their fellow creatures – wings like a bird, perhaps, or the sharp teeth of a dog. They don’t understand that they already possess the most powerful gift of all. Through their human denial, they are able to stare us directly in the eyes and inform us that we don’t exist.