Dia De Los Muertos

I took the bus out to Discovery Park one night. The problem with Magnolia, the part of town where Discovery Park lies, along with a smattering of smallish, modest houses and apartment buildings, is that it's too insular, too far away from everything. Only a mile away as the crow flies from downtown, Magnolia is at least fifteen minutes from everywhere. There are only three bridges to get there, though the place isn't even an island. It's a perfect place to hide from anyone or anything, a perfect place for ugliness to slip through.

In my pocket I held a letter to my ex-girlfriend. We had never even gone to Discovery Park together, although we had visited several parks in the area. We liked to walk around; it was sort of our thing. Come to think of it, almost every relationship I've been in has included lots of long walks.

It was a late-summer, early-autumn night, one of the first nights at the end of the summer (and there are always a few) where I wished I had worn jeans instead of shorts. Someone had told me that Discovery Park was haunted, but I don't remember who, or why. It was strange to have heard this, and I wondered what they could mean. I have seen and heard things that could make your skin crawl, but I have never really had a paranormal experience that wasn't attributable to drugs. Premonitory dreams and voices are one thing, but I've never had one of those "oh, shit" experiences that has totally wrenched apart my deeply-held, scientific understanding of physical matter and its properties. The unaccountability of extra-sensory perception can be accounted for: energy fields, waves, and particles are a lot more fluid according to physical law than matter in its various states.

As I walked into the park entrance, the darkness closed around me. Barely visible were the outlines of the trees against the moonless sky, and through an arbor tunnel I walked on a gravel path. In this weather, the color of the path matched the black sky, flecked just barely with smudges. Creaks and gasps from the surrounding foliage bled into my mind, amplifying and swirling into a muddle of voices and laughter. The trees began to speak to me in tongues, of their lost branches and the death of every winter's coming. My breathing became labored and I looked into the dark for any sign of life, but the static salt-and-pepper that lives in the corners of my perception, coming to the foreground only to fill in the blanks when there isn't enough information to process, had swept in and injected rivers and eddies of formless stars shot through my vision. I remember feeling frightened, putting my best sneering smile on, and continuing on through the jittering darkness. I hoped to scare the demons away with my own pride.

A streetlight appeared in the distance, and shined its matchstick light into my field of view. The sickly tangerine of fluorescent reflections pervaded the edges of objects now, throbbing and devouring everything in a fit of blissful recognition. I crossed a bridge and found myself looking over a field, dotted with officers' housing, remnants of the army base that was the original intention for preserving so much land from development. To one side was forest, the other a broad field followed by a long drop and the ocean, and dead ahead was a mutilated industrialistic framework of chain fences and cylindrical metallic structures. It was as if aliens had landed in a ghost town.

The ever-present wind here on this precipice over the ocean chattered through sibilant grasses, spreading like wildfire. I pulled the letter from my pocket after a short walk to the middle of a field.

Reading and re-reading it in the half-light, I was aware that it sounded fatuous and insipid, that anyone who read it would probably feel the same; so I decided to skip professing my love for a woman I hardly knew any more. This was a letter to a ghost. The woman I had fallen in love with no longer existed, replaced by a more responsible, more mature version, but I was still hopelessly, madly in love with her. It was a stupid and irresponsible thing to do, to fall in love with someone who couldn't love me, so I set it alight.

It took forever.

The paper, heavy with ink and the sweat from my pocket, hardly even smoldered. I wasn't sure that this wasn't some sort of test, but lo! eventually the flame took ahold and the paper began to belch gray, dark-gray smoke. Nothing happened.

There was no great voice, no weight lifted from my chest, no feeling of elation or relief, simply a heat that grew to burning as it approached my hand. I waited until the fire was completely burnt out before I stomped the paper to make sure: I didn't want my personal information, even in fragments, floating around, ready to be decoded and analyzed by the next schmuck to happen by.

Screams and calls, cries of horror and helplessness emanated from the energy around the houses where officers and their servants and slaves used to live. They sailed over my head and through the spaces between my bones. At once I started, jolted awake from a deep sleep of tears and regret, and was free of the misery and depression I had felt prior to that point.

And then the werewolves got me.