by Sam West
Not long left now.
The few, short steps towards him felt like one hundred; one hundred painful steps, bare-foot across shattered glass. But her pain was psychological, not physical. He remained seated in his chair at the head of the oblong, country-cottage style table. She braced herself, waiting for his next move.
She didn’t have to wait long. With the speed of a striking cobra, he scraped back his chair and grabbed her, spinning her round so that her back was pressed against his front. He was over six feet tall, and she was barely five feet four and slight of build, making her a pitiful match for his strength. Bill, however, had no qualms in taking advantage of this height and weight discrepancy, and he squeezed her tight, one strong arm wrapped around her shoulders and the other clamped over her mouth.
She shuddered in repulsion, his touch sickening her as he explored the contours of her body with the hand that wasn’t covering her mouth.
“You’re still a beautiful woman, Anouchka, I know I don’t say it often enough, but you are. You still have the body of a twenty-year-old, so slim, so tight. You’d never think that you’d had a kid.”
His hand continued to crawl over her skin, as about as welcome as a poisonous spider. It squeezed, moulded, pinched, all the things it usually did before it ripped off her clothes. The hand untucked the neatly-ironed, puff-sleeve, white blouse from the equally neatly-ironed, grey-linen trousers. Bill favoured outfits like this – smart and non-slutty – and it was almost tenderly that he stroked the soft cotton of her blouse from the inside at the same time as her skin.
The vile, wandering hand moulded her small breast through the thin lace of the bra and she tried not to flinch in disgust. Flinching meant things would get a whole lot nastier for her.
The arm snaked around her shoulders suddenly moved to fist a handful of her long, shiny brown hair and tugged hard. Her head snapped sideways, and a small yelp escaped her lips. The hand didn’t let up and she felt sure that he was going to rip out a wad of hair from the roots.
It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“I know what you’ve been doing, dear wife. Conspiring against me, plotting to leave, stealing my money, hoarding furniture in storage, I know everything, you stupid, dumb cunt.”
In her panic, just one word blazed bright in her mind: How?
She had been so careful, how the hell had he found out?
The fingers of the hand on her breast pinched her nipple, hard enough to bruise. When she cried out again, he let go of her hair and slapped her. It wasn’t too hard a slap – he knew better than to leave a bruise where it would show. That same hand circled her neck, his touch almost loving in the way he gently stroked the tender skin of her throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said in the silence that followed.
It had been the wrong thing to say. Bill’s temper was volcanic, and right now was no exception.
Her squeal was cut short when he viciously grabbed the back of her neck and slammed her face into his dinner. The side of her head smacked against the dinnerplate, the dinner going some way to soften the blow. Mashed potato and pie exploded up around her face, sticking to her in hot, slimy clumps. He shoved at her head, rubbing her face in the food like a disobedient dog. She gripped the side of the table for support, the plate tilting on the table, her head jerking sideways as it tipped. Mashed potatoes smeared her vision and blocked her nose, forcing her to breathe through pursed lips.
“Do you really think you would get away with this?” he bellowed above her. “Do you really think I would never find out?”
Had she? She didn’t know anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled by the plate of food.
“Fuck you,” he screamed, yanking her upright by the hair.
With a grunt of disgust, he pushed her head so that she went sprawling to the ground. Her back smacked against a cupboard and the air knocked out of her, rendering her immobile. She was painfully aware of the mashed potatoes dripping off her nose and sticking to her eyelids, but in that moment her arms felt too heavy to lift to wipe it away.
The dinner dripped off her face into her lap and her humiliation was absolute.
The first kick from his smart, laced-up shoe landed squarely in her ribs. She cringed and cried out, landing on her side and curling up into the foetal position. Fat tears streamed down her cheeks, which at least helped to clear her vision somewhat.
“You’re a dumb cunt!” he screamed down at her. “A stupid whore, a money grabbing cunt!”
When Bill got like this, he didn’t seem to mind that he repeated himself a lot. She let the verbal torrent of abuse wash over her, the foul, hate-smeared words meaningless to her, partly shut out by the incessant ringing in her ears.
Her thoughts briefly strayed to the old couple to the right of them. The party-goers in the student house wouldn’t hear his shouts for the loud music, but Mr and Mrs Green might.
Maybe they’ll call the police.
Bill wasn’t normally quite this vocal. Surely the neighbours would do something? Yet somehow, she doubted it – as polite as Mr and Mrs Green were, they were very insular, neither of them even bothering to say, ‘oh, please, call me by my first name’ on the rare occasions they spoke when she addressed them by their surnames.
No one is coming to help you.
Crushing despair washed over her. What was the point in anything? For the entirety of Brian’s life, she had protected him, only for her own son to turn against her, for him to think that she was a mentally unstable, bone-idle drip; for him to think that her not ever working was her choice. That hurt far more than her husband’s beatings ever could.
The shouting ceased, to be replaced by another swift quick to the ribs. Pain exploded in her side, but still it paled in comparison to her mental anguish. She braced herself as best she could, expecting the blows to rain down on her, but instead they stopped.
“Who the fuck is that?” he said above her, but not to her.
