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Post by markgunnells on Oct 19, 2013 5:56:59 GMT -6
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Post by markgunnells on Oct 19, 2013 5:57:45 GMT -6
HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO BRADBURY
The Devil used to love coming up to the surface on Halloween and watching the festivities. The tots dressed up like various demons and monsters and hobgoblins of the night. Begging for sugary treats that would rot their teeth and perpetrating nasty tricks on those who failed to comply. Egging cars and houses, festooning tree limbs with toilet paper like mummy wrappings, kicking in innocent jack-o’lantern faces. Pranks which the children swore, when caught, were harmless but which the Devil knew would lead to greater offenses like car theft, vandalism, and assault when these youngster came of age. And the best thing of all about Halloween, from the Devil’s perspective, was the fear. Older siblings terrifying the younger tykes with tales of spooks and vampires, teenaged girls letting loose with lovely blood-curdling screams as they made their way along haunted trails, unsettling rumors of razor blades in apples and poisoned candy. Fear permeated the air on Halloween like a putrid perfume, and the Devil would breathe it in, taking sustenance from it, feeding on it, growing fat with its fetid aroma of corruption and decomposition.
At least, that was how Halloween used to be.
The Devil wasn’t sure when it started, it had been subtle at first, but one day he turned around and Halloween just wasn’t scary anymore. Sometime when he wasn’t looking, the dark holiday had been tamed, domesticated. Costumes of ghouls and beasts had been replaced with fairy princesses and swashbucklers. Haunted trails and houses were but mere funhouses now, more likely to elicit laughter than screams. It had been years since there was a good scare involving tampered-with candies. Parents were not allowing their children to participate in the more macabre traditions of the season lest it traumatize the poor things. Even horror movies and novels had lost their ability to frighten. Freddy Krueger had become nothing more than a clown spouting one-liners, and Thomas Harris had even turned his once-infamous character Hannibal Lector from a cold-blooded psychopath into a sympathetic antihero. Now when the Devil arose to walk the streets on October 31st, he found little to feed off of, his hunger going unsated. The air smelled like little more than chocolate candies and marshmallow pumpkins. It was enough to make the Dark Lord physically ill.
But all that was going to change this year.
This year the Devil ascended with a mission. He was going to restore Halloween to what it once was, a celebration of the ghastly, an honoring of all things gruesome and vile. When he was done with this world, the scent of fear would once more fill the air like a noxious gas, and these pathetic mortals would choke on the fumes. He would not be satisfied until Halloween was once again established as the unholiest of holidays, a night when Fear was the god at whose altar all bowed to worship.
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Post by markgunnells on Oct 19, 2013 5:58:12 GMT -6
THE NEIGHBORHOOD THAT HALLOWEEN FORGOT
Cody left the house around nine-fifteen. He stepped out onto the porch, closed the door behind him, then stopped abruptly when he heard glass crunch under his shoe. The first thing he noticed was his Halloween lights. They were no longer hanging above the door; the string of lights was lying coiled on the porch like a long, thin snake, several of the orange bulbs busted. His raised his eyes to take in his lawn and saw the rest of the destruction.
The glow-in-the-dark skulls had been uprooted, tearing out large patches of grass and sod, and thrown onto the walkway. The cardboard tombstones had been torn into pieces, littering the yard like paper leaves. Cody had placed two jack-o’lanterns on his porch, one on either side of the steps, and they had both been caved in, their shells broken, their carved faces disfigured. The inflatable witch that he’d placed in the yard just to the right of the porch had been punctured so that it was now just a sad, flaccid puddle of black and green.
The numbing effect of shock began to wear off, and he felt boiling anger taking its place. Someone had come onto his property in the night and ransacked the decorations. It was a violation, and he wasn’t going to stand for it.
Ignoring his car in the driveway, Cody started down the street on foot, headed straight for Mr. Wexler’s two-story clapboard house on the corner. He thought he could feel eyes peering at him from the homes he passed on the way, but he figured he was just being paranoid. He stomped up the steps and jabbed the doorbell violently. No matter how hard he pushed the bell, it still made only the quietest chiming noise from inside the house, so Cody began to beat on the door with his fist, wanting to make some sound loud enough to express the rage he felt inside.
Wexler answered the door with a gentle smile. He wore a blue silk robe cinched tight at the waist, and a pipe stuck out from the corner of his mouth. “Good morning, Mr. Nelson. What brings you to my door so early this morning?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“I have many virtues,” Wexler said, amusement twinkling in his eyes, “but being psychic is not one of them.”
Cody closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths through his nose. He was not a man prone to violence or loss of temper, but right now he wanted nothing more than to smash his fist into Wexler’s self-satisfied face. “Well, Mr. Wexler, it would seem that sometime last night I had a vandal visit my home.”
