You realized too late that hiding in the dark closet may have been a mistake. The motivation for this bad move was simple, you wanted badly to give your mom a little scare. It was Halloween after all. But as you sat in the dark, your hair being brushed by your dad’s suit jackets and bottom fringe of your mom’s dresses, you began to feel the darkness in a way you weren’t expecting. As much as you knew better, being 6-and-a-half, you felt like there was someone, or some thing, hunched within that little cramped piece of darkness with you. Something unseen, unknown, and unspeakable. Its face beyond description, distorted and warped, possibly standing within inches of you, glaring at you with hungry eyes hidden within the endless black. You knew better than that, but you what else could fill you with such terror? Was it possible that an idea alone could be that frightening even without a body attached to it?
When you heard the footsteps and murmurs coming from beyond the closet door, your little mind had failed to catch up, and because of it, you sat within a trap of your own making, waiting for that which could not be known ahead of time to claw into your parents’ room, rip off the closet door, look you in your little eyes for a moment, and then strike. What would happen after that, you had no idea. But to you the terror inherit within that final instant was everything, even if you were too young to know the fate that terror implied (you had no pets, and therefore no interactions with mortality in your young life for your parents to use as a sombre teaching moment).
The door to the bedroom swung open, and if it hadn’t been as loud as it was, your squeal in the darkness would have been audible.
But, instead of scales or hooves, dirty boots from treks through the mud, or even the trailing cloak of a being which seemed to float, having no feet, what you saw there were two bare white ankles. And then a second set of footsteps approached and the soft, white feet attached to those ankles spun around on their spot.
“You sure you don’t want to come?” asked a fluttering voice.
The image of your dad’s feet, big and troll-like when compared to your mom’s, appeared within the frame of the closet door slat you watched through. “Honey, for the hundredth time, if I go with you two, who’s going to stay home to give out the candy?”
Your mom’s right foot crossed over her left, and she rested it on its toes. “We can just leave the candy at the door with a sign that says ‘take two each.’”
“Honey,” your dad said, his feet turning and walking off now toward the direction of the mirror. “It’s cute to me that you think that’s a good idea.”
She didn’t say anything. She only placed both her feet back flat on the ground and turned and moved toward her dresser. Their heels faced each other's. Their bed sat between them.
You heard the drawer open and your mom ruffling through some things, and your dad, less daintily, occupying himself with objects which sat on the shelf.
As you listened to the noise, all thought or memory of your ambition to give your mom the greatest scare of the holiday season had all but been buried under a thick sheet of mud. There was almost no you in relation to the moment. You only watched the goings-on from behind the slats of the closet door, a disembodied observer, light in horizontal strips alternating off and on up your face.
Your mom pushed the drawer closed, if sound was anything to go by, and if it was, then she must have been pretty surprised, because as soon as she turned around, she shrieked.
It was only then that the memory of your clever plan came back to you. And as you chewed it over in your head, your mom spoke:
“What are you doing, you pervert?”
“What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“Is something wrong?” your dad asked. You could tell by the slight twist in the muscles of his calves that he was looking around as if to get a second opinion from some invisible ally in the room.
“Pull up your pants,” your mom said.
Your dad was silent for a moment. “Oh, this?”
“Yes, that,” your mom said. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I mean, me and your son are leaving. We’re going to go trick-or-treating. You’re too cool to come apparently.”
“Or,” he began with an air of bemused humor. “Like we’ve been over a thousand times, I can't come because-“
“Do you want me to be lagging behind our son as he goes from house to house getting candy? All because I’m too tuckered out to run with him?”
“Oh, stop. If anything, it’ll invigorate you.”
“What hallowed ground are you trying to disturb?”
“Hallowed ground?” your dad repeated halfway through your mom’s speech.
“This is a special day with my son. Trick or treating only comes one day a year. And you want me to sacrifice the sacredness of that day on an alter you have hiding in your pants.”
There was a silence. “Uh, yes…” your dad replied.
“Well, I for one-“
“Oh, fuck it. Talking is over.” You saw his feet leap up off the ground. Before you could see them come back down again, you heard the bedsprings squeaking violently.
“No!” your mom screamed, its intensity dulled with a laughter. “Stop, don’t. I’m not that kind of woman.”
