The Halloween Girl

by O'Brien, Jeff

  Around midnight, I awoke sitting upright on the floor of my bedroom with my back pressed up against the bed. I must have dozed off in the middle of playing the game, which I had still not succeeded in beating.

  Deciding that going downstairs to brush my teeth could wait until morning, I stood and decided I’d jump in bed and sleep in my clothes. Showering and changing could wait until tomorrow morning as well.

  But, it had been quite a while since my last good scare, and I guess I must have been long overdue for one.

  After standing and turning toward my bed, I saw something from the corner of my eye outside the window, down on Cassie’s stairs. I crept closer to the window to get a better look. It was Cassie. She was still right there where she had been hours ago.

  Had she not moved from her spot since this afternoon? She was still coatless and still smoking. The pile of cigarette butts next to her gave credence to my theory that she had been on her stoop all day.

  Weird, I thought to myself. Something must really be going wrong with her.

  I turned my bed down and was about to jump right in, when I decided that I just wasn’t done spying, and crept over to the window for one more look. This time, I was greeted by more than just the sight of Cassie.

  She was still sitting there smoking, but standing before her on the sidewalk was the shape of my waking nightmares.

  The dark man.

  Still I could not see his face.

  What the hell did he want with Cassie? A million alarms went off at once in my head.

  Cassie got up, and turned around to open her front door. The dark form behind her, decked out in his long black coat and fedora that just created one man-shaped silhouette, moved up her front stairs almost as if he were floating. Before he followed her in through her front door, his red eyes flashed up at me. I didn’t bother ducking below the window sill. It was no use. He saw me. In fact, that paralyzing fear from the last time I saw him came over me once again and I wasn’t even able to move a muscle.

  My eyes were locked on his bright red orbs that were instilling an insurmountable, icy-cold terror in me.

  Before I was freed of his unseen bonds, he once again lifted his finger to his mouth, and through my closed bedroom window, from fifty feet away, I heard him whisper “shhhh” to me loud and clear.

  As he proceeded on into Cassie’s apartment and the tension of my body eased, I knew that once again I had seen something that I was not supposed to have seen, and it wouldn’t be the last time my eyes would witness his terror. I didn’t get very much sleep that night.

  ***

  I awoke the next morning with a start. I had been dreaming violent, bloody dreams. Though, it wasn’t so much just a dream as it was the most brutally violent and vivid nightmare I’d ever had.

  We’ve all had those haunting dreams, especially in our youth, where we wake up unable to shake the aftereffects. Hours could pass, and still something about the power of the dream makes you cling to the thought that there was something real about it. That was very much the case with this dream, though the effects have lasted twenty four years and going, instead of mere hours.

  Often these dreams involve the loss of a friend or loved one. This trot through the graveyard of my subconscious was just slightly more intense than that simple, but unfortunate scenario.

  I’m sure you probably guessed that this particular dream that shot me out of bed was about Cassie. You would be correct.

  I had been walking around the town square. The weather was cold but not freezing. The entire place looked abandoned. No cars were parked along Broadway. Nobody walked the streets. The sound of silence hung heavy in the air. I heard nothing but the tinnitus ringing in my ears that has plagued me since childhood for no apparent reason, perhaps the cause of my sedatephobia.

  Atop one dead tree, a woman sat on a heavy branch with a crow perched atop her shoulder. The cawing of the crow added to the unpleasant ringing in my ears once my presence was acknowledged.

  Looking up at the strange duo in the tree, I saw that it was no ordinary woman. She was glowing. Her gown and her hair were bright white, and her pale face was a picture of such beauty that it rivaled Cassie’s. She said nothing, but I knew in my subconscious mind that she was urging me away from something. What that something was remained a mystery. I looked away from her to see if any other sign of life was to been seen, and found none. When I looked back up to the woman in white, she had vanished along with her crow.

  I explored all around in hopes of finding someone or something to explain to me why the town was deserted.

  Town hall was abandoned. The bank was closed and locked up. No children played in the parks and no dogs ran around chasing one another in the dog park.

  I decided to go to the nearest church, which happened to be Saint Anthony’s, the very church that would generate a strong urban legend eight years later.

  I don’t know what it was at first, but something was drawing me there. At first, when I realized where I was headed, I figured it was just because in movies, church is where people go when horrible things happen. The town being abandoned painted such a scenario in my head. So maybe I’d find some people there and get some answers.

  But when the thought of being at church when I didn’t have to be had set in, I realized I was without question being pulled there by a force beyond my control.

  I abhorred church. Though I was only the age of ten, so it was for no reason other than that I was bored to death when I was dragged on random Sunday mornings when my mother would for some reason feel the need to go. If she wasn’t making me go, there was no reason that I would ever have even stepped within a hundred feet of one of those places.

  But still, something beckoned me closer and closer.

  As I approached the front stairs of Saint Anthony’s, the sky became dark. Day had become night in a flash. Still I had not realized I was in a dream. Though the things happening around me were bizarre and defied all logic, they were real.

