The Day After
Copyright 2012 by Lundy Burge
A little girl screamed in the distance.
She had undoubtedly fallen victim to the ghouls. They hid in the shadows, lurking, waiting, starving, until you were stupid or brave enough to walk by. Then they got you.
People pretend not to be scared, say that the creatures are nothing that the dark is just an absence of light, but of course wise men know better. The wise men, those who know things, for real, are well aware of how cowardly these people are. They know that they are even more cowardly than the ones that whine and moan about how scared they are of the ghouls, because the boasting ones are afraid of two things, the ghouls and the people they’re trying to impress.
Peter was one of these wise men. Timmy was one of these fools. Bill, Willy, and Trent, the rest of the boys, were somewhat of a mix. Bill sometimes tried to lie, when the fear was merely a ridiculous paranoia, but he had his limits. Trent never went anywhere alone, he was so scared, but was apt and ready with at least two friends. Willy was showing signs of liking girls.
This group of boys now stood at the edge of the ghoul’s home, poised to take that willy-nilly plunge into what was either to be certain death or certain victory. Because they went in with a purpose: scouting and reporting. Thrills. To go in and be able to tell amazing stories of what was in there, who didn’t make it. That was what they were going to do…if the monsters didn’t get them.
That was the hard part, and tonight—oh, tonight of all nights—the ghouls would be even more energized, more deadly. Tonight was their hunting night, their celebration. This night was theirs.
Tonight was Halloween.
And that house was the Horror Plaza, one of the greatest haunted houses the world, at least most of the children and some of their parents, had ever known. Inside was an array of mutilated wax cadavers, all of which were screaming in agony or, worse, mute. Hiding among them were booby-traps, fakers that only seemed motionless and silent, only to leap from electronic springs and harvest the screams of the unfortunate. And, of course, there were the crazy men in masks, stalking all the children like psychotic jungle cats.
With eager, cocky smiles on their lips, the boys dove in.
“Can I come with you?” an alien, high-pitched voice asked from behind.
The group turned around to find a girl of their age standing there, eagerly waiting for their response for her inquiry. She had traditional brown hair, descending to her chest in a ropy braid. She was wrapped in a black, shimmering cloth that formed straps at her shoulders and proceeded to swallow her arms in tubes that allowed just enough room for them to be comfortable. In her right hand was a broom and in her left was a plastic cauldron filled with a witch’s brew of assorted confection. The boys could see that Hershey’s, Kit Kat’s, and a few Tootsies were a part of the chocolate potion. Her head bore that unmistakable trademark, a hat surrounded by a dark halo and came up into a nearly comical but still frightening point, frightening in the fact that it was black as night and appeared sharp in the soft party light radiating for the incandescent pumpkins on strings.
The boys looked at each other, uncertain of what to do. Ordinarily, their response would be a definite and infinite no and they would be on their merry way. Lately Willy’s strange and tragically terminal condition would have him disappointed and sometimes even grumbling afterwards, but that usually wasn’t so bad that they couldn’t bear with it. Tonight, however, what would be the harm? Everyone was here for the other’s enjoyment. Everyone enjoyed each other’s screams of delight and terror. Gender was almost never an issue in this case.
So the boys finally gave a unanimous, “Sure.”
“Thanks,” the witch said.
As they walked into the Horror Plaza, Willy asked her, “What’s your name, anyhow?”
“Samantha, but I want to be called Sammy.”
She was a tomboy. Willy liked that a lot.
The group plus one went in bravely. They went through the foyer with little difficulty. It was just a hall with bones littered about the stairs and some unsettling portraits of shrewd people with old clothes on. Then they opened the door at the end of the hall, and the real stuff began.
Cannibalistic kitchens. Living room graveyards. Bloodstained walls with mangled corpses resting at ease, yet restlessly. Rooms that were dominated by spiders and their silken decorations. Areas where witches cackled to themselves as they bent over bubbling pots that had no end in sight. A whole party of monsters laughing at the patrons. Basements remodeled into torture chambers. The children faced them all.
Every kid screamed at some point, except for Peter. It wasn’t that Peter wasn’t afraid. In fact, he was sure that he was more scared than anyone there, but he just didn’t scream. He was naturally implosive. He did notice, however, that the girl didn’t seem that scared. Oh, she screamed, very loudly at that, but the scream was usually late, after the rest of the group had begun to screech. The only time when she screamed on her own was when she was just a little to close to the displays and an animatronic zombie hand made a grab at her ankle. In fact, she looked a little bit bored at the whole house.
