Smiles of Fire to the Night
Prose Short Story
By Greg Patrick
“The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.
Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.”
As if a mysterious circus caravan rolled into town while the inhabitants slept, the leaf strewn street of the quaint picturesque village seemed to transform overnight into ghoulish metamorphosis. Eyes blearily opened from nightmares were greeted by a riotous necropolis of skulls grinning and witches cackling at every corner and lamppost.
Between the phantasmagoria of lavishly witch-festooned houses lit welcomingly to bands of trick or treaters, was a dark gap. That gap marked where a long abandoned Victorian mansion, a gaunt shadow of its former stately grandeur slowly rotted. It was shunned of course, hurried past its long shadow to another comfortingly lit house.
Then an enigmatic stranger from the western states, it was said, moved in... A certain “Mr. Elmer.” He remained reclusive, spurning curious eyes and neighbourly overtures at welcome. That was all until one infamous All Hallows Eve. That infamous night when the rivalry between neighbours at the greatest Halloween display would be upstaged at a gargantuan scale. In that quaint tranquil town “where nothing ever happened.”
Mr. Elmer had sought exile here, years that seemed centuries past, yet he was the same beneath the façade. Beneath the mask, something lycanthropic was betrayed in his eyes. The aging serial killer rallied his dark passion for one more murderous rampage.
The longer nights closed in. His sleep was haunted by strange dreams, and he thought of his victims again as if they stood at his bedside rather than bound and covered in the basement. His past three victims... No. That was not entirely true. There was another. Executed while protesting his innocence to the last. Elmer left that town after that. He moved away from that place. He felt no remorse. None saw his guilt. He saw to that. He was always so careful.
The plan was perfect, exile to another place. Hide among strangers. It was perfect. And yet the old hungers called to him like cries in the night. He would leave here too, yes. But not before there was a fifth victim.” It’s been so long,” Elmer thought.
Mr. Elmer sharpened his old axe by the hearth and stashed it carefully behind an antique bookshelf. The night was marked with a red smile on the calendar. Halloween. He grinned.
“Nothing will stop me tonight! Do you hear me?” Mr. Elmer bellowed.
Shadows oozed furtively like black cats emerging from twilight alleyways to feed as he whispered his own name to the night, and it was carried on the wind like a dark rumour traded between the decorative skulls leering from every post and turnstile. Doors were cast open, and the streets were overrun by a wild menagerie of little ghouls. People waited hospitably eager to be graced with all manners of ghosts and ghouls.
Yet strangely the anticipated knocks never came. Their houses were bypassed as the children stampeded to one glowing beacon. That Halloween “witch manor” was gloriously reopened. Towering over the dreamscape of houses were lit in eerie splendor for Halloween like gothic birthday cakes enticing masked hordes from the dark, the house was lit resplendently enticingly like a giant enticing witch’s gingerbread house.
A fixed smile like that carved on a jack-o'-lantern. Yet his eyes betrayed an uneasiness as he looked beyond the tide of ghouls to four figures standing aloof from
the revelry. They were silhouetted ephemerally against the display of jack-o'-lanterns.
Perhaps an older youth escorting children. They ventured no closer, wavering in intent vigil, motionless as shadows cast by the interplay of light.
Mr. Elmer forced a wider smile that split his lip and wiped a trickle of blood as
he beckoned to them hospitably with an affable wave, yet the figures dissolved eerily in a sudden gust of wind and mist like a cauldron’s vapors the shroud of mist seeped between the jostling children and they inhaled the darkness and spectral mist. A spasmodic shudder swept through the crowd like an impact ripple over a dark sea.
Mr. Elmer did not notice. His eyes never left the place where the ghostly strangers stood before they dematerialized, he beheld them illuminated in the crimson glow of the lanterns. By the mischievous interplay of light, he recognized them. His face grew ashen, and he recoiled. He felt a surge of unease then fear. He suddenly gasped, feeling a sharp pain on his hand.
He raised it inspectingly. Bitten? The hands grabbed quicker at the candy more rapaciously then, clawing at an empty bottom in disbelief. The eyes of the children looked up at him hungrily. Then a collective yelp of indignation rose from their ranks.
“Trick or treat! Trick or treat!!!” They chanted.
The voices must have been amplified by the walls, Elmer thought. Those were not children’s voices. Their monstrous faces glared up at him. Hands raised and grasping. He drew back suddenly. Their eyes smoldered with hunger like nocturnal creatures. He reeled back against the onslaught and slammed the door. He staggered back into the living room, turning off the lights with grim finality. He knocked over spare boxes of candy stacked to the door before sinking into his armchair. The chanting persisted as they pumped broomsticks and pitchforks in the air.
This was not right. It was not natural. The behavior of the children turned darker.
