A Science Fiction Short Story
By the year 2147, Halloween had become a historical curiosity.
The children still dressed as ghosts and witches, but they did so in virtual reality chambers, where artificial intelligence generated costumes and simulated candy. The old traditions had been abandoned long ago. Real pumpkins were too expensive to grow on Earth, real candy was considered nutritionally irresponsible, and the practice of allowing children to wander from house to house had been outlawed following the Disappearance of 2093.
Nevertheless, every October 31, the government broadcast a recording of a jack-o'-lantern across the planetary communication network.
It was the last surviving image of a real Halloween pumpkin.
And every year, at precisely 11:59 p.m., the image blinked.
No one knew why.
Until tonight.
Mara Voss was eleven years old when she first noticed the blinking.
She lived in New Boston, a domed city on Mars, where the sky was permanently rust-colored and the temperature outside the habitat averaged minus sixty degrees Celsius. Her apartment overlooked the agricultural towers, a forest of illuminated cylinders where genetically engineered plants grew under artificial sunlight.
Halloween had always disappointed her.
She had tried the virtual reality experience when she was six. She had dressed as a vampire, visited twelve simulated houses, and collected digital candy that her dietary monitor immediately classified as imaginary.
It hadn't seemed fair.
This year, she'd decided to do something different.
She was going to find out why the pumpkin blinked.
Her father had laughed when she told him.
"Old video files develop glitches," he'd explained. "It's a compression artifact."
"But it happens at exactly the same time every year."
"Then it's a scheduled glitch."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Welcome to adulthood."
Her father was an engineer at the Martian Communications Authority. He had taught her enough about computer systems to know that his explanation was nonsense.
A scheduled glitch wasn't a glitch.
It was a message.
At 11:47 p.m., Mara sneaked into his laboratory.
The laboratory was dark except for the blue glow of the quantum processors. Mara sat at her father's terminal and entered the government broadcast archive.
She found the Halloween file.
The pumpkin appeared on the screen, its crooked smile illuminated by the flickering light of a candle. Its orange skin was blemished, and one side had collapsed slightly. It looked nothing like the perfect, symmetrical images in the children's history programs.
It looked real.
Mara examined the file's metadata.
The recording had been made on Earth, in Massachusetts, on October 31, 2026.
One hundred and twenty-one years ago.
She opened the transmission log.
The original file had been received from an unidentified source at 11:59 p.m. on October 31, 2027. It had then been stored in the government archive, where it had remained unchanged.
Except for one thing.
Every year, the archive recorded a brief burst of data arriving at precisely 11:59 p.m.
The data was always identical.
Mara isolated the signal and ran it through a decoder.
At first, the output was meaningless. Then she recognized the structure.
It was a coordinate string.
Not a location on Earth.
A location in interstellar space.
She entered the coordinates into the astronomical database.
The computer returned a single result.
OBJECT: UNIDENTIFIED
DISTANCE: 4.2 LIGHT-YEARS
DIRECTION: PROXIMA CENTAURI
Mara stared at the screen.
Something was sending a signal from the nearest star system, and the signal was somehow arriving every Halloween.
She checked the timestamp again.
The next transmission was due in seven minutes.
At 11:58 p.m., Mara heard footsteps in the corridor.
Her father appeared in the doorway.
"Mara?"
She froze.
He glanced at the screen. His expression changed.
"Where did you get those coordinates?"
"They were hidden in the pumpkin file."
He crossed the room and examined the data.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then he closed the laboratory door.
"Mara, I need you to listen carefully. Whatever you do, don't interrupt the transmission."
"Why?"
"Because we've been waiting a long time for it."
Her mouth fell open.
"You knew?"
"Not exactly. We discovered the signal forty years ago. Every attempt to decode it failed. The government classified it because the signal appears to violate several laws of physics."
"What laws?"
"The first is that the transmission arrives here without any measurable delay."
Mara frowned.
