Getting Into The "Spirit" Of Halloween

His voice had never sounded so cold. Catherine felt winded and just shattered. Her father was telling her exactly what she had feared he’d be feeling, but she never imagined that he’d say the words he was now saying, and never in the way he was saying it. She had only known his warm, kind, gentle voice, and she had always felt safe with him.

Her parents had been separated a few years ago, and Catherine had feared that she had somehow caused it. Both parents had been very loving to her, in spite of their divorce, and she had always spent her weekends at her father’s, where they played video games, watched movies on his swanky fifty-five inch TV and he had always made her a big, scrumptious Sunday breakfast. Her father’s cold, distant voice was now explaining how much of a burden she had been for both her parents, and that he could not go on living with a daughter like that. She could not stop the tears that stung her eyes, as she felt the crushing weight of emotion in her chest. In the past twenty four hours, her every nightmare was coming to pass.

***

“Wait up, Katie! Will - ” He was out of breath, and when he spoke, it was wrought with emotion.  “I failed my LSAT exams!!” he said, sweating profusely, and looking first at Catherine, then at Willow, their other best friend. They looked at him, worried, as Willow was just comforting Catherine after she had heard her father remorselessly cut her off from his life, and she had dropped her lunch all over herself in front of everyone in the cafeteria, and had been laughed at, by everyone in the room.  Around them, they saw it happening to everyone who had been with them that fateful evening.

Joshua had hoped to get into Harvard Law School that fall, once they had graduated from high school, and had studied for almost a year before he finally agreed to sit the Law School Admission Test that year. Since he had always been an over-achiever, his school had agreed to give him a scholarship to cover his tuition and living expenses if he got sufficiently high scores on the LSAT. As one of five children to parents who did the Lord’s work, he could not expect his parents to fund his education out of the income given to a Pastor and his wife.

***

“Everyone’s nightmares are coming true!” said Faye, at a rushed meeting they had called that evening. Everyone who had broken into the haunted building on Wimbourne Avenue on Halloween night was called. Not everyone had been affected just as yet, but they all knew that it was only a matter of time, and all ten worried about the effects of it, and what could happen next. Faye was delicate and bird-like, and had just lost one of her pets, a handsome greyhound, to a horrific car crash. Billy, a usually well behaved dog, had wandered out into the street, and been run over by a large hatchback, just before she could get to him. She had had him since he was a puppy, and was beside herself with grief over his horrific end.  

Willow was worried too, as she had suddenly lost the ability to read, even though she was fluent in three languages on a normal day. Four more people had had their worst nightmares materialize – Kevin had found himself naked in front of the class, and in spite of all her preparation, Allison had forgotten all the words to her speech that morning, and had not been allowed to give it again on another day.  Angela and Marie had found themselves on stage, announced as the finest sopranos in the town. As the entire audience was expecting them to sing, they opened their mouths and nothing came out. To make it worse, the crowd turned into an angry mob, and heckled them off the stage. Needless to say, Wendall and Joel were very worried about what might come to them.

There was a grave silence for a few moments until Allison cleared her throat, and spoke. “We need to go over what we did that night, so that we can maybe, try to think of something to do to make these things stop.”  Everyone gravely nodded in agreement. Then Willow looked around and decided to start. “We were at the Halloween party at the Williamses, when we thought that it would be fun to break in to the abandoned asylum over at Wimbourne Avenue, just to see what the big deal is, and since there were ten of us, we all felt much braver than we otherwise would have.” Her voice broke off, and Joel, who was sitting next to her, put a comforting arm around her shoulder, shivering a little himself.

“Ignoring all the boards warning us to not trespass, we broke in, and found the dilapidated asylum to be eerily quiet, save for the groans and moans of a building that old. We walked into the various rooms, wondering aloud what the stains on the walls could be – could it be dried blood? Food, flung in frenzy…or could it be excrement?” Joel mused. What secrets would a building that housed the insane of an era long gone have hidden? They all knew that that was the real reason all of them were there. All they had been told over the years of living in Moorington was that the place was unsafe, and that they were not to go there. The stories of the building being haunted were rumours, kept hush-hush, as the building had been for sale for several years, but remained unsold.

