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That first Halloween of theirs is alcohol and dancing and hot pizza at 2am under the stars, stumbling back to the place he shares with Nadir, their breath misting in the frosty air, until she grabs him by the lapel and pulls him close and kisses him. She tastes of peace schnapps and when she sighs into his mouth there’s a hint of pepperoni and he swallows the taste of her, holds her closer, her arms circling his neck, and they hold each other there in the middle of the street, music still thumping in the distance, drunken students jeering and laughing and whooping, the two of them the centre, oblivious until they break apart for the sake of breathing.
She giggles and it’s like music, as they link their arms and stumble on their way.
Their first Halloween and he’s never known a night like it but he’ll remember it always, hold it dear to his heart, for the rest of his life.
Their second Halloween she is gone. In Portugal, researching her PhD and there’s no way she can make it home, not with meetings and lectures and archive arrangements.
Reading week comes, and he is close to finishing the final draft of his thesis, and it doesn’t matter that he’s busy, doesn’t matter that there are things he needs to do, not when he misses her with a fierce and desperate ache, not when he wishes he could forget, just for a few days, every single one of his anxieties, of his responsibilities, of the things that need to be fixed.
If she were here, if he could just pretend—
But she is not here. Not here, and Kate too is gone, to an archive in Arizona, and Morgan is looking towards London, but John Henry has just as many edits to make as he has, John Henry cannot follow either of his lovers, not yet, and maybe it’s spiteful of him but Erik finds an odd relief in knowing that.
John Henry has taken to wearing his hair slicked back and it leaves him looking oddly severe, but the 26th comes and despite missing Kate, despite missing Christine, they gather with bottles of cider and chartreuse, and watch Tombstone.
If Erik’s emotional state is such that he gets teary several times, the way John Henry bundles himself up in a duvet and presses tight to Morgan shows his own disturbed equilibrium.
It is, to put it mildly, a subdued affair.
He only carves two pumpkins this year, and there is no joy in it, or in Prisoner of Azkaban.
Christine has not been home since her graduation more than six weeks ago.
It is a little more than two months since they all went to Sligo and watched the Perseids, and it feels a world away.
Halloween comes and they Skype, him in his bed and her in hers, and though they talk every day, though they Snap each other and text, the distance feels unsurmountable.
(How did people cope, being apart before the internet? He feels like he’s barely coping as it is. To have less than this—)
John Henry in a dark suit, hair slicked back and glasses that are clearly for show and a black tie with white dots, pulls him out of bed to go out. “Get up off the parliamentary side of your arse,” he says, “and get a bit of colour in your face,” and if Erik weren’t so tired he might laugh to hear Michael Collins being quoted at him for all it makes Christine rant. “It could be worse.”
He’s right, of course, but it feels like the sort of statement that needs a question to follow. “How?”
John Henry shrugs. “There could be a war on.”
Their third Halloween, Halloween is on the Saturday night.
She flies in late on the Thursday evening. Tombstone was, again, a subdued affair, but the Trinity Archive research has done wonders for lifting Johnry out of his slump, and so while Kate and Morgan and Christine’s absences were all keenly felt during the two hours and fourteen minutes, there were no tears, not this time, not from either of them.
(Nadir was prepared with two boxes of tissues just the same.)
But that was Monday and it feels very far away from Thursday as he pulls Christine into his arms in the airport for all to see and she giggles into his ear and it doesn’t matter that he was going to play it cool, doesn’t matter that they agreed Lilly would be the first to hug her. She’s his fiancée and she’s here.
Three months and eight days since he impulsively proposed to her and it still feels so new and wonderful and the best thing in the world.
He has carved ten pumpkins in the last week, just to keep his hands busy, and composed two pieces for her, nevermind all the writing up he still has to do on the latest bunch of stats.
Christ but he’ll never remember what he was supposed to say about them.
He feels like he’s getting old for going out on Halloween night. Twenty-eight is just a bit much for being surrounded by drunk eighteen and nineteen year olds and any one of them might be in his tutorial classes, but fuck it. Fuck it. He’s missed her so much and she’s here, they’re going to go out.
They’ve decided on vampires. Him, tall and elegant and imperious, the palest foundation on his face and a cheap set of fake fang, his hair slicked back with some of Johnry’s gel. (Johnry himself is also wearing it, his hair a dark brown with a wave added to the slicked fringe, and he hasn’t shaved in two days. “I’m going for the 1979 look,” he said as if it made sense, and beyond that he wasn’t forthcoming but his tie is red and black and Christine looked like she half-remembered something.)
Erik wraps himself in the cloak he ordered specially online, and doesn’t regret it for a moment.
Christine has elected for a slim-fitting green dress, her hair curled and red contacts in her eyes that are a little frightening, and some of his pasty foundation. Still the mass-murdering terror of the pumpkins.
Nadir has declined to join them, citing that he’s too old now for such things though he is younger than Erik, but Morgan has flown back for the weekend, insists he has dressed as himself, and he and Johnry depart home early, hardly able to keep their hands off each other.
