Speaker 1: I was eleven. Halloween fell on a Friday, and the
night felt colder than usual, the kind that clings behind
your ears and makes the hair on your arms stand up.
Our town had one rule. Every one knew it, even
if they didn't really talk about it. The tracks cut
a straight line through the edge of town. Just before
the woods. On the far side was a dead end street,
maybe ten houses. No one we knew ever lived there.
What was strange was that there was no haunted stories
or urban legends. Instead, there were vague adult shrugs, like
it's not a good neighborhood, there's nothing over there any more.
But every Halloween parents repeated it in the same stiff tone,
stay on this side of the tracks, and every year
we obeyed until one. Danny, Marcus, Tye, and I were
halfway through our route, bags half full, when Marcus spoke up,
what if we go to one house just past the tracks.
Ty immediately shook his head. My mum will kill me,
so we don't tell her. Danny grinned. He pointed down
the street at the far end of the cul de sac,
past the slats of the crossing sign, where a faint
orange glow appeared. There was a jack o' lantern flickering
in the low light. Someone's expecting us, Danny joked. We
waited until most of the porch lights behind us had
gone dark, when the sidewalks were thinning out, and the
parents had started calling kids in for the night. Then
we slipped across the train tracks. As soon as my
foot hit the other side, felt the temperature dipped and
the air turned wet and sour. A low fog sat
on the pavement like spilled smoke, unmoving. It didn't shift
with our steps. The houses looked strange, as if they'd
been posed there, with their painted shutters, rigged lawns and decorations.
Out front. Everything looked hand built, like props on a
set pumpkins with faces carved two symmetrically paper ghosts hanging
from trees, all cut from the same stencil. No movement
behind any window. We kept walking. The only sound was
the crunch of candy wrappers in our bags. The house
with the jack o lantern was third from the end,
porchlight blinking slowly, plastic skeleton on a swing. A ball
of candy sat waiting on a small table piled with
black wrapped coffees in perfect neat rows. Danny didn't hesitate
and grabbed a fistful. I watched Marcus and Tide took
one each, then shove them in their mouths, laughing like
it was all just the game. But I didn't eat mine. Instead,
I dropped it into my coat pocket. Something about the
waxy crinkle under my fingers made my skin crawl. Guess
that's it, Marcus said, that's when we heard it click.
A porch light from two houses down flickered on, then another,
and another down the cul de sac porch lights began
turning on, one by one, each illuminating an empty porch,
a bawl of black candy, a grinning jack O'Lantern, A
lot of lights for a street no one supposedly lives on.
If that like, someone had been waiting, and now that
we come, they wanted us to stay. We kept walking
the loop, moving in a half circle that curved back
toward the tracks. No one spoke much anymore. The air
felt heavier with each step, like the fog was wrapping
around our ankles and slowing us. The porch lights now
cast long shadows over lawns, putting us on edge, thinking
someone was nearby. Still there were no sounds but our
footsteps and the faint rustle of costumes. Then Danny started
acting weird. He jogged ahead, spinning once in the middle
of the street, like it was putting on a show.
You guys are killing the vibe, he said, too loud.
It's just Halloween. Marcus gave him a lock, calm down.
Danny ignored him. Something had caught his attention, a low
branch hanging over a yard with something swaying from the
end of it. A mask. It was paper, maybe, or
something close, pale and stretched, with angular eye holes and
longs sunken features. He looked too specific to be random,
not like a decoration, but like something someone had made
for a reason. Danny unhugged it from the branch and
turned to us, holding it up. Now, this is cool.
Leave it, I said, without thinking seriously, but he was
already sliding it over his face. The moment he let go,
the mask seemed to settle, molding to his skin, more
like latex than paper. He tapped the cheek with a
knuckle fits perfect. No one laughed. Ty took us step back.
The edges of the mask sat flush against his skin,
almost like it wasn't a mask at all, just the
second face, one that didn't blink. Then his tone changed,
Let's finish the loop, he said, we're almost there. I
should have said no. I think we all should have,
but none of us wanted to be the one to break,
so we followed. As we turned the bend of the
coulder sack, we saw the first figure step into the street,
then another and another. They moved, slowly, walking side by side,
like they were part of a performance. None of us
had agreed to watch. Men and women in old fashioned clothes,
floor length skirts, button coats, faded vests, all stitched in
muted colors and soft textures. They wore masks like Danny's.
