Shock Totem 9.5: Holiday Tales of the Macabre and Twisted - Halloween 2014

by Shock Totem

  I froze up, I suppose, and somehow found the strength to pull myself away from the monster before me. Again, I don’t remember this at all. I can’t recall what I saw then, or how I got off the stool, and then hid in a corner of the bathroom. That’s where Mom found me—curled up in a ball, unable to speak, frozen with terror in a corner of the bathroom.

  What I saw above the sink was only my reflection (duh!), which I’d seen countless times before. But somehow my juvenile brain couldn’t compute that the blood-sucking horror in the mirror was only a reflection of the badass FX job my mom did on my face.

  Mom says she had to coax me gently out of the bathroom, assuring me that no monster was in there, that it was only my reflection I’d seen. That said, I guess Mom’s reassuring words weren’t good enough for me. I was so scared that I refused to go trick-or-treating, for fear that the vampire I saw was “out there somewhere.” Worse, I wouldn’t let my mom leave me alone all night, and I think I ruined that Halloween for my little sister, too. Sorry, Sis!

  Hearing my mom tell me this story over the years made me learn a few things, like, I overcame that fear and dove back into Halloween and trick-or-treating by October 31, 1976. Moreover, I came to adore Halloween—and horror, for that matter—more and more, with extreme passion, through the rest of my childhood and into adulthood.

  Sometimes you have to get scared shitless to realize you love it. Happy Halloween forever!

  BEFORE THIS NIGHT IS DONE

  by Barry Lee Dejasu

  After passing a couple of unfamiliar houses, Shaina silently cursed, suspecting she’d taken a wrong exit into one of the neighboring towns. However, as she and her sister, May, drove past a familiar three-story Victorian, her doubts were put to rest. Shaina turned onto the next street as memories of the town of Baker came back to her.

  “I think it’s been almost eight years since I’ve been here.” She scanned the area in the waning light, driving past a two-story brick building, its sign—U.S. POST OFFICE—worn and tired.

  “I’ve never been here,” May said.

  “Sure you have. I mean, the last time we went trick-or-treating here, I was twelve and you were five...” Shaina trailed off as she glanced at the vampire queen in the passenger seat. She’d been away for only a few months, and was startled to discover that May had grown to be even less of the little girl she’d last seen. It was also a little disquieting to see her sister wearing such a racy outfit, but Mom hadn’t seemed to mind. I’ll never get used to this, she thought, and turned her attention back to the road.

  “Mom always takes me to Rehoboth or Taunton,” May said. “She says Baker is wicked sketchy.”

  Shaina snickered. “Baker? Sketchy? Please. She’s just lazy—and you’ve been missing out on a treat.”

  “I don’t know. We just never come out here.”

  “Well, this year you’re lucky. We’re gonna trick-or-treat here, together.” Shaina turned onto Bridge Avenue, found a parking spot, and pulled over.

  “Good,” May said as Shaina turned off the car. “I want to get lots of candy before this night is done!”

  Shaina snickered. “‘Before this night is done?’ Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “Just because you’re in college doesn’t mean you’re the only smart one,” May said with an edge that only a newly-teenaged kid could produce.

  Shaina smiled. “Touché.”

  They got out and looked around.

  “I think...” Shaina scanned the block, recognized the wide windows and blocky stone stairs of the second house down. “There it is.” She pointed. “They re-painted it. There used to be a big family who lived there that was crazy-generous with candy. Hopefully they’re still there.” She turned to May with a grin, which May returned emphatically.

  They walked along the old asphalt and up a short flight of creaky wooden stairs. Shaina knocked on the gray door and turned to May, who grinned before shoving a set of vampire fangs into her mouth. In that moment, beneath the makeup and the costume, Shaina once again saw her kid sister, and she felt the surreal weight of age pressing down on her.

  A full minute went by, so Shaina knocked again. They waited...and waited, but there was still no answer.

