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

“Leap Day, huh?” he’d said.

“Best holiday in the world,” she had replied, giving him the smile that he instantly wanted to kiss.

“Why?” he’d asked, though he was starting to really dig the holiday himself.

“The world is a mess,” she said. “Time is a mess. Reality is a mess. Leap Day is the one holiday that tries to catch up with everything, set things back in order. It stops the world from breaking.”

“Wow,” he said.

“Also, my daddy used to celebrate it when I was a kid,” she said. “And I loved that.”

He walked over to her, looked down at the desserts that she was working on and asked if he could help. That was the beginning of their story.

“ARE YOU MAD AT me?” he asked. Eight years had passed, and they were back in a kitchen, now in a different house—their own house—setting up for Leap Day.

“Annoyed,” she said, which is what she always said when she was mad.

“I saw something,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, putting a tray of breaded chicken into the oven. “But there was nothing there. If you’d have gotten up and looked around, you would have seen that there was nothing there. You know how important Leap Day is to me. We have a bunch of people coming over, and—”

“I saw a face,” Logan cut in.

“A face,” she repeated.

He nodded. In the daylight, with his wife in front of him holding a bowl of cookie dough with hands covered in bright yellow oven mits, the idea seemed more preposterous than it was scary.

He shook his head. “Sorry. I, uh…I don’t know. I thought I saw something. Maybe I was dreaming.”

“Sometimes, the shit you say really creeps me out,” Ashley said. “Now, make those cookies into awesome shapes and make me forget that I’m pissed at you.”

“Annoyed,” Logan corrected with a smile.

Ashley, chuckling, walked out of the room saying “A face,” under her breath.

Logan looked down at the cookie dough and remembered the little girl’s rotted, torn flesh. A face .

FOUR YEARS BEFORE LOGAN saw the face, on their second Leap Day spent together, Logan and Ashley threw a party at the apartment they were renting together. The party was smaller than the one from college and there fewer cases of beer, but it was still a blast. With Logan’s help, Ashley turned the apartment into a veritable house of worship for holidays. It was part haunted house, part winter wonderland, all amazing. When their friends arrived and made their way to the den, where turkey dinner would be served with egg nog and pumpkin pie, they all complimented Ashley on how beautiful—and, to quote Logan’s friend Charles, “how batshit crazy”—the place looked.

“Bit of a smaller crowd than last year,” Logan whispered to Ashley when they went to the kitchen to bring out the pie.

“Yeah,” she said, “which means less broken ornaments and more coherent conversation. Anyway, we’re still waiting on a guest. I’ve got a friend from work coming. Stephanie. You’ll love her.”

“Oh yeah?”

“She’s so intense,” Ashley said, grinning. “She told me this amazing story that made me really think about Leap Day. It’s…it’s actually kind of delightfully creepy.”

“How so?”

“I’ll let her explain it to you when she gets here,” Ashley said. “She’s something else, Logan.”

LOGAN SAT ON THE couch, looking at the decorations. Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving…even Groundhog Day. Who knew there were decorations for Groundhog Day? If someone could find them, though, it was Ashley.

Thinking about the face all day had slowed him down, but Logan managed to help his wife make the house look as decorative as all of the previous Leap Days. He hoped that the party, his favorite day of the year that only happened every four years , would take his mind off of those wet eyes that seemed as if they were ready to pop out of the little girl’s skull.

And her black, rotted grin.

By the time the night came and the party was about to begin, Logan found that it was hard for him to stand on his feet. As a child, he had been deathly scared of spiders to the point where he would, much to his embarrassment, scream like a little girl whenever he saw one descend in front of his face. It played with his mind; it made him see tarantualas when there were only scratches on the wall. He’d never been paralyzed by the fear, though.

Now, he felt the terror running through his veins like static. He couldn’t move from the couch because every time he closed his eyes, he saw the dead girl waving at him from across the bed.

Hello .

He had been sitting there for thirty minutes while Ashley did the last bits of preparation from the party. She was not happy about it. It was Leap Day, though, so the smile didn’t fade from her face the way it had from her eyes. If he had room in his mind for sadness, he would be crushed that he was ruining their favorite day.

The doorbell rang.

Ashley walked past Logan, throwing a “Get up, please! Come on! ” over her shoulder.

He did. He forced himself up. His legs were weightless, and he felt as if he would topple over, so he lumbered over to the wall, propping himself up. He leaned back until he could see down the hallway, looking past the den and into the foyer, where Ashley was talking in hushed whispers to someone at the door. He couldn’t hear any of it.

Finally, Ashley closed the door, turned around and walked back to Logan. Alone. Now, she wasn’t smiling. Her lips were pulled down into a harsh frown and her eyes were wide, glassy with shock.

“Stephanie is dead,” she said.

For a moment, the face was pushed out of Logan’s head. He reached out and touched Ashley’s shoulder. “What?”

“Stephanie…she died She got into a… She spun off the road,” she said, and pushed her face into Logan’s shirt. She hugged him, so he hugged her back. Muffled, she said into his shirt, “No Leap Day this year. No…”

He hugged her, thinking about Stephanie, about meeting her at the last Leap Day. The orange, glowing, toothy face of a jack-o’-lantern grinned at him from the wall.

FOUR YEARS PRIOR, STEPHANIE made a big impression on Logan and Ashley’s Leap Day party. She showed up in time for dessert, bringing with her a big brown bag. Her hair was streaked with white, but it wasn’t like an old person’s hair. It was straight and neat, like the rest of her. Logan guessed that she must have been fifty, but she had a young smile and bright eyes.

“Okay, let’s creep this up a bit,” Ashley said after dessert had been dutifully devoured. She took out some candles, lit them and turned off all of the lights.

“Scary stories? What are we, eleven? Should I get my marshmallows and branch?” Kathleen, one of Ashley’s oldest friends, cracked.

“You laugh now,” Ashley said. “But wait until you hear what Stephanie has to say.”

The group of friends gave a chorus of ooooooooh s. Logan laughed and felt young again. He put his arm around Ashley.

“Thanks for the atmosphere, Ash,” Stephanie said. “Nothing like a few candles to make a normal room extraordinarily sinister, right? That’s kind of how I think of Leap Day. February 29 th. The day that shouldn’t be.”

“I think of pie, crazy decorations and excessive amounts of beer,” Charles said.

“Which is fine,” Stephanie said. “I love those things myself. I was just a bit surprised that Ash hadn’t heard of the…darker side of this day. So I figured I’d share.”

“Bring it on!” Ashley said, and Logan smiled. He planned on asking her to be his wife later than night.

“I can list all of the disasters that happened on February 29 th. I can give you a million reasons why it’s scarier than Halloween, than Friday the 13 th, than…well, just about any day. But here’s something that’s more than a reason…here’s a legend .”