A Letter From Next Halloween

Every weekend my dog wakes me up at seven AM sharp. He doesn’t understand the concept of sleeping in. I take around five minutes to throw on some pants and find my glasses, and another five to get Bjorn ready for the morning walk and reach the path that runs through the woods. It’s another ten minutes to walk and we are back at the house by roughly 7:20. Since nobody else wants to be out that early it usually runs like clockwork, but that morning was different.

There was a man walking towards us from the path, and since I couldn’t tell which way he was going to go, I decided to play it safe and pick up Bjorn so he wouldn’t try to run at him. Of course he started barking right away, and tried to wriggle out of my grip as the man got closer. I stepped into the woods a bit and put on that smile that said ‘sorry my dog is acting like it wants to kill you’.

“Aw, he’s cute.” The man said as he passed by, and thankfully picked up his pace.

I set Bjorn down again, and we started walking. This diversion had thrown us off by less than two minutes but I felt irrationally irritated by the setback. I just wanted to get home and get back to sleep as soon as possible. It was enough to make me feel like my whole routine had been thrown off.

I was just starting to zone out and get lost admiring the fall leaves when I saw something blow across the path just in front of us. It stood out as pure white against the browns and reds and oranges of the other leaves. The leaves all scampered across the path, moving horizontally with the wind and hitting enough small bumps to give the illusion they were little creatures running across the path. But this moved in a straight neat line across the ground flipping occasionally until it crossed to the other side and got caught in a bush.

I walked up to it, and Bjorn lunged at it like he was going after a squirrel. Just before he hit the bush, the wind knocked it out and it flew into a small tree, wrapping around the base. I jumped over to it and snatched it just as it was about to dislodge.

The envelope crinkled ever so slightly when I grabbed it, but otherwise it looked brand new. Being in the woods at the very end of November, it must have just been dropped by someone. I registered that the handwriting looked a bit familiar in the half a second before I read the address. It was meant to go to somewhere in Canada, but the name listed was mine. First, last, and middle initial.

I didn’t know what to think about it, but I decided I didn’t want to look at it anymore until I was out of the woods. I walked as quickly as I could, and I was thankful to have Bjorn at my side even if he was only a little dachshund.

The minute I got home and locked the door, I flipped over the letter again. The address it was from didn’t look familiar, but they had the same surname as my girlfriend. I looked at the name it was addressed to, half hoping that it would be something else, but my name stared back at me.

At this point I wasn’t really creeped out. I was already thinking about how I was going to call up Ellie and tell her how her parents mistakenly sent me a letter, or about how there was a crazy coincidence that someone just happened to have the same name as me. And that I just happened to find it in the woods, blowing in the wind, and I wouldn't have found it had I not thrown off my routine by a minute or two. Granted this line of thinking didn’t make any sense, but I was still convinced there was some kind of weird, funny mistake until I opened the letter. Here is what it said:

Dear Sam,

We really hope that this letter reaches you okay. It took us a long time to find where you had gone. We just wanted to reach out and let you know that we all miss you. Your parents miss you too, you’re all they have left. Please just write back and let us know you are okay. We can’t imagine what you’re going through, but we lost our little girl and we know you shouldn’t be dealing with this alone.

The signature was from the same woman who sent it, so I decided to text Ellie and ask her, just out of curiosity if she had any relatives with that name. Surely this was some kind of weird coincidence, and I could rest easy once I found out this woman wasn’t related to her. Plus it sounded like this Sam was an only child, and I had two sisters.

When my roommate woke up I showed him the letter and joked about how we were totally going to get murdered. I mean what other kind of response are you supposed to have to finding something that weird? He thought it was strange as well, but we couldn’t really come up with an explanation so we just dropped it.

Ellie texted me a few hours later and said that that was her mother’s name. She asked why I wanted to know, and I didn’t know what to tell her, so I just told her I would explain it later.

That night we were going to have a cheesy horror movie marathon so I spent the morning just kind of laying around browsing the internet. I kept wanting to look over the letter, to obsess about it, but I managed to hold off until an hour or so before everyone got there. I read through it again and spent some time examining the signature. I was thinking I could ask Ellie when she got over if it matched her mother’s handwriting.

That’s when I noticed the date. I don’t know how I missed it but it was signed October 27th, which made sense, it took a few days to get here, but the year said 2017. I felt my heart speed up just a bit, like something was very wrong but I couldn’t explain why. This letter was just too bizarre. I decided against telling my roommate, because what good would that really do?

The next hour went by quickly as I frantically cleaned up my living room. It was just Ellie and my sisters coming over, but I still didn’t want to have dirty socks everywhere. Everyone arrived more or less on time and each time I opened the door, I kept telling myself that when everyone got here, I would show them the letter. Bjorn begrudgingly joined us. We had put him in a hot dog costume and he didn’t seem too excited about it.

