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He’s dressed up like a ghost for Halloween. It’s a classic costume, considered so basic that people who wear it stand out as they’re practically the only ones dressed up as a ghost. He had considered dressing up as a ninja instead, but those costumes were too stuffy for his liking. A simple white sheet is good enough, especially since he could wear anything he wanted (or needed) underneath it for the cold night.
Er-ge hands him a plastic pumpkin basket, muttering something about how it’s too cold. Er-ge is twelve, and he doesn’t wear a costume. Costumes were too cold for him, and he hated the cold. Da-ge doesn’t dress up either. Being fourteen, A-Niang and A-Die always said that Da-ge was too old for Halloween and trick-or-treating. And Meimei is just a four-year-old, four years younger than he is.
Bidding their parents goodbye, Er-ge holds Meimei’s hand while Da-ge holds Shen Yuan's so as to not lose the two youngest. Outside, the air is cold, as expected. Shen Yuan wore a brown wool sweater under the white sheet, but maybe he should’ve worn another layer. Er-ge mutters something about how it’s "frigid like Elsa descended upon our town" and Da-ge shakes his head.
The neighborhood is lit with Halloween decorations, fairy lights, and open lights from the houses. The streets were filled with children and their guardians, and the wind gently tickled their faces. Meimei whines incoherently, and Da-ge points to the left.
"Let’s start there, alright? Then we can go in the other direction."
Shen Yuan nods while Er-ge grunts in agreement, and the four Shen siblings head towards the houses.
"Trick-or-treat!" he says to the lady with a candy bowl.
She coos at him and Meimei before dumping a couple candies into their baskets. Meimei seems to find interest in the colorful wrappings of the candies, and she grabs one before biting at the plastic. Er-ge mumbles to Meimei and pries the candy from her mouth before dropping it back inside the basket.
They go to another house, one with the bright and expensive decorations, with the owners sitting outside holding bowls of chocolate. They give Shen Yuan a Kitkat and Meimei a Snickers, and they even offer Er-ge and Da-ge chocolate bars. Da-ge politely accepts, and Er-ge takes one with a flush on his face. Er-ge liked sweets, he just wouldn’t admit to it.
They go from house to house until the air gets even colder and the moon is a bright yellow crescent in the sky. On the way to yet another house, Shen Yuan sees a figure from the corner of his eye. Turning, he sees a boy sitting on the sidewalk, wearing nothing but a raggy pair of jeans, a faded black sweater, and what seems to be a pair of black dog ears atop his curly hair, along with a tail hanging from the back of his hip.
Shen Yuan releases his hand from Er-ge’s, heading in the direction of the curly-haired boy.
"Wha– A-Yuan!"
Upon getting closer to the boy, he could see bruises and bandaids adorning his face. He was rather adorable too, likely a couple years younger than Shen Yuan. He held a small paper bag. There was some candy inside.
However, Er-ge catches him before he can talk to the boy. The boy looks up, wide-eyed, and runs away. Shen Yuan is only able to stare.
Later, after heading in another direction, Shen Yuan sees the boy again. Er-ge is turned another way, holding the bucket of candy that Shen Yuan had thought was too heavy. He’s chatting with another boy, though if you could even call it chatting.
The other boy was Liu Mingyu, some boy from Er-ge’s school that he didn’t like. Liu Mingyu had a very pretty face, but was fierce and often argued with Er-ge. While Da-ge holds Meimei’s hand, Er-ge lets go of Shen Yuan’s hand, opting to spit not-so-child-friendly insults at Liu Mingyu as Da-ge sighs in disappointment.
At the given opportunity, Shen Yuan slips away from the others to go after the curly-haired boy with the paper bag.
The boy is walking along the sidewalk, heading to god-knows-where as Shen Yuan slowly catches up to him. But the boy turns around and locks eyes with Shen Yuan before dashing off. The boy was shorter and smaller than Shen Yuan, but he ran much faster, especially since the white sheet over Shen Yuan held him back.
Perhaps by now, Er-ge and the others have noticed that he is gone, but Shen Yuan still chases after the shorter boy. "Xiao Gou, where are you going?" he shouts.
The boy didn’t look back, instead slipping past a large tree. Shen Yuan follows him, but when he reaches the tree, he slips. It wasn’t from a rock or a comical banana peel. Rather, he fell. He fell into a hole.
Huh... Maybe he shouldn’t have followed the boy.
His own thoughts barely register before he’s falling and his eyes close.
~~~~~
When he wakes up again, someone is poking at his face. His eyes crack open to see a boy several years older than him, with bright eyes and brown hair. He wore a simple brown sweater vest and one of those fancy white shirts A-Die sometimes wears. Behind the teenager’s back is a pair of fake angel wings, quite fitting for his angelic appearance.
When Shen Yuan sits upright, he can see another teenager behind Angel-Boy. He was dressed as a pirate, with a pirate hat, a poet’s shirt, and an eyepatch. Pirate-Boy is taller than Angel-Boy by a few inches, with a pitch black eye and dark hair tied into a ponytail. Unlike Angel-Boy, he wasn’t smiling.
"Are you alright?" Angel-Boy asks.
Shen Yuan touches the back of his head. No blood, but it hurts a little bit. "I’m alright. My head just hurts."
"Are you new here?"
"Eh?"
Pirate-Boy, who had been silent the whole time, finally spoke. "Did you die recently?"
"I’m not dead. I just fell through something."
Angel-Boy blinks before whispering to Pirate-Boy. During the time they whisper, Shen Yuan gets up from the ground.
