They spilled from him in the form of a thick, black liquid and filled the cauldron, seeping over the bodies that rested there and then liquefying them.
Alan Treacher and Barry Foster were no more, barely even worthy of a footnote in the history of Beldam Woods. But what they accomplished with their deaths was monumental.
The Pumpkin Man took the cauldron with him when he left. There was no proof that he had ever been there. The only things that were different were the small pile of smoldering ashes that nestled back in the woods behind the police department, and the lack of two people who should have been sitting in the jail cell that faced the ashes.
V
Craig pulled the shotgun from under the dashboard as he left the remains of his squad car. He moved fast and pumped two rounds into the gas tank as he ran. Old Bones stood in front of the car and cranked his head to the side, a gesture that conveyed curiosity remarkably well. It was still wearing that expression when the explosion blew the car to Hell and knocked half the people on the street off their feet. The windows of the cinema shattered and so did a few eardrums along the way.
Far more importantly, Old Bones blew up. Screw the car. It could be replaced. Whatever the creature really was, he did not want to know what it was capable of. The bones that had made its body were almost universally broken and burned by the explosion.
The witch let out a shriek of anguish that was almost as massive as the sound of the car exploding. Despite the ringing in his ears, Craig heard her clearly. She looked toward him with eyes that suddenly flared into small suns and gestured with her hands, whispering words he couldn’t have heard anyway.
Craig had the good sense to get the hell out of the way, and that was a big bonus. The ground where he’d been a moment before liquefied, boiling in an instant. He took aim again and this time when he fired the shotgun, his aim was for her face, not her chest.
Hattie might have made a deal with the devil to come back, but she apparently didn’t get being unstoppable as part of the package. Her eyes flew wide and her hands gestured wildly. Her voice, cracked and decrepit with age, called out “NOOOO!” just before her head exploded.
The hag’s body fell to the ground, the bloodied stump of her neck bleeding black across the ground. Craig looked around, stunned, and watched as the squad car burned and the bones near it smoldered.
It took a few seconds, but eventually a few of the braver souls around him came closer, inspecting the monsters. Both were destroyed. Of the thing that had attacked Perry Wallis, there was no sign save a smear of rancid, filthy ichors where it had hit the ground.
Craig didn’t care as long as the thing never came near him again. The moon was high above and the streets were covered in debris and scattered with shocked bystanders. The rest of his Halloween night was spent arranging ambulances for the injured and body bags for the dead.
It was as he was finally drifting toward sleep that he realized Alan Treacher had been telling him the truth the entire time. Hattie the witch had tried to come back and he had stopped her.
VI
They met in the woods, at what had been called the Witch’s Hollow for as long as anyone could remember. Mister Sticks stood before the seething cauldron and from time to time dipped his hand into the black pit of corruption that roiled within. Now and then he brought his wooden fingers to the maw of his gourd face and let the fluids drip into the hollow, mummified, pumpkin-like head. Every time a drop fell inside his mouth he nodded with satisfaction.
Patrick came out of the woods, carrying two corpses on one shoulder and the small white form of Robert without his armor of bones on the other. He dropped the bodies and ripped the flesh from them in long sheets, with practiced ease. Muscles and entrails were shoved into the ragged wounds in his chest and back, and he sighed with relief as the raw materials knitted themselves into his body.
“Ahhh...damn that’s a lot better than a hole in your gizzards.” Jack watched as his brother quickly wrapped the raw flesh from his victims onto the newly healed areas, interested in the way Patrick just seemed to absorb the skin into his own mass. The section looked red and raw, but whole, with no sign that it had ever belonged to someone else.
When Patrick was done, he nodded and Robert moved to the remains. Of all the brothers, Robert seemed the least changed by the years. He was tiny, barely larger than a house cat. His long, white arms gripped bones and pulled with maniacal strength, ripping them away from the remaining ligaments that held the bodies together. He eyed each bone and sorted them with unsettling speed. When he was finished he held out his arms, spread his legs wide and let the thin filaments that hid within him wrap around the bones, drawing them to his slight form, encasing him in the fresh bones of the two bodies Patrick had provided for him.
