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

  Without warning, Cash jumped out onto the pavement, brandishing his baseball bat in one hand. “Hey there, little spook. Time to pay the toll.”

  “Come on, let’s just call it a night,” Sam said, crossing her arms and frowning. Her hood was still pulled up, but the nearest lights revealed her un-masked face.

  “Last one,” Cash promised, looking down at the little boy. “Gimme a handful of candy, and you can pass.”

  The painted white face looked from Cash to Sam, and the kid dropped the heavy bag on the ground.

  “One handful and you can go. Or I’ll take it all,” Cash threatened.

  “Wow. I’m terrified,” the boy said, and smiled. “This is the guy you’ve been gushing about?”

  Sam rubbed her face tiredly. “He is kinda cute, even if he isn’t very bright.”

  “Curfew’s at midnight. You better finish, before Dad comes looking for us.”

  Cash’s bright blue eyes went back and forth between them, and confusion was evident in his voice when he said, “You know this little brat?”

  “Yeah, this is my brother, Damon,” she said to Cash, then to the boy, “I’ve been trying to get him back to the house all night.”

  “Well, since you’re Sam’s brother, guess you can keep your treats,” Cash said, attempting to sound magnanimous.

  “If you want, you can just do it now. It’ll fit in here.”

  “Fine,” she snapped. Another Halloween wasted.

  “What’ll fit in there?” Cash asked, leaning over to look when Damon opened the treat bag. There were suckers, SweetTarts, and fun size candy bars piled around something round and red. Damon jostled the bag a little, and the ball sized object shifted. There were two open eyes and a gaping mouth above the ragged remains of a bleeding neck.

  Sam swung the butcher knife she’d carried all night. It was rusted and dirty, but still sharp enough to do the trick. The first chop cut through the back of his neck and the spinal cord. She grabbed a handful of greasy dark hair and swung once more. This time, the head came free. Sam dropped the knife beside the sprawled body of the boy she’d hoped to let reach second base.

  “We’re gonna be late,” Damon pointed out, and Sam made a face at him. Then she dropped the bleeding head into the bag with the one her brother had already harvested, and picked it up by the plastic handles.

  “I can’t believe Halloween is already over,” she said, stepping over the body. “Seriously, next year, I’m getting a better date.”

  Rose Blackthorn lives in the high mountain desert with her boyfriend and two dogs, Boo and Shadow. She spends her free time writing, reading, being crafty, and photographing the surrounding wilderness.

  She is a member of the HWA and has appeared online and in print with Necon E-Books, Stupefying Stories, Buzzy Mag, Interstellar Fiction, Jamais Vu, Eldritch Press and the anthologies The Ghost IS the Machine, A Quick Bite of Flesh, Fear the Abyss, Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, FEAR: Of the Dark, Equilibrium Overturned, and Wrapped in Black: Thirteen Tales of Witches and the Occult, among others.

  More information can be found at roseblackthorn.wordpress.com.

  HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION

  WITCHES AND THE MARCH OF DIMES, AND MIKE WARNKE

  by Babs Boden

  In October of 1975, the year before we joined the charismatic church, I was a witch for Halloween. I was four and enamored with all things witchy. I wanted to grow up to look like Samantha Stevens, act like Endora, have socks like Witchie Poo, and possess the ability to morph in to an evil dragon like Maleficent. And also be married to either Keith Partridge or Johnny Gage, but only if they were down with witches.

  When asked what I wanted to be for Halloween, I shouted “A witch!”

  And a witch I was.

  I had a pointy black hat, a flowing black dress, a long, scraggly black wig, and a broom. My face was painted with Kmart Halloween greasepaint—green, black, and gray—and one tooth was blacked out with black wax. My mother stood me in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom to take it all in, and I promptly lost my shit.

  “No, no, no! It’s scary! Take it off! Take it off!” I cried, running in circles to get away from myself.

  My very irritated mother wiped the paint off my face, and I did my trick-or-treating in my hat, dress, wig, and my own normal, boring, pasty face.

