by John Everson
She turned and stepped away from my tiny porch. “Come back to the house,” she said. “I think you’ll be glad you did.”
I shut the door on her words and her face. And her apple.
Then I sank down in my kitchen chair and tried to figure out just what she meant. It was almost Halloween, and every year, I did give out an apple. To most of the kids, it was your standard candy bars and nickel prizes fare that I tossed into their bags when they came to my door dressed as lions and tigers and zombies, oh my. But there was always one. A beautiful, perhaps haughty little girl with some makeup on her face to augment the princess costume, or the fairy dress. There was only one, but when I saw her, I knew. And I gave her a green apple.
I don’t know how it started. I don’t know why. But I’d been doing it for as long as I could remember.
And now a witch was going to take issue with it? I shook my head. My private Halloween award was none of her business. But like any female, she somehow supposed she could make it so.
I stood up and decided that this would stop, right here and tonight. A woman would not meddle in my life again. Women were only good for one thing, I’d found.
The hurting.
I slipped on my shoes and walked to the edge of the forest, where there was a path through the brush that led to a witch’s home. It was time to peel this particular apple.
The old house looked darker tonight than it had before. More abandoned. More desperate. Perhaps it only reflected the emotion of my own soul. I stepped onto the gray wood of the porch and it creaked loud in the silent night. I stepped forward and the steps echoed in the night. A ghoul creeping towards the door.
When I opened the screen to pound on the heavy wood of the door within, it fell back at my touch. Open. I didn’t think, I just moved with it. I stepped inside. The wood creaked shut behind me, but I didn’t move.
She was there on the floor just inches from my toes. Naked. Bloody.
I stared at her corpse and willed myself to breathe. Her chest had been stabbed repeatedly; seven deep red rents opened the skin beneath her shoulders and into the swell of her breasts. I couldn’t help but look at them; her nipples floated there atop blood-spattered breasts as if they were only waiting for me to suckle and I almost bent to do so before something in the back of my head reminded, She’s dead!
I don’t know what I was thinking. But I know that after staring at her for a minute or two, I finally stepped past her and moved farther into the house, stepping slowly down a dark corridor, worried that I would trip and fall headlong through the rotting boards of the floor. The house stank of dead things and mold. Rotting wood and sour animal droppings. This was a crypt and an outhouse, not a home. How could I have even imagined that Beth lived here? Witch or no, she’d been putting me on for reasons she’d apparently taken to the grave. In coming here to wait for me, she’d run afoul of someone more evil than this house.
“I should have guessed that a dead body wouldn’t phase you,” a soft voice whispered from behind. I whirled to find Beth standing just inches away, the blood glistening wetly on her skin like the polish on her nails.
“But you’re…” I began, and she pressed a finger to my lips. I could feel the dent of her nail on my lips for minutes after she took her finger back.
“I know what will phase you though,” she said, and with that she stepped closer, slipping a long silky arm around my waist, the daggers of her nails trailing up my spine to my neck. Her hand held the back of my head and she pulled my face in close to her own. I could taste her breath, sweet and tart, the cider of apples ripened and soft. She pressed her lips to mine and I gasped. She was so soft. I wanted to lose myself in her mouth, and for a moment I gave in to her and pulled her body close. I could feel the heat of her blood soaking through my shirt as her breasts molded against my chest, and the delta of her thighs rubbed up against the bone of my hip. Another “bone” between us began to grow as I realized that no matter what the cost, I wanted this woman. This seeming witch, whoever, whatever, she was. I wanted her red nails to dig into the flesh of my back as I pounded against her, and in her until…
A spike of ice shot through my heart and my eyes opened to see the glimmer of green in hers. She was smiling even with my tongue in her mouth, and suddenly the taste of her was of vinegar and rot, sour and rancid. You could never trust a woman. I shoved her away, and she laughed, stepping back easily to watch me.
With one hand she rubbed the stab wounds in her chest, and drew the new blood down to smear across her belly and nipples. She painted her flesh in her own blood, and then reached a bloody hand down to cup the thin pink lips of her sex. She held my eye, and made sure that I was watching as she slipped first one bloody finger and then two inside herself, using her own blood as lubricant. And as she performed a dirty sex show for me, her tongue slipped out of her mouth to rest against her teeth, and her eyes rolled back to show their whites as a stream of black began to leak out from between her fingers. The rot of years slipping out from her uterus. The room filled with the stench of decay, as if someone had just upended a wheelbarrow full of week-old roadkill on the floor.
I backed away from her as she climaxed, spilling the liquefied core of her womb to the floor with each groan.
Things on the floor ground and crunched beneath my feet but with my back against the hallway wall I edged away until she was out of sight, and found myself in the kitchen. The light of the moon streamed in just enough to paint the forgotten space a ghostly blue-white, and I looked for something to use against her if she came near me again. I felt around carefully for a drawer. When it opened, I found a coil of thin twine, instead of a drawer full of knives and utensils. And next to it, a short, serrated knife with a wooden handle. I pulled both from the drawer and was about to turn when two hands slipped around my waist.