He had been laying on grass when he woke up, and his white sheet was missing, leaving him in his brown sweater. Ahead of the three of them, he could see bright flashing lights and the chattering of people. Shen Yuan lights up in awe. It’s a carnival. Shen Yuan didn’t go to carnivals much. But when he did, he went on the rides for children, ate cotton candy, and watched in horror as Da-ge and Er-ge went on the "scary rides."
Angel-Boy finishes talking with Pirate-Boy and grabs him gently by the hand, the same hand that Er-ge held only an indefinite amount of time earlier.
"Come with me," he says. "We’ll try to find a solution for you, okay?"
"Okay."
"What is your name?"
"Shen Yuan."
"Shen Yuan? My name is Xie Lian. That’s Hua Cheng."
"Can I call you Lian-ge and Cheng-ge?"
Xie Lian’s smile brightens up at the address. "Of course! A-Cheng, you won’t mind, right?"
Hua Cheng, in his mighty glory, is pouting the slightest bit. "I got to call you Lian-ge first…"
The three then head to wherever Xie Lian leads them to, which is in the direction of the carnival.
Outside the gated fence of the carnival, there’s a simple sign written in words that Shen Yuan can’t read that well.
"Lian-ge, what does that say?" Shen Yuan questions, pointing up at the sign.
"Hmm? It says, Southern Realm Carnival."
The inside of the carnival is joyful, to say the least, but also depressing. Maybe it should’ve given him a fright, but he couldn’t feel anything except awe at that moment. The attractions shine with the colorful lights that line them, and there are food stands and games. (He just doesn’t realize that the food stands actually sell human meat.) The people are transparent like ghosts, some wearing masks, some with strange features about them.
Xie Lian pulls Shen Yuan closer, as if trying to shield him from lingering eyes and the attention of the other people. Then he whispers to Hua Cheng. "A-Cheng, where do you think Lord Luo would be?"
"Knowing him, he’s likely somewhere in his little personal office plotting a hundred ways to find Shen Qingqiu’s reincarnation or whatever."
"A-Cheng! You can’t say that!"
Shen Yuan doesn’t get to admire the carnival for very long before Xie Lian is dragging him over to some stairway that leads underground. It was kind of like the ones he’d seen in New York or something.
Swinging the door open at the bottom of the staircase open, the three enter into a hallway. There were some doors on the sides, with distant voices and giggling heard. At the end of the hallway was the most important door (as it seemed), with the characters on the sign reading, Luo Binghe .
Hua Cheng goes ahead to knock on the door, and nothing but silence follows for the next few seconds. Then footsteps can be heard on the other side, and the door swings open. The man that walks through makes Shen Yuan hide behind Xie Lian.
"You two again?"
The man towers over all three of them and looks twice Er-ge’s age. His curly black hair cascades down in a braid, and his eyes are red, blood red. He wears what his mom would call a hanfu, colored red and black, and his eyes seem to bore holes into them.
"Ah. Lord Luo, we just have a request. Y'know... "
"State it."
Xie Lian pries Shen Yuan’s arms from him and gently pushes him in front of ‘Lord Luo.’
"This kid… He’s human. I just want to take him back. You can do that, can’t you? You’re the only one I know who can travel between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living."
Lord Luo stares at Shen Yuan, and the younger eventually starts to feel uncomfortable. Then he taps his forehead, and Shen Yuan’s vision starts to fade.
"I’ll do it. I’m in you children’s debt anyway."
Shen Yuan wakes up again in his own bed. His parents start to lecture him about not running off and passing out behind a tree later. The memories of the carnival become yet another supposed dream.
~~~~~
Halloween had always felt so strange to him. Shen Yuan didn’t remember why, but it had been that way since the time when he was eight. Now he’s an average twenty-two year old who really has nothing to do on Halloween besides leaving a bowl of candy outside and watching trashy Halloween movies.
He looks at the clock. It’s eight pm, time for dinner. He doesn’t like cooking, so he usually orders takeout. But his stomach is growling extra loud, so he decides that a quick and easy dinner would be fine.
Shen Yuan fishes through a cabinet and sets a cup of ramen noodles on the counter, doing what he always does before bringing it back to his living room. He stirs his chopsticks in the cup as he scrolls through Netflix’s horror selection on his laptop. Several of them are pretty trashy, he'd say, but for the sake of the "Halloween spirit," he might as well watch one.
He picks a random one and goes through the entire two hours of it whilst eating his cup noodles.
Eventually, his stomach starts to feel a little strange. Maybe it would be nothing to others, but with his health issues, it’s likely not a good sign. He might as well say goodbye to his lunch too. Shen Yuan sets his laptop down and heads to the bathroom in a hurry, all the while his stomach bubbles up in increasing pain.
Was there something wrong with the noodles? It can’t be. He didn’t add any spicy stuff! Then it occurred to him. Shit... The noodles were probably expired. Too bad his body seems to hate expired foods in particular.
He’s hanging over the toilet, puking out whatever food he had before into the toilet bowl.
Despite that, his vision blacks out.
When he wakes up, he finds that his surroundings are oddly familiar. Cursing, he sits up and only ends up locking eyes with a face so distant yet familiar. Dark hair tied into a braid, blood red eyes, and the hanfu.
"Shit…" The distant memories prod at him, and he mutters out the name, "Lord Luo."
The man smiles, not in a sinister way as one would expect, but in a friendly way. Or as friendly as the man can get. Then his lips open and he echoes a single name, familiar yet unfamiliar.
"You’re back, Shen Qingqiu."