“Really?” Wexler said, taking a few puffs on the pipe, smoke billowing out of the bowl like a steam engine. “Was there much damage to your house?”
“That’s the odd thing. They didn’t touch the house at all. No broken windows, no holes in the siding. All they touched were my Halloween decorations. The skulls, the tombstones, the lights—all destroyed.”
“Oh dear,” Wexler said with an exaggerated pout. “And you worked so hard putting them all up yesterday.”
Cody felt like a twelve-year-old, standing before a stern instructor and being made to feel stupid in front of the class, but he held his ground. He would not cower before this man. “Do you have any idea who might have done this, Mr. Wexler?”
“Perhaps it was children. None of the children from Vermont Avenue, I’m sure, but children from some of the surrounding neighborhoods, caught up in the spirit of this Halloween ritual. In these godless times, children who are not instilled with the proper values are likely to do just about anything.”
“You might be right,” Cody said, talking through clenched teeth, “but somehow I don’t think it was kids. I’m thinking the culprit lies a little closer to home.”
“I certainly hope you find the mischief-maker, Mr. Cody, but I’m afraid I can’t stand here and chat with you any longer. You interrupted my morning devotional, and I need to get back to it.”
Before Cody could say anything more, Wexler slammed the door in his face.
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Post by markgunnells on Oct 20, 2013 5:29:37 GMT -6
MY LAST HALLOWEEN
I kissed both my parents goodnight, took the flashlight from my Mom, and made my way toward my bedroom, which was at the very back left corner of the house. I stopped in the bathroom first and brushed my teeth and washed my face by the glow of the flashlight, then went into my room to change into my pajamas. But I paused, standing there in only my Spiderman underwear. Lying on top of my bed was my Halloween costume, picked out and purchased weeks ago. I’d been so excited to wear it out, and now it was just going to go to waste. A zombie, like in those movies some of the kids at school talked about but I never got to see. A ripped up shirt and pair of pants (Dad had originally balked at paying for ripped up clothing when he said we could rip up some of my own worn-out clothes, but after much pestering and whining he finally gave in), and some white face paint and a tube of red gel that would make pretty realistic blood. I sat down on the edge of my bed and started to cry again. I knew my brother Michael would call me a baby, and he’d be right, but I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the fun I was missing, the candy and the exaggerated gasps from the adults who opened the doors to behold my costume. I know my brother said it was a good thing to grow up, but I wasn’t so sure. Didn’t seem like much fun. Maybe if I were more like Michael, but I wasn’t. I was gangly and awkward and tended to stutter when talking to the girls at school. No, growing up didn’t seem to hold much promise for me. If there were only some way I could hang on to childhood for a little bit longer… Wiping my eyes and nose on the backs of my hands, I made up my mind. I snuck back to the door and listened for a moment; I could still hear my parents talking softly from the front of the house. Easing the door shut, instead of putting on my pajamas, I put on my costume instead, making up my face as best I could by the light of the flashlight, examining myself in the mirror on the back of my dresser. I had little dribbles of “blood” snaking from the corners of my mouth and even my eyes. Didn’t look as good as if Mom had done it, but not too shabby either. Using a trick I saw in some old movie I’d watched with my folks, I stuffed pillows under the covers to make it look like I was in bed. Wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny, but maybe with all the lights out the charade would work. I rummaged through the bottom of my closet looking for my umbrella with scenes from Finding Nemo on it. I tried to be as quiet as possible and finally located the thing under an old jacket that no longer fit me. I opened my window and was preparing to climb out when I realized I was missing something important. Something to hold my candy. My folks had bought me a jack-o’lantern shaped bucket for trick-or-treating, but it was sitting in the living room with my folks so I couldn’t go back for it. Improvising, I took one of the pillows from under the covers just long enough to strip the case from it. Wasn’t ideal, but it would do. Then I crawled over the ledge of the window, dropping the few feet to the muddy ground, popping my umbrella even as I fell. Then I was off.
