Chell's first Halloween in Horizon wasn't what she'd hoped for.
All month long the town's children had filled her head with tales of candy, and spooky stories, and costumes, and pranks, telling her that this was a wonderfully fun holiday, and begging her to participate. Secretly, she had planned to dress up and take the kids door to door in their candy collection, but now that Halloween had actually arrived she was miserable.
Chell tried to remind herself that this was a child's holiday. The ghost stories were nothing more than stories, because there were no such things as ghosts. This night was no more dangerous nor frightening than any other; and under no circumstances was anything going to snatch her in the darkness and take her away. She was perfectly safe.
There was only one problem with that argument; Chell knew that ghosts were real.
She had first seen them- first heard them- in the depths of Old Aperture.
It made Chell feel hollow to think that those halls, once so full of life, would sit empty and untouched forever. That she may very well have been the last person to walk them. That those voices, long dead, would echo through that empty tomb for eternity, and never be heard again.
Even the people who created That Place had fallen victim to it.
And they weren't the only ones.
The orange light of the jack o'lanterns scattered throughout the town (no, they weren't moving, their light was not following her), the stars- the moon- transformed her fire to ice. It had been nearly four months and she still couldn't bring herself to look at the night sky. The full moon didn't help.
'Don't look, don't look, don't look.'
Chell wanted nothing more than to run to her room, draw the curtains and hide until light soaked through the curtains. She could have if she really wanted to, the only problem was that, considering where she was currently living, someone was bound to see her and ask her what was wrong.
And she was not going to hide from the world she had fought for.
On Halloween night Chell didn't hand out candy, or carve pumpkins, or walk with the children; on Halloween night she ventured into the woods.
When he'd first noticed her aversion to the night sky, Michael had said something to her about stars being ghosts. He'd said that some of them were so far away that, by the time their light reached the Earth, they were already gone. He told her that beautiful things tended to be sad if you looked closely enough, but sometimes the things that made them sad only served to make them more beautiful.
Alone in the darkness, on a little hill, beneath a break in the trees, Chell looked up to find a breathtaking view to a glimmering world of ghosts. It was there, nearly hidden by the soft halo of the moon, that Chell could just make out the light of a ghost of her own creation.
And for the first time in four months of voices, and nightmares, and shame, and hate, she was not afraid.
'Isn't it beautiful?'