We put in the first movie and settled in. Everyone was having fun, and I kept telling myself there was really no point in killing the party just to show them something that I was probably overthinking. About twenty minutes in we heard our first knock at the door. My older sister was closest, but I jumped up before she could move.

“I’ll get it!” I looked through the peephole and saw a group of princesses with a tired looking dad in the background. I opened the door and Bjorn ran over so they could fawn over how cute he looked in his costume. As I handed out candy I felt silly for even looking through the peephole, with so many kids, and parents, and cops patrolling, Halloween was probably one of the safest nights of the year.

After a few trick or treaters my anxiety had calmed somewhat, and I let my sisters hand out candy and ask about costumes. We moved on from a cheesy summer camp movie to a home invasion one, and I found myself thinking about the letter again.

I watched the couple on screen open their doors to one of the murderers, who was feigning trouble with his car. Of course we all berated them for being so stupid, but it gave me an idea that I just could not shake off. Halloween was the only day of the year that people willingly open their doors to dozens of strangers. It would be so easy to knock on someone’s door pretending to be a parent looking for their kid, then pull out a gun. Half the parents wore disguises with their kids, so anonymity was guaranteed.

I kept running through completely ridiculous scenarios for about five minutes or so until the doorbell rang again. I jumped up to get it and peered out the peephole once again. It was a dad and his son dressed like a superhero, certainly nothing to be afraid of, but I couldn’t get rid of a deep sense of dread that something could go terribly wrong if I opened the door. I watched them walk away then mumbled something about those darn kids ding dong ditching. I turned out the porch light, hoping that our meager attempt at pumpkin carvings on the porch wouldn’t still draw people in.

It seemed to work, it was almost twenty minutes until the next ring of the doorbell. The husband on screen had just been murdered, so Ellie had a death grip on my arm, and I had to quickly untangle myself to get up before my sister.

I peered out the peephole and felt the temperature in the room plummet. Something about these people was off. The sun had gone down completely and without the porch light on, it was hard to get a good look at them. The kid was clearly a bit older, standing at just over five feet, but she had a raggedy ann mask on, so I couldn’t tell for sure. Her hair was pulled into rough pig tails, and the smile painted on the mask was far more intricate than the rest of it. It had detailed lips and each tooth was individually outlined. Her dad towered over her, and he had also decided to go with the doll theme. Instead of raggedy ann he had on a baby doll mask that was too small for his face, so you could see his beard sticking out near the end. I’m sure it would have looked hilarious, in better lighting, and not in front of my house.

Now, I know had already made several mistakes, ignoring the letter, not telling everyone about it, and never asking Ellie to look at the signature. But I was not about to do something as stupid as open that door when my gut was telling me not to. I kept my eye trained on them, not daring to so much as blink. The dad stepped up and knocked on the door, much harder than was necessary. Everyone looked over and I motioned for them to be quiet. When I looked back they were walking away, but raggedy ann looked back for just a second, and waved.

“What was that?” my younger sister asked. She was smiling a little, and I immediately felt a bit silly for being so creeped out.

“Just some teenagers, they looked kinda sketchy.” I slipped next to Ellie again and pulled her over to me. Trying my best not to act like I was the one who needed comfort this time. My roommate was trying to catch my eye from the other couch was I was doing my best to ignore it. He wanted me to talk about the letter, and I was definitely far too creeped out to do that now.

The rest of the night passed without incident. The neighbors across from us were having a party and being incredibly loud, so we turned up the volume full blast for the last two movies. Our houses were cheaply made with basically no yard between them, so I kept hoping our next door neighbors might file a noise complaint and shut down the party before it was time to go to bed.

Since it was a holiday I guess they decided to let it slide. I went to sleep to the sound of drunken yelling and obnoxious bass music. I kept waking up and checking on Ellie. She slept like a baby, and each time I woke up, I tightened my grip around her waist, irrationally worried that she would be gone the next time I woke up. The last time I was startled awake, the music had stopped and the birds were singing. I went to sleep again, watching the first rays of sunlight dance across Ellie’s face.

I was shaken awake by Ellie. Red and blue flashing lights were shining in stripes through the blinds. Ellie pointed wordlessly out the window and I nudged the blinds apart enough to look through.

There were ambulances and police cars in front of our house. It looked like they were concentrated on our next door neighbor's house but I couldn’t be sure. We hastily got dressed and raced to the front door. We had never been very close with the neighbors. The mom was a bit stuck up and didn’t enjoy living next to college kids, so we didn’t really talk. But regardless of what we thought of the parents, they had three kids living there and I couldn’t imagine something happening to them.

We burst out the front door just as an officer was walking up our steps. He flinched and instinctively put his hand on his gun.