Erik feels like he could do the same, and when Christine pushes him to sit on one of the couches, straddles his thighs and takes the fangs out of his mouth, he suspects she feels the same.
Her fingers slip beneath his waistband, and he gasps into her mouth, and decides it’s time they headed for home.
This year, too, Christine makes it home for the weekend. Halloween is on Sunday and she’s flying back Monday morning so they will not be going out, but he does – willingly – dress as if he belongs in a western. He has devoted himself to the study of that other Erik, Erik Delacarte, since Kate presented him with the photograph at Christmas and the little bundle of music, and for once it feels fitting to wear so much plaid and boots and a broad-brimmed hat.
Nadir has taken it upon himself to attend to the trick-or-treaters, which leaves Erik quite free for when Christine takes him by the hand and leads him back to bed.
She’s gotten a tattoo – his signature on her hip. And while he is not certain how it fits into his concept of feminism, for it to look as if he literally owns her, he will admit there is something alluring about seeing his name there, about being able to trace it with his fingertips.
(He has already decided to get his own tattoo, of her signature on his hip, in the interest of balance. But also the thought of wearing her name makes his heart flutter.)
He holds her close, afterwards, and watches the fireworks through the window bright against the dark sky, and thinks of the future, and how Halloween will be, when they will have a house of their own.
The next year, they steal a chair. Well, that’s not quite accurate. It is an armchair and, yes, from the Roost, and they do very much consider stealing it, John Henry having invented the idea, but the theft would have take place before Halloween itself, if it had become a theft.
They don’t actually steal it. They come very close to it, have plans worked out and everything. Him as the mastermind, Christine as the getaway driver, Morgan brought in for heavy lifting, Uncle Al all ready to seduce the Gardaí should they get themselves into trouble. (For a man in his mid-fifties, Uncle Al, when Erik texts him, is indecently willing to take part in a seduction.)
It is Nadir who puts his foot down, insisting that as a barrister he will not be the one to defend them should it all go horribly wrong, and he will in fact disown them all, and perhaps it’s time they sober up if they’re developing hare-brained schemes.
Erik is, he will admit, a little relieved.
John Henry grumbles, but he’s drunk enough that he’s soon asleep, head in Kate’s lap.
The next day they carve pumpkins, and soon it’s time for Christine to fly back to Portugal and Morgan to London, and Johnry and Kate to the States, and it’s just Erik and Nadir left.
In the absence of all their friends, neither of them are in much mood to celebrate.
They never get as far as putting candles in the pumpkins.
Halloween would be wholly unremarkable if Christine were not home to stay, if they were not planning a wedding. A wedding still seven and a half months away, true, but a wedding nonetheless.
It is the first year without some sort of gathering for a Tombstone viewing, because John Henry is still in Colorado on 26th October, and Erik will never admit it, but he misses the tradition already.
(He will also never admit, not even to Christine, that he came very close to watching it himself, alone, just for the sake of Val Kilmer’s general way of being. Some things do not bear repeating.)
They drink cheap wine and eat cheap sweets and carve two pumpkins and he and Nadir and Christine take it in turns answering the door to children, though none of them bother dressing up.
They watch the first three Harry Potter films, and vote to forget the other five exist.
Their first Halloween married, their first Halloween in their own house, and it is only now Erik realises that he and Nadir never divided the Halloween decorations between them when he moved out. There was just so much else happening, and with the precarious state of his health at the time it never crossed his mind.
It never crossed Nadir’s mind either, and so instead of Tombstone viewing on 26th October (John Henry is away again, this time in Philadelphia), they sit down and go through the accumulated items.
Bob the Spider remains with Nadir, and his beloved cobwebs, Georgina the skeleton comes to Erik. Nadir keeps the axe, Erik takes the bats, and the skeleton in a suit they bought last year and affectionately named Joe. They split the several tiny ghosts between them, and then it is just Remus the scraggly wolf left.
Nadir nudges him over to Erik, and Erik gladly adds him to his pile.
They might, once, have toasted their efforts with wine or whiskey, but since his surgery in the spring Erik has not touched any alcohol other than the champagne at the wedding (though there is a bottle of chartreuse that John Henry gave him as a wedding gift, and a reminder of their time in Connemara that one summer, and he does find himself contemplating it, every now and then), so instead of toasting themselves and Halloween with anything bad for anyone’s health, they toast it with Summer Fruits juice instead.
Christine has acquired pumpkins, and some orange lights, and a few more bits and pieces, and it is oddly satisfying to have some of his old friends back again.
Georgina and Joe take their new places by the door, standing stately and held up with wire, and with pumpkins at their feet and on the pillars and in the garden on either side, and Remus in the window howling to the little ghosts and bats, it is quite a picture.
They are too old to go out, too old to dress up with any sort of effort. The weather is dry and crisp, and they go for a long walk by the canal like they did that first year, their fingers interlinked now as then. And when they get home, she sets up Harry Potter and he makes cocoa and puts packets of sweets into a bowl for the children that will soon appear at the door, and with the fire burning they settle in each other’s arms, and drink the cocoa and wait.