“I’m going to make you that kind of woman,” your dad said, his voice sounding strange as if he were exerting himself. “Into the woman of my dreams.” You heard animalistic growls and mock-gnawing done in an exaggerated rendition of his usual masculine timbre.
Your mom’s feet danced on the hardwood floor to a stressful rhythm.
“When I get my fangs into you, you’re going to be Dracula’s perfect bride from now on. Or the bride of Frankenstein. No complaining. Now hold still.”
This was it, you thought to yourself. The moment. Your intended target had been your mom, but you knew, somehow through the nature of their action, that they were both occupied, the two of them, and that anything you did to try to shock either one of them, would go a long way to shock the other as well.
Knowing this, you slowly rose to your feet, watching your mom’s lonely feet be obscured by the passing black lines of the slats in the closet door.
Once you were upright, you put your hand against the inside of the closet, and knowing your moment, you suddenly pushed. Pushed hard against your little cowering place.
As you did, the closet squeaked openly violently, and both your mom and your dad twisted their heads to look over. They were shocked alright.
“Rhaaaaa” you began, with your hands like claws, extending before you. You held onto that note for a moment, but a brief one, because the purpose of your action had now become lost to you. Instead you stood there, standing with as much shock on your face as that which existed on your mom and dad’s.
Your mom stood there, her upper half hunched slightly forward, with your dad’s large hand against the back of her neck. Your dad, kneeling on the bed, looking at you, his body still tensed up from his playful action, with nothing on below his waist. Sitting there, looking unlike anything you had ever seen, was a large cylindrical piece of flesh which stuck out, throbbing from against his body, and aimed at your mom’s mouth, which hung open with the gravity of her fallen jaw.
They both looked at you, frozen in their action, not saying anything. And you, frozen in yours, only looking back.
After a few more moments, you stiffly turned your body with your clawing hands still in front of you, and you ran out of the room looking like you were chasing a young maiden in all ways except for in the expression of your face, which was too uncharacteristically blank and bewildered for a supposed creature of the night.
As your mom and dad heard your steps growing dimmer down the hall, they slowly looked away from the open door and directly into each other’s eyes.
Your dad was the first one to find words. “Well, that's one way to start the night.”
You waited by the front door in your little cape, staring at nothing in particular, only trying to process what you had seen in that bedroom. When your mom came out and smiled at you, saying nothing, you realized that you preferred that to an explanation. What kind of explanation could reasonably be given to alleviate your confusion? You had stumbled onto something, probably something illegal or unknown to the rest of the world, maybe something which could get your parents into a lot of trouble if anybody found out. What use would talking about it serve?
“So,” your mom said. “You ready to go?”
Before you could answer, your dad appeared in the kitchen, his lower-half now clothed. “Just watch out for any drugs in the candy or needles in the apples.”
“Oh, that’s a myth and you know it,” your mom said, looking over her shoulder at him. She looked back at you. “Don’t listen to him. Daddy’s crazy.”
You nodded so dutifully your mom was concerned for a second that her claim about your father was misinterpreted as literal.
She grabbed your hand, and she led you outside into the cool autumn air.
Your dad stood in the kitchen, and he looked down at his waist and the bulge that sat violently in his pants. “I’ll try to see if I can get her to do you a little favor tonight. What? What? No, she was right to not… oh come on. Okay. When she comes back I’ll try to convince her to. She’ll probably be tired. But I’ll try, okay little buddy?”
There was a call of “trick or treat!” from outside by a little handful of voices.
“Okay,” your dad said to the throbbing in his pants. “You’re going to have to go away ‘til then. Be good and I promise you I’ll try to make it happen when she comes back.”
His bulge didn’t respond.
“I knew you’d be good.”
“Trick or treat!” they called again.
Your dad moved toward the front door. “Trick or treat, indeed,” he said. “Trick or treat, indeed.”
A shadow loomed, implying a silhouetted mass of being, behind every window and shade. Little allies appeared and disappeared around you, each one in the guise of some famous abomination, whether physical, ephemeral, dead, alive, sharp-toothed and clawed or relatively formless, all of them out for the same desire that you had. The desire for sugar, the booty of which was so sweet because it had been seasoned by the spice of a manageable fear.
