Channel surfing, the Hallowfiend clicked upon, then past, newscasts and talk shows, commercials and chef competitions, vibrant sporting events and animal documentaries. Reclining in his Day-Glo orange sweat suit, shallowly respiring through a skull mask of the same shade, he at last grunted, “Well, this looks promising.”
Beholden to cartoon logic, a Victorian mansion loomed atop a hill, decaying in isolation, overlooking streets of well-kept pine clapboard houses. Behind the mansion’s highest unbroken window, a wizened old spinster stared out from her lonely turret, bitterly, with a battered pair of binoculars pressed to her face, and cobwebs draped from the shoulders of her simple blue frock.
On the lower streets, a treat parade had commenced with falsetto shouts and friendly bellows—youthful splendor, seemingly immortal.
Into the old lady’s view marched queen, hobo, poltergeist, ninja, ballerina, daffodil, and killer whale, lugging pillowcases and plastic pumpkins that grew heavier with each house visited. And as they entered her cognizance, to better spite their blissful shamming, the spinster recited their Christian names. “There goes Tabitha,” she said, “and Eddie and Baxley and Imogen and Sebastian and Grant and bratty little Alice. Rampaging sweet teeth, the lot of ’em, and here I sit, all alone.”
Twilight darkened to void black. Fog rolled in to veil all but the full moon. Still, the long-toothed old dame maintained her bitter vigil, though not a singular trick-or-treater ascended the hill to pay her home a visit. She complained and she wailed, pleaded with empty air and hollered threats. At one point, she claimed that she’d hurl her own self through the window, to perish as a shatter-boned heap, if life didn’t provide her some companionship, someone to while away her golden years with. Alone she remained, as the trick-or-treaters concluded their treks, and headed off toward their respective homes, to overindulge in candy feasting.
Time-lapse terminated the cartoon’s October, birthing a cheery, vibrant November morn. Birds trilled in the trees, glutted with early worms. Exiting into open air, riding wafts of flapjack steam, seven ordinary children converged mid-street. Shielded from the elements by their scarves, beanies and sweaters, they marched, in formation, up the hill.
Turning the knob to the mansion’s front entrance, they entered without knocking. “Eunice, where are you?” they queried, clearly worried, peeking into room after room, confronting only ornate furniture entombed in dusty plastic, and baseboards laden with mouse holes, denoted by tiny excrement. “Eunice, answer us! Where can you be?”
Finally, they surged into the old woman’s turret, and therein sighed with utmost relief. In the very same wicker seat that she’d spied from now slept the old biddy, with a line of bubbling spittle trickling its way down her chin.
The youths pinched and shook her. Snapping their fingers, they hollered in Eunice’s ears. Finally, moaning, smacking her lips, shifting discomforted, the lady emerged from her slumber.
Goggling at seven young faces—each of which stared at her, wide-eyed, with childish solemnity—the woman gripped her elbows and summoned forth speech. “Why, it’s Imogen…and Grant…and Eddie…and Tabitha.”
“We all came,” declared a little blonde fellow, bending to plant a kiss upon the dame’s cheek. She reached for him, but he’d already backed away.
“But, but, where are your costumes? You were all having so much fun. I watched you through my window.”
“Oh, Eunice,” a brunette girl then scolded, “you’re always so silly, so…ridiculous. Halloween ended, so we took our costumes off. It’s time for you to take yours off, too.”
“We saved you some candy,” a bashful, chubby, raven-haired boy muttered, barely meeting her eyes. Returning his gaze to the stained carpet, he added, “I can’t believe you stayed here all night. Nobody has ever…ever…ever taken on that dare. This abandoned mansion is just so darn…creepy.”
And lo the old woman rose, and with a theatrical sort of flourish, seized her grey tresses and tugged her wrinkled countenance from her skull, and was young again. In fact, she was the identical twin of she who’d masqueraded as a ballerina the night prior. “Mama’s angry with you,” that girl giggled.
“Shut your stupid mouth, brat.”
The program cut to its final exterior shot. Eight children ran down the hill—as if death itself were chasing them, it might seem, if not for their rambunctious mirth—as the credits arrived.
Annoyed, the Hallowfiend shifted in his chair. He stroked his mask’s five orange vertebrae. A bit of sniveling angst and it’s over, he thought. Where’s the terror, the bloodshed, the stomach-turning hankerings of fanged monsters? Is the season going soft on me? Should I start scribing scripts?