He was smaller than before, but still damned impressive. Once again he chose to look as inhuman as possible, allowing the twin rib cages to warp together and fusing bones that should never have connected under natural circumstances to form new arms and legs around his diminutive form. Short legs, exceptionally long arms, and a single skull formed from two separate heads, changed until they became one misshapen, uneven skull with thrusting teeth and three eye sockets.
Robert clacked out a quick thanks to Patrick, who nodded his acknowledgement. Jack watched it all, amused and amazed. His brothers were, in his estimation, simpletons from time to time, but they were impressive in their own ways.
He looked to Patrick. “Tell me you didn’t enjoy that, and say it like you mean it.”
“Of course I enjoyed it. It’s what I was born for, to create havoc and reap the souls of the foolish.” Patrick shrugged his broad shoulders wetly. “But I also like having a stable existence in this world and I don’t find humans particularly repugnant, which is more than I can say for the two of you.”
Robert shook his head and gestured an answer. “I never said they were repugnant, I said they were too prolific. A few million less would not make this a darker world.”
Jack cackled. He had his mother’s laugh. “You have grand aspirations, Robert. I have always admired that about you.” He looked around and pointed. “I see our guest of honor is finally ready to show herself.”
The three brothers watched as Erika Carmichael came out of the woods and into the clearing, dressed in what was left of her negligee. She walked as a sleepwalker, barely seeming aware of anything save whatever it was her mind was showing her. Her breath came out in clouds and her skin was dimpled from the cold. Her appearance hardly mattered to the sons of Alvina Bathory. They cared about what was coming next.
“Where is the other one?” Robert’s gestures and clacking noises made both of his brothers, as well as Erika, turn to look at him quizzically.
“What ‘other one,’ Robert?” Patrick sighed. He was tired and he ached and as much as he was grateful to see his mother again, he wanted sleep.
“The girl who led her to the cinema. The one who should still be with her, guarding her in this delicate time.” He pointed into the woods, in the direction Erika had come from. “She’s over there. She’s hiding. I think we scare her.”
Patrick had to strain his eyes to make her out, but he nodded eventually. “Ah. There she is. Yes, I suppose we do scare her a bit.” He shrugged. “Let her stay there then. She isn’t really necessary for this, is she?”
Jack shook his head. “Not hardly. Let’s finish this, brothers. Let’s be done with this and on our way.”
Jack leaned over the cauldron, staring into it again. Patrick stepped to one side of Erika and Robert moved to her other. Each took hold of a forearm and bicep, holding on to the girl gently and then lifting her up, until her feet touched the seething darkness within the cauldron. Erika sighed a soft, breathy sound and barely acknowledged the boiling fluids that ran over her feet, her ankles, her legs, and eventually her entire form.
They submerged her completely, stepping back from the massive cauldron as the moon shone down on them from almost directly above. When the
moon had moved a few degrees in the sky, they stepped back to the cauldron to find Erika lying at the bottom, the thick black fluids gone from around her. Her hair was dry, her skin was dry, and she was sound asleep.
Patrick lifted her from the cauldron and carried her in his arms. Of all three brothers, he knew the academy campus the best. Still, Beth followed along behind him, silently, and had to lead him to the proper dormitory. He settled Erika on her bed and tucked her in gently.
VII
The two of them sat in the back of a squad car for almost two hours, not forgotten, but put low on the list of priorities. Jeremy sat to the left and Melissa to the right. Somewhere along the way, she rubbed most of the makeup off her face. Jeremy figured she didn’t much feel like looking like a witch anymore. He couldn’t blame her.
After around twenty minutes of relative silence, just as Jeremy was thinking about closing his eyes and going to sleep, Melissa asked him a question that seemed to come from left field. “How often does your daddy hit you, Jeremy?”
Jeremy blinked and felt the butterflies start up in his stomach. “He doesn’t.”
“Yes, he does.”
“No, really.” He looked out the window of the police cruiser, not willing to lie directly to her.