All of them had the same unsettling stillness to their faces.
Not joyless or angry, just wrong. And they were heading
toward us, quiet as fog. The moment the parade stopped,
it was like the whole street exhaled. Every marcher froze
in place, all at once, their heads turning slightly toward us,
like animals catching a scent. None of us moved at first.
Then Ty whispered, go, and we did. Our footsteps thundered
across the asphalt, too loud to be safe. The fog
seemed to drag at our legs. My bag of candy
bounced against my side with each sprinting step. I didn't
even look behind me until we ducked behind us, low hedge,
hearts rattling in our chests. That's when we realized Danny
wasn't with us. He'd been at the back, always the slowest,
and somehow he hadn't made it. I peeked through a
gap in the branches. He was still in the street,
lumbering away, no more than a dozen feet from the
front of the parade. The nearest mass figure glided forward
toward him, then another. They were calm and confident, like
they already had him. Danny didn't call out, nor turn around.
He looked cornered, shoulders hunched, lost in thought. Then he
did something I didn't expect, none of us did. Just
before the nearest figure reached him, he slipped it back
on the mask he still clutched in his hands. It
didn't crinkle or bit, and the thing folded into place
over his face like it belonged there. The figure paused
inches away, as if inspecting him, then turned away. The
next march I passed by and another, until the final one,
which led him towards the pack, not giving him a
chance to slip away. Danny followed motionless in the stream
of them, now just another mass, silhouette among the coats
and silent steps, blending in, avoiding whatever fate we imagined
for anyone who was caught from the hedge. Marcus whispered,
what do we do? But no one had an answer.
We were kids, they weren't, and now they had Danny.
We waited until the parade drifted out of sight, disappearing
down the end of the cul de sac. Then we
ran back across the tracks, back towards the houses with
storeboard candy and real people inside. We kept glancing back,
hoping it'd followed us, but Danny never did. We waited
someone would call. We figured maybe Danny would text, Maybe
he'd show up at school on Monday like nothing happened,
rolling his eyes and calling us babies for running off.
We kept checking our phones, refreshing apps, watching the group chat.
Nothing not that night, not the next morning, not even
a where are you guys. By noon, panic had started
to settle in our stomachs like sour milk. He probably
got in trouble Ty said, like grounded or something. Maybe
his phone got taken. Then he called from the house phone.
Marcus said. After lunch, we couldn't take it anymore. We
decided to go back across the train tracks, but this
time in the daylight, so it wouldn't be scary. Everything's
less scary when the sun's out right. Danny was probably hiding, embarrassed,
waiting for things to blow over. We crossed the tracks again,
only this time it wasn't foggy, It was just dead.
The air was dry, the pavement cracked, the grass yellowed
and stiff. The houses looked different in daylight, no longer mysterious,
just ruined, peeling paint boarded windows. One had a flat tire,
half buried in weed, leaning against the porch, like no
one had lived there in decades, a stark contrast to
how it was that night. There were no lights, no
jack o lanterns, no decorations, not even left over like
you'd imagine when you see a place abandoned. The place
was cleaned up of all things Halloween, despite the evidence
that no one had been there in a long time.
We retraced our steps, stuck close together. My skin felt
too tight, like I was about to bolt at the
slightest sound. Then we found the hedge, and from there
we saw it. Danny's candy bag was sitting in the
road where he was caught, still full, unopened. The wrapper
on top hadn't even been crinkled. Marcus finally whispered, Okay,
we have to tell someone, So we did. We told
our parents, expecting the usual lectures, sighs, and a solution.
Adults always fixed things. They called the teachers when we
forgot homework, They found lost dogs, They made everything go
back to normal, so we figured this would be the same.
A search was launched, police neighbors, flashlights, cutting through brush
behind the Caulder Sac, volunteers canvassing with missing posters, and
we standing there while they asked the same questions over
and over. Are you sure you are here? Are you
sure you didn't just lose him? But no matter how
many times we told the story the truth, no one
found a thing, no Danny, no parade, no mask, no trace,
just an empty street behind the tracks and a silence
that followed us all the way home. Time passed, the
posters came down, the search stopped, people stopped asking questions.
