Shane ed. - A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre - Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

“Your mama’s already left. I told ‘em I’d get you there. Ain’t a problem. Church is just down the street. Hardly a walk at all.”

“She left?”

“You sound worried. Nothing to be worried about.”

Sally tries to speak but her throat is completely closed as if she is being strangled.

“We got things to talk about,” Henry says and closes the door.

ONE EGG WENT BENEATH the rose bush on the south edge of the lawn and another went behind the bleached stone beside the patio. Sally put another at the base of the redwood play set and then, as an afterthought, she climbed the narrow ladder and put another in the corner of the play set’s second level.

Carefully, she climbed down the ladder and began walking to the back of the property.

“SEE THAT?” UNCLE HENRY whispers, his voice dry and rasping. “Just like an egg.”

Sally can see little through the scrim of tears. She doesn’t want to see .

“And what do we do with eggs?” Uncle Henry asks.

SHE DROPPED THE EGG on the grass and stared at it, half expecting the dyed shell to emit a scream of terror, of pain. Sally took a step back and closed her eyes, pushing out the tears pooled on the lower lids.

“YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE what you did,” Uncle Henry says. “You understand that? You never tell a soul what you did to me.”

She doesn’t know what she’s done to him.

Sally stares at the floor, but it isn’t there. There are no boards, no nails. Beneath her is the surface of a swirling black lake, like a swamp filled with grease and bile and…

The fluid ripples and twists under her feet like the mouth of a maelstrom and she wishes it would pull her down and away—even drowning would be better than enduring her uncle’s stare. His voice is like pennies in a grinder, and her mind pulls away, so far away, until his words are lost in the gurgle of the whirling bog. She shivers and closes her eyes and begins to whisper a prayer to the black fluid, but then she is being shaken and drawn back from the whirlpool of filth, and she is looking into the diseased-rabbit face of her uncle and his foul breath is on her skin and his grinding-penny decree demands her oath.

“You say it,” he insists.

“I promise,” she says .

“Promise what?” Uncle Henry asks .

“Promise I’ll never say anything.”

“About what you did?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get out of here,” he tells her with a chuckle. “We don’t want you to be late for your ghunt.”

She shuffles to the door.

“Get yourself a bushel of eggs,” he says.

He laughs, and the sound is wet and horrible and far worse than his speaking voice. Sally shakes all over as if emerging from a frozen lake. She hurries to the bathroom and vomits and vomits until her body feels like it’s been crushed between two cars.

SALLY WALKED IN FROM the backyard. A single egg remained in the basket—the cracked one with the red bottom and the halo of glitter. She traced the crack from the narrow dome to the fat base with a finger. She carried the basket to the basement door, opened it, and descended the steps. At the bottom, she again regarded the egg and again touched it as if it were a good luck charm.

She was still infuriated with her mother for including Uncle Henry in the family Easter. Sally had protested vehemently, going so far as to nearly break her promise and reveal what the sick old man had done to her all of those years ago, but Sally couldn’t get the words out. She couldn’t explain about the egg.

How could her mother not see his disease? Filth and sickness covered every inch of him. He was woven from perversity. Carved from shit. How could her mother let him anywhere near her?

How could Sally let him anywhere near her daughter?

In the basement, she crossed the cold cement floor to the door to the fruit cellar and pulled it back, allowing a wedge of light to drape along the plank stairs and puddle on the mud-caked feet below.

The simple answer was: she couldn’t.

As she descended the stairs, Uncle Henry was slowly revealed to her. He lay motionless. Naked. Damaged.

The dark dirt beneath him coiled and swirled and turned darker still, and together they road the surface of the gloomy bog. Nail heads jutted from his eye sockets; they had punctured the orbs and released a greasy pale fluid along with blood to dribble down her uncle’s stubbled cheeks—the juice dried to a crust, now. His upper lip had receded in rigor, adding prominence to his bucked teeth. His jaw lay open, propped against his second chin. Blood clotted the frayed gray hairs and made dark veins in the creped skin of his chest and belly. Before the drill, she’d used the clamps, and she’d used the hammer and she’d used the pliers. She’d used the blowtorch. Between his legs was nothing but a blackened terrain that looked no more threatening than a scoop of scorched casserole. The holes in his torso—ragged, clotted, and numerous—had been bored over the course of thirty minutes. The third aperture, the one through the hairy flesh above the old man’s heart, had been the last wound her uncle had protested—though he’d done so with little more than a hiss of breath. After that one, he’d lay still. There were twelve holes total: an even dozen.

“I know what to do with an egg,” she said.

Sally knelt down and placed the decorated egg against her uncle’s prominent front teeth. She forced the shell and the tumescent content through his parted lips, and worked it back and forth, trying to insert it whole. It cracked further and broke apart. When a piece fell to his chest, Sally retrieved the yellow scrap and worked it between his cold cheek and gums. Additional bits of yellow and white began to rain from his lips.

Unsatisfied, Sally retrieved them and worked them into his gums as she’d done with the first piece. Then she took the hammer from the floor beside her. She swung it with all of her strength. The steel head smashed her uncle’s lips and shattered his buckteeth, sending them and the bulk of the egg deep into his mouth and to the rim of his throat.

“Swallow it,” she whispered.

Then she pulled back the hammer and swung again.

JOYEUX PÂQUES

by Emma Ennis

Christine Lake inched her way over to the window. She planted herself in the corner, her hand shaking as she stretched it out to the curtain that was only ever closed on that particular night of the year. As her fingers probed a tiny gap between the material and the window, her body leaned away on instinct, as though she had no control over its various attachments.

Her fearful eyes scanned the garden in the gloom of early morning. Her heart hammered against her chest as she took in the eerie mist hanging low over the lawns and wrapping around the boles of the miserable trees that cried dewy tears. It was to the end of the garden, down by the fence that her eyes feared to travel the most. But she willed them, and her heart was stilled, her blood slowing to a more civilized trickle in her veins. There was nothing down there.

Suddenly the horizon pinked, a great slash of rosy dawn cut the gray sky and she watched it spread. The glow warmed her and one by one her knotted muscles began to unwind. After all those years of fear and hiding, of wondering, it turned out that the rumors were just that—rumors.

Light began to spread and now the dew glistened on the leaves. In the corner of the garden the hedge moved. Christine stiffened and almost jumped away from the window in fright before a gray-brown rabbit hopped into the clearing. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at the sight.