Samhain

If I were you, I wouldn’t knock on that door. I wouldn’t even walk on that side of the road where that house is, not on Halloween night in any case. No, I really wouldn’t. You can laugh if you want, but a few years back, a young girl was last seen walking up to that door dressed as a fairy, her halo aglow with tiny little stars her mother sewed the night before, together with wings made of ribbons and feathers. The little girl looked almost ethereal, and when she didn’t come back, the whole town went searching for her, but they never found her.

Tom’s father, who was a policeman at the time, later whispered to my father that they took the old man into the station and questioned him the whole night and went through the house with a fine-tooth comb but found nothing, nothing at all. Then the old man’s lawyers started screaming human rights violations and whatnot, so, in the end, they had to let him go, which was all well and good, but the little girl was never found and, eventually, her mother went mad, and they carted her to some sort of institution where she has been since, or at least, this is all everyone knows. Her father stumbled over a piece of wire one night crossing the bridge on the way home and fell into the river; it was early spring, and the river was swollen and quick with melting snow and they found him a month later, his body bloated and little fishes nibbling on his pupils. The bank put their house up for sale, but nobody wanted to buy it so it slowly rotted away into dust and weeds.

My granny says it had something to do with the old man being so old to still remember the old ways, hold onto the old beliefs, from way back when Halloween was not Halloween, but something called Samhain, which she says, meant summer’s end, a festival celebrating the end of the harvest in which everyone took part, the whole villages getting together to celebrate barns filled for winter, drinking wine and singing and roasting meats over fires, lifting the veil between two worlds; of the living and the dead so that even those no longer visible would know they are part of it, part of the living, those that love them and remember them. But all that was ages and ages ago, and nobody remembers it anymore and the old man is foolish for getting angry at how things are now, he should have been long dead and buried. I don’t know if any of it is true, but it is what my granny says and I am telling you again, I wouldn’t go near that place if I were you.