At first she didn’t know what he was talking about, but then she heard it too; the doorbell.
An alien feeling surged in her chest. Hope. Could Mr and Mrs Green have called the police? She didn’t know whether to be happy or sad over such a possibility. The chances were that Bill would talk himself out of it and then things would get so much worse for her.
The doorbell sounded again.
“Fuck,” he said.
When she dared to peer up at him, she saw that he was straightening out his suit and smoothing down his hair.
“If that’s trick or treaters, I’ll ring their fucking necks. It’s gone ten, for fuck’s sake.”
Trick or treaters. Of course. It was Halloween. His good-natured, friendly expression was firmly back in place – the Bill that the rest of the world knew and loved. Nice Bill. Kind Bill. A sickness churned in her stomach at the sheer phoniness of her existence.
The doorbell sounded, over and over, and despite how thoroughly she was wrapped up in her own pity, the strangeness of the over-zealous ringing was not lost on her. Only someone completely desperate would lean on the bell like that.
Maybe somebody is coming to help me…
She sat up, wincing as the movement caused pain to stab at her bruised ribs. He may even have broken them – it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Brian was due home soon for a visit, and sadness tugged at her heart. Bill would just tell him that she was having ‘one of her spells’, that she couldn’t cope with seeing him and would prefer to remain alone in her darkened bedroom.
Clutching her damaged sides, she used the countertop to haul herself upright, gritting her teeth against the pain as she did so. She strained her ears, trying to hear beyond the ringing in her head. Who the hell was Bill talking to at the door?
Ever so slightly, the ringing in her ears subsided, and she could make out snippets of what was being said.
“I have no sweets, be on your way, now,” Bill was saying. “Hey, what the hell do you th
ink you’re doing?”
Anouchka clung to the countertop, frowning because she couldn’t hear who he was talking to.
Only when the trick or treaters had apparently drifted into the hallway, did she hear the strange, whispering, rasping quality of their voices.
“Sweet…”
“We want sweets…
“Give them to us…”
“Get out of my house,” she heard Bill shout. “You can’t just come in here, get out.”
The creepy voices grew louder, then she could hear their footsteps coming down the hallway, approaching the kitchen. Anouchka stumbled over towards the kitchen towel which hung on a hook near the cooker and proceeded to wipe her face with it.
When she lowered the towel, the trick or treaters were in her kitchen. She stared at them in dismay, confused and disorientated at this unforeseen turn of events. Bill appeared behind them seconds after, his expression as wide-eyed and as puzzled as her own.
“You’re trespassing. Get out of my house right now or I’ll call the police.”
He appeared to be so flustered that he wasn’t even shouting anymore.
In fact, the more she looked at him, the more she realised that he was scared. It was a side of Bill that she had very rarely seen and, despite the strangeness of the situation, she relished it.
“Give us sweets…”
“He has no sweets…”
“Then a trick it is…”
Their rasping voices overlapped, finishing off each other’s sentences almost as if it were one person speaking. Anouchka looked at the four children more closely.
What great costumes they have.
Although she wasn’t sure that great was quite the correct word. Convincing, perhaps. Those masks, with their too-big noses, beady little eyes and razor-sharp, false teeth looked real. And so did the blood that smeared those masks.
“Now you listen to me, you little freaks, if you don’t leave right now, you’re going to be in more trouble than you’ve ever dreamed possible.”
Bill’s fighting words held little conviction. Anouchka watched as he strode over to the other side of the kitchen where he had dumped his smartphone on top of the microwave. The children followed him, whispering together in that disturbing way which made the hairs prickle on the back of her neck.
“He wants a trick…”
“Yes, he does…”
“A trick for Halloween…”
“The best trick of all…”
“He wants to die…”
Over by the microwave, Bill tapped at the screen of his smartphone. Even from where she stood on the other side of the room, Anouchka could see the three numbers he had dialled – nine, nine, nine. He pressed the phone to his ear as the children crowded around him.
“Hello?” he said into his phone, speaking quickly. “I need police, our house has been broken into and we are being threatened…”
His words trailed off, his face suddenly pale and his eyes wide. Anouchka stared at him in confusion. What the hell was he doing? Why wasn’t he speaking anymore?
Who the fuck was he speaking to on the phone?
The phone slid from his fingers, clattering to the slate floor. Everything that followed happened so fast, she could hardly comprehend it. One moment her husband was standing there, just staring over at her in almost child-like horror, the next he was howling in agony.
Anouchka blinked, sure that she was hallucinating. But no, the children really were attacking him. Not just attacking, but eating him. They had sunk their teeth into his legs, and one of them had even buried its face in his crotch.
Bill thumped to the floor, a kitchen chair scraping noisily across the slate as he unsuccessfully made a grab for it to try and steady himself.
The children fell upon him in an act of savagery that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Not even in a wildlife documentary had she ever seen animals tearing at their prey with such ferocity.
She turned away from the grisly scene, her stomach churning. But it was too late – that which had been seen could never be unseen. She swayed on the spot, for a moment convinced that she was hallucinating. Bits of her husband had been hanging from the creatures’ mouths, for deep down, she understood that these things were in no way human.