I jerked around, knife at the ready, but it passed through thin air. Twin green eyes stared up at me from chest level.
“Is this better?” a child’s voice asked, whispery and suggestive. “You could never handle a real woman, could you? You always were too stuck on me.”
I stared at the heavy red pout of her lips, too old for her age, and the kinked raven hair that trailed across her shoulders in feathery wisps. Just like Beth, she was naked, with seven stab wounds crossing her chest.
“You’re not her, you can’t be…” I began. She laughed, and lifted one black-smeared finger and drew it across my cheek. I flinched, but not before her dead blood had marked me.
She changed, and then her face was older, and her nose an inch from mine as she pressed her body against me, pinning me to the counter. “I am her,” she said. “And I am me. And I am the witch who lived here before us all. And I am here for all of the girls you’ve given green apples to over the years. You could never grow up inside…and you stopped them from having the chance.”
She stepped back a pace and her face looked momentarily sad. “They never did anything to you,” she whispered. A tear slipped down her face, and as it fell, I saw it change from clear to red to black. “I was sorry once,” she said. “But I’m not anymore.”
“Who are you?” I asked, gripping the knife tighter, getting ready to add to her wounds if that was what it took to escape this madhouse.
“I am Allysa Beth Romano,” she said. “And you killed me when I was only seventeen. I never got to grow up and have children. I would look like this now, if I was still alive. But you didn’t let me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Allysa humiliated me so bad I didn’t talk to anyone for months in 8th grade. But we went to different high schools. I never saw her again.”
“Not true. You knew where I lived and you followed me all through high school, looking for a way to get your revenge. And one night, as you were spying on me and my friends, you heard them dare me to go into the witch house after dark on Halloween. And you went there your
self and waited for me. You forced me to take my clothes off in the dark, and when I fought back you stabbed me. And when I screamed, you stabbed me again and again until I was quiet. Then when you heard my friends coming you pulled me down into the cellar and hid with me there until they left. I was the first body you buried here. But not the last. Not nearly the last.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. My voice choked as somehow visions of everything she said streamed past my eyes like some crazy film reel shot by a drunk.
“Am I?” She smiled but there was no humor in it. With one hand she reached out and grabbed my wrist. With her nails she gouged into the flesh of my wrist until I couldn’t resist anymore. “Drop it,” she said, and the knife fell to the floor.
“Come with me.”
The pale moon of her ass shifted in front of me as she held my hand but walked ahead into the dark. She led me to a closet in a back bedroom. “You brought me here, the night you killed me. And when you hid with me in the closet, you found this.” She pulled up a trap door in the floor, and then forced me to walk down a creaking wooden ladder ahead of her.
The basement smelled rank with rot and mold and Beth pushed me forward until we reached a wall. Then she guided my hand to a shovel leaning against the cinderblock wall. She pointed at the dirt floor all around us, and from the faint luminescence that seemed to glow from her bloodied flesh, I could tell that the ground was uneven.
“They are all here,” she said. “Every girl you ever gave a green apple to.”
“No,” I said. “I gave those apples to the girl with the best costume each year. I never…”
“You gave the apple to a girl who was alone, and looked, in your twisted mind, somehow like me,” Beth corrected. “You told them how much you liked their costumes and told them you’d picked the apple fresh from the tree just that day, and encouraged them to taste it. And once they did, the drug you injected worked fast. Oftentimes, they never even left your porch before they went to sleep. And then you brought them here, to strip them naked and do the thing to them that you always wanted to do with me. The thing you could never do with any girl who grew into a woman.”
I protested but the world seemed to spin around me as I saw the faintest memory of a dark-haired girl with the red lips and red nails of a street hooker standing on my porch. She was wearing a nurse outfit, and chewing gum when she said, “Trick or treat.”
I saw the girl dressed as Princess Leia, dark hair pulled in ram’s horn buns up on the side of her head, and I wondered what she would feel like when I…
I saw the girl wearing a brown paper bag; she called herself the bag lady…I saw the girl wearing so much Saran Wrap that you couldn’t really tell there was nothing but skin beneath it…and then I remembered how that plastic wrap had looked when it had been pulled tight across her face, smearing her wet features into a garish mask of silent screams as I laid myself on top of her and pretended that we were married…
“You can dig them up now,” Beth said. “If you don’t believe me.”
“What do you want from me?” I said. I kept looking at the ladder, trying to gauge how many steps of a head start I’d need to vault up in without her having the chance to pull me back down.
“It’s not what I want,” she said. “It’s what they want.”
She pointed at the floor of the cellar and I saw the dirt shifting in a dozen different spots around the room. Dirt was lifting and rolling and dust rose on its own into the shadowed air and then a skeletal hand appeared from beneath the earth just past my feet. I gasped and stepped back, but there were now several hands protruding from the floor, and then they were scooping at the earth, white bones on black earth, shoving aside their graves until all around me the cellar filled with the forms of dusty skeletal girls. Before my eyes their bones filled with blue-white flesh, and all as one they looked at me with unblinking serious eyes. Eyes that didn’t bleed with anger so much as finality.