“Sorry! Sorry, we just woke up and we saw all this, and we wanted to know what was happening?” Ellie stuttered a bit and she looked over just in time to see the door open up at our neighbors house. They were carrying out a body bag.

“Why don’t we go inside so we can talk?” The officers face softened and he reached out a hand. “I’m officer Jameson and I just need to ask you guys a few questions. Standard procedure.” He guided us inside. What he told us has been mixed together in my mind with details that I would have to learn from the news, and the internet, over the next few days.

The family next door had been slaughtered, except for the husband. The suspects in the murder had only killed two other families both on the other side of the country, so there had been no reason to be cautious in our state. The officer spared us the details but the internet did not. They were butchered, and these particular killers always like to leave one person traumatized, but alive. This had all happened just a few yards away from where we had been sleeping. Some of the screams that we had mistaken for drunken yelling that night had undoubtedly been that families cries for help.

The neighbors next to them had eventually called the police, but a noise complaint on Halloween wasn't treated as an emergency and the killers had escaped by mere minutes. If they had just stayed a minute longer, or perhaps if they had picked a house where the neighbors would have called sooner, they would be in jail. But things had worked out perfectly to allow them enough time to escape.

After the police left I asked my roommate about the letter. I was half worried he had been pranking me, so I didn’t want to say anything in a report until I found out for sure it wasn't him or Ellie. He insisted that he had no idea what I was talking about, and he started to get pissed off when I kept asking about it. Eventually I asked Ellie to show me her texts for the day but there was nothing in her phone about her mother’s name.

By that night I had it chalked up to stress, surely I must have imagined the letter, because nothing else made sense. I must have just been coping in a very strange way. I had almost managed to forcibly forget about it, when I heard a knock at the door.

My roommate had already found a place to stay for the night, and I had been just about to leave, so at the moment I was completely alone. Bjorn ran right up to the door and started barking like crazy. I had 911 ready to dial, and I grabbed a knife from the kitchen before I even looked at the peephole.

It was a familiar face but I couldn't place where I knew him from. He was in a suit, holding a briefcase, and my first instinct was that he was a Jehovah's witness. But why did I know him? He knocked again, lightly, and on the third knock the door flew open, throwing me to the floor. I landed straight on my back, and all I could think about for a few seconds was how to breath again after the wind was knocked out of me.

“Hello Sam,” Bjorn latched onto his leg and he just smiled and reached down to pat him on the head. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Get out!” I tried my best to sound intimidating as I sat up, but I my voice was shaking. I grabbed my phone, ready to call the cops. But as soon as I touched it, a spiderweb of cracks crawled across the surface.

“You don’t want to do that.” He reached out a hand and grabbed my arm, pulling me to my feet. “I just want to talk.” He shoved me into a chair and took a seat at the table with me. That’s when it clicked. He was the man from the woods that morning.

The kitchen knife was on the other side of the room, my mace was on the counter, and I definitely couldn’t take him in a fistfight. Bjorn had bit into another part of his leg, and blood was starting to pool on the floor, but he acted like he didn’t even notice. I didn’t know what to do so I just watched him open his briefcase.

“Now, it’s rather unfortunate about your neighbors. But I think we can agree that you and your friends are very blessed that you are all perfectly fine.” He pulled out a series of papers that all had my signature on them. He set them all out on the table, and it felt absurd, like I was buying a car or something. All of them had my name in red ink, aside from a blank line at the bottom of the last one. “Now, I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Who are you?” I asked, finally working up the courage to say something.

“Don’t go asking stupid questions.” Up until then he had been incredibly cheerful, but irritation had started creeping into his voice. “Now, I’m sure you've read up all about the gory details of your neighbors, so I want you to tell me; are you are glad it was them, and not you?”

I weighed my options for a minute, but decided the best thing to do would be to just give him the answers he wanted. “Yes, I’m glad it wasn’t us.”

“Now I would wager that if your loved ones had been the ones killed, you would be willing to do anything, trade anything to get them back. Even if it meant hurting someone else.” He smiled at me again, and Bjorn tried biting his other leg, but it didn’t do anything. “Would you agree with all that?”

“Yes.” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I felt realization clawing at me, and I stopped looking around for something to fight him with.

“Excellent, I mean you already have agreed to it,” he gestured at all of the papers, “but I wanted to give you a chance to change your mind. Because you can if you want to, just say the word and I’ll rip all of this up, and things can go back to the way they were meant to be.” I was silent. “Great, so if you are satisfied with how last night turned out, all I need is your signature right here.” He pointed to that last blank line.

I picked up the pen and signed without hesitation.

“Pleasure doing business with you.” He packed up his suitcase, and I stared at the table defeated.

Just as he was about to close the door I yelled out “Wait! How much time do I have?”

“Oh I’m not worried about a few decades, you can have the rest of your life. You’ll pay up after you die.” With that he winked and closed the door.