The Final Trick
by Scott Savino
It is with no small dread that I recount the visitation that comes to me upon this night each
year, with dreadful regularity—a creature I have dared not face, not even for a moment, not
once in the twelve visits where it has mounted the creaking steps of my weary wooden porch. I
believe it arrives near twilight, lurking somewhere close by, watching and waiting until the
precise hour when I prepare to retire. Only then does it tap its small, unnatural fist upon my
door. Ah, the sound—the sound of this particular knocking evokes a primal fear so profound
that, though I have spent many hours answering other such knocks, rather than open the door
for a final time, I cower in the darkness, breath held, praying it will leave. Yet tonight, I feel
something within me has shifted. I am weary of hiding from this being, weary of ceding my own
home to its silent demands! A funny concept to consider for I have not once in these many
years had the courage to swing wide the door and inquire of it just what those demands might
be. What does it want from me? I simply can stand it no longer! I must know why it torments me
so!
So, tonight, on this, the thirteenth anniversary of the onset of its onslaught of terror, I shall face
the abominable porcelain doll that has come to me again and again, masquerading as though it
were but another child out to trick-or-treat.
It is not merely that a child should knock upon my door after dark that unnerves me; many small
hands will rap upon my entryway tonight. Tradition compels such things of children on nights
like this, and I once delighted in them. I did… yet the sweetness of those delights has long since
burned away, leaving naught but ashes in my mouth, for this final visitor who comes each year
is different. It arrives alone, deep in the shadowed hour when all others have long since retired
and the night’s chill has returned to the very bones of the earth. From our first encounter, I knew
this was no child, though it wears the guise and mimics the manner of one.
Late each Halloween night, it comes when all others are safely inside as if lying in wait for the
parade of merriment to fade. It is at the precise moment I extinguish my lights that this
shadowed figure appears at the edge of my porch. It knocks, and then speaks the customary
words—but the whispered ‘trick or treat’ that slips from this tiny mouth chills me to the core, for
the sound carries a weight of ancient, timeworn malevolence. This voice, though soft, reaches
every corner of my house, no matter where I might try to hide from it. It is no voice I have ever
heard before, for even with my hands pressed firmly over my ears, the susurration persists. This
voice is nothing mortal—I fear it may not originate from a mouth at all, but from some defiance
of natural law, the voice of an ill-intended fiend resonating from a place deep within my brain.
Each encounter leaves an impression that claws at my soul, and I cannot rid myself of the dread
that builds each year, nor can I resist the hand of fear that grips me when I dare imagine what
might lurk beneath that ruinous ceramic mask.
I know you must think me mad—it’s Halloween night, and by all reasonable assumptions, this
child is not the revenant I imagine it to be, but simply a child! And indeed, I would assume the
same were you recounting this tale to me. But I assure you, this is no earthly child. I nearly
believed it myself that first year, until a single glance at this visitor’s garb as it lurked on my front
stoop gave me reason to pause.
That first year, with my hand touching the hasp of the deadbolt, I almost convinced myself it was
just an unusually unsettling costume—a trick of my own imagination, sparked by the season.
Yet there was something about its presence that gnawed at my serenity, an unease I couldn’t
rationalize or explain. Each time I tried to dismiss it as merely a child in costume, my mind
returned to its strange stillness, to the eerie quiet that blanketed the porch the moment it
appeared. For these apparent reasons and others I had yet to discover, my hand moved
reflexively, instinctively away. Hoping my glance through the window had gone unseen, I
retreated to the safety of the shadows within my darkened home.
And so began my fixation, a compulsion to understand this visitor that grew stronger with each
passing Halloween. In those early moments of doubt and curiosity, as I questioned the nature of
what stood on my doorstep, memories stirred—fragments from my youth, from things I’d learned
so many decades ago…
If you remember, as I do, my student years at Eldertide Polytechnic University, I studied for a
certificate in Marine Cryptobiology—a rather odd field, to be sure. You see, the campus where I
matriculated was perched upon a series of cliffs overlooking Echo Bay, a township whose
surrounding waters teemed with strange, unclassifiable entities. Having grown up near the Bay,
these creatures never struck me as odd—though odd they were indeed—and the fact that both
the region and the university seemed to draw minds curious for the eerie and unexplained, as if
by some unseen magnetism, did not feel strange to me either. It was, simply, a matter of daily
life.
