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

He raised his teary gaze to the thing’s face. Shadows still embraced its details, but a creak sounded from within the darkness like a door opening upon a haunted room. It’s smiling, he thought, and closed his eyes again, praying he’d never have to see that grin. He thrashed against the thing’s pressing arm, its shoving and choking and suffocating arm…

Bark, he thought. Its arm looks like bark.

It spoke then, its voice a log dragged across bones. “The trees did more than move. They screamed.” It lowered its face to within inches of Lawrence’s own. It reeked of oak and summer. “Remember your greatest sin, murderer.”

It rose and backed away. Lawrence heard its irregular footsteps retreating, heard the moaning and spitting of his wife across the room. He shoved his fingers into his mouth, digging for loose dirt, spitting and spitting and screaming when nothing but flecks came out.

HE DIDN’T REMEMBER PASSING out, but when he awoke, the stench of vomit dominated any lingering odor of wood or mud. A crusty film of dried puke coated his face, and he wiped the gunk with his shirt, managing only to smear sweat-saturated dirt into the mess.

Brooke moaned from behind him. He sat up, reached for his wife, his fingers just able to brush her outstretched arm, her face fuzzy in the thin moonlight. She gave him a mockery of a smile.

The bravado was gone, all the spunk and grit and attitude he had fallen in love with, gone. Her eyes shook off her smile with disdain and broadcast the truth: she was terrified and lost. Lawrence had never seen this expression in her eyes before, didn’t think defeat had ever been wired into her genes. But even the effort of smiling, her attempt to placate the fear that must be plastered across his own face, spoke of the fight in her bones, the strength of her soul.

He didn’t blame his wife for her fear. He was mortified, beyond the capacity to control his terror. Every cell in his being shrieked for release, begged to awaken from the nightmare. Raw courage in the midst of insane violence, brashness in the face of murderous psychosis, spitting into the grin of your kidnapper while chained to the ground and blinded by his blade, none of those responses to the world’s basest evil held true outside of the clichéd heroes of Hollywood. In the real world, terror bit with monstrous jaws and didn’t let go after a hail of curses and a few clever one-liners. It scoffed at your defiance and giggled at your anger.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too, Lawrence.”

“We’re gonna get out of this.” Her smile returned, even less convincing than the first.

“You were throwing up in your sleep,” she said. “I was afraid you’d choke.”

“I wouldn’t call it sleep. I think I passed out.”

“He said something to you, didn’t he?”

He let her call the hooded beast a “he,” figured to correct her by saying “it” would only add to her anguish. “He told me the trees laughed. And to remember my greatest sin.”

“Your…what the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Lawrence lowered his head, closed his eyes against the barrage of remembered mistakes that suddenly assaulted him. But they were mistakes, not sins against his fellow man—fights by his middle school flagpole that he should’ve ended before throwing that final, nose-crunching punch; lies to college bedmates when they pressed him for his phone number the morning after; an extra few lines on his resume here, a few too many intoxicated drives home there, but nothing, nothing, that justified this hell.

“I’m a good man, right, honey?”

“The best man.”

“I never hurt you, did I? Never hurt anyone on purpose when I could help it, right?”

“No, Lawrence, you never hurt me. You’re a good man. I don’t know what this is all about either. Maybe we hurt his family or something. Caused an accident we didn’t know about? A car wreck or something?”

“So he makes us eat dirt? I feel like I could throw up for anoth—” He looked at the vomit puddled on the ground beside him. The mess was thick, putrid, but free of soil. “Brooke, where’s the dirt? How could I not have thrown up the dirt?”

Tears cleared a path through the mud on her cheeks, and her soft sniffles watered his eyes. He touched his belly, imagined his stomach absorbing a mountain of mud, making it as one with himself as his blood and bone. God, I want a smoke.

“I’m gonna get you out of here. Look at me. I’m gonna get you out of this.”

Brooke answered with a scream. Lawrence followed her eyes. The hooded lunatic stood in the crude doorway. A saw dangled from his hands.

The mind bends, stretches, conforms to its surroundings with elastic resiliency and rabid stubbornness. It takes the mysteries of the universe, all the darkness and wonder, the wicked and the miraculous, the unknown and the unknowable, and molds itself into a state of either comprehension or ignorance. Only the purest experiences, the Grand Truths of the world, unhindered and unbound by any attempt at understanding, immune to man’s feeble pokes and prods, can transform the human mind into the babbling mass of jelly it is at its core. And as the towering demon strode into the room and lowered its saw to Brooke’s feet, Lawrence’s mind imploded.

He heard her sanity dissolving with her screams—gurgling, inhuman shrieks that warped his reality into a cacophony of drivel. He was aware of thrashing, screeching his own mad song. Brooke kicked, over and over like a crazed cyclist, but the thing grabbed one of her legs and jerked it straight, wrenching it into stillness. Lawrence could only see its cloaked back, but with an echoing crack its arm bent, descended, and began to pump back and forth in rhythm with the crunching of blade on bone. Blood soaked into the dirt at Brooke’s feet, pooling as the ground swallowed its fill. A toe dropped to the floor, plopped into the puddle of blood, followed by another, another, one more. Brooke’s shrieks faded into nothing, her eyes rolled back, her beautiful brown eyes, and as the creature raised its saw to her fingers, it spoke.

“Eventually everyone sins against my bride.”

As the first finger fell to the floor, Lawrence joined his wife in blackness.

HE CUT OFF HER fingers, he cut off her toes, and soon he’ll be coming to cut off my nose.

The words rolled through his conscience, high and singsong like a child jumping rope. They giggled and kicked and nudged him awake.

“You’re a rude man, Mr. Lawrence.”

Brooke. But no. She had never called him Mr. Lawrence, or rude for that matter. And her voice didn’t slice through his flesh like a rusty blade. He kept his eyes closed.

“I haven’t even touched you, yet you faint while I am speaking to you. And rest assured, I have no plans for your…nose.”

He opened his eyes, meant to tell the giant to go to Hell, leave them alone, fuck off, but his voice dribbled from his mouth as incoherent nonsense. The thing in the robes stood over him. Brooke’s leg, gray and bare and severed at the hip, hung from its hand.

The thing followed Lawrence’s gaze, then tossed the leg into the dirt. “Unnecessary,” it said. “Unaesthetic.”

Rage engulfed him, obliterated any desire for self-preservation. He saw only Brooke, his still and forever Brooke, and prayed for death’s reunion. He growled as he lunged; his fingers found his kidnapper’s neck and squeezed. It felt like squeezing lumber. The thing laughed, like gravel crunching underfoot.

“Let’s stop the charade, Mr. Lawrence. Do you remember your sins?”

“I didn’t do anything to you!” He abandoned the fruitless attempt at choking his enemy and, realizing that his feet were unchained, leapt towards its face and groped for the hood. If he was to die, he would see the face of his killer.