Her husband wasn’t screaming for long. When she hazarded a glance at the horrendous scene for a final time, the black-cloaked, writhing bodies parted to reveal that Bill was missing a great chunk of his throat. Blood sprayed from the gaping hole in his neck like a leaky hosepipe. Both his hands were clamped over the wound with little effect, his eyes bulging in disbelief. The nightmarish figures swarmed over him, blocking her view of his face, and her paralysis broke.
Stumbling backwards, she spun round in the hallway almost tripping over her own feet. The ground lurched beneath her like she was on a ferry, and the walls of the hallway tilted. Up ahead the front-door was open, revealing the black night beyond.
As if in a nightmare, her legs numb and heavy, she half-ran, half-stumbled up the hallway, bouncing off the walls as she did so.
Up the garden-path she ran, tears streaming down her face, her mind blank with terror and the surge of adrenalin numbing her damaged ribs. The front-gate loomed ahead, and when she reached it she almost tripped over it in her haste. She exited her garden at speed, only to go careering into a young woman who was running towards her.
“Please,” she gasped, gripping the girl by her upper-arms to prevent both of them from falling over with the impact of their collision.
It took her a moment to realise that the young woman was carrying a crying baby, and that she was also accompanied by a kid who couldn’t have been older than nine. He looked familiar, but right then she could neither place him or even care that she probably knew him.
“You have to help me,” she gasped.
CHAPTER TEN
Jen could only stare at the woman dumbly. She wasn’t one of them, that much was immediately apparent, and she loosened the grip on the knife.
“We have to get off this street,” Jen said between ragged gasps and frantic shushing in a vain attempt to calm the child.
“They killed my husband,” the woman sobbed.
“And we’re going to be next if we don’t get the fuck out of here,” Jen said, shrugging off the woman’s grip and lurching forward once more.
The sheer insanity of the situation was not lost on her – the main-road, people, civilisation was just around the corner, but it may as well have been a million miles away.
Jen and Danny had only taken a few steps with their new companion close behind them when the gate directly opposite them swung outwards.
“Mrs Green,” she heard the woman gasp behind her.
Jen too, ground to a halt.
“No,” Danny said, “we have to keep moving. The monsters…”
Jen stared at the older woman at the end of the garden, who was mostly shrouded in shadows. From what she could see, she was petite, barefoot, and dressed in a long-sleeved, knee-length black robe. Jen figured that the woman had been on her way to bed.
“What on earth is going on?” the older woman asked. “Anouchka? Is that you? I didn’t recognise you.”
“You have to help us,” the woman called Anouchka said, rushing up to her.
The older woman stepped to one side. “Come in, my God, you have to calm down, we’ll sort this out.” She peered over at Jen and Danny, and the crying baby. “We’ll sort this out inside.”
“No,” Danny repeated. “We have to keep moving.”
Jen remained rooted to the spot, unsure of what to do. In the darkness, the old woman smiled at her. “Come along, dear. That poor baby, is he yours?”
“It’s a she. And no, I’m babysitting for the Pearsons at the end of the street.”
“Look,” Danny whispered next to her, tugging on her arm.
Jen looked. “Shit.”
The two women over by the gate didn’t hear Danny, the older woman draping an arm over the s
obbing woman and gently beginning to guide her down the path.
Jen stared at the clown standing less than ten feet away from where they stood – the very same clown that had been on their TV and then on their phones. Leaving the promenade meant having to pass the clown, and suddenly it seemed like a very good idea to take up the woman’s offer of entering the house.
“Peekaboo, I see you,” he said.
Jen and Danny jumped into action, hot on the tails of the two women.
“Hurry up,” Danny said behind them.
He ran ahead of them and darted into the house with Jen and Anouchka close behind him.
The older woman trailed behind them, and it seemed to take her an age to reach the door, even though in reality it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“Now, is anyone going to tell me what’s happening here?” she said when she finally joined them in the hallway.
Jen scuttled around her and slammed the door shut, shoving the deadbolt across. “We don’t answer the door to anybody, do you understand? Didn’t you see him out there?”
“See who?” the older woman asked, frowning slightly.
“Him. The clown-man.”
“I didn’t see anyone outside,” she replied, before turning her attention to Anouchka. “Where’s that nice husband of yours, dear?”
“He’s dead. The trick or treaters killed him,” Anouchka panted.
The older woman’s face remained impassive. “Shall we go through?”
Jen looked at her, aghast. “Did you just hear what she just said? Her husband is dead.”
“Yes, I heard, dear. Why don’t we just go through to the living-room and calm down?”
Something else nagged at the corner of her mind, permeating through the thick fog of fear: I do not like this woman, she thought.
“We need to call the police.”
“But all calls go through to him,” Danny whined.
“Jesus Christ, we have to try,” Jen snapped, then instantly regretted it. She put an arm round the poor kid’s shaking shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“Come along,” the woman said briskly, turning her back on them and walking down the wide hallway. “We’ll sort this all out now. I’ll make up some formula for the baby, I always keep a carton of it for when the grandkids come to stay.”