The village itself is a place of whispered secrets—its waters hide creatures never cataloged by
modern science, things haunting the depths beyond the reefs, which, in hushed tones, we
students suspected held more than mere marine life. Eldertide did not openly teach the occult,
but neither did it discourage students from pursuing esoteric studies; such interests met with
neither praise nor rebuke. Indeed, the school’s occult library held tomes on death and burial, on
ancient rites, and even on entities of unknown origin—a trove for those who, like myself, had an
unholy curiosity about the edges of knowledge. At the time, I accepted these texts in the
university’s maritime library without question.
It was there that I first learned of the Victorian mourning doll, in a study of the funerary customs
of obscure sects, through a text as fragile as it was forbidden. These dolls were designed to
resemble children claimed by illness, their painted eyes shut in eternal sleep, their porcelain
faces a chilling echo of the dead they represented. Families kept these creations as vessels of
grief, dressing them in miniature burial attire, sometimes even weaving in locks of the
deceased’s own hair. This Victorian obsession with preserving death extended into these eerie effigies,
grotesque yet hauntingly lifelike—surrogate children, icons of loss bearing an uncanny
resemblance to those who had passed.
Seeing a child in such a costume—black lace, a sallow face beneath an ebon bonnet—filled me
with indescribable dread. And the mask! The mask was spidered with cracks across the frail
ceramic, each fracture snaking outward from every corner toward two hollow epicenters. For
where the porcelain doll should have had painted, sleeping eyes, the mask was broken away,
revealing only sockets of endless void. There were no eyes inside—only a darkness that
seemed to stretch on forever, sending a chill through me as deep as the waters of the Bay. I
realized, with overwhelming dread, that this figure was not simply dressed as a mourner, but as
one of the dead itself, a haunting, voiceless reminder of the lengths to which people have gone
to defy the cruel separation of death.
Don’t you see? The very idea of the garb itself was not merely ghastly, but far too morose a
theme to have been chosen by any ordinary child. And yet, it wasn’t until the following year that
I began to take note of the many other unsettling characteristics of my strange visitor.
It was that second year that I first noticed the unsettling quiet that arrived with him as he set foot
upon my sagging doorstep. I am nearly seventy-eight now, and in the time since my retirement,
as the years advance, I have lost some of the knack for repair I once valued in my youth.
Certain deteriorations to my home now lie beyond my ability to remedy—chief among them the
rotting boards of my front porch. Throughout the evening, the warped wood would groan
beneath the feet of each visitor, even the smallest child causing the boards to bend and creak
as they pressed against the rusting nails, their protest echoing faintly throughout the house. But
not with this child.
Yet when he mounted the steps, slowly and carefully in the darkness, he somehow avoided
every groan and whine of the weathered planks. That year, I remained near the door until he
had gone, watching as he trodden upon the fallen leaves blanketing the path below the final
step—not a single leaf crackled or broke beneath his scuffed, dark leather boots. The eerie
quiet that seemed to surround him did not depart when he finally disappeared into the night;
instead, it lingered for hours, so prolonged and absolute that the only sound remaining was the
faint ringing of tinnitus in my ears. For a brief time, I feared I’d gone deaf. Only when I dared to
climb the stairs to my bedroom, hearing the creak of my own weary joints, did I feel a strange,
fleeting sense of relief.
