Spooky Season

The kids always scream, when they come to my house on Halloween.
They falter, when they get to the end of the driveway, looking up at the hanged bodies I’ve dangled from the archway, their intestines spilling out and their faces red and bulging. They creak, slowly, rhythmically, as the wind catches them and spins them around or back and forth. Their eye sockets are bloody hollows, their contents long since pecked out by crows.
Those same crows greet them as they make their way nervously up the drive, beady eyes glinting in the candlelight, cawing harshly from the big willow trees that line the path. There are other things, too, in between those trees, even harder to make out – an anguished face here, a huddled rat with its awful meal there, branches that grow eyeballs and severed hands like fruit. The many limbs of a car-sized spider are caught, faintly, by the light from the house, and a lot of kids lose their nerve at that one as soon as they make it out, spinning away at a choking woman trapped in its spreading web.
And then they see the house itself, and I see all of them stop, if only for a moment.
Rows of uneven graves lead up to it, their headstones askew, their plots fresh-dug. Long-limbed things lurk in the shadows of mausoleums and crypts, slipping furtively out to paw at the earth or scuttling away to hiss at the intruders on their territory. Away beyond, hedgerows form a choking maze, filled with looming scarecrows whose pumpkin eyes flicker and flare, and then meld away into a wall of dark pine trees, their branches filled with gleaming, hunting eyes.
A few – a very few – manage to make their way onto the porch, ducking under the spiderwebs with their head-sized inhabitants, easing around the old man nailed alive to his rocking-chair, slipping silently past the hellhound with its glowing crimson eyes to make their way up and ring my doorbell.
That’s the part I’m waiting for.
Slowly, slowly, the door creaks open, by some unseen mechanism. There are frantic screams from within the house, somewhere far away, and laughter too, high and mad and wild. There is a sound of breathing, from somewhere much closer, and a sense of things moving high up on the ceiling, and little glowing eyes that watch from dark shadows.
And then they see me, and every one of them, little mummies and ghouls and witches and superheroes, screams.
I peel myself away from the wall, a terrible, towering form in a deer-skull mask, a cloak trailing on the floor that seems to conceal far too many legs. Long hands like hunting spiders reach out towards them, as a light ignites behind the mask and casts them all in haunting, flickering brilliance. I begin a long, low chant, bidding them draw closer, beckoning them inside –
They bolt, then, every one of them, candy-buckets and props thrown to the ground in their haste to flee, the door slamming closed behind them as though through its own conscious displeasure. I go to the window, and see them running in stark terror down the driveway, and occasionally looking back to catch a glimpse of my terrible silhouette still watching them.
It’s all fake, of course. All lighting tricks and animatronics and a hidden speaker system performing its masterful work. All rubber creatures bathed in eerie glows that make them seem to move, or props made very carefully over the course of the year, their every detail perfected and made photorealistic. Nothing more than smoke and mirrors and eerie music.
Or, at least, most of it is.
Category:StalkerShrike
Category:HWC23
Category:Halloween
Category:Places