A/N: Gosh, this is old. I was cleaning out my folders when I stumbled across it a couple of months ago, and since I had the time, I made a few minor tweaks. I figured, now that Halloween is just around the corner, I may as well share. I hope you like it! Please read and review-feedback makes this worth it.

Disclaimer: I own nothing except Joey and his sheet. Thank you, JKR, for this world in which I have the great privilege to play.

All stories have a beginning. All stories come to a close. But no matter where you are, who you've become, or what you've yet to do, you're a part of one—who's to say whether you're noticed or ignored?

Stories are interwoven, layered, and absolutely everywhere. The close of one seems to melt instantly into the opening of another; that's simply the way it works. And often, there exists a beautiful overlap of The End and Once Upon An Autumn Evening, where the appropriate text depends only on the direction from which we approach. What we're to witness here is an end (of life, of an era, of a story of power and evil and family and betrayal), but we're also to discover a familiar beginning (of a tentative peace, of a pitiful childhood, of a bright future and a glorious tale of love and home and overcoming). And the place that these two come together is one we know well, and it starts with words that are as familiar to us as the night on which they are spoken.

"Trick or treat!"

Young voices ring out all throughout the town, little ghosts and goblins and animals all running about, pillowcases and bags gradually filling with candy, and in some cases, emptying just as fast. Laughter and excited chatter fills everyone's ears: friends commenting on the best costumes of the year, parents calling impatiently after little ones wandering too far, the young-at-heart elderly standing behind doors charging one trick per treat. It is noisy, yes, but in a pleasant kind of way: the sort of babble that fills you up with anticipation for whatever it is that everyone's waiting for.

Truly, October thirty-first is a night to be looked forward to.

One enthusiastic group of children rushes off to the next porch, muttering amongst each other about school and scary stories and whatever else it is that the young mind can think up. A brave girl at the front, bedecked in pirate attire, presses the doorbell and hurries back to join her friends.

"Welcome, dearies! What would you like today?" asks the aging woman who opens the door a moment later, her voice as weathered as the dry leaves crunching under everyone's feet. She looks as though she's seen a million years of history, fought in every war she's recorded over the course of her career, and been so worn by time that any gust of wind might blow her down. But as soon as we look at her eyes, we instantly see the strength and brightness there, however much her mind has receded with age. She truly loves these children. Her eyes glow with recognition when she catches sight of one child near the back of the pack at her door, and she smiles at him. He might have smiled back; it's difficult to tell with the holey sheet draped over his head.

To the entire motley crowd, the woman raises her voice and cackles, "Who would like chocolate, and who would like toads?"

The children all give shouts of delight and surge forward, each receiving two pieces of the sweets that the woman has conjured in a large basket, seemingly out of nowhere. A tiny princess in purple and silver squeals when the woman reaches into her basket and offers a frog. As the last boy nears the front, he whispers, "Thank you, Miss Bagshot! Mum says to give you this!" The lady laughs, takes the little note from him, and reads through it quickly. She has to squint to see the neatly penned letters, and she mouths the words silently as she reads them.

"Oh, how kind of her," she says, stooping down to the boy's level with difficulty. He sees the pain in her face. It hurts for old people to move, he remembers. "Now, you tell your mummy that I'd love to have dinner with you all, alright? Thursday next. I'll bring pumpkin cakes." The boy giggles, nods, and beams, so proud to have been of service. With a cheery, "Goodnight!" over his shoulder, he wanders off after the remainder of his costumed cohorts.

"Oi, Joey!" a voice calls after the boy. Joey turns away from the gaggle of seven-year-olds that he's been following. His face breaks out in a smile as he espies a close friend of his, running towards him from a mother and younger sister gazing around her in absolute wonder.

This friend of his has trouble-maker written all over him. Whether it's the lopsided smile, the gleam in his eyes, or the dragon costume, complete with a tail, wings, and a hood that gave him ears and horns, we can guess that he'd be any babysitter's nightmare. "You're a ghost again." The boy points at the sheet, which has slipped lopsided and now obscures one of Joey's eyes.

"I know," Joey replies, trying to adjust his costume but still grinning with sugar- and holiday-inspired cheer. "I just like this costume the mostest out of all the ones I ever made!"