It wasn’t until the third year, when he arrived at my home once again, that I realized what
startled me most about this child, whose unsettling behaviors hadn’t changed since the initial
Halloween his dubious shadow first fell over my doorstep. His unnerving outfit was exactly the
same each time. I don’t mean merely that he wore the same haunting disguise year after year,
though that is true as well; rather, the vestment itself, already ripped and worn by decades
before I first laid eyes on him, had not changed at all. Given its original state, it should have long
since rotted into unwearable rags, yet to this day, it remains frozen in the same state of
disrepair. The dark wool of his filthy frock coat is caked with the same crusted mud as in years
before—no inch of it clean, a horrid canvas of smears and stains.
There are particular stains etched in my memory: one, the size of the skinless skull of a wild cat,
near the bottom on the left; another, a clot of moist dirt smeared across the right lapel, lumpy
and bulbous with dimensions similar to those of a spider’s egg sac swollen with an unhatched
brood. In all these years, not a speck of this misshapen clot has dried or crumbled away of its
own accord. It remains. Each year, every stain remains precisely the same as I remember them,
for they are permanently etched and continuously relived by my mind through the lens of my
horrific sleeping memories.
Every inch of the garment’s bottom hem is frayed, yet by that third year, I noticed it hadn’t
deteriorated further as one might reasonably expect and this fact has remained true ever since.
Black lace is gathered at the end of each of his sleeves. It is moth-eaten, riddled with extra
holes–crude apertures that were never woven by any lacemaker–yet these unintended gaps in
the lacework have grown no larger. A cravat, as dark as a handkerchief that has been used to
absorb a pot of spilled ink sits about his neck, its ends ragged and threadbare, with the very
same loose threads dangling, as though awaiting a hand to tug them apart. And yet, in all this
time, no hand has done so; they hang just as limply, at the same length, as they did on that very
first Halloween.
Every inch of him is filthy, from the small, tilted black top hat down to his breeches, as though
he’d spent his day clawing his way up from an ancient crypt. And he very well may have, for he
brings with him a rank odor of petrichor and decay—a stench that calls to mind freshly turned
soil and dead and rotting things that one might find in a grave, freshly disturbed.
Stop. What have you agreed to do? You’ve agreed to listen to what I have to say about the
presence that has visited me these many years, without interruption. And yet, once again, you
feel compelled to interject? I know well what you think, for you have already attempted to
convince me that these experiences are naught but illusions, mere specters of a weary mind.
But I am telling you, I have seen this thing with my own eyes, felt the sourness of my own
intuition as it sets the bile in my stomach churning. I am aware that old age has changed me; I
am no longer the man I once was. My mind occasionally falters, it is true, and thoughts
sometimes slip from their rightful place, but these confusions pass as swiftly as they come, like
clouds across the moon. You cannot continue to seize upon that one isolated incident—one
stray moment when, yes, I forgot Leonard had passed, and for an instant believed I was not
alone in this house. But do not compare that to misplacing a pocket watch or a set of house
keys.
Will you not heed my words? I forgot he was gone in a fleeting confusion—one moment alone. I
remember his funeral with vivid clarity. It was a Thursday, and the sky was dark with storm
clouds, though not a drop of rain fell. And I remember each painful detail of his burial, though
you’d dismiss my account as the ramblings of an elderly muddle-headed old fool. Let me finish
telling you of this revenant that comes to me yearly, spreading its torment upon my doorstep.
The cacodemon that haunts me is not some fancy of my mind, and I’ll not consent to have you
send a nurse here to meddle and murmur about me when I am perfectly capable of my own
care. Enough of your interruptions—when I have recounted to you the horrific aspects of this
manifestation, I will tell you precisely what I intend to do about it. And afterward, I will hang up
this call, for I will hear no more rebuttals, no more advice or admonishments regarding the
supposed feebleness of my old age from my own cousin, who, let me remind you, has for his
entire life been four years my junior. You are of an advanced age as well, Walter, lest you forget
that. I am beginning to remember the reasons we’ve spent so much time estranged and with
that recollection, I am very much regretting that I’ve taken your call.