There were so many variations of the rumoured stories, but there was one that seemed to be agreed upon. The older folks said that the building had been deserted after one of the more violent patients, who was to be transferred to a facility for the criminally insane, had gone on a rampage, killing several nurses, the resident psychiatrist and several more staff and patients before the police had finally been able to subdue him. In the struggle, the police had accidentally nicked his jugular, and in the dark, and in his aggression, they had not realized it until he had collapsed. In spite of the valiant efforts of the paramedics to keep him alive, he was dead on the way to the hospital.

They had cleaned up the building and resumed normal working hours within a month, but the horrors of the death of their co-workers had been too great for the remaining staff to continue working there, and they all left, one by one. Even then, a few more mysterious deaths had occurred, and the staff and neighbours had strongly suspected spectral activity in and around the building. With staff numbers dwindling, the patients had also been transferred to other facilities in batches.

Eventually, the government order had arrived, stating that the facility needs to be closed, as the cost of operations was too great for the handful of patients that remained. The building had then been mildly renovated, and put on the market, but decades had passed, and it remained unoccupied.

“Then we heard the creaking door. It was an awful noise. Some of us wanted to run back home, but Wendall and Josh wanted to run towards the sound, to check it out. Against our better judgement, we went with them because we didn’t want to leave them behind. We started hearing various sounds in the building now – sounds that we may have not been aware of before, but now that we were afraid, we were aware of every sound around us. The wind was also whistling around us, and it had become colder all of a sudden.” Catherine said, in a hollow voice.

“It took us a while to find it, but we eventually found him in what was once the kitchen. It was the guy in our class, the quiet, nerdy guy who was not quite the overachiever, not athletic, not the kind who would easily get noticed – what was his name? Mousy?” Josh said, looking around. “No, you twit!” Marie said. “His name is Matt. Matthew Forrest. Anyway, we were shocked to find him sprawled on the ground. Wendall and Josh carefully turned him so that we could see if he was hurt.” Her breath caught, but she continued. “His face was bloody, and he was unconscious, but he had a heartbeat, and was breathing, so we called 911. It has been five months since the incident, but he’s still in a coma.”

Angela, who had been quiet all this time, spoke up. “All of us knew we were going to be in trouble, but who knew that this could happen? This is far worse that the suspension we had last year. Maybe some of us have not had it as bad as the others, but who knows what can happen next? I have been trying to remember all the nightmares I have ever had, all morning, praying that they aren’t too horrific.” She said this, unconsciously glancing at Faye.    

It was then that they heard the little titter, and they all looked at each other. They all knew they would have missed it if the room had not been that quiet. There was a long silence when no one dared to speak. “I have a theory,” said Kevin. “I think it’s Matt. What do you guys know of astral projections?” Then, Kevin explained to a quiet, attentive room of astral projections, and how he had thought he had seen Matt a few times, when bad things had happened, and he had dismissed it as his imagination until just then when they had heard the titter. “What if this is him? What if he’s angry that he was invisible, easy to miss, and we did nothing?” Just then, everything happened at once. A sharp wind blew through the room, dropping a few things and the door slammed shut, and all of them scrambled to a corner.

Sure enough, in the other corner, an astral form materialized. It was Matt. In spite of their fear, the next hour was spent with them talking to Matt, and him saying exactly how much he had hoped to be included in various things, but that he’d be passed over, time and again, for someone more popular, good looking or just someone who was not as shy as he was. Even on Halloween night, he had followed them, too shy to ask them if he could join them. Wanting to remain unseen, he had bolted when they had almost come upon him, and had accidentally tripped, and hit his head on a jagged rock. He had awoken a few days ago, standing beside his bed, watching the tubes enter and leave his comatose body.

Marie was very sympathetic, and walked up to him, sitting on the floor next to where Matt was, and speaking in a soothing tone, calming him, and assuring him of the fact that he had a friend in each of them. She looked around the room. Not everyone was as sympathetic as she was, but they all wanted this madness to stop, so even those who were not inclined to accepting Matt smiled and nodded. There was almost an instant change in the atmosphere in the room.

***

To their relief, they awoke to a beautiful morning, and things had gone back to normal. They visited Matt in hospital that day, all ten of them.  It was not until the next fall that Matt awoke from his coma, but his new friends visited him each weekend, and read to him and spoke to him and kept him company, much to his parents’ surprise. When he awoke, almost a year since Halloween, Matt was warmly welcomed by his parents and his new friends, Kevin, Allison, Marie and Josh. 

