Ghosts are everywhere now. Once we made fun of them by carving pumpkins into strange faces and placing candles within. We stuffed scarecrows full of hay and leaves and tied them to poles. We fabricated tombstones and placed them in our yards. “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” the call went out. Then the festivities began. We mocked death. We laughed at it. The more grotesque we could carve our pumpkins, the funnier we thought it was. It became a contest. Death became a contest of who could mock the end the most.
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| Old and withered nests. |
But the laughter is all gone now. The false bravado we showed disappeared with
the first wail of the banshee during the daytime. No longer confined to the night, the
harbingers of doom now wander during the filtered daylight, and all festivities
have ended. The Jack-o’-lanterns have
shriveled and morphed with their facial features turning inward, like macabre
dried and shrunken heads. We need only
place them upon tall pikes whose ends are buried in the Earth in the front of
our yards to show our enemies what befalls those who would cross us. Echoes of Vlad the Impaler.
The scarecrows, once plump and smiling at party guests,
now lean over in twisted and tortured ways.
Death has come to life. And every
day, the ragged creatures seem to change their positions just a bit. At first we thought it was just the wind, but
the wind does not make bodies of straw reach out in menacing ways. The wind does not cause hands of sharpened
willow twigs to reach out and rake through our hair. The wind does not cause the sneer on the faces
of the soulless greeters. No, something
else is at work here.
Yet we knew it would happen, didn’t we? That’s why we played the game in the first
place. We are not afraid, we told
them. But we lied. We always lie. It doesn’t matter now. It’s not like we had a choice. The King was cut down in the Fall. The enemy has free reign, and even now we
hear the Lord of Winter’s army approaching.
The drumbeats grow louder and incessant, and the Earth shakes with the
hooves of thousands of black horses. The
day will come when we pray to have just the simple banshees again and an
occasional murderous scarecrow.
These are the dark days.