You’d stop in front of every house, each one, no matter how well-lit or dark, decorated or bare, scaring you. It was only your mom’s soft hand against your trembling upper back which would propel you forward. You’d trip up the walkway over your pillowcase filled with goodies, not realizing you were flattening the ones at its bottom with the heels of your feet in doing so, and at making it to the front door, if you didn’t get there simultaneous with others, you’d gulp a big gulp before yelling out that magical incantation: “Trick or treat!”
The first few times, nobody came out. Your mom had to run up the steps and yell it again for you, much louder. You’d feel her hand clenching your shoulder as she did, and moments later, a jolly old man or woman would appear. It always amazed you how happy they were to give up their candy to a total stranger. Your mom would thank them before leaving, and after the first dozen houses, you would catch the hint and yell “trick or treat!” with more oomph, drawing out those benevolent angels of sweetness and color.
Frankensteins and mummies passed by you in groups, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, with the occasional fairy and clown, which themselves took on a ghastly aspect in this context of endless night and eye-catching bright colors. Some of these ghastly spirits had moms and dads just like you did. Others seemed to roam wild. Some of them were taller than others, and those which were seemed to glare at your mom with their masked faces as if tugged by some unseen violence, its center of gravity unfound amidst the swirling air, while the ones as short as you seemed to just drift past her without acknowledging her existence, making them more genuinely ghost-like in being.
“Just wait a second, sweety,” she said, pinching your shoulder with her soft fingers.
You stopped and she grabbed the neck of your sagging pillowcase in her hand and then lifted it in a sudden swing twice.
“Whoah,” she said. “You’re going to have enough candy in here to last a decade.”
You smiled at her, your face made orange within the light of a nearby lawn decoration.
“You getting tired yet, or are you still up for more?”
You didn’t answer. Instead you just looked around. Your mom caught the hint.
“Okay,” she said, pushing you forward. “I guess you’re right. The night is young.”
“Having the night alone isn’t as much fun when you’re on candy duty.”
“Somebody needs to be on candy duty. The last time my parents left the house alone on Halloween, they came back at midnight to egg frozen on the windows and front door.”
“I’m not saying we don’t have to give out candy. It’s just… why don’t we leave the bowl on the stoop and every kid can take one?”
Vlad looked at his friend. There was silence for a moment. “Are you some kind of a fucking retard?”
Viktor just shook his head. “You have to stop living with a chip on your shoulder, man.”
“A chip on my shoulder? You’re telling me nobody is going to steal?” Vlad placed a fistful of candies inside a little girl’s bag. “These little shits will take every inch you give them.”
The little girl gasped.
Vlad looked down at her. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s just that I don’t want to spend a night on blue passing out candy. We’re on a kind of candy now. We should be having fun. We’re still young. I was just trick-or-treating with my sister last year. And Suspiria is on TV. Last time I watched it I was twelve. I puked.”
“Beat it kids,” Vlad said, and shut the door. He looked over at Viktor who stood halfway between Vlad and the television. A strange kaleidoscopic horror film played on the screen. “You puked?”
“Yeah,” said Viktor, earnestly.
“Sounds like fun.”
“How long before kids stop coming? Do you remember? How long did we stay out usually?”
“It’ll be done in a few hours.”
“We’re not going to miss the party? We’re going to get to do you-know-what, right?”
“We are.”
“Promise me?”
“I promise.”
“Promise me? Because Terry Grossman is the hottest girl in class. If Mike wasn’t lying about what he sold us, you realize how great this night is going to be, right?”
“I get it,” Vlad said.
“Right?”
“Listen,” Vlad said. “You don’t have to tell me. Terry Grossman’s ass is grass.” Vlad held his two hands in front of him as if he were clenching something invisible within their furious talons. “We’re going to pummel those two fat cheeks all night long and stuff her ass with more candy than a pinata for good measure.”
“Fuck yeah,” Viktor said.
A woman on the screen behind him fell on her knees against a lime green door, which she banged on screaming.
Viktor continued. “It’s Halloween night. Everyone is entitled to one good nut.”
Your mom had only been trick-or-treating all but ten years earlier, but at twenty-five, fifteen seemed aeons ago. She now moved with you through a world that she knew wasn’t hers. And though she could travel on the fumes of your - her pride and joy’s - own excitement she couldn’t conjure up that excitement raw within herself. To the middle-aged men who leered at her from their doorways, she was a sweet little thing. But by her own estimation, she was an adult, which is what made what happened next so strange for her.