Elmer screamed as a figure of a boy dressed as a skeleton launched to the windowsill and pressed suddenly against the mullioned windows, skeletal hands clawing at the panes. Mr. Elmer saw the faces of others behind him. Their eyes smoldered emberously.
“Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” The children roared.
Elmer buried his face in his hands.
“I should call the police…Yes. I mean No…. No, I can’t. The basement! The basement! My secret!” he raved.
Then Elmer heard it. The knocking. Not from the door. He understood with sickening realization that the sound was coming from the basement door.
“Trick or treat” the chant continued, growing in immensity as if the night itself chanted.
Elmer rose shaking. He took up his old axe, threw the books aside to find it. He rose and followed the sounds in the dark.
“You remember this axe, don't you?” he growled.
Mr. Elmer dropped the axe then. The basement hatch was ajar. The chains and bolts torn off as if something inside ripped its way out, like cage bars too frail to hold back wild animals. He reeled back, backed away, picking up and then dropping the axe from trembling hands then. He froze as he heard a child’s voice behind him, like venomed honey. A little girl dressed as a witch was framed at the threshold.
“Trick or treat…trick or treat,” she rasped.
Elmer heard scrambling and scurrying as the candy scattered and was snapped up voraciously as they overran his house. They were chattering like animals in a feeding frenzy
less like a mob than a pack of carnivorous animals. He backed away fumbling for his axe and for a place to hide. They were too distracted by the candy. He backed into a boy costumed as a skeleton.
“Over here! The offering is here!” the boy crowed.
The children pursued Elmer through the house. He had turned off the lights, yet
he sensed with sickening realization that they would find him in the darkness.
He heard them advancing, their footfalls and chattering sounded insect-like.
He dove under a table and crawled into a ball, cowering and trembling.
Time elapsed amid a frenzy of searching and the sounds of broken vases and chairs.
Then a lingering silence reigned.
They’ve gone! Surely, they’ve gone!”
He dared open his eyes and there, head hanging down, was a small skull-masked face mocking him with a grisly smile.
“Trick or treat!” the boy hissed.
“Give us something good to eat!” the other children chimed in.
Elmer was grasped and violently pulled out from the shadows and clutched greedily by hundreds of hands.
“Trick or treat!” The children chanted.
Elmer was lifted onto the table like an altar and borne on top of it, out of
the house in a ghoulish torch-lit procession.
“Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” The children sang.
“Where are you taking me?!?” Elmer demanded.
“To the cemetery of course!” the skull-masked boy squealed jubilantly.
The children poked Elmer with pitchforks and gloated at his horror. The old wrought iron gate screeched open before them. The mob lowered the table in a circle of vandalized statues. The heads of majestic marble angels had been replaced by jack-o'-lanterns that the children lit like profane idols. Their burning grins leered down from winged torsos. The children forced a candied apple in his mouth and a pig mask on his face. His arms were bound and splayed across the table. The mob chanted then in a strange language.
“The ritual! The ritual!” They screeched in feverish anticipation. Some grasped candles. Others cavorted wildly in a circle; their monstrous shadows cast on the church wall. The witch-masked girl hopped onto the table, cackling. Elmer screamed at the falling blade, yet it was drowned out by their chant. Hundreds of slavering mouths and claws leaning in, teeth bared to feed voraciously. Little party cups were raised like chalices collecting the streaming red.
The little witch licked the blade as if from a carved cake.
“Trick or treat!” the children howled in wild rapture like a pack of wolves over a kill.
Then the bells from the old colonial church tolled midnight and they were lost children again. Like an exorcised spirit, a dark mist was exhaled from their mouths, morphing into a grisly spectral figure like a harpy before shifting amorphously and dissipating like a receding tide between the graves. A spasmodic shudder swept the horde that sent them to the ground.
The children rose, taking off their masks and staggered, dazed, bleary-eyed, and disoriented as if from a nightmare.
“Mommy!” A little girl began to cry.
Confronting the old witch’s house, four figures reappeared as if restless shadows
were granted form and face. They lingered against the background of dozens of displayed jack-o'-lanterns like an eerie shrine. Then they raised their arms like a coven of witches in the act of conjuring. The disembodied moan of the wind caressed them as the jack-o'-lanterns were suddenly extinguished at the final tolling of the bell. Meanwhile, as frantic parents were reunited with their children wandering aimlessly in the dark, the kindly old churchyard caretaker approached a sobbing child.
"Goodness you are out late! You should run along home then. There there. Don’t cry. My you have been busy tonight,” the caretaker said as he spied her amply filled bag.
“And what did you get for trick or treating?” He asked kindly.
Reluctantly the child reached into the bag and Mr. Elmer’s severed head was raised by its hair, candy spilling from its mouth.
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Greg Patrick - A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man. He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.
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