HE WALKED OUT onto the back porch; he didn't know why. The darkness had reached its fullness. The trick-or-treaters were long gone home, the candy stored away, the jack-o-lanterns extinguished. Lights were starting to go out in the widely-spaced houses along the street. But he did not notice the view of the street; his attention was turned to the backyard, where there were no lights. Something had come into his mind, the sense of things stirring, things which he could feel but not see.

Even in the night he could make out some details of the yard, the mowed grass and planted trees; farther than that nothing could be seen. He knew what was out there, at the far end of the yard—the brush that marked the edge of the overgrown field, and beyond the field the woods of low trees, extending down into the ravine, then up the other side to the old one-lane road. Somehow, this vision of the land struck him as a human imposition. It was not just what people had done with the land, not the buildings and the trees cut down or planted; it was the knowledge itself, the idea that anyone could know what was out there, that anyone could attach names to all that melts away into the night. And out there in that solvent night was something restless, something on the approach.

As night wore on, the facts of the daylight hours would lose their surety. The impossible would have its moment, a chance to edge into the world. Perhaps it was not the words of parents that sent the costumed children scurrying home as the evening darkened, but an unformed intuition of the strange things that could be loosed in a time like this.

Something flew silently above him, off into the trees, likely a bat or an owl. But he could think of it too as some undefined thing from a time when there were no bats or owls, only tangible pieces of the darkness that coalesced and took wing, flapping into view and then out again to dissolve back into the blackness.

There was a calm over the world, the calm of uninhabited silence. Yet he found himself gripped by an unease congealing into fear. He was being watched, and he could not watch back.

The longer that he stood there, the more undefined the world became. His sight became vision without meaning. The silhouettes of shrubs and trees lost their identities, lingering as vague, impermanent forms. The sky and earth lost their separation. Nothing could be trusted, or even understood. The unreal was real.

He was unattached, adrift, like a man awakening from the deepest sleep to find that four thousand years of history had been only a dream, and all the accompanying knowledge and reason but the fantasy of his slumber.

And as his sense of reason slipped back from him, he understood the unseen motion all around, the things coming not just out of the dark, but out of the solidified darkness of the soil.

They were skeletons, the unnumbered dead of uncounted ages, pushing up from beneath the ground.

The skeletons were at rest no longer, disentangling themselves from the tree roots, sliding past the dirt and stones. The bones were deformed and distorted, but not rotten, still chalk-white and hard. Skulls watched him, their faces twisted into leers. The dead surrounded him, and they were close, close, closer with every moment. Already they reached their long arms up, almost to the surface, grasping to pull him out into the raw blackness, where everything was unknown, and unknowable, and inescapable.

His muscles locked, his eyes grew wide, his breath grew shallow. To run would do no good, but only carry him into the cold arms that awaited. He stood still, not moving, but yet hoping, trying to draw himself back, if only back into himself.

Then his shoulder hit against something. It was the faded wooden screen door—flat and straight and solid, crafted by human hands. Unlatched, it hung ajar, the spring that pulled it closed having broken years before. Somehow this encounter pulled back to him just a little bit of his mind. He looked behind him at his house, and inside his house. Through the doorway he saw real, comprehensible things, walls and floors and chairs.

He saw the lamps of his home. From the outside their glow looked dim, almost orange, like the fires of ancient hearths, hearths where the men of an unknowing age found refuge from the terrors of the night. There was a place to feel the evils chased away, to leave the ghosts to the ghost stories.

And here was the cold paralysis of fear, the impossible presence of restless bones performing the motions of life, but bearing no personality save malice.

He stood on the porch as if balanced on a fulcrum between two worlds. He could fall into one, or push himself back into the other. Despite, or maybe because of, his fears, the decision came. He built his will as best he could and summoned forth the strength to tear himself away from the appraising gaze of empty skulls. With a few quick steps he was inside, among the solid and comprehensible.

He shut the door behind him, and in the closed-off room shut his mind to visions from the engulfing night.


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