Tag Archives: Hallowreadings

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Fireside beckons…

I forced my way against an impalpable pressure to the foot of the stairs and looked up at her. She stood, taller than I had seen her before, expanding and gathering form, palely luminous. She began to float down towards me, with a slow, sweeping movement I saw the features; the eyes were intensifying their light. I did not want Stella to see those eyes.

I stood on the second step, with my hands behind me gripping the rail. In that way I could hold myself up from falling, despite the trembling of my knees. I shook all over; my skeleton was of ice and my flesh shrank from it; I could not get my voice out of my throat; the words that I spoke were whispered and my laugh hoarse…

The form shrank and dwindled, losing outline and light; it became a greyish column of fog with a luminous nucleus, and it bent. While I pressed upward, it doubled back. My voice was frozen in my throat, but my thoughts went on beating it, like a flail. I saw it cowering, wreathing and writhing like smoke under a downward wind.

Dorothy Macardle
The Uninvited, 1942

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Halloween isn’t just for children…but we start there

…Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker’s Eddy, people still looked at the Radley place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions…

…The weather was unusully warm for the last day of October.  We didn’t even need jackets.  The wind was growing stronger, and Jem said it might be raining before we got home.  There was no moon.
The street light on the corner cast sharp shadows on the Radley house. I heard Jem laugh softly. “Bet nobody bothers them tonight,” he said. Jem was carrying my ham costume, rather awkwardly, as it was hard to hold. I thought it gallant of him to do so.
“It is a scary place though, ain’t it?” I said. “Boo doesn’t mean anybody any harm, but I’m right glad you’re along.”
“You know Atticus wouldn’t let you go to the schoolhouse by yourself,” Jem said.
“Don’t see why, it’s just around the corner and across the yard.”
“That yard’s a mighty long place for little girls to cross at night,” Jem teased. “Ain’t you scared of haints?”
We laughed. Haints, Hot Steams, incantations, secret signs, had vanished with our years as mist with sunrise…

Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

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