"The Spirit of Things" by John Skipp

Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1986

Readers unfamiliar with "The Spirit of Things" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

Imagine Halloween being observed by painting one's front door frame with animal blood. Wrong season and wrong religion, right?

But in "The Spirit of Things" by John Skipp the old gods prehistoric humans worshiped and supplicated return to a modern metropolis with vigorous agency. 

Skipp focuses on a final rollercoaster hour in the life of Jake Wertzel, alone in his high-rise apartment as the onslaught begins:

     Why me? he thought. Why here? Why now? Last year the worst of it had gone down in Chelsea and the Village. The year before that . . . the first year . . . had laid waste to much of the Upper East Side. If there was a pattern there, Wertzel couldn’t see it; but he’d hoped that the horror would focus itself uptown again, give him enough time to save up enough money to maybe get the hell out of New York before the fall.

     As if there were anywhere safe to go.

     Most of all, he wished that things would revert to the way they used to be. He wished for the sound of children’s voices, giddy with laughter and hoarse with demands. He wished for cheesy plastic masks, eye holes sliced in ratty sheets, prosthetic warts, and theatrical blood.

     He longed for the days when it was easy to pretend that the whole thing was just a joke....

Many Halloween-focused horror short stories dive into the Halloween-lore-is-real theme. Skipp's story declares: over the last millenia, we have forgotten how real Halloween always threatened to be, and now it's back.

     They had been watching, and waiting, for a long long time. They had watched the Church march arrogantly across the face of the earth, twisting the old pagan holidays to suit it, stripping and homogenizing away all meaning, then positing nonsense in its place.

     And though centuries passed like seconds to them, it still dragged on too long. Where the Great Dark Ones had once strode the earth, there now stood Kolchak, the Night Stalker and Casper, the Friendly Ghost. They had seen the shitty movies. They had read the shitty books. They had seen themselves turned into limp-wristed Bela Lugosis and carrot-headed James Arnesses, heard too many bad actors get the spells all wrong and conjure up demons that couldn’t scare the fleas off a pink-nosed bunny.

     Worst of all, they had seen All Hallow’s Eve transformed into a ritual for posturing, preening babies; had seen their glorious faces mocked and strung up in too many dime-store windows. For far too long.

     But that was over....

[Italics in original].

So spare a care next 31 October, amid all the frivolity, for the old gods no one really wants to meet again.

Jay