Now, if you would let me resume, I would tell you that it took several of the years that followed
before I came to note the unbearable feeling of cold that I’ve felt each Halloween since that
first—tonight now thirteen years past. It may have taken until the seventh or eighth year before I
was able to attribute the arrival of the inescapable chill that heralds his presence, descending an
hour or two before the normal children return home from their evening of frightful holiday fun.
For many years before it became of note, I had attempted to quell the frigid drafts I attributed to
the typical seasonal temperature dips of October’s even falls by lighting the furnace or even
bringing dried logs from the pile outside in for the fireplace. Once or twice, I even lit the stove
and sat before it, the pilots burning with the gas turned up to the highest levels. Each of these
attempts accomplished little to nothing, and the air everywhere around me remained as icy as
the clutch of the reaper.
It was not until after many years of fruitlessly seeking solutions that might resolve these silvery
atmospheric shifts that I realized there was no stopping myself from shivering as I sat before a
searing log or a scorching oven’s naked flames…there was to be no effective force to banish
this chill from the air because this chill did not arrive upon the air but on the fingertips of this
creature’s unseen claws, deposited in a hole those claws had scratched into my soul. This
molestation of glacial winds was never coming from without. It had always come from within,
radiating out from me and into my surroundings.
Halfway through the night, I unconsciously began to notice that those children who visited were
freezing as well, and I began to suspect I was the cause of that symptom. I watched as their
breaths formed normal ghosts in the air, and by the time the moon was high, their
exhalations were as thick as fog resting on the surface of a frozen lake. My own breathing, I
found, was just as dense. I don’t know why it took me so many years to discover it, but I learned
after watching all of the conventional childrens’ chilled respirations at my door, by stealing
furtive, fearful glances through the entryway curtains, that this malevolent beast not only did not
shiver at the cold the way that its peers had done (if, as you continue to insist on my misplaced
rationality, that based on its size and stature children are its peers at all.)—there was no cloud
of breath. I learned on that night so many Halloweens ago that this thing did not seem to
breathe at all.
With the advent of this epiphany, in the many years that followed, I decided I had seen well
enough of this entity. Cultural traditions, and the joy that this time of year once brought me, still
compel me to ignite the guiding lights that lead to my front door, and to pass treats into the
buckets, bags, and pillowcases outstretched by every trick-or-treater who knocks—every trick-
or-treater except that one. For what must now be five years, in the moments immediately after
extinguishing the porch lights, I retreat quickly to the basement, where I proceed to cower until it
leaves. Like you, I too have questioned the rationality of my behavior, the absurdity of my
reactions to what might seem to be just another child, out for an evening of annual spooky fun. It
would be easier to accept that I suffer from paranoia, or perhaps even the onset of dementia, if
not for one undeniable fact: since the year I ceased glancing through the windowpane at it, this
demon has begun knocking for longer and longer periods of time.
Three years ago, it continued to rap on my door for half an hour, then for a full hour the year
before last. After what I experienced this previous Halloween, I’ve decided I can no longer afford
to react in terror to this creature’s endless demands, for you see, it continued to knock and
knock and knock—its unignorable, thunderous whispers of ‘trick or treat’ echoing from the back
of my skull—for two full hours. Yes, for two hours, it went on, unceasingly knock, knock,
knocking at my door, calling out ‘trick, trick, trick—treat, treat, treat’ with that endlessly echoing
silent voice. This relentless torment left me helpless and sobbing on the cold concrete of my
basement within ninety minutes. Don’t you understand? I just can’t take it.
If this lich’s patterns hold, it stands to reason that this year I will be forced to endure four hours
or more of its voice resounding inside my mind as I lie helpless on my basement floor. So, I
have reached a simple conclusion: I will finally allow it to do what it has come to do, if only
because then—at long last—this ordeal will be finished. Tonight, I shall face this wretched
tormentor, and once I learn what it is, I will give it whatever thing it desires, if that alone will
compel it to leave my door and never return.
The trick-or-treaters will be here soon, Walter, and so I must take my leave of this conversation.
