A hundred blots of light shone on the walls of the room, refracting off of gemstones that lined a platinum-coloured headband. Standing next to the window, Kamon raised the band and affixed it to her head, pushing back the lines of dark hair that framed her face.

The doorknob jangled before a heavy knocking rung out. Violet’s muffled voice came through the door, asking to be let in. Kamon walked to the door to unlock it, admiring the sway of her shimmering silver dress.

“You look stunning!” Violet gasped, bursting into the room. On her head was a thin black hat shaped around a wide wire brim. It narrowed into a drooping triangle at the top.

Kamon rolled her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you the hat looked strange?” She had always thought Violet’s idea of a witch was funny. An old crone with a penchant for evil, wearing all black? That was more an elderly in-law at a funeral than anything.

“A witch hat is classic,” Violet insisted. “At least people will know what I am. But you?”

“I am the moon,” Kamon announced, “and anyone with a mind will know.” Draped along her silver dress were chains of blue beads that rattled when she moved.

“Who dresses up as the moon, anyway?” Violet grumbled. She opened a nearby closet, rifling through the cleaning supplies.

“I am elegant,” Kamon replied, “and you are sticking your head in a cleaning costume, trying to find a broom. I prefer the moon.” Violet turned back to glare at Kamon, holding a dried-out mop.

When Violet left, Kamon stood in the centre of the room, wanting again to admire the light reflecting off of her costume. She was disappointed when she saw nothing; it was nearing dark by now, and no more sunlight came in through the window. Instead, she looked through the glass at the real moon, slowly coming into focus behind the clouds.

Before Kamon departed, she locked the window but opened the door to the room. She wanted to let the moonlight come and go.

The party was loud. The entire drive there, Kamon had been able to hear the beads of her dress shift with each movement of her leg. Now she could barely hear her own voice. She closed the heavy wooden door and stepped further into the house.

Her walk was practiced – each step crafted to accentuate the flows and shines of her costume. She strode to a group of two, one of whose faces she recognized in the low light.

The man, his name was Roman, was dressed in white and yellow with golden bangles along his arms. Atop his head was a circlet of hastily glued feathers that, despite their frailness, carried a regal air about them. Suddenly Kamon felt plain, her grey dress damp from the light rain outside.

“Kate!” he shouted, turning to her.

Kate. Or Katherine. That was her name here.

She replied in turn, and they talked about nothing, really. Roman said he was supposed to be a golden goose, although Kamon couldn’t imagine why a goose would be gold. At some point the girl who was wearing no costume Kamon could see asked what she was dressed up as.

“The moon,” Kamon sighed, “I am the moon.”

Kamon left, weaving through the crowd and scanning the tops of people's heads. She saw one, two, three witch hats, but none sat above Violet’s face. Perhaps Violet would recognize her instead – she was visible enough, the rays of her headdress sticking above the heads of most people.

She made her way to the other side of the house but saw no more familiar faces. It was quieter here; the voices of people were finally audible above the tapping of feet on the floor. Kamon grabbed a drink and sat on the edge of a chair.

There were ghosts, so many ghosts. Some had taken more effort than others – a man who had draped himself in strips of white fabric and face paint stood next to someone else that worn a bedsheet with holes cut in the front. The white almost shone in the midst of the crowd.

Back home, people believed in ghosts. There was a specific banyan tree her mother had told her was haunted, warning Kamon and her siblings from getting near at night. Now, she had a picture of the tree in her wallet; there were no trees like that here, and it brought her comfort to see. She chuckled under her breath, amused at the irony of it all.

That was what the ghosts here were, chuckles and nothing else. The man with the bedsheet over his head turned and Kamon glimpsed his eyes behind two comically large openings in the cloth. The gentle gliding of the sheet was undercut by the heavy stamps of his sneakers on the house floor as he moved from one side of the room to the other.

A draft of frigid air flew through the room. Kamon turned to head to see an open window creaking in the wind. She hadn’t noticed it open before. She rose from her chair and approached the window, shutting out the cold as she closed the glass. It was only now that she saw a door out of the corner of her eye, small and black and almost hidden. The golden knob shone.

Kamon approached the door. It was shorter than she had realized, to the point where she had to slightly crouch. She placed her hand around the knob and was stung with the feeling of cold metal. She glanced around the room, hoping for the sight of a familiar witch, but saw only strangers.