When at last the group had escaped the horrid building and had made their way into the safety of the jack-o’-lantern riddled graveyard, Peter pulled close to Trent and confided in him his observations of the little witch.
“You saw how that girl that came with us wasn’t scared?” he asked, readjusting his cracked plastic goggles that every mad scientist wore.
“Rueah,” said Trent through his fangs, “Shey must bey oon ov those toughs cohkeys.”
“I hope not,” Peter said, “My little sister’s one of those, and I’ve seen her around the third grade boys. She sticks to them like a leech.”
“Rah gureat,” said the vampire, audibly.
“Hey, Dracula!” Timmy called, “Will you take those stupid teeth out? You sound high on Novocain!” Trent shrugged and did as he was told.
*
After walking a bit away from the Horror Plaza’s farm-raised screams, Bill had an idea.
A very stupid idea.
“Hey,” he said, “What time is it?”
“Ten-thirty,” Peter said, “Why?”
“Who wants to go to the graveyard?”
Everyone, even tough cookie Samantha, said no.
“Ah come on,” he said holding his hands, one of which was donning a mechanical razor-clawed glove, in a pleading gesture, “It’s Halloween!”
“That’s why we don’t want to go,” Willy said, “You know how many ghosts and things will be out there tonight?”
“So?” Bill argued, “We’re wearing costumes. We’ll look just like them probably.”
“He’s right,” Samantha said eagerly, “I’m in.”
Timmy, not to be out done by anyone, let alone a girl, joined in, throwing in a howl from his werewolf costume. And, reluctantly, all the others joined in, with the black robed, scythe wielding Willy coming in dead last.
“Let’s make it interesting,” Timmy said, “Let’s all stay there until one. That’s after midnight. Anybody who leaves before will be declared chicken and we get they’re candy,” he finished the challenge giving Sammy a smug look. She was the first to accept.
“All right,” said Dr. Peter, the metal of his stethoscope gleaming in the moonlight, “Let’s get mauled by zombies.”
*
The pseudo-monsters all walked among the gravestones, waiting for anything to pop out from behind them and slaughter them all, leaving only the blood stains on the rocks as evidence. Nothing came.
After touring for a bit they came upon a stone bench right in the middle of a particularly concentrated cluster of old markers. Timmy declared it the official camping spot for the required dura
tion, and no one objected. The sat closely huddled together, both for warmth and for protection from the monsters lurking behind the stones and the fear that was more real and threatened to rip them to shreds at any moment.
Suddenly they heard a sound. Soft crunches of leaves like a footstep.
“What was that?” Bill said, wondering how on earth he came into such a deliria as to come up with this.
“Cat?” Timmy said, always hoping for the best.
“That’s not a cat,” Samantha protested, “Did that honestly sound like a cat to you? I say it’s a vampire.”
“Since when do vampires make sound when they walk?” Trent said in defense for his disguise.
“Have you ever heard a vampire walk?” Willy, who was sitting closer to Samantha than the others were, said.
“No,” Trent said, “because they don’t make any sound.”
And so the group was split into to camps in the debate on whether or not vampires made sound when they walked. And of course, once you get a group of children who have a large stockpile of candy talking, anything is going to happen. They jumped from vampires to aliens to werewolves back to aliens to worms to vomit to teachers to parents to ghosts to the fact that they were here and it was only five minutes to one o’clock.
“Nothing’s happened yet,” Peter said, a little ring of disappointment mixed in his voice.
Truly, all the kids were disappointed. They had expected a challenge. A test to prove their courage to the others. A great beast to fight, a monster to slay. An inspiring tale of survival. Then again, they were relieved not to face any such thing.
Samantha, however, didn’t seem surprised of the lack of sightings.
“Of course nothing’s happened yet,” she remarked, “It’s Halloween!”
All the boys gave her a questioning look.
“We all look like ghosts and ghouls and monsters, right?” she explained, “Well, all the ghouls and things see us dressed like this, and they think we’re one of them. And why would they attack their own with the hopes of finding a good, plump, live human on Earth?”
“Excellent point,” Peter concurred.
“But the monsters and things are here for three days, as legends go, so tomorrow, when we all look like ourselves…”
“What are you getting at?” Timmy demanded, not at all grasping the point. Unlike Peter was right now.
