October 26th

Nobody could see him. Nobody could hear him. He was like a ghost, only he wasn’t. She had done this to him. How many weeks had it been since he followed that group, all dressed in dark robes and stepping down those stone steps into the darkened cavern below? He kept his distance, saw what looked like a person tied to a wooden table that they carried with them down the long hall lit with black candles. They disappeared around the corner, and he heard a man screaming. The chanting grew louder, stronger, more exhuberant. He felt an unearthly wind blow past him. It knocked him over, and then she had appeared.

"You aren't supposed to be here," she said, blood dripping down her arms and splashing off the concrete floor.

"Don't kill me," he pleaded.

"I should," she said. "You've seen too much." The unearthly wind blew all around, sounding like whispers. "A much better idea. Probably worse than death. Nobody will ever see you again. You will be invisible to all, like a ghost. No person can hear you or touch you. You can trespass all you want now, and it won't matter — but never come back here. This place is sacred."

Using an invisible force, the witch threw him backwards. He flew through the air and crashed into the wall. When he stood to his feet, he realized he was no longer in the chamber. He was on a street in the middle of town. People walked past him, nearly bumping into him without noticing him. He looked down at his hands, and saw nothing. A woman walked straight towards him, and rather than bumping into him, she passed right through.

Days turned into weeks, and life was torture. He had no human contact, and couldn't touch anything, couldn't pick up anything, couldn't affect anything. He was a ghost for the most part, except he wasn't dead. He still required food and water for nourishment, but he couldn't touch the food he saw, couldn't lift it to place it into his mouth. When he bent down to eat, his lips passed through the sustenance.

Rain poured down after a couple of days, and this somehow replenished all the water he needed, giving him sustainment of life, but he still couldn't get food. He'd jump into a lake to keep his body alive every couple of days, though the hunger caused an aching and a pain that eventually would not go away. It stayed with him, subsiding every now and then but never disappearing completely. Finally, he knew he had to go back, to find that witch, and get her to undo her curse, to fix him so he could finally have relief from this agony.

He walked in the dark, empty chamber. Candles still lined the halls, but they were cold and their wax had hardened into puddles around them. His steps were soundless.

"Will she even know I'm here?" he asked himself. He couldn't hear his own voice. Everything about his existence was silence. In front of him, on the floor, sat a pumpkin, or at least what was left of it. There was a circle on the floor serving as a base, then some sort of rod embedded into this and pointing up vertically. The cap to the jack-o'-lantern was pressed onto the top of this rod just where the top of the pumpkin would have been. Thin wires, almost invisible, protruded out from the rod, and on these were the carved out pieces for the pumpkin's face — it's eyes, nose and mouth. It looked like a reverse jack-o'-lantern, a pumpkin with an invisible shell. Beside the rod flickered the flame of a small tealight candle.

"Of course I know you're here," she said from behind him. He spun around and found himself face to face with the beautiful face of evil. She smiled with a hint of trickery hiding behind her eyes. With the flick of her wrist, he felt himself thrown backwards. He was pressed with his back against a wall, several feet above the ground. "I warned you never to come back here."

"Please," he pleaded. "Help me. I can't eat. I'm starving. You told me you weren't going to kill me."

"And I wouldn't have. I left you still alive. It was the starvation that would have killed you."

He felt his arms being pulled in opposite directions. His legs were stretched down towards the ground, but his body remained stationary. The limbs popped from their sockets, and he screamed.

"You know, they're never going to find your body," she said. "But I'm sentimental. I'm keeping something to remember you by.

He felt a cutting into the skin on his cheeks and forehead. She marked an x in the air with her index finger. With the first slash, his face tore from his head, turning visible and flying across the room towards her. She caught the bloody skin with her other hand. With the second slash, he felt his body ripped apart completely like being quartered by horses. A splash of invisible blood resounded throughout the empty halls.

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