  Even though it was still eight years before the burning incident of Halloween 1998, Saint Anthony’s was still a place with macabre appeal. The church had been abandoned for quite some time, and there were many rumors of ghosts and hauntings. It would seem nonsensical to try to find people in an abandoned church during a possible time of crisis, but the strange pull that drew me toward the building pushed any logic aside.

  At the top of the stairs the massive oak doors opened wide, giving way to a sea of darkness that spilled out as if it were bright light. It wasn’t just darkness, though. It was dark light, something that made no sense and defied logic. How such a thing could appear visible to the human eye, I still have no idea.

  Out from the shadows stepped the man in black. Still I could not make out his features clearly. Under the brim of his hat, two red slits of light appeared as they always had during my sightings of him.

  He lifted a hand slowly. Instead of putting a finger to his lips and urging me to be silent, his long black index finger extended from his hand longer than any human finger possibly could and he motioned with it for me to come forward.

  As is always the case in dreams, I had no real power over what happened or what I did. So, per his request, I walked, or floated, up the stairs. I wasn’t sure which I did, but it certainly felt like I was in midair.

  I tried to hurry, anxious to get a closer look at this mysterious figure who refused to show his face. But, as soon as I was close enough, he was gone once again.

  From the top landing of the church stairs, I peered through the open doors. The altar seemed miles away, past hundreds upon hundreds of rows of pews. Off in that bizarre distance I could see something going on. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew that it was violent and I needed to rush over there and bear witness to whatever was taking place.

  Running as fast as I could, it seemed that only more rows of pews were popping up and the altar was getting no closer to me.

  After an excruciating amount of time without making any p
rogress, I was suddenly at the foot of the altar, revolted and shocked by what I was seeing.

  The dark man had returned. Sitting on a massive throne made of human flesh, watching the spectacle unfolding down below him.

  The throne on which he was perched was more than just made of human flesh. It was living human flesh, sewn together cruelly to form a chair. Still-breathing human beings had been bent in unnatural ways and stitched to one another at the faces and legs. Some of these poor souls were just alive enough to groan and whimper as the dark man sat comfortably, laughing with delight.

  And just what was down below him was so violent, so painful to look at and so astonishingly vivid in detail that I am still shaken by the memory of it to this day, twenty-four years later.

  Nailed to a large cross that was lying flat on the floor was the man that the world looks to and calls Jesus. He was writhing in agony, as a woman whose face I could not see had nailed him to the cross and was furiously hammering massive nails into his face and head.

  As I previously stated, I am not and was not ever religious. It was not the Americanized messiah being brutally massacred by hammer and nail that so badly sickened and offended me. I hold Jesus in no different regard than I do Luke Skywalker or Gandalf The Grey. It was simply the vivid reality of seeing someone being so horribly maimed and brutally tortured that still causes a turn in my stomach.

  The dark man laughed wildly as the scene below him unfolded. With every nail the woman slammed down into the skull of Jesus, the evil shape above howled with delight; a deep and guttural laughter.

  I tried again to see the dark man’s face, but as I looked up I found the throne was now at least twenty feet above the altar, and hundreds more groaning, tortured bodies had been added to the base of the throne.

  I heard crying and looked back down on the brutal scene in front of me. The cry was not coming from Jesus, but from the woman hammering his face and head.

  The cries sounded familiar. They sounded just like Cassie’s had when Brent had first attacked her. This cry seemed muffled and restrained. It sounded as if she was in as much pain as her holy victim.

  “Cassie!” I screamed.

  She continued hammering away at the skull of Jesus, but looked back at me. Then I saw the sight that truly put me in therapy for years.

  I must stress again that this was not a normal dream. I’ve never forgotten even a single detail of it, as we often do with normal dreams, and its vivid detail was equal to seeing anything happen before me in real life.

  It was Cassie, all right. Only her eyes and mouth were sewn so tightly shut that the stitches had nearly torn right through the holes they interlaced. Her face was a mess of oozing blood.

  It was perhaps the shock and surprise that so horribly affected my mental well being. Jesus getting large nails driven into his skull wasn’t easy to handle either, but the shock and awe of seeing the face of someone I knew, and pretty much loved, was unbearable.

  Her cries continued, and it became clear to me that she was trying to tell me something. I couldn’t possibly understand any of it with her lips sewn tightly shut, but it was evident that her cries were restrained screams for help.

  It seemed as if she could see me through her eyelids as the eyeless gaze stared straight at me.

  All the while she pleaded for me to do something, she didn’t stop hammering nails into the holy one’s head.

  I then noticed thick, crimson strings sprouting from her. Two on the back of each of her hands, two on her shoulders and one on her neck.

  I looked up again and saw that the dark man was using her as a marionette, controlling her every move with the bloody, sinewy strings he maneuvered in his hands. He laughed and laughed as he continued to force Cassie to pick up the nails and pound them down into the head and face of Jesus.

  I wanted to run but could not. The dark man had once again instilled that fear in me that planted my feet to the ground.