I would wish you a pleasant evening, but once again, you have teased away whatever cordiality
I may have spared for you. May you have the very night you deserve, cousin.
As the hours have aged past tonight, I find the resolve I had assured myself of earlier in the day
wavering. Steeling myself for what must be done, I begin to carry out the plan I swore to follow,
regardless of fear or hesitation.
With a long, bracing breath, I extinguish the porch light, casting the house’s exterior into
complete darkness, leaving only the weak blue light of the swollen moon. Moving carefully, I
make my way through each room, seeking out and smothering every source of illumination,
allowing the thick, oppressive shadows to gather and swallow me whole. I bury the bedside
clock beneath a pillow, cover the oven’s glowing display with a thick towel, and unplug the
microwave—banishing every glimmer, every whisper of light. This is my fate, my descent. I will
not face this persecutor in glaring light; I will sink into the gloom and meet it on its own ground.
Navigating blind through the darkness, I reach the kitchen and drag a heavy wooden chair to the
door. I settle into it, feeling the wood’s unyielding hardness against my back, setting myself to
wait as silence, thick and nearly tangible, spills from the shadows.
Slowly, I notice a shift in the air. That dreadful chill, once distant, awakens anew, plunging even
deeper into what I can only imagine has replaced my blood with something icy and otherworldly.
Though the furnace ought to keep the home’s warmth at bay, each breath now leaves me as a
a ghostly plume of mist hanging in the air.
A rattling sound disrupts the stillness, subtle at first until it becomes an irritating, grating noise. I
only realize its source after some moments—it is my own teeth, chattering, perhaps from the
glacial air or from terror itself. Whichever it may be, I remove my dentures, placing them warm
and wet in my lap, quieting this unconscious sound.
The minutes stretch with unbearable slowness—ten, fifteen…twenty. By the twenty-fifth minute,
irritation begins to replace fear, twisting itself around my already frayed nerves. Have I truly
allowed myself to surrender to some imagined terror, a figment of my own mind, as Walter
implied earlier? Is this creature no more than a specter haunting the shadows of an aging
psyche?
Just as I am about to leave the chair, ready to abandon the vigil, a soft, deliberate knock echoes
through the house, freezing me mid-step.
For a moment, I wonder if I only imagined it—a fanciful trick, the first sign of a cracked cognition.
And then, another knock—one soft rap after another, each sinking into me like the slow tolling of
a funerary death knell.
I turn slowly, heart pounding, each beat a frenzied attempt by the organ to liberate itself from my
ribs. Cold, stiff fingers reach toward the deadbolt, pulling it back, and then find the knob. With a
final, trembling exhale, I pull the door open.
There it stands, waiting for me just beyond the threshold. For the first year since this torment
began, I am facing it directly, rather than from behind my curtained window, and for the first year
in many long years, it is silent. It is barely more than a shadow, cloaked by the moonlight and
the shade of the oaks, as though enveloped by a darkness that pulses with its own malignancy.
The figure is slight, and as my eyes adjust to the gloam of nearly midnight, I make out a strange
fabric clinging to it—cloth woven of cloth as dark as tortured souls, absorbing every trace of
illumination in the surrounding darkness and snuffing it out. The edges of the garment shift and
waver, blurred and jagged, as though it were wrapped in shadows so dense they fray into the
air, spectral wisps drifting with a will of their own.
As it lifts its head to look up at me, the shadow of a blackened top hat slips away to reveal its
face—and God help me, the face! What stares back is an eyeless mask of rough, unpolished
bone, stark white against the shadows, its surface marred by fractures that crawl like veins
across the cheeks and brow. The sockets gape, wide and cavernous, each a dark void that
seems to reach endlessly inward, as though drawing in all light and life. Within those hollows
lies an ancient, unspeakable emptiness that feels as if it might have sentience and breathe on
its own without the need of the substantiation of a corporeal body.
