a sliding windows moment

Many of those who've lost loved ones during Christmas find only squirming, foul things behind each cardboard door of the advent calendar. To others, the once bedazzling birthday celebrations turn and rot, until the festivities are but a reeking, regurgitated reminder of time's decaying touch. Then there's Halloween.

Our senses blaze under streetlights, raging adolescent imaginations gulping down plumes of orange, pumpkin-spiced smoke as house windows turn into freaky visions of bumps in the early evening. Joyous, painted families shamble around the leaf-littered streets of suburbia, knocking for treats, giggling as they skim the icing-sweet surface of the entry-level underworld.

But some of us don't need clowns in storm drains or plain old death to surrender a part of our soul. It was 1993 and I was ten years old. Old enough to know there were murky things behind closed doors, too young to know the shape of them.

My mates weren't trick-or-treating. I can't recall why. But this year, I was allowed out on my own; short leash, but long enough to rake in £12 and a fat sack of goodies from the neighbouring network of streets. I had pity on my side and a reasonable Dracula costume. Flapping sheets of drizzle had done away with most of my face paint when a surge of reckless courage lifted my fist and drilled cold knuckles four times against the door of 218. Nobody lived there. I was almost certain, but I felt greedy and compelled to try.

I'd made it two steps toward home when I heard a sound from the second floor. It was a terrible, brittle sound. Quick and urgent. Like long-undisturbed insects writhing in unexpected daylight. Then the rattle of a loose window. The type that slides vertically. I backpedalled and squinted up into the now pouring rain. The window rose and revealed a black hole. Somehow the hole seemed to sweat. I either saw or sensed movement within it and a creature burst out in jagged stabs. It was bedraggled, a stretched crab of a man with mirthless, lank hair, matted against a face without visible features. Bony Meccano arms on knotted shoulders latched outwards onto the Yorkshire stone walls like a spider striking out of its hole. I knew he saw me, alone in the night.

No cars passed.

All the other kids had gone. Bolted for cover in their houses. He froze for a moment as if sniffing the air, then finally sputtered parched words of some ancient language that I so nearly understood but just missed the mark before something drilled my face with a leaden smack. The creature had somehow stung me. The skin buzzed as I slowly brought my hands up to a throbbing cheek. It grumbled and the window slammed shut. In the roadside gutter, sitting atop the mulch of leaves and carrier bags pregnant with ditch water sat the offending, solitary orange. I turned and ran all the way home. Every day I passed the piece of fruit, keeping my head down, scared to look up at the window, until the orange fell to time and collapsed enough to fall through the grate in moldy chunks, taking a small part of me with it forever.