  This was the same year that my sister’s husband took me to the local March of Dimes haunted house. It was advertised heavily on TV, and I had been clamoring to go. Standing in line at the ticket booth, four-year-old me stood up on my tiptoes to stick my stupid moon face up to an opening cut in the side of the booth, and a large hairy hand reached out and grabbed my face. I think I wet my pants.

  We filed past the operating-room scene, where a doctor with a Groucho Marx nose and glasses sawed in to a screaming, gore-soaked patient, pausing to inquire, “Would you like an aspirin?”

  We walked past Dracula’s coffin, where a Van Helsing-type brandishing a wooden stake and a mallet struggled to keep the Count in his coffin, while the ghoul looked right at me and hissed. I think I my pants again.

  There were howling werewolves and slamming doors, and a dark black-lit maze where things brushed up against us.

  Finally, in the basement lab of Dr. Frankenstein, I was on the verge of a hysterical little-kid nervous breakdown, so my brother-in-law asked The Monster to direct him to the nearest exit, pointing at me and telling him that I was terrified. The guy pulled off his mask, and gave us directions.

  On the way home, I hid in the footwell in the backseat of my sister’s Datsun, convinced that the surgeon, Dracula, the werewolf, and the owner of the hairy hand from the ticket booth were chasing us down the road.

  Subsequent Halloweens sucked, as any kid who grew up in a churchy household well knows. Instead of dressing up like your favorite TV character or monster and roaming the neighborhood in the dark, acquiring pounds and pounds of delicious candy, you attended the church youth group “Harvest Festival” dressed as a either a hobo or your favorite Bible character. We sat on hay bales drinking apple cider, eating ginger snaps, and listening to recorded Mike Warnke sermons. Mike Warnke was an evangelist who claimed to have been a Satanist, and talked at great length about Halloween being a high holiday in the Satanist church, where they skin baby bunnies and drink blood and get up to all kinds of sex-and-drug-fueled Satan-y hijinks. He’s the main reason that holy-roller kids like me got gypped out of Halloween for most of our childhoods...

  As God is my witness, if I ever meet up with this guy (who has since been exposed as a massive fraud, of course) I will punch him dead in the face.

  “That’s for all the Milky Ways and Tootsie Rolls and Nestle Crunches and Hundred Thousand Dollar Bars you cost me, you son of a BITCH!”

  HOWDY DOODY TIME

  by Kriscinda Lee Everitt

  Laura sat in the living room, half-heartedly watching the live Halloween episode of Ghost Hunters, like she did every year while handing out candy. Her husband, Sam, was upstairs sleeping—in bed early to get up early in the morning to dig a grave.

  He was the new cemetery caretaker. They had moved into their new home—on the cemetery grounds—toward the end of September. The small two-story sat just a moment’s walk from the gates—a limestone affair whose front featured what looked like a wide, squat turret with a conical top. This resulted in a round living room and upstairs bedroom that proved difficult to furnish. It was perfect for Halloween. Perfect, except that, apparently, it was bad form to decorate for Halloween inside a cemetery. Thanksgiving would be fine. They could go all out for Christmas. But not Halloween.

  It’s a cemetery, for shit’s sake.

  She’d insisted on a pumpkin—to which Sam had capitulated—but she wasn’t allowed to carve it until the night before. And it had to be gone November 1. He’d even given her reason to believe that maybe he’d leave the gates open on Halloween night—at least for a little while, so that maybe some of the neighborhood kids coul
d come in and trick-or-treat. So, she’d bought candy, carved her pumpkin, put a candle inside, and waited.

  “They won’t come in there, Laura,” Sam would say. “It’s a cemetery...”

  “...for shit’s sake,” she’d finish.

  “They won’t even know to come in here,” he’d say, zippering up his Carhartt jacket.

  “I can put up a sign,” she’d answer. “A few signs, so they know to come around the front. You said I could have one pumpkin. They can use it, as a beacon.”

  “Candy beacon.”

  “Yes.” She’d smiled.

  “I’ll think about it. But don’t get your hopes up. You might end up having to eat all that candy yourself.”

  “Oh no.”