The creature tilts its head ever so slightly, a slow, deliberate movement, and I become aware of
the foul, unsettling air that clings to it—a scent dry and old, like parchment hidden away in
damp, forgotten tombs, mingled with a faint rot–a repugnant putridity that fills the air with an
unsavory sweet decay.
My breath fogs in the cold air between us as I stare into the mask’s depths. My hands are as
cold as death itself, yet I find the strength to raise one of them, fingers trembling as they brush
the fractured edge of the mask. The terror I feel at this touch is indescribable, a churning horror
so profound it defies language—nay, further departed from language, it defies understanding
entirely—a dread that unravels the very fabric of my sanity throbs from my fingers, following
down my wrist, into my arm and then thrumming with the beat of uncertain doom throughout my
body. Every instinct within me screams to flee, yet my hand seems to act of its own accord,
gripping the edge of the mask and lifting it, so slowly that the act stretches into eternity.
The moment seems to continue onward and time becomes elastic and pulls away forever.
And then I see.
I don’t know what I expected to discover but it certainly wasn’t the very thing I behold staring
back at me in the dark. The face I look upon is a face I know but it appears to hold a weariness
and exhaustion I don’t remember it to have shown me previously. There is a quiet bewilderment
somewhere behind the skin that I neglected to notice when last I gazed upon this face in the
mirror…
It is my own face, though it does not look as I remember it to be. I run my fingertips beneath my own
eyes and feel the bags beneath them. I never knew my eyes to be so devoid of joy and to carry
the weight of such bags beneath them, but I know that this thing that is staring back at me,
pale, hollow, and leached of all warmth is indeed the truth—my truth. I can feel every crag of
wrinkle and every sag of jowl that I see upon my own face, with my own hands. As any light that
may have previously remained inside of my eyes fades away as the recognition of these truths
dawns on me. My own eyes, now fully dead of joy, usefulness or purpose gaze back into
themselves and I see and acknowledge the emptiness within them—there, lurking somewhere
behind them is a fathomless confusion that hides away and has been hiding away, a harsh truth
ignored until this moment. With a heavy finality, I see myself as I must truly be–as the thing I
have become—drained of life—a hollow shell—empty—useless…
As I stare at the child that stares back at me with my own face, through my own hollow eyes, a
lifeless smile pulls at its cracked lips and that smile slowly twists into a deathly rictus. But—but
wait! This is a reflection of the emotions of my own face is it not? Why then does this wicked grin
strike such a chord of horror within me to set my pulse to race once again at the pace, the
erratic arrhythmic tempo it beat with prior to the revelation of this truth? This revelation
befell me with a sense of sorrow and calm.
I don't understand! A moment ago, I gazed upon what I knew to be the truth and in the next
moment, something about the face has morphed into something else entirely! That is not a
smile that my lips have ever smiled!
My heart seizes, and the boy, dressed as a broken Victorian Mourning Doll removes his top hat,
and holds it before him as if it were the Halloween treat pail of an ordinary young person. Only
then do I hear the ancient sound of the voice I have dreaded all night to be forced to hear as it
slithers not just into my ears, but into my mouth, my nose, my eyes—it slides its way through my
every open orifice and coils itself as an unwelcome visitor might disregard its host and make
itself a home within my mind—an ancient low, hollow whisper rattles through not just my head,
but every organ in my body muttering, “trick or treat” and the face before me—the smile on the
face which is mine, but also mine no longer continues to grow inexplicably and preternaturally
ever wide…
The sound of the words becomes an endless echo that reverberates and sears my
consciousness with its inexplicable incandescence, burning white-hot and bright until it
vacillates suddenly, dissolving rapidly into something gelid and tenebrious. The sound stretches,
twisting to defy comprehension before it evolves abruptly from its nebulous state of disarray into
something recognizable once again.
Laughter.
It is endless and soulless and quietly, it fills the night.
The realization of the mistake I’ve made comes to me suddenly and as I attempt to stumble
backward and away, the looming darkness closes in from all around to consume me and the
laughter resonates within my thoughts in a crescendo that is growing ever louder.
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