Joey's friend does not seem impressed, though his expression may just be the result of the green and gold scales painted on his face by a careful hand. "Whoa!" he bursts out before Joey can continue, looking over his companion's shoulder. "I like his costume!" He scurries over to whatever it is he's spotted, dragon tail in tow.

"Nice costume, mister!" the boy compliments the erect figure on the pavement. Joey edges towards his friend and this strange man, who, indeed, is robed in an absolutely magnificent black cloak with the hood pulled low over his face. He gives off a very eerie aura, Joey thinks with sudden wariness, stopping before he reaches the duo. Joey watches as the figure lowers its head slightly and regards the boy standing before him.

Taking a step back, Joey's friend gives a start, turns away, and rushes back the way he'd come, calling, "MUUUUM!" the duration of his flight. Without taking his sight off of the man in the cloak, Joey side-steps in the same direction.

The man follows Joey's friend with his eyes, and his hand twitches for a second, almost angrily. But the figure does not move.

Joey finds his playfellow crying into his mother's skirt, saying that the bad man over there had looked at him funny. Not really listening to her son, attributing his tears to simple Halloween haunting jitters, the mother pats his head and pries him off so that she can go and retrieve her daughter. Blonde pigtails are bouncing after a cat that is weaving in and out of alleys.

"Alright, Arthur?" Joey asks, tripping slightly over the hem of his sheet as he wanders nearer to comfort his comrade, who seems already to be feeling much better.

Arthur glances over at his mother cautiously, lowers his voice to a spitty whisper, and hisses, "I think that man over there must be the Devil."

"Really?" Joey gasps, for in their world of imagination, anything is conceivably possible.

Arthur nods very seriously. "He looked at me all evil-like, like he was gonna eat me. His eyes are red, Joey," he adds, as though that settles the matter. "Who else could it be?"

Joey acknowledges this with an excited nod. "You're right! What did his face look like exactly?" he presses, then, as another thought strikes him, "Hang on, you don't think he could be here to do something…bad, do you?"

Arthur's eyes widen in shock, mind spinning delusional conspiracy theories that any learned person would scoff at. "Well, he's gotta be! That's like the Devil's job, isn't it?"

He peeks over Joey's shoulder in what he's certain is a very professional, surreptitious manner (when, naturally, he looks like he is preparing to cause nothing but mischief) to see what the Devil is doing just now. To his immense shock and budding fear, the figure is no longer standing on the corner. "Look Joey!" Arthur exclaims very loudly, "he's gone! He was standing right there!"

Joey whips about, sheet billowing up and revealing some red trainers and black, knee-length pants.

"Golly, you're right!" Joey whispers out of the corner of his mouth, pausing to adjust his costume yet again. "D'you think he just teleportated? Just like that?"

Sending his hood into a jittering frenzy, Arthur nods fervently. "Where do you think he went?" he murmurs in a hushed, yet carrying whisper.

Joey subconsciously inches a few paces closer to his friend. "You don't think we'll have to fight him or anything, do you?" He cannot seem to keep the waver out of his voice. "What if we…what if he…I mean, it's possible, yeah?"

On Halloween night, it's almost as though anything can happen. Even the most skeptical of us can feel that strange shiver on the wind—the chill that has you looking at every moving shadow and starting to believe that what you think is a leaf breezing through an evening sky, almost purple, is actually a witch cackling as she passes by on her broomstick.

That's exactly what the boys are sure they see as a shadow races across the sky, blotting out the stars in a few places, and then passing by just as quickly. "Think that's him? The Devil?" Arthur whispers, wiping a runny nose with his sleeve. The pair stare up at the charred expanse.

"Maybe…no, wait! There he is! On the end of the street just there!"

Pointing and taking cautious steps towards their target, Joey leads his friend across the street covered in leaves, past a few houses all decorated for the holiday…

The town, naturally, possesses an ambivalent beauty of the ghastly and festive sort—jack-o-lanterns alight every porch, some with smiling faces, others with scarier ones, and still others bearing the silhouettes of pictures. Joey is never disappointed with the designs every year. He loves carving his own, though he is not all that skilled with a knife yet, and this year, he made one all by himself for the first time—a crescent moon with what is supposed to be a wolf howling at it. Unfortunately, he messed up a few times, so now it's just a squiggly gumdrop shape. Although, Joey thinks to himself, if he really squints, it does look kind of like a man in a cloak.

