White Shoes

 White shoes. Damn these white shoes.

  His shoes were white, and he was angry. He stomped along the side of the road, hands in his pockets, white breeze gently tousling his hair as he moved through the October night. 

  It was a beautiful night; an almost stereotypical October evening. The air was chill enough to make his breath fog, and the moon shone pale and white in the midst of the star-filled sky. The ground was still warm, but the dry weather made the grass and the few leaves remaining on the trees rustle in the soft breeze, restless in their pre-winter nakedness.

  He was angry because the white shoes ruined his look. They were a simple pair of Dunlops, purchased at Target the day before, low-cut and unremarkable except for their immaculate paleness. They bobbed along under him, a pair of white ovals tracing arcs through the night as he walked.

  That was what cheesed him off - they ruined the look. He was perfectly camouflaged except for them - dark red coat, black jeans, coal-black hair and a dusky complexion. He would have been another shadow except for the damn shoes, and he hated wearing such a giveaway as he trudged down the highway against the traffic.

  The walk had been a good idea, though - gotten his mind off the whole thing at work, off the new water pump his car was going to need, and off of her. Much as he tried to blot out the image of her face in his brain with the sights and sounds of the night, though, she kept coming back to him, a pale oval face on the moon.

  It was a trial separation, the whole being apart thing. They both knew it was going to be permanent, yet played at the false affections, proclaiming their eternal friendship. Problem was, they hadn't been friends long enough to have anything to return to once the romantic part of their union was gone.

  But that was no matter, because the night was beautiful. The night before Halloween was supposed to be like this, he mused. The weather was perfect for monsters. The kind that slowly rose up behind you in the weeds, and slowly pursued you as you ditty-bopped along like a horny teenager in a bad horror movie, never seeing what was behind you until it was too late and the claw was on your - 

  He looked behind, saw only taillights and weeds, blowing gently in the breeze. Decided there was such a thing as too much atmosphere.

  Returning his attention to the grass in front of him, he mused on the cars whizzing by. Even with the white shoes, he would still be hard to see, especially to someone fixated on the task of driving. Did they see him at all? Did they catch a glimpse at the last minute, a fast image of a lanky young man striding down the grass shoulder, hands jammed in his pockets, jaw set against the wind? He supposed some of them did. What did they think? Did he conjure up images of lone stalkers, purposefully moving through the night to unholy destinations, weapons carefully concealed in backpacks like the one he was wearing?

  His held only books - CGI and Perl scripting for the World-Wide Web had been on the menu tonight. Computers, for all their social stigmata, could be very comforting at times. No computer even interrupted a compile to burst into tears and want to talk about seeing other people the way she had at the McDonald's drive-thru two weeks ago. They did what you told them, when you told them, and when they went wrong, you could figure out why. Very comforting. 

 He walked on, soft rustling his only company.

  Presently, his thoughts returned to monsters. It was the right time of year, after all - the critters of horror were about to receive their yearly homage in the form of grubby five-year olds dressed as Britney Spears, demanding candy. Halloween was originally a pagan holiday, a Druidic celebration of the end of the year. What would the original Druids have thought of this modern version of Halloween? Would they have approved?

  He suspected not.

  The monsters of that time were truly frightening things, vile creatures that lurched forth from caves and barrows and places better left unvisited in search of human flesh and souls to feed on. The original idea of Halloween wasn't celebration - it was self-defense. If you looked like a monster, they might pass by you in the night and not recognize you for a tasty morsel. The Druids must have been terrified on these evenings, waiting for the slithering knock at their door that spelled their doom.

  He wondered what those monsters might have looked like as he walked by a decrepit old house, a distinct anachronism in the upscale suburban neighborhood he called home. They would have been fearsome - tentacles and claws, dripping venom and ichor as they approached. The Old Ones, the real deal. Pagans believed God didn't chase them away so much as fill the vacuum when they'd lit out on their own. Not like they worried him, though - he'd taken two months of karate at Chop-Socky USA, and he was confident that any denizen of Hell would have a tough time with him.

  Hell-spawn or not, they still had gonads. His mind filled with kung-fu visions of inhuman attackers, him calm and collected, drop-kicking and shotgunning the unholy monstrosities back to wherever they came from, like his favorite computer game.

  "Cthulu, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave the store." he said aloud to the silent night, chuckling at his wit.