As she pushed you along the sidewalk, past and behind a cavalcade of kids going in both directions, she heard someone call out “hey, Mrs. _______,” and at hearing her own name, she spun around with you to see a person, much taller than you, but much shorter than your mom, looking at the two of you, his expression impenetrable behind his skull mask. After a moment of standing there, his anticipation likely due to nerves, though it would have been invisible to you then, he yelled out “trick or treat!” and then he grabbed the waist of his black pants, their position indistinguishable from the black of his shirt, and he tugged them down to his lower thighs.
Sitting there, waving in the night, was his hard cock, which swung from his crotch as he shook his waist back and forth.
Your mom stood there for a half second, and then you saw the world go black. Her hand was held tightly to your face. You tilted your head slightly, allowing yourself a bare minimum of room to see, even if it was just through a narrow slot, needing to witness the thing that your dad had. The thing you had just found out about. This one was different though. It was slightly smaller, but much harder, almost violently so, and it seemed to be blushing an angry red.
“Suck it!” he said, emboldened by his anonymity. “Suck my… my cock.” His voice became weak at the vulgar word, but he had managed to squeeze it out anyway, and the cock in question throbbed at his success.
Your mom only stared at it for a second. If she weren’t so shocked, she would have been angry from the insult to her inherit in the moment, but, even more than that, the awkwardness it created for you. The ugly part of life it introduced her pure son too, well before his time.
You only stood there, your mom’s cold hands against your face, struggling subtly to look at it. The sight of it, in all its alien strangeness, thrilled you. The way it throbbed and bounced with each throb. The strangeness of it. The strange magic, which felt both in keeping with that of the night while also in strange contrast to it.
The strangest part was that nobody else said anything about it, not even the adults who had seen. They had only pushed away their kids and continued walking. Your mom on the other hand, who had been addressed specifically, had no choice but to look.
The sight itself wasn’t an ugly one. The cock, hairless and smooth, was nice enough for someone who clearly wasn’t fully developed yet. It was big and well-shaped in a way your mom could appreciate with that part of a woman’s brain that’s always overshadowed by her sense of decency and self-respect. If the boy had been of age, had been more respectful and socially capable, and she had been single, a sight like this, with the proper context of a month or so of dating, would have been pretty nice, and she would have had no complaints regarding seeing it. But given the moment, its context and its vulgarity, its disrespect and its hint of infidelity, your mom could feel nothing other than annoyed contempt. The whole situation was just so harmless yet irritating. So much so that when it occurred to her who the voice behind that mask belonged to, she felt a sudden rush.
“Timothy?”
There was a sudden studder in the grotesque rotating of his hips, making it clear that she had hit her mark. He continued, seeming to grow even harder, if such a thing were possible, at the mention of his name, but she could tell, even behind the mask, that there was a growing awareness in him that his foolproof plan appeared to be less resilient to his foolishness than he originally thought.
After a few seconds, even his intense arousal couldn’t save him from his crushing regret, and he slowly pulled up his pants and began to walk off, looking back as if to appear innocent of the accusation of being Timothy, the sweet young man who went to your church.
“Say hi to your mom, Timothy,” your mom called to him joyfully. “Tell her I’m interested in helping out with the next charity drive.”
Timothy didn’t say anything. He only looked back from the lifeless eyes of his mask, his pants covering his crotch, with his soft hairless ass still out, which he eventually covered up as he went.
Your mom watched him go, then she looked down at you. “That’s enough scares for one night, don’t you think?”
You just looked up at her, the hand she used to cover your eyes was now resting on your shoulder.
“Still want to trick-or-treat, I guess? Okay, I understand. Let’s go, little man,” and she turned you around and pushed you onward.
Your dad sat on the couch, reclined slightly, taking whatever slight reprieve provided to him by circumstance, and he lay there, his jeans pulled down to his thighs, looking at the screen of his TV as he tugged his throbbing cock. His balls shook with each motion. On screen, Anya Taylor Joy walked nude through the woods, her unbroken butt-crack blessed by the night moon.
