All Hollow’s Eve

Short Story

1
Dusk

The bright orange sun was closing in on the West because it had no time left to brighten the day with its hollowescent rays. Its work was done on this last day of October. In the morning it would be a different sun over a different spectacle. The edge of the day glistened out and twilight began to fall.

This meant that the younger children were out in their costumes, made of cheap plastic and cheap rayon, asking at every door whether be in evidence wanted to have a trick played on them or would they give the treat to be left alone by this mob of wee folk. There were of course parents at every turn watching their progeny because there were whispers about the darkened figure which the Internet was calling “All Hollows” because of the note that to newspapers displayed on their front page. There were other names from the police blotters and reporters’ notebooks, but you outside the confraternity had heard them, yet.

Partially because it was still a little news story, partially because there were splurges of the urges of bright semi-have quasi-celebritesque influencers, and partially because there were too many people wanting the best of all of Halloween to be a resounding success. Meaning of course, profitable. So, the decision was made to keep the sleeping dog being slept. Even though there were 4 bodies each without a head.

But, of course, there was one reporter who did not think this was a good idea. He had notes from different notebooks which had a lack-of-sleep feel to them with jottings in the margins with tape. He had spoken to three of the earlier victims and had notes in the books and on pieces of paper, even napkins because once a victim started to talk it seemed as if they could not stop at all. He noted that none of the witnesses had a good description. The best he could get from one was that he was “just average.”

One of the notes screamed out: “I have never met a thing so remorseless and filled the dead eyeballs. It was horrible.” He was reading the last notes as he walked along the concrete sidewalk amidst the gabled houses from an era long past, he remembered it being called the “Greek Revival.” He wished he could remember what they were doing other than building these edifices to live in, but he could not. He stroked his brown scruffy beard and held it a while in thought. But no thinking came to him at the moment. Pity that.

The man’s name was Hal Owens, and though wiring he clearly had some obvious strength to his torso. He walked up as the trick-or-treaters moved down towards the chapel of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Hal flipped his notes and remembered that there was at least one playing card scattered near every sighting from a reliable witness. He took notes on every detail which was in common between all of the witnesses. There had been four whose veracity no one could question. For you see, Hal was a sometime reporter to whichever site could pay him a note to continue wandering and taking notes. Because that for Hal was the stop of life. One time he had even contributed to the capture of a car thief who worked in the area.

But then he stopped and inside the bushes that surrounded a 1950s-style ranch house, he saw a playing card with a single ace in the key of spades. He then searched the area in the slovenly clip Arbor Vita to see if he could find any more. But there wasn’t any, and he stood up just at the moment when a troop of children scattered past him in the foreshadowing of twilight.

Then he stopped. And what burned within his eyes would be remembered until his dying day. Just beyond the bushes, there was a child in a pirate costume, all needed, and a bag full of candy corn and sugared suites. And without a skull with no trace of what happened to it. There was no blood, none at all.

But Hal did not see this only let out the most earth-cringing scream. It shivered from his feet to the top of his hair in a bloodcurdling way. And Hal was not the sort to let any emotion let alone the terror that you could see in his eyes.

2
Twilight

The police cars had arrived with their sirens echoing through the night but absolutely silent. Police officers were setting up barriers on the street so that no one could simply drive straight through. A few people cursed as they had to go a longer way around on this festival of the Angel of Death.

There were still the children rising between the doorways to riches but only above the line that separated the old from the new. One can see it in the houses: the old were built before 1900 and the new were slapped together in the 1950s.

The Sgt. arrived in a new cruiser and surveyed the subtle carnage that had been left behind. A rookie teamed up with him and told about the witness, named Hal Owen, held by two police officers near where the child’s body had been discovered.

The police Sgt. took a few notes on his ledger, and then looked up and asked: “Does this man called how have a job? Is it local or out of town?”

“These groups by with a few checks from a few flaky Internet sites, and he has some savings from taking medical examinations for money. He lives in a halfway house.”

“He’s unemployed. Or as the Department of Labor would say ‘marginally attached to the labor force.’ Is that what I’ve heard you say?”

The rookie knew that the Sgt. was a stickler for details because he had been grilled like this before. “I guess that is what I’m saying.” And the rookie noted down the term “marginally attached” and put it in his warehouse of memory.

Then the Sgt. went down to the area and signaled as to where the witness was. Once having gone that direction he bounced up to Hal and with a bright shiny voice:


“They tell me that you are Mr. Owens? I’m Sgt. Gibbing. Pleased to meet you.”

