It was October, Halloween night.
I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom, wearing brown pants, a khaki shirt, and boots. I strapped on a gun belt and tightened it, then checked that my gun was loaded, made it safe, slipped it into its holster. On the other side of my belt hung a coiled skipping rope. I’d cut one handle off and knotted the end to create a makeshift whip. I’d practiced with it for hours in the backyard, until I could reliably knock empty cans off the picnic table, and make it crack like a real whip.
I pulled on a brown leather jacket, then slung a canvas messenger bag over my shoulder. Finally I put on my brown fedora and pulled it down low over my eyes. The fit wasn’t perfect – after all I had made it earlier that day, out of cardboard. But looking at myself in the mirror, I felt changed. I stood straighter, and felt stronger, more confident, more like the adventurous movie hero I was impersonating.

I also felt, distantly but distinctly, changes on the horizon, something foretold by the 5 o’clock shadow I had clumsily applied with drug store Halloween makeup. A foretelling of things to come, changes that I didn’t yet understand, but felt coming nonetheless, as strong as the coming of winter.
It was late October, and darkness fell early. As I stepped outside, I felt the coolness of the late fall air, that coming winter on the breeze, the endless dark nights.
But this was Halloween, and this autumn night was alive with possibilities.

*

Autumn in Bay D’Espoir was something to behold. All around the hills and coves and inlets, the birch and maples and tamaracks ran to a riot of rich colours, reds and oranges and yellows, splashes and explosions of colour among the steady swathes of light hardwoods and darker evergreens. Walking the roads that wound around the bay and the wood-cutting paths that disappeared into the forested hills, the land was a burst of colours and falling leaves and change, the ground wet and mossy underfoot, the smells of leafmold and damp earth and coming darkness, and the first smells of woodsmoke from the chimneys around the cove.
I love winter, but autumn has always been my favourite season. That coming darkness, that encroaching coziness that turned the evenings into a series of splendid retreats from the world, into what was, for me, a wonderful world of books and comics and art, drawing pictures and writing stories in my room late into the evening, after family dinner and homework was done. It took away some of the pressure to spend all of your time outdoors, with friends playing street hockey or bike riding, or just wandering around seeing what kind of adventures and trouble we could get into.
I enjoyed all that, in its place and time. But I was – and still am – a solitary person, an introvert who both enjoys and requires time to myself, inside the world of my own head, to both process the things taking place in the wider world, in my life and the world around me, and to spend time in that creative space that brings a sense of grounding and peace that I always miss when I don’t get it. During busy times, with lots of socializing and travel and responsibilities, where I don’t have the time to lose myself in books and music and art, I feel the tension build, even though I never manage to identify what it is that is missing until I get back to a space and time that allows me to sit down and listen to music again, and say ah yes, this is what I was missing from my life, from my mind, from my existence.
And the early evening darkness really starts to be felt by the middle of October, when it’s dark shortly after suppertime, when the streetlights come on and it’s time to head for home earlier and earlier. I always felt that it was Halloween night when that transition really took place. Before Halloween, evenings came earlier and earlier, but you still planned to spend time outdoors after dinner, even if those times were getting shorter and shorter. After Halloween, the evenings were for inside.
But Halloween itself was a strange exception to the rule that you had to be in the house 15 minutes after the streetlights came on. Halloween night, you were allowed to stay out for hours, performing the strangely socially-acceptable activity of dressing up in costumes to hide your identity, and going door to door to demand tribute from all of your neighbours and threatening vague “tricks” if they don’t comply.

*

It was Halloween night, and dressed as Indiana Jones (or some approximation anyway), I met up with my friends down by the old firehall, just a concrete foundation now, but the centre of our social world. We compared costumes and candy sacks and came up with a game plan on how to hit the greatest number of houses in the shortest period of time, dividing the cove into sections we would tackle one after another.
On the first hill we climbed, we knocked on doors of our friends, doors opened by parents or grandparents or others who we knew, and who surely knew us despite our costumes, and started the candy collection.
At the top of the hill, one of the doors was opened by a gorgeous girl a few years older than me, already in high school, which is as large as a generation gap gets when you’re in your early adolescence, and she was too intimidating for me to ever talk to in real life.
But this night, emboldened by the costume and the persona I was inhabiting, and by the boldness of my friends, similarly acting outside the normal bounds of our usual social strictures, we were more daring than we could even have imagined the day before, and demanded more candy than she first offered, and even made a suggestive comment about the kind of treats she might be offering. It’s amazing to think that we were able to do this, since none of us were sufficiently disguised for her not to know who we were. But we did it, and turned and ran from her door with our treats, leaving her with an expression on her face that I remember as shocked, even impressed, but was most likely, more accurately just amusement at the ridiculous antics of a bunch of kids.
We would see her again, later that night.