“Yeah,” your dad said in a vulgar hush, massaging his dick like a maestro. “Let me fuck that sweet ass.” It was the evil of the scene, its resurrected paganism rising from the ashes of a fallen Christian resolve, coupled with the smooth nakedness of its subject, which was getting to him. “That’s evil’s ass now. Fuck salvation. This is the only salvation you need, honey. Live deliciously. Bounce that ass on Satan’s cock. Now that’s delicious.” He began slapping the head of his cock against the smoothness of his inner-thigh.
“Trick or treat!”
“Oh fuck,” he hunched over and stood still there for a few moments, trying to fight the startled orgasm. It’s all because of that bitch, he thought, thinking of your mother. If she would have sucked my cock and balls earlier, I wouldn’t have to jerk off. If anyone’s ass should be given up to dark forces of the night, “it should be hers.”
Luckily, he hadn’t nutted, and would only have to wipe up a negligible amount of pre-cum. While getting his pants back on, they called out “trick-or-treat!” again, and he said “coming, coming,” to himself. “But not cumming too much…”
When he opened the door, he saw Hazel and Emily standing there. Emily stood in a black catsuit, it hugging tightly against her recently-formed shape. Hazel stood next to her with less confidence in her posture, an angel in a white skirt, a halo held above her head with pipe cleaner. Your dad swallowed.
Emily called to your dad joyously by “Mr._____,” doing so with her hands up in the air in celebration and her right foot drawn up against her calf. After she was done, she went to go set it down, and she stumbled slightly in place.
Your dad looked closely into both their eyes.
They were both drunk.
Emily called your dad’s name again, almost smearing it against the air with her drunken drawl, and then she opened up her arms wide. “Give me a hug!” she exclaimed, dragging the word hug entirely out of shape.
Your dad did as he was told, and feeling the young girl, her dad black and her mom white, against himself, he used the opportunity to pull her in tight. When he was finished, and she backed up, he looked at Hazel. “Hazel, hug?” he asked.
She nodded her head without speaking, and then shuffled forward and he could feel her nicely-formed body against his.
He could tell as he held her that she barely knew where she was. He fantasized about lifting her skirt and going in for a squeeze of her ass, which had grown to the point where it was now significantly bigger than your mom’s. It wasn’t something he ever would have done, but the third trick-or-treater there on the stoup, standing behind the two girls, ensured that even more.
“And who’s this?”
The third stood there, looking male, though it was hard to be entirely sure with the skull mask covering his or her face.
Emily turned around to look. Her head drifted backward, as if she recognized him by face. She squinted. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only hang out with the living.” She turned and elbowed her friend, who seemed startled and confused by the action.
Your dad almost felt like thanking the strange figure that stood there, looking bizarre under the stoup lights, because if he hadn’t been there, your dad might have made the mistake of inviting the girls inside.
Instead, after some small talk (the figure in the mask having left), he told them to have a great rest of the night and sent them off. It wasn’t until their two asses continued on, becoming smaller and darker in the night, that he saw a strange figure of broken white emerge from out the bushes on his lawn and continue on, following at a distance behind them.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. Those girls were easy pickings. And Hazel for sure, if not the both of them, was almost certainly still a virgin. He could still see the white of her costume, and traces of her pink flesh, stumbling through the blackness (Emily’s costume and flesh were invisible at this point due to the blackness of their material), and the thought of what this little creep was trying to pull by following them sickened your dad.
The trick-or-treaters had thinned out enough at this point. He grabbed his coat from the rack, and stepped outside, shutting the door behind him. On the television, Anya Taylor Joy floated into the pagan air, feeling the power of the night surge through her perfect form.
She rose nude though the darkness, the impossibly-large trees behind her, their branches embraced by the black night. Her body, as perfect as they were, was embraced even more tightly, and through her submission to the darkness and its powers, was thrust up to her throne of pure and thin air, far away from the fire which gave light.
When Vlad hung up the phone, his face had gone a pale white.
“What is it?” Viktor demanded.
“It’s Grossman,” Vlad said. “She’s dead…”
Viktor’s mouth fell open. Then he stood there, watching desperately for any signs that his friend was messing around with him.
“They found her in the pumpkin patch.”
Viktor stared.
“She was lying there, completely naked, except for her head.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her head was the only thing covered,” Vlad said, his voice thin and without color.
