Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Last Thing I Hear Every Halloween.

Every Halloween night, just before the clock strikes twelve, I always play this music. It's always the last thing I hear before the magic of the season vanishes like the flame of an extinguished jack o' lantern.

For those of us who claim Oct. 31 as our favorite day of the year, this is always a melancholy moment. At such an hour, I am usually the only one awake, having promised myself to celebrate every last second of Halloween. I walk through the darkness to the window and look out upon the neighborhood. The streets are black and empty. Only dead leaves scratch along the sidewalk where masked-children roamed hours earlier. The houses along the street sit nervously in the shadows of the streetlamps and a red moon rises quietly behind a bank of clouds.

As the music plays, I imagine that from the corner of my eye, I see eerie shapes moving silently through the darkness. Skeletons creeping through the backyards as they quickly make their way back to the graveyard before midnight. This is how Halloween ends for me every year.

5 comments:

Goneferalinidaho said...

Nice! Who is it?

Mantan Calaveras said...

It's definitely spooky, but I don't let Halloween come to a close at midnight, after all it's Hallows day now, with Dia de los Muertos to follow!

The way I see it, it's just the beginning of the dark season, heh heh heh.

James Colton said...

That was awesome! Thanks for sharing it.

J.P. said...

The song is composed by Donald Rubinstein and is appropriately named, "Halloween." I found it years ago on the soundtrack to George A. Romero's film "Martin."

The Gill-Man said...

VERY nice! Of course, I personally consider Halloween to end when the sun rises on November 1st! Yeah, I know it isn't technically true, but in my mind it's a way to extend my favorite day as long as possible.

Like Mantan said, All Hallows and Dia de los Muertos are also extensions of the day, so it's all good!