*

In the dark depths of the cove, we continued our house-to-house antics. We dared each other to go into an abandoned house, which of course we had been telling each other for years was haunted. We got as far as climbing the front porch and tried to open the door, but the old screen door fell right off the hinges and hit the porch with a bang that sent us scurrying away into the darkness before the owners, who lived in the newer house next door, could come to investigate.
We approached the house of the known town crank, a grumpy, nasty old man who we hardly ever saw but were scared of anyway, and dared each other to knock on his door, and we did. Ignoring the darkened windows and unlit porch lights, we climbed his front steps and banged on the door, again and again, until he threw it open and roared at us to get the hell off his property and again we scattered into the darkness, laughing and yelling as he cursed us. In my adult years I wondered if he was really just a lonely old man, scared by the raucous bunch of monstrous youths on his doorstep in the dark. But that night he was just another monster, probably harmless but real enough in our adolescent world.

And neither he nor us were the only monsters afield that night. We were coming to the end of our rounds, walking down a darkened road, when we heard them coming. Witches, four of them, dressed in black and cackling like they owned the night. Which, of course, was ours. And we knew we had to show them.
We hid in the ditch, disguised by alders and darkness, and drew our guns from their holsters, and crouched waiting, grinning at each other. It was the girl from the hill earlier in the night, who we had spoken to so brazenly, and the older sister of one of my friends, and two of their friends, twin girls who were the subject of much teenaged fantasy.
They came down the road, with their black dresses and tall hats and cackling laughs, and we knew they were on their way to a Halloween party down on the beach, a place we wouldn’t be welcomed by the teenagers.
But when they were close enough that we could smell them, perfume and cigarette smoke, we broke from our cover and ran across the road right in front of them. We fired our cap guns into the air and yelling like cowboys, like horror movie villains, and my friend threw a pumpkin towards them, a Jack-o-Lantern that had stolen from someone’s front step. It smashed on the pavement in front of them, and they screamed satisfactorily and leapt backwards and clutched at one another while we ran away yelling into the night, into the darkness.

*

We kept collecting our tributes, the candies and chocolate bars and suckers that we gathered in our pillowcases, running from house to house, faster and faster as we felt the night closing in, gathering towards its inevitable end.
And towards its inevitable end, while running from house to house in the curve of the cove, I started to get out of breath, to fall behind my friends. I was never as athletic as them, a consequence of my book-loving lifestyle no doubt, and while they tried for a time to let me keep up, soon the excitement of the evening drove them on and they lost track of me behind them, leaving me to trick-or-treat door to door by myself, out of breath and struggling to keep up, knocking on doors a solitary figure, which was a very different experience from knocking in a group. Suddenly my movie-hero costume seemed more a ridiculous conceit than a protective spell.
But eventually I caught up to them again, when they had run out of houses to hit.  We wandered the Halloween night a bit longer, all bravado and swagger, until the night got too cold and even the superheroes and monsters had parents who would expect them home. So we headed home, in our separate directions.
Down on the beach we could see the red glow of the bonfire, and imagined what was happening there with the older kids, with their cigarettes and beer bottles, cheap wine and boyfriends and girlfriends and whatever happened in the dark of the woods when couples went off for a walk. We didn’t know, or thought we knew, or knew that we would find out soon enough. That change coming on the horizon, a new season in our lives, the coming of winter ahead of us.
But for now, it was enough to go home, take off our costumes, remove our makeup and masks, and sit on our bedroom floors in our pajamas. Counting out our candy bars and lollipops before heading downstairs to watch monster movies on TV.

Keith J Collier is a Canadian Historian & Journalist. A former research assistant for the Maritime History Archive at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, he writes about northern Canadian culture, heritage, and history. He has published numerous articles regarding Nunavut, wildlife conflict, and the resource industry for The Independent.