When I was twelve years old, I went trick-or-treating by myself. A month earlier I would have said I was going with my best friend Jimmy Miner, but that was before his mother got sick and they moved away the week before Halloween. In my parents’ eyes, that left me open to taking my eight year-old sister with me trick-or-treating, which served the dual purposes of freeing themselves from taking her and giving me some company.
While I protested a little bit when they initially made the suggestion, in truth I didn’t mind carrying her along. I was lonely, and I loved my sister Mary a lot. Loved being her big brother and how she looked up to me, wanting to do what I did and go where I went. Sometimes it was a pain, sure, but as Halloween drew near, I was looking forward to spending it with her.
Then she came down with a bad cold and I wound up back on my own. I almost didn’t go at all, but I didn’t want my family thinking I was that down in the dumps, and I did want to score some candy beyond the handful of “healthy treats” my mother was letting us eat.
So on Halloween I went out, made my rounds, and came back with a large sack more than halfway full of the good stuff. My father was watching a horror movie in the living room when I got home, and I announced my return briefly before heading upstairs to my room with the idea of squirrelling away my loot. When I passed Mary’s closed door, I heard my mother in there reading her a story. Poor kid. I could tell she was really sick when I was heading out, but she was also sad about missing out on Halloween with me. I promised myself I’d save her some of the best candy for later as I eased my door closed so I could go through what I’d gotten.
Normally I would have just stuck some of it away in a drawer and then headed back down to eat some of the rest while we watched t.v., never really reaching the bottom of the bag until at least a day or two had passed. But I really did want to save Mary some good stuff, and to do that, I needed to see what I was working with. After a moment of indecision, I dumped it all out onto my floor.
It was a nice neighborhood, so there was always a lot of good candy in my bag, almost as though the neighbors were competing with each other to see who could give their children diabetes first. But that year, I noticed that there were several weird squares of white paper or something mixed in with the brightly colored bits of waxed paper, plastic and foil. Frowning, I picked one up and turned it over.
It was a picture from an old instant camera. My dad had shown me one before, a Polaroid. I remember thinking it was like magic that the square the film was on would fill in as you shook it, almost as though being drawn in by some invisible hand. But this one was still blank, and shaking it did nothing. I looked back down at the floor and counted eight more potential pictures down there.
I was curious to look at the rest, but at first I just stood there trying to figure out how they would have gotten into my bag in the first place. I knew the bag was empty when I left home, and I watched everyone that put candy into my bag while I was out. I think I would have noticed someone slipping a stack of nine instant camera pictures in with a candy bar or a handful of gum.
Unable to think of an explanation for the undeveloped picture in my hand, I set to looking at the rest. I think I half-expected them all to be blank, maybe with the idea that someone had just accidently stuck some unshot film in my bag while trying to give me candy. The idea sounds dumb now, but the growing worm of worry in my stomach was demanding some kind of explanation. As I bent down and turned over the next photo, I felt that worm burrow deeper into my core.
It was a photo of me. Taken just that night as I was leaving the house in my pirate costume, fake parrot on my shoulder and big Halloween bag in my hand. Judging from the angle, it was taken from somewhere near the bushes beside our garage.
At the time, I didn’t think about the practical realities of a picture like that. For instance, how was the picture was so clear and not grainy when it was already getting dark yet clearly no flash had been used? And as I went to the next picture, how had I not seen whoever was taking these photos?
Because the second developed picture was again of me, but a closer up shot. Based on the distance and angle, I’d have guessed the photographer was no more than five or ten feet in front of me. Again, the picture was almost unnaturally clear, this one at a slight upward angle, as though taken by someone smaller than my five foot height. Judging by the background, in the picture I had just left from getting candy at Penny Johnson’s house.
My hands were trembling as I went through the remaining seven pictures. Photos Four through Six were blank. Seven showed me from behind as I was cutting through a side yard to get to the street behind ours. Eight was also blank, while Nine showed me returning home just a few minutes ago.
My mind reeled. That was impossible. How could anyone have given me these photos if they were still taking them when I was walking into the house? The bag hadn’t left my hands all night long, and yet I was looking at photos of events that were only ten minutes old.
This led me to recheck the ones that were blank. I felt my mouth go dry as I saw the start of an image beginning to ghost its way onto what I thought was number Eight. Swallowing, I grabbed the photo and gave it a shake. It was another of picture of me, this time looking with sympathy at Mary’s room as I headed to my own to divvy up the candy.
It had been inside. Maybe it still was.
The thought pushed itself up from the black, burning in my mind like a coal as I began frantically looking around my room. I was truly afraid now, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I was on the verge of yelling for my mother when I saw another picture starting to fade in. I gave it a shake and then dropped it as I recognized a close-up shot of my bedroom door.
Turning away from the pile on the floor, I ran to the door and quietly thumbed the button lock. Now I was worried about calling out to anyone out of fear they might get attacked by whatever was outside my door. And back then, kids my age didn’t have cellphones, and I didn’t have a land line in my room. My mind raced through several bad plans before I settled on the least terrible of them. I would climb out my window, go down and around to the living room where I could tell my father, and he could help me get Mary and our mother out of the house safely.
That’s when I heard the voice.
