From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:40:32 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Ghost Lights  by Neoxphile
Source: direct

Reply To: Neoxphile@aol.com


Title: Ghost Lights
Author: Neoxphile
Feedback: neoxphile@aol.com
Keywords: Challenge Fic, Halloween, post-col
Spoilers: William, The Truth
Timeframe: Post-IWTB
Disclaimer: Mine, wish they were.

Summary: Halloween night just isn't the same.

~*~*~

Halloween Night

A cold wind picked at the pair who hurried down a deserted sidewalk,
past dark windows set into the uniformly gray buildings of the
business district; all the businesses were legally required to close
by 5:30 p.m. The boy held his father's hand tightly, and his short
legs struggled to match the tall man's stride. His father wanted to
slow down, to give the boy a breather, but it was dangerous to be out
at night. Especially that night. As it was, the streak of red,
crimson as blood, was already wide in the sky.

"Dad, why do we have to walk?" the little boy sniffed. His cheeks
were red, and even though his longish brown hair, exactly the same
color as his father's, hung in his hazel eyes, it didn't do much to
keep him warm. Octobers had grown colder over the past few years, and
the official weathermen said it might snow.

"The car broke down, you know that." It had, two miles back. Like all
cars of the day, it was small, fuel-efficient, and not terribly
reliable. Unfortunately, the last was a manufacturing goal that had
been well met.

The child stared up at him. "But why can't we get a taxi or
something?"

"Have you seen anything that looks like a taxi?" his father asked
rhetorically as they hurried down the empty sidewalk. People no
longer carried phones with them, so the only chance of getting a taxi
would be hailing one as it passed.

"No, sir," the dejected nine-year-old replied with a heavy sigh.

"That's why we have to walk."

There were no vehicles of any kind around. None had passed them, not
even once in the two miles since they abandoned their malfunctioning
car. He hadn't wanted to give up for dead, not at first, so they'd
wasted a half an hour of the waning daylight as he fiddled under the
hood and tried to coax it back to life. He hadn't expected to see any
cars either, not on Halloween night. Most people had the sense to get
home well before dark, and he wished that he'd had that sense too,
instead of going to visit his mother.

"How much farther?" the boy asked, beginning to whine.

"Four miles or so, Max," Will said through gritted teeth. It wasn't
Max's fault that he walked so slowly, he was only nine after all.

"Four more miles? Dad, that's so far." Max looked around, clearly
aware that the twilight was beginning to fade away.

"I'm sorry, Buddy. But there isn't much I can do about it."

"I wish mom had a car," Max said wistfully. "Then she could pick us
up."

"Me too." He thought about repeating his father's favorite saying
about if wishes were horses, but that seemed mean given that even a
horse would have been handy right then. He and Max had both been
taught to ride.

"Dad, can you..." Max broke off with a shiver, and stared down a long
dark alley before looking away. "Can you tell me what Halloween was
like? You know, before."

Before. No one ever had to elaborate when they use the word before.
Everyone knew what they meant.

Will frowned to himself, and tried not to snap at the boy that there
was no sense dwelling on the past. Memories of the past were always
bittersweet, and Will didn't spend much time revisiting them. But
when he looked down at his shivering son, he realized that Max would
be slightly less miserable if he had something to distract himself
with.

"Well," he began. "We used to dress up."

"As what?" Max asked, clearly perking up a little even as the shadows
deepened around them.

"Oh, anything. Some people would dress up like their favorite cartoon
characters, and others would pick outfits that were perennial
favorites."

"Perennial?" Max repeated uncertainly.

"It means every year. What I mean is things like clowns and witches
and vampires, the grim reaper and werewolves, things like that. You
could see kids dressed as those things any Halloween."

"But why? How come they picked icky things?"

"People used to like to scare themselves a little. They'd dress up as
scary things, and even go to special events were people in scary
costumes would jump out at them to scare them silly. Those were
called haunted houses."

"Oh," said Max. "We don't do things like that any more."

No, Will thought, they didn't. There weren't horror movies or scary
costumes any more, though he could recall walking past a crumpled up
mask five years earlier that had been  discarded in a alley and so
faded that he couldn't quite figure out what it had been meant to be.
Partly these changes had come about because there wasn't much of a
market for manufactured scares any more, but mostly because they were
outlawed.

