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

He was a respected and busy man, so naturally when he showed up he skipped to the head of the queue. He had been down there for some time when an inhuman roar rose from the bowels of the house, shaking the foundations of the town. In homes all along the street, people stopped what they were doing and shivered; the Devil had come to Murrins.

In a stumbling body, the men rushed downstairs, the loving father at the forefront, anxious to protect his business interest. He flung open the door and a wave of that awful howl buffeted them with its force.

On the floor by the bed was a man, naked and bloody. Where his penis should have stood, proud and erect, was a jagged stump, a geyser of blood spurting from the center, the flow already ebbing as his life did. The detached appendage was lying on the floor by the door like a giant fat slug; a slimy streak marked its track down the wall where it had been flung.

She was crouched over him, her thumbs dug deep into his eye sockets. Vitreous fluid leaked from around her fingers, getting sucked up his nostrils with each agonised breath he took. His leg twitched as her long nails shorted some circuit in his brain.

Her head snapped up and she glared at the string of shocked faces outside the door, faces she knew only too well, faces that would, at some point in the night, have been hovering over hers, sweating and contorting with exertion and unrequited ecstasy.

Her eyes flashed red and black, something very alive and very diabolical behind them. Her hair was a tangled black mass around her pale, sunken face. Her dry, abused lips cracked and split as they stretched in a deranged snarl, her teeth ringed with blood.

All the torment and torture, the pain and injustice had broken through that feminine shell and manifested itself into the demon that stood before them.

The growling sound was coming from deep within her throat. It grew and rolled up through the house, filling the foggy night air. People set down their forks or newspapers and listened in fear.

A blue flame licked the house, flicking out from under it, forked and pointed like a dragons tongue. Within minutes it had consumed the house and everyone in it.

That night, all through the town, every infant disappeared from under the watchful noses of their loving parents. Mass panic erupted the next morning when beds were found cold and empty. Terrified parents met at the ends of driveways, wringing their hands in despair, tears cleaving tracks of worry down their cheeks.

One by one they found them; their mangled bodies scattered across the woods and fields like discarded dolls. Some bobbed face down in the well, all bloated and sodden. The lifeless forms of others dangled from the trees as though dropped from a height, their necks twisted, limbs shorn. Others lay on the cold ground, broken and bloody, spines snapped like twigs. They all had one thing in common—there were none left alive. She had exacted revenge for each monster that had been planted in her belly, and for the only one that she had cared about.

And so, according to the legend, that was how it began.

On Easter morning she came, The Easter Bunny, stalking through the gardens of the town. In some she left her mucus-coated gifts to the inhabitants, others she passed right through.

When Christine was a kid she remembered warnings from her mother not to look out the window on that night before Easter, and never, under any circumstances, to go outside before her father said it was okay. She remembered vividly the burning rituals in the back yard.

Her mother told her once of a time when she herself was a child, when she dared to look out the window. She screamed so loud her ears rang and Christine’s grandmother had covered her eyes, comforting her and chastising her in equal measure.

“You don’t want to see that, Christine,” she had said.

Now her mother was gone. She had died old and gray and peaceful in her sleep on a blustery day the previous autumn. Christine had a child of her own. A two year old with bouncing blonde curls that she refused to trim.

Her father lived with them, supported by a walking stick those days. Countless times Christine had tried to move from Murrins, but life had always gotten in the way and thwarted her plans. Now her father did not want to leave her mother and she, Christine, must look. For the sake of her son and all the unborn children she and her husband wanted to create, she got up with her boy at dawn and stood at the window on Easter morning, to see if the legends were just horror stories, or history.

CHRISTINE DRAGGED HERSELF TO her feet, her legs shaking. Her gut contracted and her whole body screamed at her to run away, but her traitorous hands once again reached out and lifted the curtain. Her heart beat like a drum when she saw that she was still there and it had not been her imagination, her tired eyes conjuring falsities.

She stood on the lawn, looking down at the grass. She was naked, scraggy black hair sprouting in patches from her wrinkled skin. Her hideous, saggy breasts dangled like excess flaps of skin against her stomach. As Christine watched, she squatted low over the ground. The window was open a crack and the smell of her wafted across the garden on the breeze; the smell of blood and filth and sex.

From the dense black bush at her pubis something began to emerge. A gelatinous goo slipped from between her legs and hung there like a string of clear snot. She shifted on her feet and an oval, membranous thing fell to the ground with a wet plop. Blood and amniotic fluid splattered with its exit.

It lay there, pulsing between her feet. Something moved beneath the transparent shell; something pink and green and monstrous.

She moved over a few paces and squatted again. Christine could see her tense up as she forced out another seed.

And as if her eyes weren’t abominated enough, they took in something worse.

A thousand ‘what-ifs’ lashed at her in a successive assault: What if they had thrown out the rancid meat they found in the fridge the night before instead of feeding it to the dog? Then it wouldn’t have started to squirt its reeking diarrhoea all over the floor and have to be put outside for the night. What if Carl had pushed him out the back door instead of the front? What if he had not gone to bed so early and hence been so befuddled that he had not latched the door after him? What if Christine had been watching her son instead of the gorgon on the lawn with her slimy discharge?

All those little links created a chain of events that led her to the point where she was now watching them both.

Christine was frozen in fear as she watched her little boy wander into the garden, his blonde curls bouncing as he walked. The two outside were unaware of each other.

She willed the hag not to turn around; she tried to catch her son’s attention; she struggled to make her legs move.

But nothing worked.

The hag suddenly pivoted, her black and red eyes fixing on the unsuspecting toddler. She bounded across the distance between them like some grotesque rabbit. His curls sprung when she grabbed him. His high-pitched wail of terror pierced Christine’s heart. In a single movement she cracked him in half like an egg. His juices flowed, his cries ceased.

She lowered her horrible head to his back and with teeth as sharp as razors, tore away a chunk of fabric and innocent flesh. She spat it aside and ducked down again, ripping away pieces of his little body until she got to the good stuff, the marrow in his bones, the fluid from his severed spine. She drank it down with relish, her horrible lips wrapping greedily around the bone.

Inside the house Christine found her voice. She screamed until her throat felt like it was going to bleed.

A hand clamped over her mouth and she was dragged away from the window. She spun around to face her father. Tears streaked both their faces.