"But Proxima Centauri is more than four light-years away."
"Exactly."
Her father glanced at the clock.
"Thirty seconds."
The laboratory lights dimmed.
On the screen, the pumpkin flickered.
Its carved eyes seemed to deepen, becoming dark holes in the orange flesh.
Then the candle went out.
For the first time in 121 years, the image changed.
The pumpkin disappeared.
In its place appeared a human face.
An old man with a white beard and frightened eyes.
He was speaking, but no sound came through.
Mara activated the audio channel.
The old man's voice filled the room.
"If you're receiving this, then the experiment worked."
He looked over his shoulder, as though something were approaching him.
"My name is Elias Thorne. I'm a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The date is October 31, 2026."
He paused.
"We have made contact with something beyond our understanding. It claims to be from a civilization that exists outside normal time. It says it has observed humanity for thousands of years."
The old man swallowed.
"It chose Halloween because, for one night each year, we collectively celebrate the possibility that the dead can return, that monsters can walk among us, and that the impossible can become real."
Mara felt the hair rise on her arms.
Thorne continued.
"The visitors told us they would send a message to our descendants. They said the message would arrive on Halloween, every year, until someone understood it."
He leaned toward the camera.
"The message is not a warning. It's an invitation."
A noise came from somewhere behind him.
Thorne turned.
His face went white.
"They're here."
The screen went black.
Mara looked at her father.
"What happens now?"
He didn't answer.
Because the terminal had begun displaying new text.
One line at a time, letters appeared in the center of the screen.
WE HAVE FOUND YOU.
Then:
WE HAVE BEEN WAITING.
Finally:
MAY WE COME INSIDE?
Mara stared at the words.
"That's a security breach," she whispered.
Her father shook his head slowly.
"No. The system has no external connection right now. I disconnected it before you arrived."
"Then how—"
"I don't know."
A new line appeared.
WE HAVE BEEN YOUR MONSTERS.
Another followed.
YOUR GHOSTS. YOUR DEMONS. YOUR SHADOWS.
The laboratory temperature dropped.
Mara's breath misted in front of her face.
Her father reached for the emergency shutdown switch.
"Don't," she said.
"Mara—"
"They asked permission."
He stared at her.
"They're a signal from another star system. They could be anything."
"Then why ask?"
The terminal blinked.
BECAUSE YOU TAUGHT US TO KNOCK.
Mara thought of the old Halloween stories, of children shouting trick or treat, of the imaginary monsters who waited behind doors.
For centuries, humanity had invented creatures in the darkness and then pretended to fear them.
What if something had been listening?
What if, somewhere beyond the boundaries of ordinary space, something had learned the stories?
Something that had waited for a way to reach us.
Mara placed her hand on the terminal.
"Who are you?" she typed.
The response came instantly.
WE ARE WHAT YOU IMAGINED WHEN YOU WERE AFRAID OF THE DARK.
Her father pulled her away from the screen.
"No more."
But Mara had already typed another question.
"What do you want?"
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then the screen filled with a photograph.
A photograph of Earth.
Not the Earth of 2147, with its sprawling orbital cities and artificial continents, but the Earth of the twenty-first century.
Blue oceans. Green forests. White clouds.
And on the surface, millions of tiny orange lights.
Pumpkins.
The photograph had been taken from space on Halloween night.
Mara looked closer.
Each pumpkin was glowing.
Each carved face was turned toward the sky.
Then she noticed something else.
Behind the planet, barely visible against the stars, was a vast shape.
Something larger than the Moon.
Something with no discernible outline, as though the universe itself had developed a hole.
Her father whispered a word she had never heard him use.
"Impossible."
The photograph vanished.
A final message appeared.
WE HAVE COME TO RETURN YOUR IMAGINATION.
The lights went out.
For seventeen seconds, the laboratory was completely dark.
Then the emergency lights came on.
The terminal had shut down.
The transmission had ended.