"Then what?" Max asked.

"Oh, then we went from house to house and said 'trick-or-treat' and
people would give us candy."

Max looked puzzled. "Why would they do that?"

"It was tradition, Max. People liked to see what the kids would dress
up as, and they would reward them candy."

"What else?"

"Do you know what a pumpkin is?" Will asked. "I'm pretty sure your
mom showed you a picture of one in a book."

"Big orange thing, right? People grew them gardens." When gardens had
still been allowed. It had been quite a while since people were
allowed to grow their own food instead of buying it at state
sanctioned stores.

Will nodded. "That's it. When I was a little boy, people would carve
them, and put a candle inside."

Max gave him a skeptical look. "Dad! You're making that up."

"I'm not, I swear. We used to carve faces into them, and light them
up."

"Why on Earth would you do that?"

"Another tradition. Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, people
believed that carving the faces and lighting up the pumpkin, or maybe
a turnip in some places, would help keep evil spirits at bay,"
William explained. "Actually, that's what Halloween was all about
beginning. By the time I was a boy, it was just for fun, but once
upon a time people believed that spirits roamed the earth on October
31st, and dressing up as monsters would confuse them. Pumpkins would
confuse them too."

"Oh." Max looked off in the distance, and Will guessed that he might
be thinking about how dark it was. Neither Will nor Madison ever
broke curfew, so this was one of the few times Max had ever been
outside after dark when he wasn't in his own yard. "Dad, are we going
to get in trouble?" Max asked, proving that Will's theory have been
correct.

"I don't think so. We didn't mean to break curfew, so we shouldn't
get into any trouble." He hoped. In all honesty, it actually depended
upon who was there to scan Will's ID when they made it back to their
apartment complex. He didn't tell his son this, because it was no use
worrying about something that probably wouldn't happen.

Instead of being reassured, Max grabbed his arm. "Look!" he said,
grabbing Will's arm.

Will followed his finger. In the distance, he could see a trio of
green, glowing spheres. SensorShips. It wasn't good. Most of the
guards were pretty lax when it came to enforcing the sundown curfew,
but things were different when They were around. Will's grip on his
son's hand tightened a little bit.

How it all come to this? That was something that Will wondered again
and again. "It's okay, don't worry."

But he worried. Things had felt tenuous for nearly two decades, but
lately they seem to be unraveling even more. It was strange to think
that he was more worried than he had been right after the invasion,
despite everything that had happened since then. He couldn't stop
imagining that humanity stood up on a precipice, and that someone was
about to push them off at last.

He looked down at Max. Will's parents had been in their 40s when they
adopted him, and when they talked to him about growing up and having
children of his own, there had been the expectation that he would do
so a little younger than that; perhaps in his early thirties, or
maybe his late twenties. But that was before the breeding programs.
Before the aliens accidentally, not that they ever admitted fault,
killed off far more people than the intended to when they invaded in
2012.

No, neither Will nor his parents ever anticipated that people would
be assigned a mate soon as they graduated from high school with the
expectation that they would soon reproduce. Will had the feeling that
his eleven-year-old self would have been very surprised to learn that
he would have a child just eight years later. And two more besides
since then, at home with his wife, safe and sound for the night.

Max broke into his reverie. "Dad, you said people liked to be scared.
What was the scariest thing that ever happened to you on Halloween?"

I stayed out past curfew accidentally, and became terrified that I
might have inadvertently targeted myself and my young son for
reprogramming, Will thought. Of course he didn't say that. It would
be monstrously cruel to do so, even if it was true.

"Dad?"

"Um, the scariest thing that ever happened to me on Halloween was
when I was eleven. It was the last year that there was any trick or
treating." The fact that the invasion had started less than two
months later didn't need to be said; even children Max's age were
taught in school all about how the aliens had come to "help" humanity
back in the December of 2012. Most people hated the fact that the
propaganda was taught even in the earliest grades of elementary
school, but many children didn't seem to buy into the hype the way
they were intended to so grumbling was kept to a safe minimum.

"So before there were so many rules to keep us safe?" Max asked.