  After they’d moved in, enjoying a lovely Indian summer, she’d taken to walking every day, as the cemetery was large—178 acres—and it contained several distinct areas, which she was learning to discern by their shapes and styles. There was a Jewish section, and a Chinese section. A children’s section, and a section for the hundreds who’d died of a certain epidemic. There was a rich section, full of marble mausoleums, and a clerical section for Catholic priests and nuns (in separate micro-sections). A cemetery of the 19th-century Lawn Park style, it was beautiful, sprawling, and meticulously proper.

  The grounds were full of Pin Oaks and Sugar Maples, Sourwoods and Sweetgums, all yellows, oranges, reds, and browns. The earthy russet scent made the air thick, and breathing it transported Laura back to the quieter, simpler times of her 1970s childhood where the eye- and mouth-holes of her stiff-plastic character masks pressed into her flesh, and the garbage bag-quality costume crinkled over her corduroy pants and velour shirt. She trick-or-treated with a pillowcase.

  From the front porch, one could not see the gates of the cemetery, as the side of the house faced them. All up and down the opposite side of the street were houses, full of families, full of kids who’d been walking door to door, playing maybe a few tricks, but, by and large, gathering treats.

  But now, it was dark. Laura could hear kids on the other side of the gate laughing, screeching with delight. The big bowl full of candy in the foyer sat sad and untouched. On the television, Josh Gates pulled a bad pun, which was completely ignored by the sound people as the overly dramatic spooky music lead everyone into a commercial.

  This live broadcast needs a laugh track, Laura thought, just as a faint knock came to the front door.

  She sat there for a moment, thinking she’d imagined it. A peel of children’s laughter came from outside and she swore it seemed closer than the street.

  They came in! Sam left the gates open! They must have seen the pumpkin!

  Laura sprang from the couch, losing a slipper as she did. She flung the other off into the foyer, straightened out her candy corn motif sweater, grabbed the bowl, and took a deep breath, smiling wide, before she opened the door.

  Here were her first trick-or-treaters for the night—at her new home—a little late, but here they were all the same.

  “Trick or treat!” they sang in what should have been unison, but wasn’t—the way only kids can do.

  “Oh my!” She pretended to be frightened. These were not the costumes she’d expected. Most of them were handmade, but then, she’d read in Real Simple’s October issue that handmade was coming back, much to the horror of middleclass mothers everywhere. They must have been embracing it, because here they were—witches, sheet ghosts, a black cat, a devil. There were even a few of those plastic character masks of her own childhood, which must also have been coming back into vogue—Underdog, Wonder Woman, C3PO. There was only one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

  Laura grabbed handfuls of candy and threw them into buckets, bags, and baskets. And for the next hour, they came, with a soft knock, a “trick or treat,” and they’d leave, giggling and laden with candy, until finally, the last.

  He was a lone little boy, wearing a checked shirt and a bandana, but no hat. He had freckles painted on his face and his lips were big and bright red. He opened up his pillowcase—like she would have carried.

  “Trick or treat, Mrs. Stanton!” he yelled with glee.

  She leaned down to him.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name’s Walter,” he said, a little confused.

  “No, no, I mean, who are you?” Laura laughed.

  “Oh!” he said, figuring it out. “Why, I’m Howdy Doody!”

  And he was. Howdy Doody. That was even before her time. That was her own mother’s time. She couldn’t believe this stuff was so popular now. She guessed this was what happened when homemade costumes came back into style—the grandparents made them because the parents were presumably too busy.

  She threw a handful of candy into Walter’s bag, smiling. He cinched it shut and ran off the porch.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Stanton!”

  And he was gone.

  Laura watched a little more Ghost Hunters, started to nod off on the couch, and then decided to go to bed.

  As she crawled under the covers, Sam stirred. He reached a hand over, squeezed her arm, then let his arm fall limp again.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Ferwuh?” he slurred, still half asleep.

  “For keeping the gates open.”

  “Didn’t,” Sam said, then drifted back into slumberland.

  Laura assumed he didn’t really hear her, and soon fell asleep herself.

  The morning of November 1 was bright and unseasonably warm, so after her usual cup of coffee, she thought she’d take her daily walk.

  On the porch, she discovered her pumpkin missing—perhaps a Halloween causality of some local teens. The gates were open all night. She shrugged and hoped she wouldn’t find it smashed over a statuette’s head somewhere in the cemetery, or there’d definitely be no trick-or-treats next year.

