This is Halloween

by James A. Moore

  Denny Halloran looked at the girl coming his way and put on his best serious scowl. “Have you girls lost your minds? Those mushrooms are poisonous! Everybody knows they can kill you.”

  “It’s just a fake out, mister. We wanted to give her a scare is all.”

  Denny looked down into the Hollow, where he could see the dark-haired girl laying naked as the day she was born, her face half buried in mud. He had his doubts about the explanation.

  “It didn’t look all that fake from here.”

  The redhead looked back and him, smiling softly. She was a beauty, the kind of girl he expected to see on the cover of a teen magazine. Her eyes seemed almost luminescent in the faint light, and she had a perfect smile.

  “No, we’re not crazy.” She even had a laugh that was cultured. “We’re just having a goof with the new girl. We told her she had to eat a mushroom or walk home naked. She didn’t like either option, so we decided to fake her out. She gets to walk home, but she thinks she had a real poisonous mushroom. We planted it here a couple of hours ago.”

  He still had his doubts, and as nice to look at as the girl in front of him was, he was curious about the one down below, lying in the muck. He looked again, hoping to catch a second glimpse of her body in the starlight. Even with his binoculars he could only see so much in the darkness.

  The girl was gone. He double checked, looking around the area in front of him, and yes, she was definitely no longer in the same spot. He could still see her imprint in the mud.

  “Well, looks like your friend is up and moving at least.”

  The girl in front of him chuckled softly and put her hands on his chest. “Don’t sound so disappointed, I’m still here.”

  “Huh?” Not his wittiest comeback, but the idea that a sweet little girl like the one in front of him might be coming onto him was enough to send a few thousand volts through his head.

  “Well, I was just thinking, since you’re here, maybe you could walk me home?”

  He felt his heart beating fast and licked at nervous sweat on his lip and mustache. She was a damned fine looking girl.

  Who could get your ass put away for a decade, the voice of reason reminded him.

  Still, it was dark out and he didn’t like the idea of leaving the girl to walk home alone.

  “Okay, let’s get you on your way.” He looked around. “Say, should we help your friend?”

  The girl looked around and stared at the spot for a few seconds before answering. It might be that she was sounding a little hesitant. It might be that he overlooked it, more worried about getting the girl he had home safely. There were a lot of variables to consider.

  “No, I guess she’s okay. Maybe one of the other girls came back for her.”

  In the end he told himself it was just wanting to make sure the girl he was with got home safely. That was all the excuse he really needed.

  They turned and headed for the private school, moving away from the Hollow and anything that might be in their way. Denny said nothing at all when the girl wrapped her fingers into his own.

  XV

  Almost half a mile away, Shannon and Tracy were running next to each other and finally slowing down, winded from their unexpected sprint. Somewhere behind them, crying from time to time for them to wait up, Karen was heading in the same direction, burdened by the new girl’s muddy clothes and shoes. It never crossed her mind to drop the dirty garments. She’d been raised to believe that you did not take what belonged to other people. It just wasn’t done.

  Some lessons go away over time; some are ingrained.

  Karen wiped at the blood still spilling from her lip. The damage was mostly done; it was just a matter of getting the swelling to go down before she had to go to class in the morning. She was trying to be rational about everything, but it wasn't always easy.

  Shannon would shoot her if she talked, but she wanted to talk, wanted to let someone know that Shannon had pretty much committed murder. That was the only word for it, really. She’d made the new girl eat one of the mushrooms and everyone knew those ugly things were the worst of the worst. She’d even heard from some of the local kids that people had been deliberately murdered with the plants before.

  Did that make her an accomplice? The thought settled into her head and started worrying at her mind like a termite taking to balsa wood. She couldn’t go to jail for murder! Her dad would kill her! But there it was, plain as day, she had watched Shannon commit a murder and she was carrying the evidence in her hands.

  Karen threw the clothes to the side and shivered in the chill night air. Something reeked around her, a dead skunk or maybe a possum. Whatever it was, it smelled bad enough to make her gag.

  A second later she felt a powerful hand slide across her face, covering her mouth and her nose completely.

  “You’ve been a naughty little girl, haven’t you?” The voice was deep and raspy and sounded very, very angry. She tried to breathe in to scream, and gagged again on the thick odor of rot that smothered her.

  Her hands beat at the meaty limb that covered her face, nails carving trenches into flesh that was too soft to be alive, but that bled blackness over her hands just the same.

  “Naughty girls get punished. You should never leave home without a parent to watch over you.”

  That was all she needed to hear to know she was in deep, deep shit. Karen tried a second time to pull her face away from the hand holding onto her and discovered that she was too firmly held.

  The hand that matched the one covering her mouth reached around her and ripped at her Watersford Academy sweatshirt, tearing the dark gray fabric and baring her stomach and chest to the world.