”Candy?” It was a low, soft voice, with a rasping strangeness and hesitancy that reminded me of when animals make noises that sound like they’re speaking human words. And then again, slightly louder and insistent, ”Candyyyy?” This was followed by a loud thump as something hit the door, causing me to let out a yell in spite of myself.
Its demand made no sense, but none of this did. Working largely off of fear and instinct, I plunged into the pile and began raking the candy back into the bag. I hesitated when it came to the photos, deciding at the last second to leave them out since the voice had only asked for candy.
I went back to the door and called out. “I’ve got your candy. All the candy I have. Please take it and go.” Sitting the bag of candy on the floor, I gently unlocked the door before opening it just far enough to shove the bag through with my old baseball bat. Slamming the door shut, I relocked it. I sat down and braced my feet against the door in case it decided it was unsatisfied with my offering, but everything was quiet.
Looking over at the photos, I saw another one, Four, was filling in. The photo’s view was like the photographer was going back down the hall. Thank God, I thought, wondering how long it would take for it to leave the house so I could go tell my parents what had happened. Then I heard it again.
“Candy?”
The voice was more distant, and it only took me a moment to realize why. When I looked over at the pictures, Five confirmed my fears. It was outside of Mary’s door now. Mary who was in bed sick and had no candy to give.
I’ll always regret the decision I made next. I was scared of opening the door, but I also worried that if I didn’t get my father involved right away, I might be making a dangerous situation that much worse. So I went to my window and climbed out onto the roof. Taking a deep breath, I jumped into the bushes below, and while I felt a flare of pain in my left ankle, I kept moving and was back inside the house within seconds.
My father was still in the living room, but he was asleep in his chair now. I went to him, my eyes fixed on the nearby stairs as I shook him and yelled. He didn’t wake up. I shook him harder and his head lolled forward. I had a terrifying moment when I was sure he was dead, but when I leaned close I could hear him softly snoring. Panicking, I stepped back and kicked him as hard as I could in the leg, sending a fresh bolt of pain through my own hurt ankle in the process. Still nothing.
My frustration at being unable to wake him and my worry over Mary and my mother was turning to anger by this point, and since I had left my bat upstairs, I grabbed the fireplace poker and headed for the stairs. Every moment I climbed the steps I expected to be attacked, but no attack ever came. When I reached the top, I could see that Mary’s door was standing wide open.
I ran into the room, ready to try to fight off whatever might be in there with them, but all I found was my mother, lying on the edge of the bed and fast asleep. I searched the room and the closet, but there was no sign of anyone else, including Mary.
I started shaking my mother, and after a few moments she came awake. I was hysterical by this point, but I was able to convey enough that she woke up the rest of the way and began screaming Mary’s name and searching for her. Within seconds, my father was groggily climbing the stairs to find out what was going on.
I kept helping to look for Mary too, but when the house had been searched and the police were on their way, I thought and returned to my room to collect the photos for the police. That’s when I saw that Number Five had filled in as well.
The picture was of Mary, clearly crying and terrified. It was hard to make out much of her surroundings, but I could see dirt walls with roots threaded through them above her and to her sides. One of her bare feet was in the frame, and next to it I noticed what looked like a scattered collection of small bones and candy wrappers mingled in with the dark, subterranean earth.
They never found my sister, though the case is technically still open even after nearly twenty years. That’s mainly because every year, on Halloween, I find a new instant photo of Mary. Sometimes it’s in my mailbox. Sometimes it’s in my shoe. Once I found it in the middle of a loaf of bread I had just bought that same morning. But every photo shows my baby sister as she’s grown up in some dark hell. Pictures of her running, fighting, huddling in the dark. Doing inscrutable tasks or looking bleakly into the camera, her eyes so different now than when she was a young girl. Though she’s four years younger than I am, she looks much older than me now, and while I always turn the pictures into the police after showing them to my parents, we’ve never been any closer to knowing where she actually is.
As you might imagine, Halloween is a hard time for me. In some ways I look forward to the brief, if terrible, glimpse I get of my sister every year. It lets me know she’s alive, though I don’t know if that’s really a blessing. But it also fills me with dread at what new terrible thing I’ll have to see and know when I look at the latest photograph.
Today is Halloween, and as expected, I got a photograph. Except this one was different. I recognized the location. It was my daughter’s school. The picture looked like it was taken from out in the hallway, looking in to where my little girl sat in her third-grade classroom. In a panic, I immediately called the school, but they said she was perfectly fine. Not willing to take a chance, I picked her up right away and had my wife meet us at a hotel two towns over for the night.
My wife understands some of it, enough to be properly scared, but she thinks it’s just some psycho who kidnapped my sister as a child and is weirdly fixated on me. And there’s no real point in me trying to explain that its more than that. But I did point out the other thing I noticed about the photo before turning it over to police this afternoon. You see, the picture of our little girl was actually taken through the window of the classroom’s door, and in the glass of that window you could see a faint reflection of the one taking the picture.
It was Mary.
I’ve always loved my sister, and for most of my life I’ve felt guilt and sadness over her being taken. I’ve prayed every night for her to return home. But now we’re holed up in a locked hotel room with a loaded gun on the table and three huge bags of candy stacked against the outside of the door.
I still love Mary, but I no longer want her to come home. Better for her to stay in whatever world she’s been raised in and leave my new family in ours. I hope the candy will be enough, and if it’s not, I hope the gun can stop her.
Just stay away, baby sister. Just stay away.
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