“Covered by what!?” Viktor demanded, his voice pulled into a tearing whine.
“By a grinning jack-o-lantern.”
Viktor’s mouth fell shut, and he looked at his friend unimpressed. “You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”
Vlad began laughing. “When was the last time you felt that scared on Halloween?”
“Fuck you.”
“No,” Vlad said. “No, it’s still bad news though. Grossman isn’t going to the party.”
“What!?”
“It’s her gay boyfriend. He doesn’t want her to go.”
“Fuck,” Viktor said. “He looked down at the hairs on his arm. “He’s going to do that hot dog thing with her ass.”
“Hot dog thing?”
“You didn’t hear? Tony told me that Josh told him he sticks his dick in between her buttcheeks and fucks her.”
“Fuck…” Vlad said. “We could have done that to her tonight.”
“Tell me about it,” Viktor said. They both sat there. On the television screen a terrified woman in a nightgown groped through the darkness, trying to avoid a maniac that followed on her heels. She locked herself in a room, and the man was trying to work his way through the door, her last defense. She looks up and she notices a tiny window. Her way out.
The two young men sat there with their stiff erection as the woman on the screen stacked boxes beneath the window to reach it.
“You know what I say?” Viktor said.
His friend looked up at him.
“I say we drug the next hot thing that comes to this door.”
His friend’s eyes narrowed. Then he looked off as if he was thinking.
The girl on the television had made it up to the window, she pulled her legs through, away from the killer, and positioned them underneath her on the other side.
He then came back to the moment. He looked at his friend. “But…”
The woman was facing into another room. She jumped from the window. The camera followed her as she dropped toward the floor.
“Trick or treat!”
The woman on TV screamed as she landed, because what she thought would be and empty floor turned out to be a giant wall-to-wall garden of barbed wire. As she screamed there, she watched a man come into the room with a knife. The two young men looked over at the door.
“Okay,” your mom said. “Now we’re really done, aren’t we?”
You stood there, and she could tell by your distant stare that you weren’t. She turned to look at the target of your sight, and sitting there, like a fortress in the distance, sat a prettily-attired house on the hill. She could tell by just one look at its orange glowing adornments in the chilly blackness that it had captured your imagination and your heart.
She turned back, looking at you with a resigned smile. “Okay…” she said. “We do one more.” She kept her eyes on you, waiting for affirmation. “Deal?”
You looked away from the house and up into her eyes. You nodded.
“Good,” she said. She grabbed your hand, and you could feel the incline as the two of you moved up toward that glowing front door. Two plastics gargoyles sat perched on the flowerbeds of the porch, looking as ominous as they were inviting. Your mouth filled with the taste of candy as you stepped into the orange glow, and as your mom looked back to ensure you were ushered up those steps, she did so to the sight of you licking your trembling lips.
You both then stood on the stoup. “Okay,” she said. “Last one. You ready?”
You nodded your head.
She smiled at you. Then she turned and faced the door. “Trick or treat!”
Your dad had found Emily by the way her ass silhouetted against the occasional burst of Halloween light. Her cheeks shaped and reshaped themselves, and the way she stumbled, its little drunken subtleties apparent even in the clipped darkness, was so specific, that he could identify the two by this even better than he could through Hazel’s white dress (which failed to differentiate her from other trick-or-treaters from a distance).
The creep was nowhere to be found, though your dad watched for him as he slowly followed behind the girls in the family SUV. He looked in the darkness behind them, watching for any flash of white, or any strange masked figures who followed too closely. Though he saw many pivoting heads, none of them matched the sight of that skull, nor did any seem to be following the girls.
He would occasionally look back at the girls, feeling guilty that he couldn’t help himself. Hazel was beautiful, and her skirt drew a lot of attention toward itself, especially with the implied possibility of it being accidentally lifted, giving your dad quite the forbidden sight. But it was Emily, with her form-fitting catsuit, leaving little to the imagination, coupled with her personality, which only fit her costume too well, which really tugged at the loose threads of your dad’s imagination.
His elbow rested on the window frame, but he lifted his arm and brought his hand inside the car, and then he began massaging his crotch.
“Bad girls,” he said. “Drinking underage. Someone ought to give you a spanking…”
He saw a flash of white in the darkness.