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Post by markgunnells on Oct 23, 2013 15:09:55 GMT -6
TREATS
Mitch’s eyes snapped open, and he lay still as death, holding his breath as he waited for the sound to repeat itself. There was still the wind outside, but underneath it, he could hear a soft scuttling sound, like something was crawling along his bedroom floor. He tried to convince himself that he was being silly again, that this was just more Halloween-inspired imaginings, but he couldn’t quite do it this time. This was different than before. This wasn’t an ordinary sound he was attributing with ghastly significance; this was a sound that didn’t belong. Sitting up slowly, like a corpse rising from its grave, he peeked over the side of his bed. He noticed that his wastebasket had fallen over—the sound that had awakened him—but other than that, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But no, that wasn’t entirely true. It was hard to see by the scant light thrown by the nightlight, but there were what looked like scratches in the hardwood floor by the wastebasket. Like one of those Magic Eye puzzles, now that Mitch had seen the scratches, they were impossible to miss. His eyes scanned the floor and saw more of them, leading like a trail along the side of the bed until they disappeared around the foot. They weren’t deep but they were unmistakable, two-inch long gashes in the wood. Rats, Mitch thought, terrified by the idea. He remembered Todd telling him about a movie where a little girl had woken up to discover dozens of rats in bed with her, crawling over her body, clawing at her flesh, biting and lashing at her. Mitch jerked the covers up and checked under them, assuring himself there were no red-eyed rats about to start nibbling on his toes. He gasped aloud as he heard more scuttling from the floor. The noise seemed to be coming from directly underneath the bed, and Mitch’s overheated imagination could too easily see the dirty thing crouched in the darkness, gnashing its teeth together, lying in wait for Mitch to place his bare feet on the floor so it could bolt out and take a bite out of his ankle. Stop it, Mitch told himself. If there was a rat under the bed, chances were it was more afraid of Mitch than he was of it, impossible as that seemed at the moment. After all, Mitch reminded himself, a rat was a tiny creature compared to a boy. He would probably seem like a giant to the animal. Despite the ridiculous plots of the late-night movies Todd’s Mom let him watch, rats were not vicious creatures with a hunger for human blood. Unless they have rabies. Mitch thought of Cujo, one of the few scary movies his mother had actually let him watch. That sweet Saint Bernard had gotten rabies and turned into a slobbering monster that terrorized a woman and her kid. If a dog could get rabies, why not a rat? Mitch knew on some level that he was being absurd. A rabies-infested rat waiting under his bed to attack like some kind of hellbeast? That was some story he’d invented. Quite a chilling little Halloween tale. Frightening but highly unlikely. But there was something under his bed. He heard the scuttling again, what sounded like claws on the wood, furtive rustling movements. A rat still seemed the most likely culprit. And even if the thing wasn’t rabid, that didn’t exactly make Mitch feel any better about it. He thought about calling out to his Mom, but he didn’t want the rat to know he knew it was there. Irrational, but he couldn’t quite shake the idea that the rat was intelligent and was somehow stalking him. Mitch didn’t want to be in his room anymore. Now that the rat—or whatever it was—had invaded, the room didn’t feel like his anymore. It belonged to whatever was under his bed, and now Mitch was the invader. He wanted to get out of the room, shut the rat up inside, and go down the hall to his Mom’s room, crawl into her warm bed and sleep next to her, cocooned in the protective shell of her presence. But the door was so far away. The distance between his bed and the door to the hall seemed an endless expanse of hardwood floor, the distance between here and the moon. His room had never looked so big to him before, had actually always seemed kind of small compared to Todd’s room, but now he felt like the walls had pushed out, leaving him with miles to travel if he wanted to get out of here. But if he really ran for it, maybe he could make it to the door before the rat could catch him. Mitch was a fast runner, had won a blue ribbon at Field Day at his school last year. If he jumped from the bed and pumped his legs as fast as he could, he should be out the door in only a matter of seconds. And the rat probably wasn’t expecting him to make a run for it, so he should have the element of surprise on his side. The rational part of Mitch’s brain tried to persuade him that there would be no chase. The sound of his feet hitting the floor would probably terrify the rat and send it bolting further under the bed. However, six year olds rarely listen to the rational part of their brains, and Mitch just knew that if he was going to get out of the room, he was going to have to run for it. Mitch pushed the covers down to the foot of the bed, trying to work up the nerve to make a dash for the door. He crawled down to the foot of the bed and peered over. There was no rat, but what he did see brought goosebumps to his skin. More of those scratches, but lots of them, and deep this time. A quarter-sized hole had been scratched into the floor, tiny splinters lying about like shrapnel from an explosion. It looked like the rat had been trying to dig a hole right through the floor. Either that or it had merely been sharpening its claws. Mitch decided to jump off the foot of the bed instead of crawling down off the side. It would put him that much closer to the door. He crouched, steeling himself, hearing more scuttling under the bed, then leaped for the floor, trying to put as much distance between himself and the bed as he could. He landed hard, the impact sending a jolt up his legs, but he didn’t fall. Without pausing to look behind him, not wanting to know if the rat had come out after him, Mitch broke into a hobbling run. Mitch was almost to the door when it happened. His hand was outstretched for the knob, and he was starting to think he had overreacted to the whole situation, when he felt something heavy smack into the back of his left leg. He let out a yelp, stumbled, and went down on his hands and knees, his head banging against the door as he fell. At first he thought he must have tripped over something, even though he didn’t remember leaving any of his toys out in the middle of the floor, but then he heard that scuttling sound behind him. Close behind him.
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