‘His strength was also his weakness’

It was a dull September evening in Wintervale, and the residence of Det. Ret. Johnson Compton was quiet, almost too quiet, he thought, for just a year ago, he had been given a handsome farewell dinner by the Wintervale Police Department. After that, he had had a few friends over every now and then, until last Christmas, when he had heard that he had lost his only son, who was on his first tour in Afghanistan. People had begun carefully avoiding him since then, as he had taken to drinking in the evenings, and had become a mess, given his state of bereavement and retirement.

He had survived two conscriptions, a full life of public service, a messy divorce, the loss of his only son to war, but retirement was not something he had planned for. Work had put everything into perspective – it had given him purpose, gumption, and just the will to go on, but retirement had hit him hard. Oh how the mighty had fallen, he thought, for retirement is something he had never given much thought to, but the day had come when he had been politely asked to leave.

He had taken a fascination to twirling his gun, his Beretta M9 standard issue pistol, each night, not really thinking of suicide, but not that he hadn’t considered it either. It was a thought that had crossed his mind a few times, but it had not stayed with him long enough for him to go through with it. He also read and reread the harsh, incriminating letter his ex-wife had written to him, a few months prior, blaming him for letting their son get conscripted.

His diligence at work had left him without a life outside, and he was bitter, at least 30 pounds overweight, addicted to alcohol and lonely. As he was reminiscing about the numerous criminals he had put behind bars, he was reminded of a certain someone he had met, only for the duration of a particularly twisted case, but he believed that that person had completely changed the way he had thought about all things mystical. This person was an expert in such things, and, well, the killer was no ordinary killer.

The killer had been a sociopath with suspected cannibalistic tendencies, and had been the one that got away for several years, until he met Monsieur Jean Claude LaValle. The corpses had been found in a large yard, not far from the killer’s property, carefully semi-buried, and semi preserved under a mat of fake grass, and used as a nutrient source for several strange exotic plants. However, upon exhuming and performing autopsies on each corpse, it was found that they had been missing organs and bones – different ones each time. Belonging to an affluent family and being a renowned professor of art history in his own right, the killer had access to the best criminal lawyers money can buy, and had also won the jury over with his charm, good looks and innocuous façade. 

Although Compton instinctually knew that this was the killer, there had always been cause for reasonable doubt, and this had both, frustrated and infuriated him. He had spent several coffee fuelled, sleepless nights poring over all of the evidence, forensic reports, the videos and transcripts of the trials, trying to find a chink in the killer’s armour, but to no avail – the bastard had thought of everything.

Fifteen years since the first trial, while the case file had still not been closed, LaValle had walked into PD, speaking of the involvement of voodoo in the killer’s modus operandus. He said that he saw a pattern, and that he suspected that the killer’s victims were carefully chosen to perform the rites and rituals to conjure evil spirits. At first, Compton had utterly dismissed the strange man’s allegations, but several sleepless nights later, he eventually decided to call him back, and to hear him out. The more LaValle explained, the more he saw that LaValle’s knowledge provided much needed context to the evidence. He finally knew where to look, how to look at the evidence, and he asked LaValle be a consultant on the case. In his forty years of service, this was the first time he had enlisted the help of someone outside of law enforcement to help him solve a case.

He had finally come upon volumes of journals the killer had kept, hidden in an underground vault, not far from the first burial site, where they had suspected him to have stored the other implements used in the voodoo rituals. They found what they were looking for, but they did not expect to find the journals, detailing his turbulent childhood, his initial, animal kills, and then his introduction to a voodoo club. He mentioned that the club was filled with pretenders, and that he wanted the real thing. Thus began his murderous pursuits, and he had practiced killing – stealthily at first, but later, emboldened by his ability to walk free, he began to roam free, killing more and more people for more darker rituals. Upon this discovery, the case was a slam dunk. The killer’s attention to detail had been his own undoing – both, his strength, and his weakness.

The Det. Ret. felt a rush, even just thinking about the day he had heard that the Professor’s death sentence had been fulfilled, just a week after he had been given a medal of honour by the Mayor for putting the Professor behind bars. Was life worth living now, that he had no such service to do, no one to protect, nothing to look forward to?

He remembered the advice he had given his friend, Jake, about an entirely different matter. He had told him to stop thinking, and to just get on with it, because we’re all not getting any younger. Everyone had laughed. Then, in a rush of emotion, he picked up his Beretta and shot himself in the temple. Then it all went black.