He turned to find it. His heart jumped at the sight. A skull, its barely-visible horror, flashed through the darkness.
“…but not him,” your dad continued, turning on the wheel. “Definitely not him.”
The SUV screeched up onto a driveway, flattening an ornamental waving skeleton and coming to a complete stop.
The skull stopped in place. Even with its flat expression, unchanging, its stutter in mid-air implied sudden shock.
Your dad saw that in him, and, simultaneously, saw the two girls on the opposite side of the vehicle in his side-mirror, stop, themselves startled. And as they stopped, your dad could see the jiggle of the ass he had just saved. His heart fluttered.
The kid in the skull mask stared for a second. Your dad stared back, the second adult to judge him so directly, so personally, on this day, and it just so happened to be the husband of the woman who had done it earlier that night. She told him, was what crossed his mind. Nothing else did. And the terror of it, sent him, without any thought whatsoever, fleeing in the opposite direction.
From your dad’s point of view, the assailant’s mask almost flipped into negative space before him. It was only through the sounds of his fleeing into the distance that your dad knew he wasn’t just some apparition.
Your dad stared, proud of himself for the moment he had just prevented. Then he saw it, looking at him in his side mirror.
It was those faces. Those two pretty faces.
He turned around.
The two girls stood at his window, startling him.
He grabbed at his chest. “Jesus!” he said.
“Wow,” Emily said. “Mr._________, what are you doing here?”
“You two shouldn’t be drinking,” he said.
A look of panic took over Hazel’s face.
“We weren’t drinking,” Emily said, stumbling in place.
Your dad shook his head, trying to drag himself into the role of authority figure for once. “I think if you guys were as sober as you’re pretending to be, you would have noticed Skeletor following you for the past thirty minutes.”
Hazel squinted. Emily looked over her shoulder. “Who?”
“The guy in the skull mask. I just chased him off.”
Emily spun back around, her mouth hanging open. “Skull mask? Was he…”
Your dad began nodding.
“He was a psycho killer!?”
Your dad stopped nodding. Oh, my sweet summer children, he thought. If only you knew the real evils you’ll have to face. The ones horror movies don’t warn you about. He stared at their blank faces in the darkness. You’ll learn soon enough.
He could feel the knuckles of Emily’s fingers on his upper arm. He looked down, seeing her gripping on his window frame. Her body was pressed up against the vehicle door. It was out of his sight, but he imagined it there, its soft shape pushing up against that metallic surface that he had opened and closed so many times.
“You guys shouldn’t be wandering out here like this.”
“No, we shouldn’t,” Emily agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “We might get chopped to bits.”
Your dad looked around. The owners of the driveway, one of whom was a woman with rollers in her hair, stood at their door, staring at him.
He turned and looked back at the two girls. “You two are far from home, hey? Are you both going back to your own places when the night’s done?”
Emily opened her mouth to speak, but instead pointed her finger drunkenly back at Hazel.
“Okay,” you dad said. “Why don’t you both get in and I’ll drive you there.”
“Yes, yes,” Emily said, her glassy eyes glimmering. She grabbed at your dad’s door handle.
“Back seat,” he said.
Hazel did as she was told. But your dad watched as Emily crossed in front of the vehicle, her body now illuminated in all its splendour by the bright golden yellow of his headlights, before disappearing again into darkness. The passenger side door opened, and he watched as that body got in beside him and plopped itself down.
She continued speaking, apparently finishing a thought. “…because you’re driving, Mr.______,” she said. “Good thing too.” She turned, her cat ears visibly turning with her head in the darkness. “Because if you didn’t, we would have been in serious danger.”
He saw her smile form independent from the rest of her face, which was, her eyes most of all, still obscured by the darkness of the night.
The door opened.
Your mom stood there, and for only a second, Viktor, in his inebriated state, had only assumed that she was costumed as a piece of candy corn.
Vlad, standing behind him, recognized her near-immediately, as a member of his older cousin’s graduating class years ago. He had remembered her walking across the stage to grab her diploma, doing so shyly and modestly, but to a large amount of applause. He would often catch her across the street from his middle school, walking to her boyfriend’s (your dad’s) car in the high school parking lot. When Vlad had finally hit puberty, she was one of the older girls he’d often work into his masturbation rotation, especially using her for fantasies of getting his cock sucked in a convertible like the one your dad drove at the time.