Hefting his remote control up, the Hallowfiend thumb-pressed a button. Expecting a powered off television, he gasped, as it seemed that he’d only changed the channel. Live action spectacle had succeeded the animated mawkishness. A pallid, roly-poly figure cavorted across the screen, his overcoat an eerie shade of purple, his top hat’s vibrancy built of colors that, though frozen in silk, yet seemed to be flowing.
Between his pair of skulls, the Hallowfiend’s human face now grinned. Can it be? he wondered, elated, ripple-wallowing in the warm, fuzzy throes of nostalgia. When letters built of artfully posed, roped-together cadavers slid into and out of the screen, spelling out HAPPY HALLOWEEN, he was sure of it.
Those corpses’ nostrils and ear canals were overstuffed with candy corn. Their broken-jawed mouths and gouged-out eye sockets dribbled pumpkin seeds and liquid that might have been blood, were it a darker shade of red.
The screen went dark for a moment. Power tools sounded. Begging segued to bleating, to shrieking, to fading burbles. The Hallowfiend found himself gripping his knees, on the edge of his seat.
Radiance returned to the screen, though it now arrived through a haze of theatrical, green-tinted fog. Again, corpse letters met the Hallowfiend’s sight, though their message now read NO GOD CAN SEE US. The skull bounties had shifted, too, with squirm-wriggling maggots having supplanted the candy corn, and beetles having superseded the pumpkin seeds.
Off and on, again, the lights went. Now, each corpse wore a purple overcoat and a psychedelic top hat, paying homage to the series’ star. Wider and wider stretched their broken jaws. They began, in fact, to bend backward, permitting the emergence, from the greasy-grimy depths of those purposefully posed casualties, of shadowy arms, flexing taloned fingers. When those fingers snapped, all light again fled.
Into the ebon void sepulcher that then lingered upon the screen, a pronouncement arrived—clotted seepage from nether space—borne upon a voice that resounded with strains of Lugosi, of Price, of Karloff, of Lee. Word for word, in twinned tempo, the Hallowfiend recited the invocation right along with the announcer: “On October’s last evening, a season’s very skeleton might be glimpsed through its flesh. Beyond indifference and fad costumes, true monsters skulk the wind. And on that note, a festering welcome, both to our spectral viewers and their blissfully oblivious hauntees, to The Diabolical Designs of Professor Pandora’s special, once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime Halloween episode. Are you arriving or leaving? Are you, at all?”
The darkness abated to unveil the strangest of orchards: threaded arms, shaded with black putrefaction-infused midnight. Oh so realistic, they seemed, embedded with light bulb and camera lens fruit, linking creatives and couchbound, Pandora and Hallowfiend.
Pumpkin fire infernos erupted at the apexes of ebon candles within the hollows of carved pumpkins, orange totems whose jagged grins, were they prone to discourse, might have described invisible chains linking past, future and present—binding every soul in hollow triumph, in electric-veined agony, in resignation, in abandonment to decay.
When I’m dead and gone, thought the Hallowfiend, whether via failing physiology, unforeseeable accident, exhausted suicide, or lucky victim, let it be a witch that sweeps up my cremation, so that my ashes might accompany her broom flights for long centuries.
His mind wa
s wandering. From the opposite side of their communion, Professor Pandora tapped the television’s inner screen, demanding that the Hallowfiend pay better attention. True artists abhor indifference and disdain, after all. The Hallowfiend knew that. He would do better.
Just twice-in-a-lifetime, he mused. Fortunately, I possess eidetic memory and never have forgotten, never will forget, all the charm of this cheaply made magnum opus. Replaying what he’d missed in his mind, he watched intestines spill forth from open abdomens, into a cauldron, as a slowly perishing obese couple cooked themselves into a cannibal’s feast.
As he danced around those unfortunates, his demeanor most impish, Professor Pandora promised the slow suicides that their very worst dreams were returning to escort them to nether space. Eyes wide with agonized disbelief, flesh waxen from blood loss, the sacrifices grinned and nodded.