The door opened silently into a set of stairs leading downward. Kamon lowered her head to fit through, pulling up the ends of her dress with her hands to make sure it didn’t drag on the dirt that was scattered along the staircase. Kamon wasn’t exactly sure why the odd staircase was so compelling to her. But she continued moving down until the sound and light from the door had faded into a barely recognizable murmur. At the bottom of the stairs was a tiny plot of floor that seemed to lead nowhere. Kamon ran her hands along the walls, feeling for something until her fingers met a plastic light switch.

With the lights illuminating the room, Kamon could see that the door at the top of the stairs was now closed. If someone had closed it or if it had drifted there itself, she didn’t know. There were a few boxes on the ground, filled with the thing Kamon presumed nobody used. At the bottom of the wall was a small square gate. Kamon crouched down all the way, hitching her dress on her knees, and wrapped her fingers around the small wooden knob. The door kept stubbornly shut despite her pushing, until finally opening with a great heave and a small cloud of dust. It was a crawl space, vast and empty.

When she was younger, Kamon had found a spot similar to this at an old school with her older brother. Her brother went in first, saying she could go after he made sure it was safe. While he was inside, she had waited by the door as lookout, but after a while became bored, wishing she and her brother had gone in together. She decided then to leave the entrance and wander a little farther into the school to explore. When she returned to the crawl space entrance, her brother was banging on the other side of the door. It had locked from the outside. By the time she opened the door his knuckles were raw, but they clutched a few soccer balls that lasted them years. They left after that.

Maybe that was why Kamon barely hesitated to enter the crawl space. She wanted to finally take her turn.

She detached her shining headband, looping one end around the entrance knob and the other around a nearby box. It propped the door open for her as she got down to her knees, giving up on keeping her dress spotless. Compared to some of the costumes upstairs, it would look shabby no matter how little dirt was on it.

Kamon tucked her hair into the back of her dress and squirmed into the dimly lit space. She could see, if only barely, from light filtering in through the boards that made up the crawl space’s low-hanging ceiling. The light pattering of partygoers’ feet rung above her as well, imitating rain. Pipes that darted around the space to somewhere else in the house rumbled as water rushed through them. This was a different type of monsoon than she was used to.

Bits of stray gravel dug into her knees and elbows as she made her way across the ground. She tried her best to navigate around them, but the space was cramped, and her sight was even more limited. In the shadows, the pebbles that stung her skin were almost invisible.

The space was not flat. Instead, it dipped and rose like an elaborate cave system. One point almost required Kamon to squeeze herself through with her arms. The light emanating from above became weaker as she continued. She hoped there was another exit; her brother would not be waiting to rescue her if she got stuck. Kamon breathed a sigh of relief when the floor began to lower again, allowing her to relax her knees. She turned around and lay flat on her back, giving herself a moment to recollect herself. Above her were wires and pipes that lined the wood; someone must have been her before. There were faint traces of hands and shoeprints in the gravel; people before her that had positioned themselves as she did to fix whatever problem with the plumbing or wiring. What she was here for, she wasn’t exactly sure, but she wanted to traverse the space, if only just to have done it.

Newly motivated, Kamon readjusted herself back onto her hands and knees, though the red sores of her kneecaps sent a dull pain through her body in protest. The crawl space only continued to expand as she clambered through, settling at a depth large enough that she could nearly stand. Looking down at herself, she brushed off the piles of dirt that had accumulated on her costume. The formerly brilliant platinum and azure colours she had worked so tirelessly on looked dusty, cheap. Many of the beads had broken or fallen off. Kamon didn’t mind – the real moon was also covered in dust. She was far more preoccupied with the space in front of her. It must have been close to outside. She could feel the cold winds outside lightly brushing against her. The floor her was damp, with a long crack running down the middle. She followed the opening with her eyes. In the middle of the ground in front of her, a seemingly young sprouting of a tree was growing out of the crack.

Kamon eyed the plant, questioning how it could possibly grow here. It was cold, with low light and water. Getting closer to the tree let her see the details of its suffering. The leaves were decrepit, browning at some parts, while the bark, barely maturing, was patchy and desiccated. The roots slunk through the cracks deep into the ground; the system must have been deceptively massive for the sprout’s size in order to get the nutrients required. Memories of the haunted banyan tree back home flashed across her mind. Banyans were aggressive, dominating the land with their expansive roots.

The age of the tree in front of her became unclear - the crevice it grew from gave the disguise away. Perhaps it was young, or maybe it was far older than Kamon considered, shrivelled by the harsh environment. Maybe the true life of the plant was the coiled tangles of roots that writhed through the ground and under the house. She peered into the fissure, seeing nothing, but felt the prickles of a primordial cold wash across her skin. Kamon lowered herself to her knees, her costume flowing onto the ground like an open flower. Her hair, slack around her head, drooped down and brushed the edge of the tree’s small leaves. They crackled, frozen whispers.