  Her voice muffled by the fangs, May said, “They’re not home.”

  “Guess not. Let’s try someone else.”

  They headed back down to the street, but May hung back as Shaina passed the car. “We’re not gonna drive?”

  “Nah. The good thing about Baker is all the houses are in a giant zigzag. We can just go to the houses on each block, then it becomes the business district, and the road just loops around by the woods and brings us right back.”

  They continued on to the next street. There were a couple of houses with lights on, so they went to the first one. As they approached, Shaina saw a hand lowering one of the shades. Oh, good, she thought.

  She led May to the door and knocked, and waited...

  “What’s up with that?” May asked.

  “Hello?” Shaina called, trying to stay patient. She knocked again, but there was no answer. She put her ear to the door, prepared to step back in case it were to swing open; but nobody called out to her. Indeed, there was no other sound, not even of approaching footsteps from inside.

  Shaina cursed, but managed to warp the four-letter word into a guttural sound. “Someone’s still got know something about trick-or-treating in this town.”

  “I don’t think so,” May said, and Shaina turned to her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trick-or-treaters.” May turned and nodded at the silent street behind them. “There’s no one else trick-or-treating out here.”

  Indeed, they didn’t see or even hear a single other person as they moved up to the next block. Shaina then noticed the lack of decorations: no jack-o’-lanterns on porches or doorsteps, no fake cobwebs or electric candles in any of the windows, no white cloth ghosts or even ribbons of toilet paper hanging in trees.

  Shaina didn’t want to give up just yet, and they tried a few more houses; however, there were almost no signs of life at any of them. At one point, Shaina made clear eye contact with a wide-eyed woman peeking through a window, but the woman quickly turned away, and didn’t answer the door when they knocked.

  After the sixth unwelcoming house in a row (now on the second stretch of houses in the zig-zag), Shaina turned away from her perplexed sister and let her breath out through pursed lips.

  A jet flew by overhead, and as its warbling roar vanished, Shaina noticed the palpable silence around them: no birds or bats chirped, no dogs barked, no insects buzzed. She realized she’d not even seen a single car since they’d entered Baker; it was like the whole town was hiding. As the streetlights began to flicker on, she shivered.

  They were standing across from the “business district,” which was little more than a cluster of squat buildings that sported a bank branch, a Laundromat, and a couple of stores. She briefly recalled evenings with an old boyfriend here, running through the interconnected alleys between two of the buildings to get to his home. Like their relationship, time hadn’t helped the business district; the stores were pockmarked by empty spaces, their doors sealed tight, windows papered over in reluctant goodbyes.

  “What the fuck?” May said. Shaina practically jumped out of her skin at the unexpected F-bomb.

  She glared at May, who shrugged. Seriously though, Shaina thought. “I’m so sorry, May. This is totally ruining the evening.”

  “It’s okay,” May said. “It’s not ruined. We can just go back home and trick-or-treat there.”

  “I’ve just never seen anything like this.”

  Dusk had started to light up the stars above, although the local weather station’s promised clouds were beginning to creep in from the horizon. It wasn’t supposed to rain until long after midnight, but Shaina still wanted to get back to the car before she needed to break out the flashlight on her keychain. She glanced at her watch. “It’s still
early. Let’s go.”

  Shaina watched May’s face as they walked down the street. May was annoyed and disappointed, but luckily that seemed to be all. She wasn’t a little kid anymore; that was for sure. She’d come a long way from her days of crying and throwing tantrums, but then, she’d always been good about—

  Shaina stopped, listening. Her and May’s shadows were stretched out in the murky yellow pool of light from the streetlamp behind them.

  May said, “You heard it, too?”

  “Yeah. Sounded like a door shutting or something.”

  They waited for some kind of follow-up to the sound; some kind of an address from one of the residents, maybe even an apology for their tardy courtesy, but there was only more of that uncomfortable silence.