“You know they call this the House of the Lost,” Beth said, still the only ghoul who spoke, though from the faces of the girls who were stepping towards me, there was no need for any other words. “You picked a strange place to bury your dead,” she said. “A witch did live here once back when we were kids…and the ground still bears the power of her curses.”
A hand reached inside my shirt and another slipped between my jeans and my belly. Their fingers were cold and hard. My belt began to loosen and I pushed them away, but only for a moment. Four icy hands gripped each of my arms and pinned me to the wall.
I tried to struggle and kick, and for a moment, I actually pulled one fist off the wall and connected with the face of a girl with buckteeth. She bit me and I screamed just as someone else kneed me in the groin. It didn’t take long before I was stripped naked and the ghostly flesh of all of my girls pressed me to the wall.
Beth laughed, and reached out to finger the thing that had betrayed me all of my life. “It never did grow up, did it?”
And then she was the Allysa I remembered again, the sparkle in her green eyes still full of both humor and the cruelty that only children can display, before the pain of life has taught them the real weight of the hurting.
She guided my hands down from the wall and back to the shovel and flanked by naked ghosts, she pointed at a spot in the earth that seemed relatively level. “Dig,” she said. “And make it deep and wide. You’re going to have a lot of company.”
I dug. The cellar earth moved easily, but my hands were quickly raw. The sweat poured off my head but I didn’t feel hot. Every time I looked up from the earth I saw the empty eyes of all the girls I’d buried here on Halloween nights past. All the girls I’d loved. In my own way.
Under their silent eyes I stepped the shovel down again and again and dug the grave deep. I didn’t protest when Allysa put her hand on my head and told me lie down in it. I knew there was no point; they were not going to let me leave, and honestly, I’m not sure I wanted to. After a time, maybe that hollow place inside you just grows so much that the shell left around it simply doesn’t care to move anymore.
“Do you know what day it is?” Allysa asked, as I crouched down in the damp earth. I shook my head, momentarily confused.
“It’s Halloween,” Allysa said. “Your day of green apples.”
I lay down and waited for the girls to join me. I figured when Allysa had promised company that they planned to torment me even beneath the earth for my crimes.
But then something hard hit me in the head. And something else bounced off my chest. I reached out and found the smooth skin of an apple. I held it up and saw the glowing eyes of the girls peering back down at me from the edge of my grave.
“Take a bite,” one of the girls said. And then another said the same. And another.
“Take a bite,” the whispered in unison, over and over again, as more and more apples rained down on me, painfully bouncing off my knees and hip and ribs and face. I held the apple to my mouth as the grave began to fill with the fruit. It was cool and hard against my skin, and soon I could feel nothing but the weight of green apples against my chest.
I bit into the apple in my hand, and the taste was sour and sweet, both at the same time.
Just like a woman.
I looked up and saw the girls above me growing into women, their pert breasts and boyish waists filling out and curving and their eyes lengthening into organs both sultry and feral. The apples continued to rain down on me until I could no longer see the beautiful dead nudes above me who were stoning me in fruit that should have still been maturing on the branch.
“All wasted,” Beth’s adult voice came from somewhere far away. “All of it wasted like apples gone wrinkled and brown, left to rot on the ground untasted.”
All around me the immature fruit began to change, growing older, ripening. The smell of vinegar filled my nose and then I was drowning in the scent and drip of bitter age, covering
and crushing me until I cried out again and again that I was sorry.
But there was nobody left to hear or care. They were all dead.
To Earn His Love
What better way to spend Halloween night than to watch a witch in action?
I shivered as the cinnamon-sharp autumn wind cut through my denim jacket, but the thought of the coming night made me warm…and a little scared. Marshall had asked me to sneak in and watch before and I had, thinking the whole while that it was all just a put-on, that my older buddy was ditching me in a draughty shack for kicks. But I’d gone along with it, hiding behind the wooden crates for an hour, and sure enough, she had shown up. She turned out to be Miss Carny from 4th period English! What the heck was going on here, I’d wondered, but Marshall showed up right after and the two had begun their strange erotic magic without a word.
Marshall never called her Miss Carny. He just said “the witch”. She’d called him to her a couple other times since that night, but Marshall hadn’t invited me to watch again. Understandable, really. I don’t think I could do what Marshall did with the witch while anyone else was watching. The time I had watched, my heart had nearly stopped as I saw my teacher savagely strip her clothes and then buck and shriek beneath Marshall on the floor. As soon as he had been spent, she had pushed Marshall off of her. Then she’d reached between her legs with a flat hand, and scooped a sticky mixture of their lovemaking out. She’d walked, boldly naked, across the shack and used a wooden spoon to scrape the goo from her hand and mixed the junk into a mason jar with other, dark and fuzzy things. After a few minutes of concentration, she’d turned back to Marshall, still lying on the floor, and smiled.
“Se-magic,” she whispered. “Your semen seed will draw his interest. You will bring him to me.” She’d groaned as if in orgasm at her own words then, a deep, throaty sound that made me cringe.