The plant struck her with wonder; at least, she told herself that. But wonder was a bright and confident thing. The feelings festering in her gut burned cold, dark, and unshakable. Kamon had once believed in spirits. Sometimes, she still did.

Screams shot through the air. Suddenly the light rumble of feet from above turned into a heavy downpour mixed with shouts. Kamon jerked her head back, shocked by the sudden noise. She stood as much as she could in the low space, pressing her ear to the wood above her. She couldn’t make out what was happening from noise alone. It was too loud, a blur of running shoes and what sounded like shattering porcelain. Whatever was up there, Kamon didn’t want to be stuck in the house.

She moved through the space as fast as she could, looking for some kind of exit. Eventually, she dropped back down to all fours, figuring it was faster than shuffling around with a half-bent back. It was then that she saw a small door under an alcove in the wood, identical to the one she had come through at the start. She hurried over, listening. The cacophony had mostly died down, the house now silent except for the faint echoes of voices. She tugged on the small door and it flew open. There was no headband left to hold it, so the wooden panel stubbornly tried to close as Kamon scrambled through, the rough edges scratching at her skin. Kamon moved quickly; she wanted to see what was happening upstairs, but a part of her was afraid something from the crawl space would emerge from the crevice and follow her out. The passageway was nearly pitch black by the time she reached the end.

She tumbled through the faint ring of light and burst out the door, facing the sting of rain and wind. Outside. She brought herself to her feet, the beads of water on her shining in the moonlight. A group of murmurs drew her attention back to the house, where a collection of people had amassed around the front door. Laying on the ground was Roman, the goose made of gold, clutching his leg while people knelt adjacent to him and applied bandages. What truly caught Kamon’s eye was the triangular edge of a black hat that bobbed above the heads of the crowd.

She made her way through the group, most of who were too distracted to notice the strange dusty woman dressed like the moon. She elbowed a black cat out of the way and saw, near the edge of the porch, the freckled witch she had been looking for the whole night.

“Violet!” Kamon stumbled towards her, exited to finally find something familiar.

“Kate?”

“I was looking for you,” Kamon stammered. Before she could continue, she noticed the wide-eyed expression Violet held.

“What happened?” Violet did a double take at the dirt caked across Kamon’s clothes. The feeling of shame that had been suspiciously absent from Kamon’s mind hit her all at once, her face flush with embarrassment as she tried to wipe down her dress.

“I fell.” A moment of silence passed between the two before Kamon followed up with an attempt of clarification. “I was getting my phone from the car.” They shared a look, in which Kamon was sure Violet was skeptical but knew it would be easier to not ask anymore questions.

Kamon turned, gesturing towards the front door. “Why is everybody outside?”

“A shelf broke,” Violet explained. “Fell on a bunch of stuff. I was close to getting squashed. Some other people got hurt.”

Kamon looked to Roman, seeing the full effects of his injuries now that she was up close. She grimaced upon seeing his left leg, bent like liquorice. Splotches of red scratches were dispersed along the skin. His costume, once meticulously crafted, looked now as if the goose had been shot and left in the wild. She looked away, trying to hide the repulsion that had begun to colour her face.

“I was worried when I couldn’t find you,” Violet responded. “I thought you might’ve been crushed.” The two began to chuckle at the morbidly comedic picture of Kamon, flattened to the ground, before the tattered breaths of the wounded Roman quieted them.

“I want to go see,” Kamon said.

“The shelf?”

“Yeah.”

“Feel free.”

Kamon skirted around the front door, not wanting to navigate through the assembly of people near it. Arriving at the back entrance, she stepped into the house and approached the site of the fallen shelf.

It was bigger than she had imagined it to be, taking up a sizeable portion of the room. The dark wood of the shelf had sharp edges coated in metal; one of them had crashed through a nearby window and scattered shards of glass inside and onto the yard. With the ensemble of various costumes surrounding the thing, it looked like some absurd scene of a play. A mystery, maybe. Though it was unclear whether the question was who pushed the shelf or who was under it.

Kamon observed the scene, noticing that the shelf had been positioned against an untarnished wall. It confused her how it had managed to topple, unless someone had pulled it, which, considering the shelf’s size, seemed unlikely. A childlike suspicion began to seed in Kamon’s mind, expanding more with each second she spent staring at the shelf. She tried to ignore it, thinking of other ideas. People are dumb. And drunk. But the notion only continued to grow.