When the commercials arrived, they too were vintage offerings, ghosts of recollected Octobers, residuum of cherished youth. Aging vampires sunk their fangs into cans of diet soda, declaiming, “Better than blood, even!” Black and white zombies shopped for bifocals. A cereal sweepstakes offered a date with a decades-dead horror actress.
When the feature presentation returned, the Hallowfiend grinned yet wider. Dressed in crude homemade costumes—patchwork something-or-others that obscured girths and genders—cresting on sugar rushes, trick-or-treaters arrived to the tract home that Professor Pandora had selected for his special evening. Soon, he’d be ladling homeowner stew into the kids’ candy bags.
Oh, how the Hallowfiend giggled in anticipation. Trick-or-treaters had inspired his relocation to rural isolation, after all. When one’s victims arrive to their house, it’s too easy, he’d decided. The thrill of the hunt unravels when one simply seizes the unmonitored from one’s doorstep. One grows lazy.
In lieu of a fulfilled expectation, however, the Hallowfiend instead found astoundment. This isn’t how I remember it! was his realization, watching the trick-or-treaters knock and knock, only to retreat, disappointed. Returning, those kids hurled eggs and carved pumpkins against Professor Pandora’s borrowed house, but not a one was so unfortunate as to glimpse the star’s mad visage.
Segueing into its next segment, the presentation revealed two oldsters in a shared horse costume. Cringing at threats uncackled, the pair retreated, throats intact, and exited the screen prior to more commercials.
A sick prank! thought the Hallowfiend. Or perhaps censorship has proven more insidious than I’d believed. Again, he raised the remote and attempted to power off the TV. Again, he only changed the channel. A pair of toy poodles, dressed as Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, fawned at the feet of a camera-shy faux firefighter.
“Yeesh,” groaned the Hallowfiend. Carefully watching his thumb as it met the remote, this time he successfully powered off his television. Back up into its ceiling alcove it went, punishment for having displeased him.
A cherished childhood memory butchered, thought the killer. The cruelest of tricks to make tonight’s treats all the sweeter.
* * *
The sound of shattering glass diminished his optimism; the House of Eternal October had attracted a vandal. Leaping up from his chair, the Hallowfiend hurried to meet them.
Having painted his home’s every window midnight black to maintain an inner atmosphere of perpetual gloom, the Hallowfiend expected eye-scalding sunlight to assault him, streaming through the shattered pane. Instead, to his astonishment, the Hallowfiend beheld a firmament shaded purple, orange and red, in the grips of eerie twilight.
How did time slip away from me? he wondered. When last I checked, it was still afternoon. I better slit the vandal’s throat with due haste, then go collect my guest of honor, lest all of my careful preparations go to waste.
The window breaker possessed cunning, it seemed. Lesser eyes than the Hallowfiend’s would’ve sighted only dirt road and cornfield, sweeping their gaze across the mise en scene. The Hallowfiend, however—in his single-minded devotion to victimization—hurled his scrutiny from tassel to tassel, tugged it down leaves, husks, ears and stalks, damn near traced root trajectories.
Is that a snake I see slithering? he wondered, squinting into the gloaming. No, indeed, it’s the end of a chain! Impossible as it seems, one of my scarecrows has escaped from its cross. Perhaps I should’ve used handcuffs.
The Hallowfiend’s rusty, lethal scythe rested aside the doorframe. Reflexively, he seized the tool as he hastened outside. Adrenaline sped the blood in his veins, threaded his well-aged muscles with vitality. Though he hadn’t envisioned the pursuit, the Hallowfiend lived for such moments, when he felt as if he might inhale death’s charnel bouquet and exhale pumpkin fire, and others’ dread grew tangible.
Onto the wraparound porch he surged, then down its six steps. Into a maize maze that stretched endless in the unreality of a feverish thoughtscape, he cast himself wholly, unleashing a howl of zoophagous implication. The tinkling chain up ahead, the rustling of leaves—rudely brushed aside by predator, prey and scythe—the droning of cicadas, the rhythmic respiration, all combined in the twilight, aural galvanization.
Though only corn plants did he see, not a singular doubt existed in the Hallowfiend’s mind that he’d soon be scythe-slicing the escapee’s Achilles tendons, and then driving his curved blade into the scarecrow’s abdomen, again and again, before leaving them to bleed out into the cornfield.