  It was then he noticed the moon, or more specifically the clouds. Light cirrus had been streaming across the moon all night, driven by the same wind that was howling through the naked tree branches above him. Two solitary clouds crossed the moon, now, crescent-shapes mirrors of each other.

  They approached the moon from above, and as their edges touched the edge of the pale lunar disk, they suddenly joined with the moon's disk to become horns. Big ones. Very distinct.

  And they stopped.

  Other clouds blew on by, but those two clouds stayed locked in place, fixed on the top of the moon. The effect was unmistakable.

  He stopped. Stared. The wind continued to blow gently, but its sound through the tree branches gradually changed from a softly trilling whistle to something a little more...rhythmic. Something purposeful. And deliberate.

  For a minute, he wished he was home, and resumed walking with a much quicker pace towards his home, a few hundred yards ahead. It occurred to him how alone he was out here, how naked and unprotected against the world he was, and somehow chop-socky didn't seem a realistic deterrent against whatever howled in the wind.

  Soon, the lights of his house came up, comforting and warm. His father would be inside, watching Monday night football and drinking a beer. He imaged the warmth of the house, the soft couch, the gentle drone of the television as he gently drifted off to sleep. It was a warm, wonderful image, and he was most of the way up the driveway before it cleared from his mind.

  He looked up, and the clouds were gone from the moon. They drifted across the sky again, heading their separate ways. The moon shone alone in the sky, pale light illuminating everything almost to the quality of daylight. He caught a glimpse of a branch tip from one of the tall birch trees in the backyard poking up into the moon's disk, and wondered what a beautiful sight the line of trees would make against the moon from the backyard.

  He felt foolish for the mirage he saw earlier. Science had proven there was no such thing as an evil spirit. Too many ninety-nine cent rental movies when he was a kid, too many comic books, too many visits to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore. He wanted to stand in the backyard and look at the majestic moon, behold the scene of naked branches and pale pregnant lunar glow, and he'd be damned if any third-grade mental artifact was going to stop him.

  He rounded the corner of the house.

  The backyard was huge - almost half an acre. It was a half-day proposition to mow, and in the winter the snowdrifts would pile up against the back of the house up to ten feet. The line of birch stood at the back of the yard, a dense wall of black on this night even though most of the base foliage was long gone. He stepped into the yard, looked back at the house.

  He could see the glow of the television, pictured Al and the meat-puppet-of-the-week chattering mindlessly as the Vikes choked another one. On the opposite side of the room, he could see a pair of stockinged feet, his father sitting in the recliner reading the paper. It was a picture hanging on an inverted wall - Suburban Monday, In Repose.

  He looked back to the moon. It was beautiful, pale, full. The tips of the birch trees hung just under it, not quite the right angle yet. 

  He closed in on the treeline.

  Halfway through the yard, he stopped next to a young tree that still refused to give up its leaves. They rustled softly, restlessly, and caught a bit of his attention, making him stop there for a second.  He looked at the treeline and thought; this is as close as I get. Anything comes out of there, I'm fast enough to get to the house. It was childish, but then so was saying your prayers at night and he didn't see anyone in a big hurry to give that up.

  He put his hand on the tree. Felt something sticky.

  It seemed like sap, but as he pulled his hand away he caught a coppery scent and saw the black color. It was blood, but it seemed to be going the wrong way somehow - dripping down. That couldn't be right. That was when a low hanging branch caught his attention, because most tree branches didn't have hooves on the end of them.

  It was a deer's foreleg, severed at the second joint. High in the tree. Still kicking.

  His mind was just beginning to form the thought _maybe we should get out of here_ when the tree, bending gently as if pulled by an unseen giant hand, leaned over and opened its branches above him. Before those kung-fu reflexes could kick in, the branches and leaves engulfed him, lifting him off the ground as the tree returned to its normal position.

  He was engulfed. A branch shot out and rammed down his throat, into the pit of his stomach, and the stamen of the attached leaves shot out tendrils into his organs. He tried to scream, but the branch choked him, and as the other branches and leaves became chewing, sucking appendages, spurting digestive fluid and lapping at his dissolving flesh. He barely saw, through the curtain of fleshy leaves, that the horns had returned to the moon. Fighting and kicking losing his strength and his sanity, his mind desperately thought, what's happening? What's happening?

  And, as the tree consumed its fifth catch since Awakening, if a car had driven by or his father had put down the paper and looked out the window, all they would have seen was an ordinary tree with a pair of inverted pale white shoes at the top, kicking frantically as they disappeared into the foliage.