They pass three unremarkable Halloweens, and then the year comes that Clíodhna is a baby and as he puts Georgina II into place (Georgina I tragically fell apart last year, but he sets her out as a heap of bones), he wonders if his tiny baby girl might not find all this a bit frightening.
She does stare, the first time she sees Georgina and Joe, and yelps as if surprised, but the feared tears do not come, and Christine looks at him as if to say, I told you so.
(She did indeed tell him so.)
They add a witch to the collection this year, and call her Audrey, and with Clíodhna settled into her high chair gurgling and laughing, he cuts faces into the pumpkins until a squeal and a giggle catch him off guard, and he looks up to find Christine, dancing off with their baby girl around the sitting room, and the feeling that swells in his heart is beyond naming.
For several years, Clíodhna is too young, still, for trick-or-treating. On her second Halloween, she develops a taste for jellies, on her third, Christine sets cat ears on her head which she pulls off to look at, then hands them back up to her mother to wear.
(Erik has to turn away to hide his laughter.)
They dress her as a tiny cat the next year, and every time he opens the door to their callers, she meows and presents the bowl of sweets.
When he opens the door and finds John Henry and can only stand and stare because the man is supposed to be still in Sussex working through a sanatorium archive, he’s snapped out of his daze by Clíodhna putting the bowl down and launching herself into their visitor’s arms.
“Johnry Johnry Johnry,” she’s learned the nickname from him, and Johnry is laughing and wearing a grey suit like the one he had when he was Doc Holliday the year he rushed in to talk to Christine about Noël Browne, but he’s laughing now too and grinning at Erik over Clíodhna’s dark curls and cat ears.
“Well won’t you invite me in?” and there’s a trace of sauntering cheek in his voice, so that it’s all Erik can do to maintain a straight face.
“I heard it’s bad luck to invite in strangers.”
And Johnry winks. “Only when they’re vampires.”
The struggle not to snort is so much he throws the door open, and Johnry steps inside.
The next year there is no surprise visit from John Henry because John Henry is already here. Nadir has assumed responsibility for Clíodhna for the day and the night, and Johnry has appointed himself the greeter of children at the door, his hair dyed back to black and slicked into place, with his heavy wool coat and bow tie.
(“You don’t want Clíodhna’s friends,” he said, “wondering why they can’t visit this year. They might upset her in school.” And school is just junior infants, but Erik would do anything to keep Clíodhna from getting upset.)
Neither Erik nor Christine have gone to any effort dressing up. He’s still tired, still recovering from the surgery that saved his life in July, and she just didn’t feel like it, and he can hardly blame her.
Clíodhna was a little upset over their lack of decorations this year when every other house in the estate is lit up, but Kate took responsibility for the pumpkins when she arrived yesterday, and Morgan set to work with the decorations, even adding a cowboy hat to Joe that made Erik laugh to see.
(Clíodhna was the happiest little girl in the world again, by the time they were putting her to bed.)
There was the idea that they might have gone down to Sligo for a few days, and stayed with his mother or Al, and but it was deemed too tiring and he’s glad now they changed their minds, glad they decided to stay, and that their friends came.
He holds Christine close on the couch, when everyone has gone, and as she leans into him he kisses her hair and wonders how next year will be, with their new baby, wonders how he will be.
And will he be able to enjoy it? Or are his best years already behind him?
“No we’re not dressing Andriú up as baby Harry Potter.”
“But Daaaaad…” and she gives him those big pleading eyes, just like Christine’s.
“He wouldn’t like it.”
“Yes he would.” No five year old has the right to look as adamant as this, certainly not one wrapped in a black coat looking for all the world like a tiny Hermione Granger. “All he needs is the scar.” She says it very precisely, wiggling her fingers in front of her forehead so he knows what she means.
“Have you asked Mummy yet?” That’s good, Erik, play it cool, pass it over to Christine.
She tears off into the kitchen. “Mummy Mummy Mummy…” and he sighs and fixes his battered coat around himself (Remus Lupin again this year, and feeling ancient to go with it) and follows her.
And finds Christine grinning in her battered blue dress, and Andriú in his high chair, a delicate lightning bolt drawn on his forehead.
“See Daddy! Mummy said yes!”
He represses the urge to sigh, again, and smiles down at the bundle of energy that is his daughter. Was he like that once upon a time? Or does she get it from Christine? Or is it both of them?
Probably the latter.
He makes a great show of checking his watch. “We should be going or all the houses will be out of sweets.”
She gasps just like he knew she would and rushes for the door, but he stops her. “Goodbye kisses.”
She whirls around and leans up to kiss Andriú’s cheek and Christine leans down to receive her kiss, then stands so he can kiss her. Andriú’s forehead is soft beneath his lips, and hardly has he straightened up when Clíodhna grabs his hand, and pulls him out the door.