“I’m guessing it’s about once a week. Maybe a little more, but not too much.” Her voice had a dreamlike quality, a faint, almost-singing tone that he found unsettling. “Not often enough to leave marks. Those take time to heal.”
Jeremy shook his head, not trusting his voice to answer without shaking. “He doesn’t hit me.”
She remained silent for almost a minute. Then she leaned across the seat and put her hands on his legs. Her touch was delicate, not really enough to make him flinch but he did anyway. “I know he hits you. I can tell.”
“Even if he did hit me, how would you be able to tell?”
“Because of the way you look at grown-ups. It’s the same look I used to get on my face. I saw it in the mirror all the time before my dad…did what he did.”
Jeremy closed his eyes and rested his head against the cool glass of the car door. “He doesn’t hit me.” Closed eyes didn’t stop the stinging at his tear ducts or the waterworks when they finally started. He cried quietly, but he cried just the same.
Melissa sat back in her seat after that and stayed quiet. After a while, the tears stopped. Not much after that, Jeremy fell asleep, curled up in a nearly fetal position. By then Melissa was already asleep.
VIII
For the second time in his life, Josh Kinder woke up in his bedroom and had every reason to believe he’d been killed. He was still in his Halloween outfit, minus the jack-o-lantern. He hoped he’d had a good time. He wished he could remember it a little more clearly.
He found out later what had happened.
He didn’t question it, merely accepted that he’d gotten lucky. But he made a promise to himself. He would never go as a monster at Halloween again. Next time he dressed up, if he ever did again, because he was getting too old according to his father, he would be a clown or a super-hero. It just seemed a little more sensible.
He didn’t ask what happened between Jeremy and Melissa. He saw that something had happened, but had no idea what it might have been. Both of them looked more shell-shocked than in love, so he figured his chances with her were still pretty good.
For her part, Melissa remembered Jeremy risking himself a few times to at least try to keep her safe on the burning hayride. So she did something she had seriously considered doing several times in the past. She made an anonymous call to the police and reported Jeremy’s father for abusing him. She made sure she had evidence first. It’s amazing how many people have video cameras. Amazing, too, how few use them in ways that are anything but for holding fond memories.
Melissa remembered her own troubles with the video camera. She remembered her own troubles with her father. She missed her mother. She loved her mother. But the fact that her father was rotting away in jail had never once hurt her feelings.
If her actions helped Jeremy in the future, so much the better. She just wished someone would have helped her in the same way before it was too late.
Epilogue
Beth and Erika made it home without any unusual encounters, which pleased Beth to no end and was exactly what Erika had expected. Or rather, exactly what Alvina had expected. Erika’s body was now host to the power and presence of a witch. She stood in the bright sunlight and looked at her naked body in the mirror as the morning broke. Buried deep inside her, Erika still screamed. Alvina liked the sound.
This body, this form, was ideal. She didn’t have to worry about the wretched pains of her old age any longer and there was no need to hide her appearance. She was young and she was beautiful and she knew how to make sure she stayed that way.
Alvina let her hands caress her new form, touching and marveling at any sort of physical sensation after so long without. She would make sure to act appropriately horrified when anyone mentioned the tragic events of Halloween night. There were seventeen dead or missing and over fifty injured after all. What a shame.
She felt the smile play at her lips and closed her eyes, imagining the man who kept coming in and visiting this form when she invaded Erika’s dreams and prepared her new vessel from afar.
George Burgess was the headmaster of the school. He was also a pedophile. Or at least he wanted to be a pedophile. She didn’t believe he’d ever quite developed the courage to act on his desires. Not yet.
Outside in the Sunday morning chill, she could see the man walking toward the chapel on campus. It would take remarkably little to ruin him for life. Evidence could be manufactured if she needed it. Like pulling a rabbit from a hat. Or better still, and simpler, she could just remove his sexual desires entirely.
She hadn’t decided which to do yet. All in good time, and she had all the time in the world. She was young, after all, and ever so pretty.
THE END
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Epilogue
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Epilogue
Harvest Moon Page 27