Who escaped their pole, anyway? he wondered. My intended’s next-door neighbor, her bestest friend, her intermittent boy toy, her yoga instructor? Are the four conscious of their new statuses as lobotomized background actors, or ghosts haunting their own physicalities, remnants of vague purpose?
His dogged pursuit carried him further, then further from the House of Eternal October, deeper into the non-ejaculatory orgasm of insanity unbound, hunting. The inside of his mask attained a familiar humidity, as if, between skulls, his face was sheathed in graveyard dew, warming toward evaporation.
In the grand thrill of it all, the tunnel vision of bloodlust briefly nullified his sense of direction. Ergo, the Hallowfiend was genuinely shocked, though only for a mere moment, to find himself emerging from the maize rows into a clearing he knew well: the very same site, in fact, where he’d erected four brain-damaged scarecrows upon steel crosses.
Every scarecrow had escaped, dragging their chains along with them! Had he purchased defective links? Had one of his helpers betrayed him, irate that the Hallowfiend wanted intimacy with his special lady, and they’d miss the main event? Maybe Professor Pandora escaped from my television to play a trick on me, the killer thought, breathing deeply.
A 360-degree appraisal revealed no signs of the escapees, save for feet indentations in the soil that seemed to lead in all directions. No longer could the Hallowfiend hear the chain tingling. Doubts danced at the edge of his consciousness.
* * *
In the dimming light that remained, he sighted incongruity. His plants were infected with corn smut, of a bizarre purple shade. Corn kernels gone tumoresque! thought the Hallowfiend. Perhaps I’ll taste some tomorrow.
Instinctively reorienting his sense of direction, he pondered the intentions of the mentally crippled. Would they flee down the dirt road, and every one of its miles, in search of altruistic community? Would they simply lie down and perish? Had his brain surgery erased their senses of self-preservation, every iota of their personalities?
Would they seek revenge in the cornfield or…might they actually return to the House of Eternal October, the site of their lessening, voluntarily? Had the shattered window been isolated, brutish spite, or the opening salvo in a battle that would test his wits?
Generally, on All Hallows’ Eves, the Hallowfiend’s slaughter games closely corresponded with what he’d envisioned beforehand, as if his victims and he weren’t acting independently at all, but inhabiting roles they’d memorized. Ergo, the deviations his reality had sprouted made the killer wonder if he was dreaming, or perhaps had died in his sleep, and ent
ered into an afterlife of eternal frustration.
Shaking such megrims from his skull, wondering whether a banshee wail would attract scarecrows or repel them, he was reassured by a sound most familiar: inarticulate rage.
At least one of them remains enough of themselves to realize they’ve been violated, thought the Halloween, slipping through the maize rows in pursuit, the blade of his scythe hanging over his shoulder, a lunar crescent. So thinking, he was tackled, hurled sidewise by a collision that bent maize plants beneath him, crippling their stalks irreparably.
From the weight pinning him prone, and the force of the fist striking the back of his head—bestrewing his soil-obscured vision with short-lived starbursts—the Hallowfiend estimated that his assaulter was none other than his intended’s next-door neighbor, a portly, balding widower who believed that his perpetual geniality disguised glistening lust for the lady.
In vain, the Hallowfiend reached for his dropped sickle, with only the tip of his right middle finger brushing against it. For the very first time in his lifespan, he felt not a predator, but a helpless, battered…nothing. The enchantment inherent in every October, that which had sustained him every year of his life, had made jack-o'-lanterns of moons and fashioned the gruesomely butchered into fine art, threatened to abate, for the first time in memory.
His personality was slipping; his traitorous lips were on the verge of pleading for the Hallowfiend’s life. A master of slipping through shadows, of hiding in crowded closets, of wearing Day-Glo orange in costumed crowds and somehow blending in, felt the stirrings of panic and made a conscious decision.
No, I won’t play the victim, now or ever. Better that I die bludgeoned by an imbecile than marinate in my own fear. His resolve thusly fortified, he reached behind his head and caught the scarecrow’s fist as it plummeted.
Using the scarecrow’s own weight against him, he hurled the man forward, into a headfirst tumble that, unbeknownst to the Hallowfiend, caused the scarecrow to bite clear through the tip of his tongue, then swallow it. A crimson blotch, nearly black in the ebbing sundown radiance, spread across the burlap sack that covered the man’s noggin.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4 Page 28