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

“My baby!” she wailed. “What’s she doing to him?”

Her legs went from under her and her father followed her to the ground, his arms gripping her tight with a strength that had not wasted along with his body.

“You have to let him go,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “We must bear the sins of our forefathers. It is the burden of our town.”

Christine hiccuped huge sobs that racked her body.

“My baby,” she moaned, lying down on the floor and curling up in a protective ball while her father tried his best to soothe her through his own pain.

How some things always stay the same. Just as people never asked where the newborn babies came from that were carted from that house long ago, now they turned a blind eye when the younger members of the community failed to show, their presence replaced by red rings around the eyes of their parents.

Nothing much had changed in Murrins over the years; nothing much at all.

THE GREATEST SIN

by Kevin Wallis

Lawrence opened his eyes into blackness.

“Brooke?” His throat ached with the words. When only the rasping of his own breath replied, his chest tightened and a wave of terror descended. “Brooke!”

“Here.” Her voice was steadier than his, but thick with her own fear. “I’m here, Lawrence.”

His sigh sounded like a November gale in the silence. His wife’s form started to materialize several yards away as his vision fought the darkness. Realizing he was lying on his back, Lawrence tried to sit, but pain hammered his head and he fell back with a moan. He felt the back of his skull with a shaky hand and found a lump the size of a walnut. A crusty mass flaked beneath his touch. Dried blood, he assumed, and the darkness deepened at the thought.

“What happened?” he asked. Brooke had always been the smart one. He prayed that strength would surface now. “Where the hell are we?”

“No idea. But my head hurts like a bitch.”

“Mine too.” Inhaling and holding his breath against the pain, Lawrence sat. His head threatened to drag him back to the deep, but he managed to get upright and suppress the dizziness. He dragged his hand across the ground towards his wife, needing to feel her skin, her hair, her breath. He shook his head, growled as the lump throbbed and stabbed, but managed to clear his sight enough to find her in the lessening dark; despite its dampness and palpable tremor, her hand had never felt so warm.

“I feel dirt beneath us,” she said.

The darkness had ebbed enough to allow Lawrence his first view of his surroundings, and his flesh chilled in the humid April night. They sat in a space the size of a child’s bedroom. An odor of wet earth saturated the already moist air, and a glimmer of moonshine flickering through a crack in the ceiling granted them just enough light by which to see. The four surrounding walls, either caked with or entirely comprised of mud, seemed to pulse, throb, breathe with the threat of constricting them into pulp. A nonsymmetrical box was described into the dirt of the far wall like a crudely carved door. The ground consisted of the same muddy substance as the walls, and chunks of it clung to his hands and feet…

Oh God.

His feet were bound by chains as thick as a giant’s thumb; the other end of the chains vanished into the hard-packed earth. He looked at Brooke and found her chained to the ground, as well. Terror licked his spine.

“Are you okay, baby?”

“I think so. I don’t…do you remember what happened?”

Amazed at the steadiness in her voice, Lawrence said, “No…I think…I was smoking by the car. We had just packed up the tent, right? That’s the last thing I remember.”

Brooke twisted her bound legs beneath her so that she could sit upright. “I remember double-checking the campsite, making sure the fire wasn’t still smoldering in the pit. I…I heard a creak behind me, thought it was you. There was a smell…”

“Like something burning, right? Like a fire? I smelled it too. Then…” He rubbed the back of his head and flinched at the pain. “Then we woke up here.”

“What the fuck, Lawrence, what the fuck? Where are we? Who would do this?”

Stay calm, sweetie, please stay calm. If you panic I’m gonna lose it. Sweat dripped down his forehead, hung off the tip of his nose, and fell to the mud unheeded.

“I remember something else,” she said. “The trees, right before we were hit by whatever hit us.” She leaned forward, fixed his wide gaze with conviction. “They moved— ”

The door camouflaged into the far wall slammed open with a wet thud. The couple shrieked like a single organism and scuttled backwards, stopping with pained grunts when their leg shackles pulled taut.

The stench of a thousand swampland logs swept into the earthen room. Lawrence gagged and buried his nose into his filthy sleeves. The air was fat with the smell of wood, the stink of wet things. He shut his eyes, afraid to let the poison in, and let toxic tears flow. The stench wasn’t nauseating in itself—it smelled green, lush, alive— but the concentrated thickness and intensity of the smell overpowered what little resolve Lawrence still possessed and drove a string of whimpers from his throat.

It’s a dream, he thought. This is a dream smell. But when the sound of shuffling footsteps followed the stench into their prison, he opened his eyes and prayed to be awakened.

The figure striding into the room was easily seven feet tall. He limped towards Lawrence with an unsteady gait, his legs teetering and seeming to threaten collapse with each step, like a toddler learning to walk but too inexperienced to trust his limbs. A gown of thick brown fabric covered his thin frame to where his knees should’ve been, and a hooded cowl capped his head, rendering shadows over his face.

Brooke lunged against her chains. “Who the fuck you think you are the fuck did you do to—” She stopped as the towering figure turned in the middle of a rickety step and strode towards her.

“No!” Lawrence screamed. “Me! Come to me!”

The figure drew his right hand from his robes. A mound of black dirt lay in its palm. Brooke had backed away as far as her binds would allow, and Lawrence saw blood ringing her thin ankles where the chains bit. The man— that’s no man you know that’s no man— stopped in front of her, dark crumbs falling from his upturned hands. With a crack that stained Lawrence’s jeans with a spurt of urine, each of the figure’s legs bent at the middle and snapped, creating a pair of splintered, jagged knees. Brooke screamed, covered her ears as if preparing for the next explosion of breaking joints.

The thing knelt before her, its face cloaked in the darkness of its hood. Its left arm emerged from its sleeves, as straight and unwavering as its legs had been before the deafening crack. Lawrence envisioned a snake slithering from its den as the arm grew longer, longer, knotty yet smooth. Lawrence lunged, fingers curled and eager for the thing’s neck, but his chains locked tight and he pitched forward, his face slamming into the earthen floor. He raised his head into blindness, tried to scrape the grime out of his eyes. His ears, however, were ruthlessly keen, and pain riddled his chest as he heard his wife’s shrieks collapse into retching, choking sobs.

The thing was on him before he could regain his sight. A hand as hard as granite grabbed the back of his skull and wrenched his head back. Lawrence screamed. A ball of dirt smashed into his mouth. He shook his head, tried to dislodge the filth, to see his attacker. Blinking away enough for a hint of blurred sight, he saw only the hooded figure’s arm, directly in front of his face and shoving the soil down his throat. He gagged, spit, shrieked behind the wall of dirt filling his mouth, and finally, he swallowed. The dirt, now muddy with his saliva, slid down his esophagus like a ribbon of slime. He coughed, exaggerated the action in an effort to expel the dirt from his mouth, his stomach, his lungs, but the thing pressed harder. Lawrence could taste its fist in his mouth, and it tasted like timber.