“If you think this place is scary tonight, you should try the day after!” She cackled as an added flair for intimidating the boys. It mostly worked except for Timmy and the deliriously close Willy.
“All Saint’s Day?” Peter said dryly.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Okay,” Timmy said, “And…”
“Let’s do this again,” she said, “Tomorrow. Same time, same place, same rules. Deal?”
“Deal!” Timmy shook hands with her, “Who’s with me?”
Slowly, like they were linked to a chain sinking link by link into an endless abyss, they all joined in.
*
They camped at the same spot as last night, by the same graves with the same corpses in the same moonlight. It was all the same, except they weren’t in any get-ups.
And the cemetery didn’t want them there.
Peter wasn’t sure why, but he could just feel that they weren’t supposed to be here, that they were vermin that would either be kicked out or exterminated.
Now, Peter had seen enough movies and read enough books that when you had that kind of nagging fear in your stomach, you got out of there and took that fear to where it wanted to go, no matter where that happened to be, because if you ignored it, odds are that whatever was causing it is not going to ignore you. Unfortunately, Peter knew the price and wasn’t willing to give up either his dignity or his candy. Not just yet.
The group had reached the eleven thirty mark when Bill had stopped blabbing about all the stupid homework they were getting and made a comment a little closer to camp.
“Hey,” he pointed out, “Look at that crow.”
Sure enough, resting upon a cross that had had most of its marvelous ornaments acid rained into oblivion was the black bird. It looked ragged, savage, despite of its pristine inky feathers. It seemed to give them a look of a mad child staring at an upside-down bug, sympathetic and willing to squish you to put you out of your misery.
“What’s a crow doing here?” Timmy huffed as if the crow was trespassing.
“Because we don’t have ravens,” both Samantha and Peter said automatically.
Suddenly, they heard a sound that deserved to be in a horror movie. It wasn’t a twig snap or a crisp crunch in the leaves as a foot crashed down on it, but a shuffle. Like someone who’s unsure of where to go. Yet there was certainty in it. It knew where to go. To them.
The group huddled in closer, closer as the steps got closer, closer. So slowly it came, while the seconds of time just ticked, ticked, ticked, away unnoticed. They knew that whatever was getting closer had to be seen, if for nothing more than to satisfy their blind curiosity, but none of them had the courage to aim their flashlights right, instead hitting the ground a few feet from them. Finally, with the spastic flick of a wrist, Peter shot the beam only inches from it on the ground, allowing the spotlight needed for its perfect entrance.
When it entered the light, nobody screamed because they could have sworn that it wasn’t real, that it was just a nightmare they shouldn’t waste their breath on. It was like a giant worm. Its body was a sea-blue tube supported by a fringe of tiny squiggling tentacles. Vibrations pulsed through it, and it couldn’t be told whether it was breathing or heartbeat or something else. At the end was a blue missile head that opened a slit full of neat sharp little teeth. At intervals of five or more seconds, it would lazily open its red eyes as if in a hypnotized dream-state.
Peter knew why it swayed back and forth. It was confused. It recognized them from the previous night, when they were its friends, all the monsters and ghouls that came out on Halloween. But now, they were human, not monstrous, but they still had the same faces from the night before. Could this be a trick? A test? What should it do?
Knowing that they didn’t have much time, Peter began to back away and tried to urge the others to follow suit, but before they could make any headway, the crow, the master of the worm, let out its screech, its command to attack.
Luckily, they ran before the thing could lunge. They sprinted towards the exit, know good and well what was literally at their heels.
They reached the asphalt bordering the unfenced graveyard and just kept running and running and running until they got to the familiar street corner where their own streets met to do lunch.
It was only then that they realized what was wrong.
“Where’s Samantha?” Willy asked.
*
The worm squirmed back to the tombstones, melancholy at the fact it had lost a meal. Suddenly, it heard a rustling. With a start, it opened its eyes wide to find that witch-girl from last night bending over a strange orange bubble filled with the yummy colorful shreds it liked so much.
Samantha looked up, her black hat pointing towards infinity in the dark. She gave a warm smile to the worm and tossed a handful of toffees, its favorite, towards its open mouth. It snapped its jaws shut, happy, and slithered away.
She heard a short caw from behind her. She whipped around to face the waiting crow.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” she implored, “This kind of candy isn’t good for you. You’ll get very, very sick.”
After a short squawk of protest, it flew away, hoping to find a nicer girl who would actually give him rewards for all his hard work.
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