Talk of the Devil (in this case, the being himself their subject of discussion), the man they're following steps into a narrow, empty lot that opens up to nothing more than some bushes and a small wood. The hooded figure steps purposefully, slowly—taking his time with this journey, wherever he is trying to go.

The boys hide behind a bush, frightening a crow that lurches off and caws to its brethren that there is danger afoot. "What's the Devil doing now?" Joey asks Arthur in a whisper, trying to tug his sheet from a branch on which it's gotten snagged. "Is he doing something bad yet?"

Trying desperately to get his tail out of sight behind the bush, Arthur does not react for a few moments. Then, he sits up on his knees, tail in hand, and glances over the top of the shrub, which comes scarcely up to his nose—he has to hunch his head down to keep out of sight, although his dragon hood's ears and horns stick out above the leaves. "It doesn't look like he's doing nothing except walk up that lot," Arthur reports, whispering so harshly that with any more distance, we might mistake it for the susurrus of dry leaves being tossed about on the breeze.

"How about now?"

"Oh, quiet, you, he'll hear us!"

"How about now?" Joey practically breathes, voice as quiet as he can possibly manage.

"I told you, he's just…" Arthur's answer trails off until he stands up up and interjects, "GONE!"

"What?"

"He's gone!"

"Gone?!" Joey repeats, rising alongside his partner and studying the lot. "Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure," retorts Arthur, always having to be right. "Do you see him, then?"

Joey shakes his head. "But we can still go see what he's up to, right?" he suggests, taking a few hesitant steps forward. A chilly breeze blows through the air, carrying with it the smell of Halloween: straw and leaves and pumpkin and soil and that odd mustiness, the kind that we associate with monsters and death.

Arthur joins Joey's side, and together, they march right up the path until they reach the little fenced-in gate near the wood.

Gate?

"Was…was this here before?" Joey mumbles, pausing for a second and scratching his head, which only succeeds in frizzing his hair and messing up his costume again.

"What, you think it just appeared out of nowhere?" Arthur chuckles, sounding very grown-up. "That's stupid." He doesn't sound so sure, though, and won't grab the gate at first.

Suddenly, he turns his head in the direction of the lot of bushes and trees beyond. "Do you hear that?" he asks his companion fearfully. "That noise?"

"Noise?" repeats Joey, stepping closer to the gate. "What noise?"

Arthur's eyes widen. "It sounded like someone yelling…but really far away-like. Hey! Listen!" he whispers urgently, grabbing Joey's arm. Joey obediently close his eyes and furrows his brow, trying to hear. Now that he's listening for it, he thinks he can hear something too: it sounds like someone screaming—a horrible, wrenching scream of fear, like Joey sometimes hears when his older sister watches scary movies with her friends. Like Arthur said, it is very faint, but Joey is sure it's there. Then on top of it, laughter—but it isn't laughter like his friends sometimes made whenever Joey told a joke or did something funny. It's cold. It's the softest whisper on the air of something evil.

And the screaming just goes on.

Just as abruptly as Arthur grabbed his arm, the shriek dips into silence. The two boys glance at one other—neither are inclined to admit it, but relief washes over both with its cessation. Perhaps the nature of the date or the hour is to blame; regardless, there is something uncanny about the lot and the voices no longer disturbing the night. At the very moment they relax, thinking they might return to Arthur's mother to eat some of their candy, another extremely faint sound meets their ears—or are they sensing the noise rather than actually hearing it?

"Is that a baby crying?" Joey murmurs.

Arthur shrugs, expression thoughtful. "It sounds just like my little sister when she didn't get to bed early enough…"

"Maybe there's a little baby in the bushes that's hungry," Joey suggests timidly. "Shouldn't we go see if it's alright?" Arthur shakes his head violently.

"I'm not going in there!" he whispers hoarsely, looking genuinely scared. "What if the Devil stole it? And it's being possessed by some evil demon soul…hey, there's that noise again!"