  Shaina shrugged, hiking her jacket up around her frame. “Well, let’s go...”

  The sound came again, louder. Not a door, Shaina thought distantly as she searched for the source. It had come from the farthest house to their right, in the wooded area beside it. The crackling thump reminded her of deer in the forest, all but invisible until their heavy feet fell on the brush beneath.

  “What was that?” May asked, her voice low.

  “Let’s...just get back to the car,” Shaina said.

  Another thump, louder. Not just louder—it came from another direction. Shaina tried to place the sound, saw only the concealing forms of the half-lit houses around them, felt the cold, phantom hands of fear glide down on the space between her shoulders, and the sensation spread quickly through her chest.

  “Shaina?”

  “May, just...come closer.”

  May came over and grabbed Shaina’s hand; the jack-o’-lantern’s plastic handle was hard and intrusive in her grip, but there was something comfortingly familiar and normal about it.

  Another crunching thump came, and there was no denial of its approaching proximity this time. May moved closer beside Shaina. Another impact, behind them now, and Shaina once again found herself thinking of footsteps.

  “What is that?”

  “I—” Shaina shook her head, eyes wide, as a new crash boomed from just behind one of the houses. “I don’t know. Let’s...just stay under the lights and go back this way.”

  There was a moment of silence as they made their way down to the intersection and crossed the street to the business district. As they neared the bank, they heard it again: Crunch! May’s hand clamped down hard on Shaina’s, and they both stopped.

  Crunch!

  “Shay...” May’s breath ran out on the syllable, and Shaina saw her wide eyes focused on something in the distance. She turned—

  The shape beside the house could’ve been anything; it was too short and shapeless to appear outwardly threatening. It was a blurry silhouette against the dim ambience of the streetlight across the way, indistinct in form; but when it ducked out of sight around the corner of the house, Shaina felt her breath die in her lungs. A moment later, she noticed a light in one of the windows only after it winked out, hidden or smothered.

  “Jesus,” Shaina hissed as she half-pulled, half-pushed May into the glass annex at the front of the bank. They pressed themselves to the glass, and Shaina heard May’s breath coming and going in quick hisses.

  “Just calm down,” Shaina said. “I mean...we don’t even know what’s going on.” She fleetingly recalled a group of pranksters in Providence who shot films of themselves dressed up as a giant, creepy snowman and jumped at passers-by, scaring the living daylights out of them in the name of Internet humor. “For all we know, this is just a—”

  “Shaina...”

  May’s tone injected a shiver into the base of Shaina’s neck that rattled her whole body. She turned to find May pointing at the two cars parked directly across the street—and the unsteady movements of the dark shape crouching behind them, peering above the bumper and hood. For a long moment, they just stared at it. It was too round, too wide, to be a person. Fueled by some kind of desperate hope, Shaina craned her neck to get a better look, but as soon as she did, the shape dropped down out of sight. She didn’t breathe—she just stared, and waited.

  Just as suddenly as it had vanished, it reappeared around the back of the farthest car, something huge, as tall as the vehicle beside it, and nearly as long. It squatted closely to the ground, too dark to see clearly, but its gray hue distinct enough from the dusk around it.

  Shaina heard May’s voice keening in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the thing, not even as it began to rise up. Then it jumped—no, it stretched its upper half straight toward them, getting impossibly long—

  Then they were running.

  It was a wild, screaming run, directionless save for getting away. Halfway down the block, Shaina remembered a way between the buildings, and steered May into the alley, a plan beginning to form. As their shoes crunched on the gravelly asphalt, Shaina urged May to keep going until they emerged in the shadowy back alley. They stopped to catch their bearings, as well as their breaths.

  “Shaina?” May said, her voice quivering with tension. “Where are we going?”

  “Back...to the car,” Shaina gasped. She led them into a connecting alley to the right. A wooden platform had been added to the alley’s upper half in the years since she’d last been here; it looked like some kind of storage area. The resulting tunnel beneath the wood was perfectly dark, save for the promising glow of an exit at the other end, in the middle of the black.

