I’ll See You on All Hallows

by Katie-Rose Svich

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

Halloween 2005 — New York City

It was getting close to midnight. As soon as the hour struck, the race would begin. City lights glimmered in the distance, visible from the darkened streets on the edge of town.

The motorbikes started to line up, bright fluorescent paint cutting through the darkness of night. A neon green Kawasaki Ninja pulled up at the far end, its rider landing her black leather boot flat on the road, gracefully but with a quiet force, gravel crunching beneath the sole. Gloria could feel the stares on her but she stood her ground, pretending not to notice. She kept her eyes forward and that one foot pressed to the ground, the other still mounting her bike.

“What’re you doing? You got told before: no one’s gonna want to race a girl. It’s harsh out on the track.” Someone walked up behind her, giving a rough jolt to her shoulder. Gloria didn’t say a word in reply, but she drove her elbow backwards when she sensed the guy creeping up again from behind. “Ack! What the hell was that for? Crazy bitch...”

Seventeen years old. Everyone knows teenagers and motorbikes are a bad mix.

The public service announcements on TV asked parents if they knew where their children were right now.

The crowd had fully gathered, and all the bikes on the starting line started to rev their engines. Gloria glanced up the row, looking for the single person she was interested in: Daniel. On his red Ducati, he was considered the best rider in this part of town, maybe even the entire city. He didn’t acknowledge her, but Gloria knew he’d noticed she was there; the rival he’d never admit to. But tonight she’d show him, she’d show them all.

A girl in high heels and a denim miniskirt stood before the line of competitors. She raised her flag in the air then dropped it back down again, and the race began.

The sound of all the engines would have been near-deafening to anyone standing on the sidelines, but Gloria was completely deaf to it. The bike moved swiftly and smoothly beneath her, as if melded with her body. Scattered lights bled and blurred into each other until they became a continuous strip of light that followed her in the corner of her eye as she sped along the dark road.

She saw Daniel; they were neck and neck, green Kawasaki versus red Ducati. As if sucked into a vacuum, everyone and everything else disintegrated away into the night as the two of them became conscious only of one and other. The speed increased, blood surging, pulses fast but steady — everything was moving closer and closer to the finish line until there came the screech of a tyre slipping, handlebars twisting, the jarring crash of metal on pavement.

Gloria and Daniel lay side-by-side, limp on the road, screams in the background, a shared pool of blood spreading beneath them. Both their bikes were burning; crushed metal, twisted in a mangled mess and illuminating the night like a bonfire. It almost looked like one of those magic bonfires from ancient Halloween, centuries ago.

“Look at you two kids” — a voice from above.

“Live fast, die young. I’ve seen it more times than I can count.”

Both of them looked up to see a tall figure leaning over them. It was a man with a young face, but the youth seemed more like a mask, a decorative cover over something that was actually very old.

The god of death smiled. His shoulder-length silver hair wasn’t the silver of natural age, but more like bleach and metallic coloured dye — a punk rock style he seemed to have chosen just for this occasion. His black cloak fell halfway down his calves, with a hood hanging down his back, and his long black boots with heavy soles squelched nonchalantly into the amassing blood.

A human skull hung as an ornament from a silver chain around his waist. Filling both the eye sockets were antique clock faces, ticking faintly, but somehow audible above all the surrounding commotion. The detail on those clock faces was minute: delicate hands, gears turning, finely painted circles inside of circles, each dotted with numbers. Layer after layer of time... Planes of existence compounding one on top of the other for eternity.

Gloria remembered hearing in school that if you managed to travel a light year away from the earth you’d look back and see everything as it was exactly a year before, yourself as you were. A thousand light years of distance and you’d see a thousand years back. The stars she was looking at now were already hundreds if not thousands of years old, their light only reaching her eyes now from however many light years away. Dead in one place, alive in another.

Gloria’s head began to spin. All the shadows and all the light, every colour — it all blended into the same pale blue, like a computer screen starting to fade.

“Can you see that guy?” Daniel’s voice entered her ear, stunted and glitching. “Yeah,” Gloria replied, monosyllabic.

“Then why is everyone else acting like they can’t?” Daniel continued to fight through the electronic glitching sound that threatened to shatter his voice entirely.

“I think you know why.” When Gloria spoke those words, she noticed Daniel’s face pale, if possible, another shade, one cheek pressed deep into the rich pool of crimson on the road. That pool kept creeping outward as memories started slowly seeping into both their heads, like forgotten files temporarily dragged back out from an old hard drive.

Graphics flickered in and out. Soon there was going to be a hard re-boot.

Live fast, die young... Re-boot.

When people talk about immortality as a kind of superpower, they never consider how it’s actually torture. But then again you probably never realise it until you remember it, however briefly. Gloria grimaced at the sound of Death’s boots squelching in all of her and Daniel’s blood.

Light fractured and the scene began to pixelate as Gloria let her head roll to one side, staring blankly at her former rival. “I still love you.”

“Me too,” he replied.

Words they would never have said up until this moment, but now, if only for the final few seconds of this round, they made sense.

Sirens could be heard in the distance as the stars in the sky became more and more distorted. Stars, dead in one place, alive in another. Multiple realities co-existing until the system, one day, finally crashed.