In three days it will be Halloween, the most enchanting day of the year. And if it’s late October, I am somewhere far, far away. Some place dark where ethereal things cavort. I hope you can manage without me.

I could leave you a long list of things to do on this night dedicated to the macabre. There are movies to watch, fun-house horrors to survive, haunted places to visit.

But for an up-close look at the netherworld, you don’t have to buy a ticket or take a long drive in a stinky minivan. The ghouls walk among us.

They come in the form of ghosts – the living dead who have survived too many close encounters with the grave to count. Men who have been repeatedly stabbed, shot, run over. Women who wash down Valium with brandy and awake in a dreamy, gray place clad in hospital garb.

The ghosts haunt the city unmindful of their fortunes. They continue to stumble from bars and into traffic. They step into violence without concern and float almost majestically through peril. They survive without trying while others succumb to disease or accidents in spite of the pristine and careful lives they have led.

The dead here come in the form of zombies. They wander the streets in a barely lucid semi-daze, arms hanging limp at their sides. They have pulses and heartbeats and yet nothing stirs them. These are people who pronounced themselves dead years ago and now roam at all hours without direction or inspiration.

Zombies have, for one reason or another, given up on a life of ambition and the pursuit of joy. They amble as if portions of their souls have been rubbed raw and they are aware of the sting of it and nothing else. They exist at the most primal level: eating when they are hungry, sleeping when they are tired. The upright journey through the waking hours is only another function that needs to be tolerated on the trip to the grave.

There are vampires among us, also, those who take but never give. Unloving ones, they feed off others but never contribute to the societies in which they thrive. Vampires have an unwavering sense of entitlement. They believe they are owed what others have gained and they will skulk in shadows and take by stealth. The vampires are thieves, gluttons and scoundrels. They are bloodsuckers who think themselves noble.

The werewolf has a home in your neighborhood. He is the person who dons shirt and pants and shoes and yet he is a beast in human attire. The werewolf is the stealer of children, the rapist, the killer of strangers.

His only guiding forces are those of selfishness and greed. The werewolf is an animal that needs to be caged. A brute that cannot be tamed. He is a true monster who shifts his shape. He might be the Little League coach or the schoolteacher; a churchgoer or a local barber.

But he is not human at all. The werewolf is not bound by the moral code that silently directs you and me through flawed but mostly sin-free lives. He is a solitary savage and an unrepentant one.

Ghouls are everywhere. Some deserve our pity, others merit our scorn. There is reason to be afraid. On Halloween, you can strap on a mask and pretend to be something that flaps around in the night. You can stumble through a party dressed as the reaper, reaching a gnarled hand toward the pretty girls before getting a refill from the keg. It’s an out-and-out good time dedicated to the emulation of horrors both classic and neo.

The guy in the cheap zombie mask is really just Louis from accounting. The classic ghost floating from the bar to the buffet is Clark from advertising. He pulled a sheet off his bed and poked a few holes in it and his wife is probably going to brain him. The bloodsucking freak with the glow-in-the-dark fangs and booze breath is Oliver from human resources. Normally shy to the point of awkwardness, he is as animated as can be as long as the fangs are in his mouth and the pale paint is upon his pallor.

Come Nov. 1, all the cheap masks and makeshift costumes will be thrown in a box or discarded. When Halloween has passed and playtime is over, there is just me and thee and all the real monsters of the world. And you know? Sometimes I wonder about thee.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.