A scruffy men looked up. He had on a tweed jacket which was many decades out update, slacks which were vintage 1970s bellbottoms, and a shirt that once was white but now was Ivory. The only tell-tale mark that the witness had was a band scar along his neck, probably a tracheotomy from some distant accident. The Sgt. being more acute than most noticed that his right hand had ink splotches at the end the right cuff had matching ground in black where he was taking notes. The Sgt. wondered: Who, among the civilians, takes notes that way?

What came out of the scruffy men was a single long sentence with few commas and the occasional semi-colon as intersperses. The Sgt. gradually managed to piece together that the man’s name was indeed Owens, and the head had been looking for witnesses to All Hollows.
 

The Sgt. knew the name quite well but said nothing to the witness.

Finally, Owens talked about the fact that the head was missing in great detail. It was obvious to the Sgt. that this was the single observation that set the witness's mind into a death spiral, which it had not come out yet.

 The Sgt. asked a few questions, but they were mainly to wind the witness. It worked: the witness slowed down and stopped and then finally put his hand on his beard and said: “This is like the others. All of the others. At least from reliable witnesses.” The Sgt. took note that Owens had at least a little bit of training in investigation. Perhaps more information would be possible when Hal was more to the nines than now.

 The Sgt. said happily: “Can you excuse me for a moment? That was very enlightening.”

 Once away from the witness, he reached his cruiser picked up the telephone, and called the police Commissioner. The Sgt. had a Ph.D. in criminal psychology, and he knew that this was the moment when they had to come clean because a child had been slaughtered.

On the phone, it was a trial but, in the end, the Sgt. made the case that this was the last straw and they needed to put together a brief for the Mayor and throw together a police announcement detailing the things that they had learned and leave out the one thing that the witness did not say and no one else had said either, to the Sgt.’s knowledge.

But the Sgt. was tagged by the rookie. The rookie gave the Sgt. a cup of coffee before delivering the bad news the witness had escaped.

 The Sgt. looked joyous. “Thank you for the coffee. I will handle the witness.”

3
All Hollow’s Eve

The police Sgt. was cruising through the newer parts of town looking for the escaped witness. He had been at the interview which is the police Commissioner who detailed most of what was then known about the, let’s face facts, serial killer. Each of the bodies had been found without a head and in the newer parts of town. But they could be found very close to be older section which made the police Commissioner speculate that be killer might be poaching in the new and then going back to the old. A reporter asked if this was solid, but the police commissioner said no it wasn’t.

The police commissioner turned to the squalid section but saw nothing, so he turned around and hunted in the developments which were insanely fashionable in the time of Kennedy and Johnson. He looked at the large windows and small doors, wondering what people on the inside were thinking. He shivered because he knew that the fantasies were running riot through the heads of the civilians.

The Sgt. then turned onto a cul-de-sac which was very narrow to comply with the ordinances on zoning. He drove around the circle at the end and saw something that made him think that there was a person who was the Juniper Bush on the side of a duplex. He parked the car and set out, without a gun, in an unthreatening way that police officers were trained to do.

Then in an instant, he saw the old tweed which almost certainly was the escaped witness. He quickly spun towards where he had seen and rapidly came close to the hedging and saw the very person he was looking for.

This time the Police Sgt. was neither gay nor happy: “ I think you should come with me.”

“I don’t want to go. When I was speaking with you last, I remember who I was.”

“That’s not your decision.”

“I found clues that cannot be explained.”

“There are rules, and you have broken several. Come with me and we will keep you safe.

At this point, Hal moved is and up to the red and peeled be tape off of his neck. There was some motion and the entire head folded back to review tentacles stretching up from the neck. The corpse stepped forward leading with the tentacles. The tentacles ripped in two the policeman’s blue ripping and shredding where they touched into find colored lint.

The police Sgt. sighed. “The body does not remember except when it tries to feed unless trained.”

Then the police Sgt. out a playing card and delicately scissored off his neck and tentacles emerged from his nether regions. The head was folded onto the back of his shoulders. The two were grappled together with each of them having four tentacles lodged inside the other. But then the tweed corpse shot out a new tentacle which was three times as large as the others and drilled it into the neck. One could see that a large chunk of the insides from the lungs to the intestines were being down. It swigs all of it inside the gullet.

After the corpse had satiated itself, it ripped off the sergeant’s head and slurped on the eyeballs. The feelers pulled in and a hand rose and the head back into place. And he ran so far away. But he would be caught in the wee hours of the morning. And no one saw Hal Owens again.

In fact, there was no record of him at all.

4
Dawn

In the pale, yellow light, a body was discovered on a lawn. It was dressed in the blue of the police with black shoes and a black tie. There was a police badge a little ways away but there was no cap or skull anywhere to be found though the junior corner found a small scale which did not match any known creature.

No one mentioned anything about the inside size being swallowed or the tops of blue lint.