  “But we didn’t come this way...”

  “We’ll cut through to the other side of these buildings, and then we’ll be only a block and a half from the car.” She found herself unable to calculate the actual distance, but she wouldn’t start questioning herself now.

  May shoved her hand into Shaina’s and said, “Let’s go.”

  It was dark and cold in the tunnel, and their awkward footsteps were the thunderous in the low-ceilinged darkness. The tunnel smelled, too—it smelled bad; rancid, rotting, and cloying, Shaina had to literally pinch her nostrils with her free hand to shut the stench out.

  There was a scraping sound, and Shaina’s heart leapt into her throat, but May apologized, murmuring something about the ground. Shaina turned to her, but saw only more of that horrible blackness that threatened to drown her senses. Turning back to the expanding rectangle of light and open air ahead, she was grateful that May couldn’t see her own look of fear.

  “It smells so gross in here,” May said. Shaina was actually somewhat relieved that May was paying more attention to the smell than the darkness around them.

  God, could Shaina have forgotten how long the alley was? It had been years since she’d been down here, sure, and the wood above them had never been there; plus, she’d also never been through it at night. Even so, it was like the tunnel was getting longer before them.

  “Why are we slowing down?” May asked.

  “It’s an optical illusion,” Shaina said, almost more to herself. “Were just disoriented.” They were getting closer to the other end, for sure; it was just hard to tell in the absolute black of the tunnel. “Just go straight and hold my hand. You’re doing fine.”

  They kept walking. Soon the tunnel began to widen and brighten as they neared the end. Shaina looked down and could see her own feet beneath her. She let a half-forgotten breath out of her protesting lungs.

  They emerged into the dim light of a loading area behind one of the business district’s buildings. There was the back of the liquor store, the old Subway, so the other alley had to be...

  “Which way?” May asked, but Shaina’s narrowed eyes slowly widened as a sick, sinking feeling formed in her stomach.

  There were only walls facing them. No alley, no passage...just this cul-de-sac.

  Shaina blinked, looked around rapidly. No. No. This wasn’t it. This wasn’t how it had always been. Could they have even just entered the wrong alley? No, she’d remembered correctly—this was it. But then...

  “Shaina?” May asked.

>   “Oh shit,” Shaina heard herself say, but she didn’t care about that right now.

  “What?”

  “This is some kind of loading dock, but it’s all closed off.” She took a deep breath, let it out in a heavy, shaking sigh and pointed at the bright, new-looking bricks, maybe only a year old. “That wall...it didn’t used to be there.”

  “So we’re trapped?” Shaina could hear the panic rising in May’s voice. She hoped there was something she could say to comfort her sister, but she knew that this was pathetic optimism. Pursing her lips, she turned and nodded at the black eye of the tunnel.

  “No...but we have to go back through there again.”

  They gave each other a long look. Shaina pulled out her keys and turned the flashlight on. It was one of those tiny things that you had to squeeze to keep the tiny LED shining, but it produced a mercifully bright halo of amber-colored light. She trained the beam on the ground before them, and felt May take her hand. Holding her breath, Shaina led them back into the dark.

  The smell didn’t seem as bad this time; perhaps they’d gotten used to it, or perhaps they were moving in the same direction as the air currents. It still stank like the lowest circle of hell, however, and Shaina kept her face scrunched as they walked.

  The alley once again had that disorienting illusion of growing longer, narrower, but Shaina pushed on, trying to think of where they would go next. They would return to the front of the business district and, keeping an eye out for...that thing, they would go directly to the nearest house and—

  And what? Wait there? Hide out like everyone else? Call animal control?

  A wet scraping sound came from nearby, but May didn’t claim responsibility this time. Shaina began to walk a little faster, squeezing May’s hand.