That actually was the intention of the myriad of rules that were
imposed on what remained of humanity. When the invaders had planned
to make their big strike against Earth, their estimations had been
that only a small percentage of people would resist to the point of
death. Will had once seen that estimate to be around ten percent. In
the end, between resistance and disease, almost fifty-five present of
all human life was extinguished. This left a population significantly
smaller than the aliens needed to meet the goals they had outlined
for colonization, so rules to keep people safe were draconically
enforced by humans that the aliens could trust...and some of those
invaders looked human enough when they wanted to anyway, so few
people defied the guards, not when you didn't know if you'd be up
against a man, or something much stronger that just looked like one.

It's kind of like Halloween, Will thought a little giddily, they play
dress up too. He noticed that Max was looking up at him with a
faintly alarmed look, and realized that he'd never answered the boy's
question. "Um, yeah. It was the last time before then."

"What happened?"

"Well, I went trick or treating with my friends Bobby and Edward. We
had gotten a lot of candy, but Bobby had a good idea: we could get
even better treats if we went over to the neighborhood where the
wealthy people lived-"

"-back when people were allowed to be rich, huh?"

"Yeah." The aliens might not have ever met Carl Marx, but they would
have liked him. They definitely had similar ideas about wealth
distribution, and how people ought to be happier if there were no
longer significant gaps between the rich and the poor. "Anyway, we
both agreed with Bobby, but trick or treating was only for two hours,
which was a problem. Getting to that other neighborhood would have
taken a long time...if we'd taken the convention route. So, even though
we knew that it wasn't a good idea, we cut through a swamp."

Max's eyes got wide, and Will felt a little better. He was definitely
taking his son's mind off of the trouble they might be in once they
finally got home. "A swamp?" Max squeaked excitedly. "They still had
them then?"

"They did. People claimed that they were a good way to get rid of
water pollution. We got half way through the swamp when it happened,"
Will said ominously.

"What?" Max half-yelled, taking the bait. 

"Shh!" Will hissed, automatically looking around for Them. People who
made a scene in public were often dealt with harshly. "How many times
have I told you and Daniel not to shout?" Before long Will would be
keeping an eye on Lydia's volume too, but just then she was only
fourteen months old.

"Sorry," Max mumbled.

"It's okay. Anyway, we'd gotten halfway through the swamp when Edward
shouted a lot louder than you just did. Bobby and I demanded to know
what was wrong, but he wouldn't say anything. He just pointed."

Fascinated, Max dropped his voice to a whisper. "At what?"

"Fifty feet from where we stood, several green glowing balls hung in
midair. They were bigger than the softballs they made us use in gym
class."

"Did you think that the-" Max thought better of what he'd been about
to say and clamped down on his tongue for moment. "-Helpers made
'em?"

"No, this was before They came, remember?" Not that the thought of
aliens mightn't have occurred to them anyway. But then, just before
the invasion, aliens only seemed to visit sleeping people who weren't
wrapped too tight, and the occasional drunk in a pickup truck.

"Right. So..."

"Edward started to babble about ghosts, and we yelled at him, telling
them not to be stupid. I don't know what Bobby thought, but I was
pretty well convinced that we were the victims of a prank set up by
high school kids who'd snuck into the science lab."

"Was it big kids playing a joke?"

"Nope. Once no one laughed at us for being gullible, and the balls
began to bob around... Edwards's ghost theory started to sound more
realistic."

"What did you do?"

"We ran like hell. And the glowing blobs seemed to follow us!"

Max's eyes were wide with shock and delight. "No way!"

"It sure seemed like it." Will smirked at the memory of the three of
them crashing through the swampy darkness while the glowing spheres
mindlessly trailed after them. They were damn lucky no one with a
video recorder happened by at just that moment.

"That does sound scary," Max remarked.

Since his son showed no signs that he realized they had nearly
reached the checkpoint, Will decided to keep talking. Maybe Max would
continue to be too distracted to notice that twilight had long since
slid into night. "I won't lie to you, we were almost scared enough to
wet our pants by the time we got out of that swamp."

"Did the glowing balls follow you out of the swamp?"

"That's what struck us as weird - they didn't. We looked around
everywhere for them, but they were just gone, disappeared."

"They couldn't leave the swamp?"