Only this time, they instantly come to realize, it isn't a sound. It's a shape—a wave, a ray, a pulse…something almost tangible that pounds through their skulls. Like any other seven-year-old would, they place their hands over their ears and clench their eyes shut, trying to block out the only thing this sensation reminds them of—a thunderous noise.

Behind his eyelids, Joey thinks he can see a huge flash of light, green light, flying through the sky on the same frequency as the wave rushing through his head, but when he opens his eyes, there is nothing. It must've just been in his head…his eyes trying to adjust to darkness…yeah, that's it…his dad said something like that once.

Arthur opens his eyes to see Joey standing facing him. Same expression and position; hands clutched tightly around his ears. "That was really, really weird," Arthur mumbles, face fearful. He slowly relinquishes his hold over his ears and squeaks, "Where's my mum?"

And with that, the two boys start off down the drive, back to the street with its jack-o-lanterns and costumes and people. No more Devil. No more funny green light. Just candy and friends and illuminated windows…

"Joey! I've been looking for you everywhere!"

A girl walks up to them now—not in costume, merely jeans and a purple top, though the sheer volume of makeup on her face likens her to a vampire. She is certainly much older than the two boys—sixteen and a half, Joey can tell you, because she is, of course, his older sister.

"Mum sent me out to get you…it's getting late," she explains impatiently, grabbing Joey's hand. "What are you two doing way out here?"

"Well see, the man over there with the cool costume was actually the Devil, because he had red eyes and he was going to eat me, and then he came over to the gate to that creepy forest over there and he was trying to steal a baby, and there were these funny sounds and lights…" Arthur rambles on as they begin the walk to his house, launching into the full story and adding details as fast as he can remember them.

Joey's older sister simply listens and walks, nodding every once in a while to indicate her attentiveness to their frantic story. Not that it makes any sense—for one thing, they continually interrupt each other and talk over one another and disagree over various details. The strange things kids can think up…

Around five minutes later, as they turn onto Arthur's street (they had to keep stopping so that the boys could debate and then compromise on what actually happened) the story has almost reached completion—

"And then there was this green light—"

"—Yeah, it was all green and stuff, and just like the sound—"

"And then when it all stopped—"

"—'Cause you know it had to stop—"

"It was just over. Just like that. And then the end."

The girl pulls the children in her keep closer to her side as a man in funny clothes races by on a motorcycle, muttering to himself in manic desperation—his expression is desperate, too: frightened and furious and grieving all at once.

She's seen people like this in other, bigger, cities. Not in Godric's Hollow—the lunatics and the deranged usually stay away from places like this. Perhaps he is only in a hurry to get home, she muses, shaking herself and tugging on the boys' hands as they continue down the street. His outfit would make a fine costume, after all; that's probably it.

Joey turns his head to watch the motorcyclist go by. The man looks like he wants to scream like that scream they heard out on the lot by the gate—maybe he heard it too. Did the Devil steal his baby? Maybe he heard the crying, and now races forth to save them. Joey casts his gaze towards his trainer-clad feet pacing along the asphalt and wishes he'd gotten a chance to tell the man that he's already too late. The baby is possessed with an evil demon soul just like Arthur said.

Joey voices this regret aloud, announcing it into the streets growing steadily quieter.

His sister eyes him with an amused expression on her face. "Well, I'll tell you what," she says, "maybe you can tell me about this stolen baby tomorrow, after we've all had a good night's sleep."

Arthur and Joey look quite cheerful about this, and when they drop Arthur off at his house and leave him with his mother, the two boys are able to exchange brief good-byes, not littered with pleas to hang out for just five more minutes. As Joey and his sister step off the porch and begin the short stroll back to their own home, she wonders where on earth the boys could have possibly pulled that story from. What nonsense her brother could spin in his head!

We watch the brother and sister walk down the street on which there are scattered leaves and candy wrappers, assorted costume parts and mud puddles, and we can only marvel at a child's wisdom. We know the truth and the story and the nightmares to come—and though the two people before us can't hear it, we can—the anguished cries of a man who's just lost everything: a friend, a family, a trust, an innocence; and the frightening sobs of a large man with a larger heart.

They don't know it, but we do—another story has just begun.