Darkness grows

Is it too soon to think of Halloween?

The summer holidays are not quite over, the days are still long.  I am in the living room of an apartment overlooking the harbour in Gibraltar and the heavy heat of an August afternoon has settled on the town and shows no sign of shifting.  The sea is a molten grey, the sky a slumbering haze of white, and even in a bustling city the air is still, sounds muffled, movements slow and stilted.  Yet there is a sense of ending now.  Next week parents will be making preparations for children to return to school and bosses across the city will breathe a sigh of relief that the summer holidays are over and workers can get back to their usual routines.

August afternoon at Gibraltar harbour

And already, shops are stocking garish plastic masks, posters announce Halloween events, fancy dress parties and discos, face paints and costumes and a bewildering array of wigs, false teeth, fake injuries and all the paraphernalia that accompanies a modern Halloween festival.  This is an indication of how business has jumped at the popularity of Halloween to make money - and how people so enjoy this day that they take part in the fun year after year, whatever their ages.

Halloween is only two months or so away and in these busy days of starting school, work, university or whatever it is you do in the autumn, it is a good idea to plan ahead to enjoy the fun.  Or to face your fears, to come eye to eye with the encroaching dark.....

And the darkness grows...........only a single lamp keeps it at bay.

Check out the links on the right hand side for ideas for enjoying your Halloween and keep reading for a sample of what's to come.

The Dark

An extract from one of this year's Chilling Tales:

     When I was just a kid, like my little brother George, I used to wonder how it was that grown ups aren’t afraid of anything.  When George was born, my Mum said I was to look after him, to protect him from harm, to chase away all the things that might frighten him.  So I did.

     I always played nearby to catch him if he tripped and fell, and I held his hand when I walked him to nursery school on icy mornings.  I chased away the neighbour’s dog with a stick when it came too close, and flicked the spiders in our room out of the window, just so George wouldn’t be afraid. But what I couldn’t do was keep away the Dark.

     I used to wonder, on those misty twilights around Bonfire Night, how grown ups just weren’t afraid of the Dark.

     “Don’t be silly, there’s nothing there,” my Mum used to say when she came to tuck us into bed.  We had two narrow beds in the room at the back of the house overlooking the yard and past its mossy-covered wall to rough ground.  Beyond that, in between the deep green of a row of yew, we could just glimpse the grey stumps of old tombstones, standing guard over the graves of the town’s dead.

    Every night Mum would turn off all the lights when she went to bed, to save money, she said, because ever since George’s Dad left the house, we had so very little to live on.  And every night when I heard her bedroom door shut, I’d creep across the carpet and snuggle up with George – just to keep him safe from the Dark.

     It was just about that time, when George had just left nursery to come to big school with me, that we learnt why grown ups aren’t afraid of the Dark.  It was the week of Halloween, when the days start to get shorter and the nights longer, and the leaves have fallen off the trees and become mulch along the street where we lived.  That week, I found out that grown ups aren’t afraid of the Dark because they just can’t see things the way us kids can.  And what George and I learnt on that evening, was that there were Things in the Dark, or, at least, a Thing, a shape that moved and changed silently, that followed you like a hound on the scent.  You only knew it was there because of the patches of black it left behind as it moved, a silent trail.  The Dark was a patch of night that was more intense, bleaker than the rest of the night around it.

     It was George who saw it first, the Dark, crouching in between the mouth of the alley and the bottom of the lamppost.

     “Can you see it, Harry?” he asked, in a whisper that almost caught at the back of his throat.  It took me a moment or two before I could make it out: a formless shape that kept moving, like a shiver in the shadows.

     “What is it?” asked George.  Our walking had slowed and our feet felt glued to the concrete of the footpath.

     “I don’t know,” I whispered.  The Dark was a movement in the air, a shadow denser than the shadows around it.  But it was nothing.  You could see right through it, like grown ups do when they don’t want to see the things that make them afraid.  You couldn’t grip it, or throw things at it to make it go away.  It was just there, the coiled, sinister and cold, deadly cold, Dark.

Chilling Tales for Winter Nights is currently being edited and formatted ready for production.  It will be available on Amazon in time for All Hallows' Eve....when the nights draw in, the gates to the otherworld are opened, and people might be wise to be afraid of the Dark......