"Right, but we didn't know that until later, so we kept looking
around for them, expecting them to pop back up any moment. Edward was
more scared than me or Bobby, so he began to insist that we go home
immediately, which made me mad. I yelled at him that we'd gone to all
that trouble to get to the rich neighborhood, and it would be stupid
to go home without trick-or-treating. Bobby quietly listened to us
argue before asking Edward if he really wanted to turn around and go
through the swamp again. Edward said no, of course, so I got my way."

"Dad, did you really go back through the swamp once you got your
candy?"

"No, and I don't think Bobby really meant for us to, either. He was
banking on Edward being too freaked out to even think that we could
take the long way home, and it worked. We were almost done
trick-or-treating went Edward suggested we go home the other way.
Bobby and I told him it was a great idea, like neither of us had
thought of it ourselves."

"That's kind of mean."

"I guess it was."

"Hey, you said you didn't know then that the balls couldn't leave the
swamp until later, so how did you find that out?"

The checkpoint was coming into view, so Will spoke faster. "As soon
as we got to Edward's house, he decided that he needed to confess,
and told his mother everything. She immediately began laughing and
didn't stop until we indignantly demanded to know what was so funny.
Our 'ghosts' were nothing more than balls of swamp gas."

"That's all?" Max looked a little disappointed.

"Yup, and we felt pretty stupid-"

"Especially Edward, I bet."

"-But she told us not to feel bad because they been spooking people
for hundreds of years, and one of the nicknames for them was Ghost
Lights, so plenty of other people had mistaken them for ghosts too."

"I bet you all felt better then, knowing what you'd really seen."

Will looked over his shoulder; the green glow of the SensorShips was
still out there.
"You know, we did. But not so much that we ever cut through the swamp
again at night." Not that there'd been much of an opportunity for
that, Will thought but didn't say. By New Year's Day 2013, Will was
the only one left. Edward and his sister had died of aliens' disease,
and Bobby's family was taken away after his father was branded a
resister. He hoped that they were long dead because it was better
than the alternative...

"I wouldn't have gone-" Max's words dried up when he became aware
that they were standing before the guard hut. He groped for his
father's hand, and Will could feel the tremor that ran through his
entire body.

The guard, one Will did not know by sight, gazed at them impassively.
You wouldn't know from his blank face that he held so much power over
them. "ID."

Will quickly handed over the plastic ID card that was stamped with
his name, William Van De Kamp. The guard looked at it before looking
briefly at Will's face. He peered down at the boy, but Max was only
nine, and had not yet been issued his own identity card, so the child
didn't hold much interest for the guard. Instead, he looked off into
the distance, looking contemplative. "It's dark."

The coldness in the man's voice made something shrivel inside of
Will. "Sorry. Our car broke down. We had to walk the last few miles."

The guard nodded briefly. "Where?"

"Sixth street, sector four."

Turning away, the guard focused his attention on the computer monitor
in his hut instead. Will watched as he accessed the cameras for that
street. Will's car soon came into sharp focus. In days gone by one
might worry that a broken down car might be vandalized, but nobody
would dare touch the car these days, not even if it stayed there for
a week.

After a moment study, the guard looked back at Will. "Tomorrow be on
time."

When the guard opened the gate to let them through, Will felt a sense
of giddiness. He told himself that the story had been for Max's sake,
but he had been using it to distract himself as well. It kept the
gibbering part of his brain that insisted that they would immediately
be dragged off for reprogramming at bay. And it had been wrong.

It was Will's instinct to thank the man profusely, but he didn't.
There was something about the man's demeanor that made Will think
that this was not a man at all, and displays of appreciation would
not be welcomed, nor particularly well received. Growing up his
parents had told him that his insistence that he could tell the men
from the pretend men was mere self-indulgence. No one could see
through their disguises. But Will thought he could... he just learned
not to tell anyone else about his secret ability.

If Max knew that his father had been in terror that they would not
make it home that night, he showed no sign of it. Instead, he
scampered ahead of Will, saying "Wow, mom's going to be really
surprised that we're late. Do you think she'll be mad?"

"No." She'll be relieved that we came home at all. "I'm sure she's
been worried."

"Oh, yeah, she would be. Do we have enough credits to buy her some
flowers? That would make her feel good, after being scared tonight."

Will reached down and ruffled his son's hair. "That sounds a good
idea."

When they reach their building, Daniel, age six, stood in the window
watching for them, and Will watched as Madison's hand reached out and
grabbed him just before he would've run outside. It was taking longer
for them to rein in Daniel's impulse for dramatic gestures than it
had Max.