  For one brief moment Karen thought she was going to get raped and her actions reflected her fear and desperation. The idea of being physically violated was enough to refuel her panic, to make her forget all of the petty considerations, like her inadvertently helping to murder the new girl, that had clouded her judgment. Whatever silliness she’d gotten herself into was strictly secondary to getting away from the nightmare of having some foul-smelling pig of a man force himself on her.

  She needn’t have been worried. Sex seemed to be the farthest thing away from the man’s intentions.

  She realized that around the same time his fingers spread wide and then started peeling back her skin like it was just another layer of clothing to be discarded. She looked down past the hand holding her face, her eyes wide with pain and desperation, just as the other hand exposed bared raw muscles and violated nerve endings.

  There were worse things than being accused of murder. Much worse. She might have even decided there were worse things than rape if she’d lived long enough.

  XVI

  They sat together in the darkness, worried less about bug bites this time of year than they would have been even a month ago. The woods were creepy this late in season and they both knew if they were caught off campus they would be in for a healthy dose of disciplinary action.

  And they both knew that a few days of detention would be nothing at all if anyone found out about what they’d done to Erika. That was murder, plain and simple. Shannon knew it and so did Tracy. Tracy’d set her up and Shannon had knocked her down. And the worst part was they couldn’t have said why they’d done it five minutes after it was over.

  Erika hadn’t done a damned thing to either of them, but they’d felt an automatic hostility toward the girl. Oh, there was always a pecking order to maintain, sure, but they’d never felt compelled to take it so far before. Normally it came down to a quick push and shove match at the worst. This was different.

  This was murder. Neither of the girls wanted to talk about it, but both of them were thinking the same things, feeling the same things. There was guilt, of course, but there was also the simple knowledge that they were fucked.

  “We screwed up bad, Shannon.”

  Shannon nodded her agreement, trying not to cry. She hadn’t meant to do it. Somehow she didn’t think a judge or a jury was g
oing to care.

  But Shannon was nothing if not self-serving. True, she was feeling bad for Erika, but at the same time what good could possibly come of getting herself locked away for the rest of her life?

  “We have to go back and see if she’s still there.”

  “Say what?”

  “We have to go back, Tracy. We have to see if Erika’s still there and if she is we have to do something with her body.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.” Not too many people could call Shannon crazy. Tracy was allowed because they were friends and because Tracy could probably knock her teeth straight down her throat. Tracy was a big girl, several inches taller than Shannon and about as strong as an ox. As she’d already proven tonight, she knew how to use her size and strength to her advantage. One of the first rules Shannon had established for herself was to stay on the girl’s good side. For that reason alone, she calmly explained the facts to the girl.

  “Okay, there are signs of a struggle all over the place, right?” She waited for the girl to nod her head. “So if we don’t do anything, and they find her in that spot, they’re gonna know it wasn’t an accident.”

  “They’re gonna know that already! We took her clothes!”

  Shannon hadn’t thought about that. She wondered idly where the hell Karen was, but decided not to let it bother her. “Okay. Well, you saw the creep in the woods. Monica was going to go calm him down. Maybe we can use that.” And again there was that niggling little issue in the back of her head: where was Monica? It didn’t take that long to get rid of the average loser. Unless of course he was something a little worse than average.

  “Use it how?”

  “Hey, he was out where he shouldn’t have been and probably spying on us. We can skip all the trouble if we make it look like someone was stalking her.”

  “Jesus, that’s sick.”

  “Then you think of something better!” Shannon’s nerves were feeling stretched fairly thin. She was losing her patience at high speed.

  “I don’t know!” Tracy was screaming back and that couldn’t be a good sign. Shannon held out her hands and sighed and shook her head.

  “Okay, forget it. Let’s just go and look and see if there’s anything we can do to fix this, okay?”

  Tracy crossed her arms and thought hard for a few seconds before nodding her agreement. It was better than not checking, really, and there was always a chance that they could somehow fix the fucked up situation they were in. If it was possible, they had to try.

  The two of them started walking, seeking the trail that had led them to the Hollow before.

  Ten minutes later, they were truly, deeply lost in the woods.

  XVIi

  Patrick looked down at the remains of the girl he’d chosen and swallowed his regret. He’d done what he had to in order to survive. He’d done as his mother asked of him along those lines and now he had to find the girl who’d eaten the mushroom. If she were truly chosen by his mother she would still be alive, but possibly lost in the woods and though winter was not on them, the cold could cause her almost as much harm as the woods around them.

  Her state of mind was an entirely different matter. Even if the mushrooms hadn’t been fairly common knowledge to the locals, Patrick would have known about their more unusual effects on people. The poisons that could ruin the body were nothing compared to the toxins that could alter a mind. There had actually been a few cases where people had consumed the Witch’s Tongue and quickly learned to regret it. He knew, because he had used the fungi himself on a few people who had begun to suspect the truth of his nature.

  He used his foot to push the carcass off to the side and partially behind a tree. Then he went back to where she had dropped the other one’s clothing.