At least the real ones. But the story that didn't die,
it morphed. People started calling it the Halloween Vanishing. They
made it sound like a ghost story. A kid crossed
the tracks one Halloween night and never came back. Don't
be stupid like him. They didn't say his name any more,
Not in the versions that spread. Danny became the boy
an example a warning at school. New kids would whisper
it to each other in the weeks leading up to Halloween.
They were made up details. He dared a ghost the
show itself. He knocked on the wrong door, he stepped
on a grave hidden under a porch. We never corrected them,
or would we even say that the truth was worse
than all the stories combined, that we saw him disappear,
that we ran. Eventually, even Marcus stopped talking about it.
Ty moved away the following year. But I couldn't forget,
not when I saw porge lights flicker, not when I
passed the edge of the tracks on my bike and
felt something watching. The warning stuck. Though every Halloween, parents
whisper the same things to their kids. Don't cross the tracks.
It works. No one does, not anymore, no one except me,
Because I needed to know what happened. Someone had to
go back, so I made a plan. I told my
friends I was done for the night, tired, be coming
down with something. I waved them off as they headed
up toward Maple Street, then slipped away. No one noticed
when I double backed and headed away from the busy streets,
back toward where everything happened. When I reached the tracks,
my hands were already shaking. The fog was thinner this time,
but the cold was the same, the kind that didn't
just bite your skin, but soaked through it. The coulder
sac waited like it had been holding its breath for
a full year. The air felt hushed, heavy ready. I
didn't knock on doors, didn't speak. I walked fast, keeping
to the sidewalk, eyes forward. Porch lights flicked on as
I passed, first one then another, a quiet relay, like
they recognized me. I found the hedge. It looked the same, grown, tangled,
brittle from the cold. I dropped to one knee and
crawled behind it into the same hollow where we'd all
crouched the year before, knees pressed to the dirt, limbs
tucked tight, the same place where we'd watched Danny stop running.
I took myself low and held my breath waiting. And
there it was the parade, same masks, same clothes, same
empty rhythm. They marched past with heads tilted slightly forward,
as if sniffing the air for something. Not a single
footstep out of sync. My chest tightened. I told myself,
I just needed to see it again, just needed to
know it wasn't a trick or a story. We told
ourselves wrong. But then something shifted beside me, a soft exhale,
barely more than a stir in the air. I turned
my head and caught my breath. Someone was already there,
crouched in the dark, beside me, close enough to touch.
The shape of him was impossible to mistake. Too familiar.
The hoodie faded blue with a frayed pocket, seem the
jeans with one cough, always slightly rolled, as if he
never learned to fold them properly, The worn out sneakers
with one fluorescent orange lace. Danny. I wanted to speak,
to say his name, grab his arm. One motion made
me stop, A hand raised signaling me not to move.
My throat logged up, my chest felt caved in. His
head turned slowly, masked, creased under his hood, the same
mask he pulled from the tree a year ago, wrinkled materials,
stretched too tight, hollow eyes, and a yellowing mouth. His
hand rose and pressed one finger to the mask's lips
in a silent, shushing motion. Then he stood, not rushed,
not robotic, just quiet, steady, and walked out from behind
the hedge toward the street, toward the parade. He didn't
run or look back. He just stepped between the masks
marches and fell in line, as if he'd always been
a part of it, as if this was where he
belonged now. I waited, frozen behind the hedge until the
last figure disappeared around the bend. Then I ran. I
didn't stop until I reached the the tracks, crossed them
like the edge of a cliff, And when I was
safely back in my neighborhood, I finally let myself breathe.
I couldn't tell anyone, not my friends or my parents,
not the cops who'd closed Danny's case and turned him
into a bedtime warning, because how could I explain it?
What would I even say? That Danny had become one
of them, that he, for some reason chose to stay.
I was forced to I didn't know what the mask meant,
or if Danny was trapped, if he was happy, or
if there was anything left of him in there at all.
I just knew he saw me and that he remembered,
and I still don't know which part hurts worse