Madison had a million questions when they got inside, and Will was
happy to answer them all. He was just happy to be home and safe, Max
too.

**

Later, while Will brushed his teeth and put on his approved
nightwear, he found himself thinking about the Halloween night he'd
told Max about. He'd only told him part of the story. He would only
ever tell him part of the story.

What Will didn't say was that the most frightening part of that night
happened after he and his friends had parted ways for the evening. He
had just reached the side of the house when he realized that he heard
voices inside the house. Angry ones. Although he knew that it was
wrong to eavesdrop, he sensed that this conversation was important,
so he froze there to listen in.

"I know this is hard to hear, but-" an unfamiliar voice, a woman's,
began to say, only to be cut off by William's father.

"He's not your son," he said harshly. "Not any more."

"You don't understand how important this is," an equally unseen man
protested. "This is literally a matter of life and death."

"I think we've been more than polite," William's mother said tightly.
"Other people would have thrown you out as soon as you mentioned
aliens, let alone asked to take his blood."

Will shivered. What only earth would these people want his blood for?
Dimly, he realized that "these people" were his birth parents - he'd
known since the age of five that he was adopted - but at that moment,
he wasn't giving the fact much thought.

"To make a vaccine that will save people!" the unseen woman
exclaimed.

"Right, a vaccine," Will's father rumbled sarcastically. "One you
claim can only be made if you bleed our little boy."

"You say that like we intend to drain him, but we only need a little
blood. We're immune to the virus, but we only gained that immunity as
adults. The research we've done over the last few years suggests that
Will's blood would work much better than ours since his immunity is
coded into his DNA."

"You've said that you're a doctor, where? I want to tell them that
they've mistakenly hired a crazy person."

"I'm not crazy," the woman, his biological mother, Will finally
allowed himself to think, said.

"Insisting that you need our son to help stop an alien invasion is
beyond crazy," Will's mother replied coldly.

An alien invasion?! Will found himself thinking. That sort of
exciting-terrifying thing was the theme of movies and books, not real
life. That kind of thing wasn't possible because there was no life on
other planets. Everyone said so, and everyone couldn't be wrong.

Apparently Will's father had enough because he growled, "Leave. Go
now before I call the police to make you leave."

A moment later the door creaked open and Will dove behind a bush to
position himself to watch them leave. They passed by the porch light,
and he saw them. The woman was short and slight with red hair that
caught the light like a brief flame. The man, on the other hand, was
tall and rangy with hair and eyes like Will's.

It only took them a second to pass him, and part of him wanted to cry
out, to demand their notice, but he didn't.

They were speaking in hushed tones. "Should we take...drastic
measures?"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

Will watch them leave, and felt helplessly conflicted.


In the end, they had opted for drastic measures a few weeks later,
and had been hauled off in handcuffs as their reward. As far as Will
knew, they had still been in prison for their kidnapping attempt when
the ships arrived. He had no idea what might have happened to them
after that.

Will sometimes thought about them, wondering what life might have
been like had they succeeded. If there had been a vaccine, would
there have been enough people to resist successfully? Had his
parents, the people who had loved him and raised him since he was a
baby, single-handedly caused everything that had happened? He tried
not to think about that, but it was hard. That was one of the reasons
he rarely visited. Until today, it had been eight months since he'd
last seen them.

He went to stand by the window, and he could hear Madison trying to
convince Lydia to go to sleep. The moon outside was bright enough to
see that the three SensorShips he had spotted earlier had invited
friends. Something was going on, but he couldn't turn on the news and
expect to hear anything akin to the truth, so he just had to wait.

Wait and wonder. And hope that things were not about to take another
turn for the worse.

                       The End

Author's notes:
This fic was written for
the Tale of Two Halloweens Challenge and 
Project Midnight Challenge. Find both challenges 
(and dozens more) here
http://www.mulderscreek.com/tnf/challengeshub.html

Learn more about Ghost Lights here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o%27-the-wisp

Want more halloween fics? Visit Bump in the Night, the new
Halloween/scary-fic archive for themes ranging from the 
infamous FBI Halloween Ball to Zombies
http://www.mulderscreek.com/halloween/bump.html