  She walked, inhaling the musty fall air, feeling wonderful and picking up the occasional stray candy wrapper. Some must have blown in from the street, except that the further into the cemetery she went, the more abundant they became, until she stopped dead on the paved road and looked straight ahead of her...into the children’s section.

  Here, there were candy wrappers everywhere, all over the graves. Snickers, Kit Kats, Milky Ways, Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, Whoppers—all of the candy she’d passed out the night before.

  Laura stepped ahead into the section and walked slowly up and down the rows—wrappers everywhere. And then, when she stepped into the third row, there was her pumpkin. It sat unharmed, smiling up at her, from the grave of a Walter Beaumont, who died in 1957 at age ten.

  Howdy Doody!

  She stood there for a few minutes, processing, and then grabbed the pumpkin and took it back to the porch, hiding it out of the sight of visitors. She then returned to the children’s section with a garbage bag and painstakingly picked up every wrapper. All this time, she processed, looking over her shoulder to make sure Sam wasn’t around.

  And she concluded two things—first, that next year, she’d make sure there was a wastebasket out here, and second, that she would have to figure something out for Christmas.

  Kriscinda Lee Everitt is a writer and editor. Her stories have appeared in anthologies by Permuted Press, Postscripts to Darkness, and Evil Girlfriend Media. She is the founder/editor of Despumation, a journal publishing stories inspired by/based on extreme heavy metal music. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two murderous cats.

  HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION

  WHEN I SCARED MYSELF OUT OF HALLOWEEN

  by Jeremy Wagner

  When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, Halloween was (and still is) my favorite holiday of the year. I’ve always been fascinated by things macabre, spooky, and scary. Well, except that one time, when I scared myself out of Halloween.

  I loved trick-or-treating as a kid and was really into dressing up, from famous monsters to C-3PO. I think I started trick-or-treating around three years old, with my mom always buying me costumes I thought
looked cool. At age four, I was really into witches, and begged my mom to buy me a witch costume and do my makeup. I’m sure I must’ve raised a few eyebrows, as a witch was probably looked at as being a “female role” that should be played out by little girls. Anyway, Mom did as I wished and got my costume on me and did my makeup. I’m surprised I didn’t form a glam-metal band later in life.

  Anyway, I digress here...it was when I was five that I decided I’d pick out my own costume, pick out the accessories, and do all the labor to dress myself—like a big boy. It was 1975, and I decided I wanted to be a vampire. My mom bought me a little vampire suit and cape—from either a JCPenney or Coast-to-Coast store. From there, I picked out some fangs and some horror makeup to go around my eyes. On Halloween night, before my mom took me out trick-or-treating to nearby farmhouses and country towns in central Wisconsin, I dressed myself, put the fangs in, and practiced my best Bela Lugosi accent.

  “I vant to suck your bluuuuuuud.”

  Despite my determined and successful work at getting my costume on and my fangs in, I couldn’t manage my makeup or hair. Mom wanted to give me a real vampiric face, so she slicked my hair back and sprayed it down to look like Dracula. I didn’t care about quality-checking my mug in a mirror as I trusted she would do an amazing job.

  As my mom did my makeup and hair, I sat impatiently in a kitchen chair, fantasizing about how much candy I would get (and how much I could steal from my sister after we returned home from our Halloween rounds). Once my mom finished, she told me I looked awesome, and it was almost time to leave to trick-or-treat across the countryside.

  This next part is the part I don’t remember at all. From what Mom tells me, I had to go to go “pee-pee” before we left, so I raced up to the bathroom on the second floor of our farmhouse. Evidently, I relieved myself and, like a good boy, I went to wash my hands afterward. Now, as an adult, I’m around five foot three, so at age five, I was around three feet (haha) and always needed to use a small stool under the sink to wash my hands. I guess I pulled out the stool, stood on it, and prepared to wash my hands—and to my horror, found a monster staring back at me through the mirror above the sink. A mini-nightmare, a little ghoul with fangs, a corpse-white face, and dead black orbits hosting wide eyes...extremely wide eyes.