  Not too far in the distance he heard two of the girls screaming at each other, raging over having killed the one called Erika. He hoped not for their sake. Otherwise they would soon know what pain and suffering were all about.

  He looked to the east, to where he knew Denny was walking a young girl through the woods, and shook his head in silent rage. Any other time and he could have done something about it, but currently he needed to listen to his mother’s desires above all else.

  Deeper in the woods he could hear another noise, a faint laughter. The girl he was looking for was close by, close enough that finding her should prove easy.

  The operative word being should. The laughter was moving, going to different places in the woods and going to them at running speeds.

  XVIIi

  It went well at first, and then, just like that, his fantasy and his reality blew up in his face.

  The redhead, her name was Monica as he soon discovered, seemed okay with the idea of fooling around. It was, to Denny’s mind, a perfect example of fantasies coming true.

  Somehow they’d drifted as they walked and before he knew it they were leaning up against a damned big oak tree and getting into some heavy petting and even though he knew he was in the wrong and that the girl was years away from legal, he couldn’t stop himself from touching her body and kissing her face and wanting so very much more than that.

  And then she suddenly pushed away from him, her eyes wide and her pretty face showing nothing but disgust and confusion. She had instigated the entire thing, but now she acted like he’d been forcing himself on her.

  Where the hell was the logic in that?

  “Mister? You get away from me or I’ll see you in jail! I know you, you’re the goddamned milkman.” She backed away, readjusting her clothes and looking venomously at him.

  “Hey, Monica, come on now. What’s all of this?” His body was primed for action and suddenly the little bitch was turning into a tease. Denny didn’t like teases; teasing was all good and fun if it went somewhere but he was definitely getting the feeling that Monica wasn’t going to finish what she’d started.

  The girl wiped at her face, her mouth, as if to make sure she could erase all contact with him. Her expression was enough to annoy him, but the idea that somehow he’d suddenly made her feel dirty was offensive in the extreme. He hadn’t forced the issue; she’d been the one coming on to him.

  “You know what? You’re just a little cock tease. Why don’t you run on home to your fucking prep school?”

  He started away from her and would have kept going if she hadn’t actually started crying on him. He’d made about ten paces before he heard the soft sound of her drawing in fast breaths and exhaling in moans.

  When Denny turned around she was standing in the same spot, looking down at the ground, her face twisted in misery and her arms wrapped around her narrow torso as if to keep warm.

  Seeing her like that made him realize for the first time since he’d been caught up in his sick little fetish that he was dealing with a child. She was maturing, sure, but really she was a kid and that in turn made him feel like a complete ass.

  Having a conscience was not making his night any sweeter.

  “What is it now, Monica?”

  She looked his way, her face wet from her tears. “I don’t know where we are.”

  Damn. That one knocked him for a mental loop. They were in the Beldam Woods, and as a rule the woods were dangerous.

  “Come on, then. I’ll get you home.” She looked dubiously at him. Denny raised his hands. “No touching or anything okay? I’m just gonna walk you home.”

  After a few seconds of staring, she nodded and started in his direction.

  If Denny knew his work partner as well as he thought he did, he would have known that the dangers in the Beldam Woods were far greater than he’d ever expected. He would, in fact, have done anything to avoid going into the woods at all.

  Denny was ignorant to a great many facts of life. He was also completely unaware of how lucky he had been to even get to the oak tree where he and Monica had come close to statutory rape.

  Monica put her foot down in exactly the wrong spot, and everything that Denny should have known was made abundantly clear to him. The
traps Patrick Winter had set and maintained for years were not completely mundane in their nature. As should be expected when dealing with a monster, there were certain supernatural elements involved in their creation. One second Monica was looking distraught and disheveled and the next she was looking very dead.

  Cords of hardened, dried tendon lifted from the ground and lashed at the girl. Where exactly they came from, how they were anchored and all other mechanical aspects of the trap were lost on Denny. All he knew, all he saw, was the sudden and violent dismemberment of a girl he’d been close to having sex with ten minutes earlier. The fibrous trap flew from the ground and wrapped around her lower face, her neck, her left arm, her midsection and both legs and then pulled with incredible force. Wire thin blades of tendon cut into and through her body in an instant, effectively slicing her body into so many bloody pieces of different size and shape.

  Denny watched her literally fall apart, and then he started screaming.

  XIx

  The two of them had made it most of the way back to the Witch’s Hollow before they heard the laughter. The sound was high pitched and strained, and completely devoid of anything like humor.

  Both Shannon and Tracy tracked the sound for almost a minute before they saw Erika. The girl was still dressed only in her underwear, but she was covered in mud and there were several deep cuts on her body where she had apparently failed to notice branches and the heavily barbed vines in the area. Her eyes were wide open and she was smiling and giggling as she ran past them.

  “Holy shit,” Tracy spoke with the soft tones of shock in her voice. “She’s still alive.”

  “We have got to catch her and right now.”

  Off in the distance they heard a man screaming, but they didn’t have time to pay him any attention. The lunatic naked girl was their top priority.