It was evident from the age of four that she wasn’t like the other children. Other children believed in things like fairies and unicorns and Santa Claus. Other children’s favorite holiday was Christmas. At one point, in school, someone had decided to take a ‘favorite holidays’ survey to make a pie chart. It backfired in the poor child’s face; everyone chose Christmas. She did, too, not wanting to be the 1%. But it was a lie. It was always a lie. From the first time she trick-or-treated, she felt something. At first she wrote it off as the atmosphere of the evening. That was how you were supposed to feel on Halloween, was it not? Some kind of strange magic in the air? As if someone, or some thing, or some combination of the two, was watching you? Oddly enough, it didn’t scare her. She was afraid of many things, which is why it always baffled people as to why her favorite holiday was Halloween, if she chose to tell them so. But this presence that she felt, every Halloween night, was...