  The church began growing darker and darker. The figure of the mutilated Jesus vanished, and the eyeless and mouthless Cassie stood facing me on the altar.

  All the mad puppeteer’s strings were gone now, except for one: the one connected to her neck, which had morphed into a rope and tied itself tightly into a noose around her neck.

  “Hey down there, Tommy!” growled the dark man from way up above. His voice was like gravel and phlegm. “I know you’ve got the hots for lovely little Cassie, so why not spend the rest of eternity with her?”

  As he screamed those last words, the altar fell out from beneath us like a trap door.

  The rope stayed tightly wrapped around Cassie’s neck as we plunged together into darkness.

  For miles and miles we fell. All I could see was Cassie falling next to me at the same speed. Around us was an endless abyss of the darkest black.

  Somehow, my subconscious told me that the rope attached to Cassie’s neck was about to fall to its length, so I reached my arms out and clung tightly to her. For a second she smelled as I always imagined she would up close.

  The sweet, spicy scent of those strange black cigarettes she smoked filled my nostrils along with the fruity shampoo that I sometimes caught a whiff of when I would walk by her outside on a warm day.

  Sure enough, the rope finally reached its length and I felt her neck snap violently from the impact. Only, she was not dead. Her muffled screams of agony started again, only more furious and pathetic as her neck had suffered internal decapitation.

  Her sweet smell turned rotten and vile, and I felt myself fighting back the urge to regurgitate as I clung tightly to her dangling body.

  My face was pressed against hers, as I had no other option than falling down into the dark, silent abyss.

  My two worst fears, darkness and silence. Then, as if on cue, my third worst fear made its appearance.

  Snakes.

  They began slithering out of her ears and nostrils.

  I remember crying and whimpering in a terrified frenzy as I had to choose between an eternity clinging to the tortured Cassie covered in snakes or plunging to unknown depths of darkness and silence.

  Her eyelids ripped open from the stitching, and a massive, ugly snake with gigantic fangs slithered out, hissing loudly. My mind was made up for me; I fell into the darkness.

  As if my subconscious hadn’t been brutally mean to me enough already, it chose this time to play its worst trick ever on me.

  When I did finally wake up that morning, the date and time were exactly a little over eight hours from the time I went to sleep.

  But the rest of this dream lasted days and days.

  I fell and fell, helpless for such a long time that I felt my sanity draining away. My stomach experienced violent pangs of hunger about halfway down, which must have been well over two days of falling.

  At one point I was convinced that I had died and this was hell. I would be stuck there forever.

  My heart beat violently against my ribcage as my body craved water and began the stages of severe dehydration.

  On and on I begged for true death.

  And when finally my subconscious showed me some mercy and I awoke in my bed, it was not the dream that caused me to shoot out of bed. It was the voice that whispered in my ear.

  I felt the dark man’s face pressed right against my ear. After what I had just been through, I lacked the courage to finally turn and face him to see just what his face looked like under the shadows.

  “Should you hope to ever see her again, look deep into the shadows,” he whispered.

  I never imagined just what those words would mean to me some day. And then, when the courage finally came to face him, he was long, long gone.

  ***

  Emotions and confusion had a field day in my brain. The dream had been so strong and vivid that my mind would not accept it as a dream.

  I was convinced that Cassie and I had really been there. I needed to go find her and discuss what had just happened to us. She must have had the same dream, right?

/>   Clinging to her body and smelling her shampoo and cigarettes was so clear in my brain that I swore I could still smell her. The crack sound of her neck snapping was so loud and intense; a noise I’ve still never forgotten.

  After waking up and getting dressed, I saw a good foot and a half snow outside my window. Obviously school had been cancelled, which is why my mother hadn’t woken me before leaving for work.

  I sat in my room with a bowl of cereal and continued going to work on the first level of the eighth world in Super Mario Brothers. I was hardly putting any effort into the game. My mind was full to capacity.

  An elusive thought, one that had been hiding out in the dark corners of my brain since I woke up, began presenting itself in a clearer form, expanding and growing like a cancer. The dream had begun to feel more like a dream as I focused more on the video game, but this thought, or premonition, or whatever it was, was telling me something about Cassie. Something I realized I was completely certain of, but had no natural way of knowing.

  She was gone. Maybe dead, maybe alive. But definitely gone. The dream somehow signified this fact and I could not deny it.

  Then, I remembered the words of the dark man as I awoke.

  Should you hope to ever see her again, look deep into the shadows.

  Even as a naïve and fairly ignorant ten-year-old boy, I paid attention enough in my science classes to know a few things. And I remembered a teacher once telling us that a dream could extend beyond sleep into the first moments of wakefulness. I learned that it was not uncommon for a person to sometimes think someone is speaking to them as they wake up, but find no one there as they become fully alert.

  Despite this knowledge, the words of the dark man had to have been more than a dream. I felt him. The icy chill of his sour breath as his gravel-and-phlegm coated voice whispered into my ear still lingered in my nostrils. I even remembered feeling a surge of heat replacing the cold of the space he had been taking up next to my bed when he vanished.