“Hey!” A hand on her shoulder jerked her out of her thoughts, prompting her to jump in surprise. She shouldn’t have been so tense. It was Violet, Kamon knew before she even turned from the sound of her voice alone.

“Sorry, did I scare you?”

Kamon didn’t respond, her eyes staring at nothing in particular.

“People are leaving.”

Kamon opened her mouth, holding the words back with her tongue.

“Someone drove Roman and the others to the hospital. I think they’ll all be fine.”

Kamon looked back towards the shelf, the few people in the room filtering out through the front door, carefully stepping around the glass.

Before Kamon had left Thailand, she had spoken to her mother at the airport. It was a short conversation mostly composed of hugs and goodbyes, but at some point, Kamon’s mother had grabbed her by her shoulders and looked straight at her with piercing dark eyes.

“Don’t act Thai. Don’t even speak Thai unless somebody asks.” This was the price of being educated in a foreign country, to become a foreign person.

So, when Kamon saw Violet’s eyes staring right into her, she didn’t tell her about the plant growing underneath the house. She didn’t say how she had ventured through the crawl space and found a ghost in the tree. She didn’t mention her thought that a spirit had pushed the shelf over. People here didn’t believe in stuff like that. Here, a ghost was just a different type of memory. Nothing more.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Violet left and Kamon followed suite, jogging to catch up to her. The crowd in the front yard had mostly dispersed by now, people leaving the house in groups or solo. Violet turned to face her, saying something about how the party was a bit of a letdown, and that she would get together with Kamon tomorrow, to make up for the lost time.

“Maybe lunch,” she mumbled.

“Sure.” Kamon did not have to ask where. They had a place.

She watched as the witch departed, her mostly black costume fading into the night save for the shine on the wire brim of her hat. Kamon was about to leave as well before she reversed her path and walked back towards the house.

She could go in through the front door this time. A few partygoers were still sat inside, most of them probably the people living here. She was certain they felt worse about the shelf than she did. Kamon moved towards the other end of the house, seeing again the black door that she had entered when she got here. She opened it and went down the stairs, now free of cobwebs thanks to her earlier venture.

The light was still on from before, making it easier for her to see the steps. At the bottom, the headband, still sparkling, held the door to the crawl space open. Kamon grabbed the band and the crawl space entrance snapped shut. She turned around and began to ascend the stairs, before breaking into an upward sprint that didn’t stop until she burst through the black door onto the main floor. She dusted off the headband and put it back on, regaining some of the elegance her costume had carried at the start of the night. Looking down, Kamon brushed the dirt off of her dress and untangled the beads.

From her position at the door, she could see the window she had closed earlier in the night. She approached it, examining her reflection in the glass and using it to adjust her dress and hair. She stood there for a small moment before deciding to reopen the window. For anything that might want to come in. Or out.

There was no one to see on her way back to the car, but she used the opportunity to make the sidewalk a strange sort of runway. She bathed in her own beauty, allowing the costume to glide as the folds ebbed and flowed and the rhinestones along the headband glittered. She held onto the glamour until she reached her beige-coloured car, getting in quickly and driving off.

Kamon hadn’t planned to stop. But her gas was lower than expected and she had some extra time. The man had looked at her strangely when she entered the gas station, awestruck by her costume. Or maybe it was confusion. She couldn’t tell. Despite the giant neon sign advertising the station, the actual area was poorly lit. She had to move her face in and squint while refilling her car.

The rain had increased in intensity by now, coming at an angle that made the plastic roof of the gas station practically useless in shielding her from the weather. Kamon stood on the side of the car to stop her from getting drenched, cupping the back of her head with her hand.

The gas station was dead quiet, the only people in sight the man standing at the counter inside, absentmindedly watching a hockey game on the TV, and a few teenagers huddling on the other side of the block. She thought the party had been too loud, but now that she was here the noise seemed like a luxury. Even in the crawl space, she had been able to hear them. It was easy to be brave then, with the comfort of knowing the company around her. Not now, in the dark and rain.

When her gas was finished filling, Kamon went back to the machine, being attacked by the rain once more. She took out her wallet, seeing her driver’s license, and paused, reading it. Her name, Kamon. On the other side was a picture of the haunted banyan tree back home, standing proud in the sun. She hadn’t wanted to go near it, afraid of something hiding in the roots.

Kamon directed her eyes towards the adjacent street and the trees that dotted it. These were not banyans, but some type of evergreen that retained its colour through the winter. In the storm, they tilted, their stems delicate, empty, lonely. Kamon drew closer to the road, taking the picture of the banyan out of her wallet and clutching it close to her heart. There were ghosts. So many ghosts.