The Story of the Halloween Village

Lexi was fast asleep until her nightlight began whispering. 

She had insisted on having a nightlight since she was two, and having good and concerned parents, they complied. She’d had three nightlights in her life so far, the most recent showing up as an unclaimed gift at her birthday party the week before. No one had claimed it – not her mother or father, nor her uncles or grandparents. She assumed it must have come from one of her friends. Seeing as it was a nightlight, no one seemed very concerned. And it looked harmless enough: two smiling ghosts roasting marshmallows over a campfire. They seemed pretty excited about their dessert. 

But of all the nightlights she’d ever plugged into her bedroom wall and said “good night” to, none of them had ever spoken back.

Lexi slid slowly out of bed. She was a little scared but managed a few steps. She was sometimes brave, but always curious, which made up the difference in any scary situation. 

The nightlight was whispering fast now, and she could see the little mouths of the ghosts moving quickly. They spoke in unison, saying, “All the candy in the world comes from The Village,” over and over, which stopped being fascinating and started being annoying. Lexi asked, “What is The Village?” 

The ghosts looked up at her, still smiling, seemingly happy to be saying something new. “The Village is where Halloween lives.”

Lexi became excited about the idea that her favorite holiday might actually have a home, a place where it sleeps. Her birthday was on Halloween – tomorrow in fact – and her favorite part about it was all the candy. It felt like the whole world was giving her candy for her birthday. And since they had to have her birthday parties days before trick-or-treat, it was like having two Halloweens. If Halloween had an address, she certainly wanted to visit it. 

“If I go to this village, will Halloween give me candy?”

The ghosts, still smiling, paused to look at each other, then back to Lexi.

“Sure.”

“How do I get to the village?” she asked.

One of the ghosts reached for the marshmallow at the end of its plastic stick and pulled it off. It stretched its arm toward Lexi. “Eat this and you’ll be there in a blink.”

Lexi balked. “That doesn’t seem very…”

“Delicious?” a ghost interrupted. “Exciting? Magical maybe?”

“I mean, we’re clearly magic,” the other ghost said. “You can trust a little magic.”

“Yeah,” said the first ghost, “just a taste. You don’t want too much magic.”

“That’s true,” Lexi said, plucking the marshmallow from the ghost’s tiny hand and popping it in her mouth. Sometimes brave, always curious. 

“How long before I get there?” she asked.

“Oh, one good blink and you’ll see.” 

Lexi closed her eyes tight, then opened them quickly. The ghosts were right. Wherever she was, it was nighttime. She stood on a hill covered in autumn leaves, looking out over a vast landscape of houses and buildings and parks. She noticed that all of the places were spooky. They looked like the things from where she lived, but with a whisper of gleeful menace. 

There was a grocery store, but the sign was spelled “GROSSERY STORE,” and the food in it was still moving in its bins. Next to that was a costume store that sold masks of normal people’s faces. There was a school campus for ghosts and witches and mad scientists, and out front was a marching band of zombies. There was a sign pointing toward a downtown area called the Black Arts District, filled with nightclubs and music and a New Orleans second line (for whom she could not say), but all of the customers were skeletons and werewolves and a few creatures she couldn’t place. There were witches in cars zooming through the streets. In the distance there were signs and lights for an enormous carnival, but all she could hear coming out of it were screams. 

It was a mad, mad world of bright lights fighting to shine in dark, dark places. 

She looked up into the night sky. There was something wrong with the moon. It was full but not shaped like a circle. Before she could put her finger on what was wrong with it, it rotated too fast for a moon, turning until a cackling, tooth-filled skull appeared. A skull as big as the moon turned left to right and then down. Its jaw hung open, filled with black space, and it fixed the swimming red dots in its eye holes on her. As it did so, the clouds that had obscured it began to part and more of the mountain-sized skeleton revealed itself: an enormous torso that blotted out the horizon, and arms as big as skyscrapers. Its bones filled the sky like a dark season. When it spoke, everything around her shook. Her curly hair blew back in the gust of its voice. 

“You are the Halloween child. The little one with Halloween for a birthday.”

Lexi was scared, of course, but fixed her mind on listening and not running away. Besides, where could she hide from a skeleton as big as the sky?

“My name is Lexi. And I think you mean me, yes.”

“Looking to start your trick-or-treating early, it seems.”

“Well, I was asleep actually, but these two ghosts woke me up.”

The mountain of bones laughed. “Oh, you mean Alex and Alexandra. Tricksters, they are. Always with the smoke and mirrors, those two.”

“Well, no offense, but I didn’t mean to come here. I really should be sleeping.”

“I agree! This is no place for a little girl on Halloween Eve. Everyone here is way too excited for trick-or-treating, when I let them out into your world to play for a night.” Lexi shuddered at the thought that many of the kids she saw trick-or-treating might not actually be wearing costumes. Or be children.

“Well,” the skeleton boomed, “if you want to get back home, you’ll have to go through every part of the village.” 

Lexi looked around. ”Pretty big for a village.”

The skeleton shrugged. “What can I say: October is a lot of people’s favorite time of year. You’d be surprised who shows up. We’ve had Nosferatu. The real Frankenstein. One year, we even had Blade, the vampire hunter, come through. That was an awkward season.”

Lexi looked down at the village that wasn’t exactly a village these days. “I suppose I can do that. Some of this doesn’t look that scary, just weird. My parents are weird, so I can handle that.” 

“Oh, there are way scarier places than here,” the skeleton warned. “Pirate Island. Across the river sits The Haunted Nile, where mummies and alligator gods roam the sandy land.” 

“Shouldn’t all these creatures be in graves at a cemetery?”

“There’s one of those, too, but it may as well have a revolving door on it. The only people brave enough to go near that spot are the Day of the Dead folks. Everybody welcomes them, even though they’re normie people just like you. You know, real and alive.”

“They’re at the end of all this?” Lexi asked.

“Or the beginning. Depends on how you look at things.”

Lexi bit her lip and nodded. She had made her decision. She had a lot of candy to get to tomorrow. Best she get to the costume shop and see if they had anything in her size.

“Thanks for not being a big baddy,” Lexi said to the skeleton. 

To this, the skeleton said nothing, then turned away until it looked like a moon again.    

The miniature Halloween Village opens at Streetlight Guild on Saturday, Oct. 25, and runs through Friday, Oct. 31. Click here for a full schedule of hours.