Mara's father stood motionless, staring at the blank screen.
"Will they come?" she asked.
He looked at her.
"I don't know."
"Should we tell the government?"
"We'll have to."
"But what if they decide to fight them?"
Her father rubbed his eyes.
"Mara, we don't even know what they are."
She thought about the message.
We are what you imagined when you were afraid of the dark.
"Maybe," she said, "they're not here to hurt us."
Her father gave a tired laugh.
"That's a very human assumption."
"Isn't it also human to assume everything wants to hurt us?"
He didn't answer.
Mara returned to her apartment just before dawn.
She couldn't sleep.
Instead, she opened the oldest history archive she could find and searched for Halloween photographs.
She found images of children in costumes, their faces painted white and black. She found photographs of jack-o'-lanterns on porches, of black cats perched on windowsills, of families gathered around candles.
She found an image of a little girl standing beside a pumpkin.
The girl couldn't have been more than five.
She was wearing a bedsheet over her head, with two holes cut out for eyes.
The caption read:
Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, 2026.
Mara smiled.
Then she noticed something strange.
Behind the girl, in the window of the house, stood a shadow.
It was too tall to be human.
Its head was tilted.
And it was smiling.
The next morning, the government announced that the annual Halloween broadcast had been canceled.
The official explanation cited a technical malfunction.
By noon, every copy of the pumpkin file had been erased from the public archives.
By evening, the Martian Communications Authority had sealed its laboratory.
Mara's father was ordered to remain silent.
But something had changed.
Across the solar system, children began reporting strange occurrences.
A boy on Europa claimed that a ghost had visited his bedroom and asked to borrow a book.
A girl on Titan woke to find a perfect pumpkin sitting on her windowsill, although no pumpkins had grown there in centuries.
On Earth, in an abandoned village in Massachusetts, an old cemetery's security cameras recorded hundreds of shadowy figures gathering among the graves.
They stood in silence until midnight.
Then they vanished.
No one could explain the events.
The government dismissed them as hoaxes.
The scientists called them anomalies.
The religious authorities offered competing interpretations.
But the children knew better.
They had heard the old stories.
They had seen the shadows.
And they had begun leaving their doors unlocked.
One year later, on October 31, 2148, Mara was twelve.
She had spent the afternoon carving a pumpkin.
It had taken her father six months to obtain a genuine specimen from a botanical preservation facility on Earth. The pumpkin was small and misshapen, with a pale orange rind.
Mara had carved two triangular eyes and a crooked smile.
At 11:58 p.m., she placed a candle inside it.
At 11:59 p.m., the candle went out.
The room filled with a soft, silvery light.
Her bedroom door opened.
A figure stood in the doorway.
It was tall and thin, with long arms and a head that seemed to be covered in shifting shadows. Its body was translucent, like smoke suspended in water.
Mara was afraid.
She was also curious.
The figure tilted its head.
"Trick or treat?" Mara whispered.
The creature made a sound like distant laughter.
Then, slowly, it extended one long hand.
In its palm lay a piece of candy.
A small, ordinary piece of chocolate wrapped in silver foil.
Mara took it.
The creature bowed.
And then it spoke, in a voice that sounded like wind passing through an empty house.
"Thank you."
Mara blinked.
"For what?"
The creature looked at the pumpkin.
"For remembering us."
It turned toward the doorway.
"Wait," Mara said. "Will you come back next year?"
The creature paused.
"That depends."
"On what?"
It looked back at her.
"On whether you still believe in us."
Then it disappeared.
Mara stood alone in her bedroom, holding the chocolate.
Outside, beyond the transparent dome of New Boston, the stars glittered above the red desert.
Somewhere, four light-years away, something ancient was watching humanity.
And for the first time in more than a century, the people of Earth and Mars had a reason to celebrate Halloween.
Not because they were afraid of monsters.
But because, in the vast darkness between the stars, something had finally answered the knock.
And it had brought candy.
