The True Meaning of Halloween

Every Halloween, I rise at 12:01 AM so I can catch the first of the ghosts arriving. It’s a long way from the Seventh Great Netherworld, so I can usually make a few spirit-dollars just by listening to their complaints about the trip and serving them an ectoplasmic cocktail.

Roughly around dawn, when the ghosts go inside my personal crypt to hide from the accursed rays of the sun, I get to work.

This is actually my busiest day of the year, though I rarely get any writing done. In many cultures across manifold dimensions, “The Will-Wight” is pretty much the Halloween version of Santa Claus.

Year-round, my dark elves from the South Pole labor in subterranean workshops, crafting tricks and traps for all the bad children across the worlds. You might expect that the good kids get candy, but actually candy goes to the kids with the best masks.

And to the parents.

I spend the daylight hours preparing for my journey. On the first Halloween sunset, I split into uncountable fractal clones, which go on simultaneous deliveries to every trick-or-treating household. As night spreads across each world, so do my innumerable clones, which vanish with daybreak on November 1st.

I don’t wear red, but I do dress up in a different costume every year. Tonight, I’m making all my deliveries as Nien Nunb.

I don’t carry my tricks and treats in a sack but rather in a spatial storage Jack-o-Lantern, which spits out the appropriate delivery at each house. Instead of reindeer, I have reindeer-eating bats. And, of course, instead of a sleigh I drive a 1967 Chevy Impala.

As my legion of clones collapses back into me, leaving me with their fractured memories, I know the night is winding down. I spend the last few hours hanging out with the ghosts, who usually leave me with a few immaterial gifts before moving on to the Eighth Great Netherworld.

By midnight, I’ll crawl into my coffin exhausted but satisfied. There’s nothing like the look of joy on a child’s face after you reward them for their innovative Zombie Buzz Lightyear costume by tossing a Reese’s down into their bag from five hundred feet up.

After all, isn’t that what Halloween is all about?

—The Will-Wight