He poked Viktor in the back, and Viktor flinched, annoyed. He was thinking what Vlad was thinking. He didn’t need a physical cue, especially not one which made him jerk his shoulder directly in front of the person he was thinking it about.
You stood below your mom, looking up at the two men, nearly invisible to them, holding your pillowcase open in wait.
They only stood there, staring at your mom. She stared back uneasily.
Then, awkwardly, a smile came to her mouth. “Trick or treat,” she said again, softly. She pointed down at the open mouth of your pillowcase.
Viktor looked down into its open orifice.
Vlad came up behind him, “oh,” he said, slightly hunched in improvisation. “Another lost lamb has come to my dreaded castle… Come in, come in.” He waved you both in with a curling finger.
Your mom smiled, playing along with the macabre showmanship, doing so for your sake. As she looked down at you smiling, you looked up, past her as Vlad stepped behind her, shutting the door. He had his eyes on the back of her head as he continued on passed her and into the house. You saw Viktor, still standing there at a distance, staring at your mom.
“The last one for the night,” Vlad said with a slight accent. “And therefore, our special guest of honor. Come in, come in.” He waved you both inward, moving in the direction of the kitchen, subtly tapping Viktor on the small of his back to follow.
Your mom’s eyes crinkled as she looked down into yours. “Spooky,” she said. “Let’s go.” And as she took you forward with her, you felt your palm, perspiring and shaking, being dragged toward the grinning stranger in the kitchen doorway by hers, which was smooth and perfectly still.
Your dad watched the two girls leave his car, and he sat there, watching them do so, with the sober reality of never being able to touch them dawning upon him.
After all, tonight was his chance. He had them alone with him in his vehicle, drunk and vulnerable, perhaps a little interested (at least in Emily’s case) and he, instead, with perfect responsibility, only made small-talk, doing so in a way that emphasized his maturity and fatherly authority, while also emphasizing their youth and inexperience.
As he sat there, watching the two girls adjust their clothing around their perfect bodies, himself sinking both into a sombre miasma, as well as the well-earned dopamine of fulfilled responsibility, Emily looked up at him and smiled. “Thank you Mr. ________,” she said. “Because of you, we’re safe.”
He smiled back, then looked back at the road. “You girls have a good night, okay,” he said, and put the car into drive.
“Happy Halloween,” she said.
“Happy Halloween.” He stepped on the gas.
Through his rearview mirror, he watched the two girls move through the decorative light of Hazel’s front lawn, stumbling up its incline.
He laughed to himself, looking back down. “I should have at least gone in for a squeeze…”
As he drove, seeing the streets thin with figures, fantastical or typical, his thoughts began to crowd with fantasies of what could have been, and, finding the first alley, her turned into it, discovering there, complete darkness. He put the vehicle into park, turned off the ignition, falling into complete blackness, and he sighed.
He shut his eyes, and at shutting them, he saw Emily’s curvy hourglass of a body, soft and well-shaped, standing on his stoup, her face painted with whiskers, her brunette head adorned with black cat ears. As he thought about what she smelled like, he began to undo his belt, and lifting himself, pulled his jeans and underwear down to his thighs.
He sat there, in the darkness, stroking himself, imagining the two of them still vulnerable in his backseat, as he leaned back there towards them, grabbing at their smooth thighs, and convincing them to turn around and mount the seats with their knees, lifting Hazel’s skirt, and pulling down Emily’s pants, seeing the two pairs of butt-cheeks attached to these two best friends, feeling, squeezing, kneading, kissing, licking, sucking them both, pressing them together as if they were one. Tugging himself as he did this, and then going back there with them, gaining leverage in his own backseat, ready to insert himself into them and enjoy them, one by one. Watching them kiss and caress the other, feeling their drunkenness as if it were the spirit of ecstasy itself, their smells wafting out into the night, and their sounds fading and becoming one with the sounds of crickets and distant traffic.
As he sat there, shut-eyed in invisible pleasure in the backseat, a young masked figure passed silently by his vehicle, not knowing he had seen this particular vehicle earlier this night, nor being aware that anyone was within it. The figure moved through the alley, young, dumb, and horny, without any prospects of what to do with himself. He looked into the vague orange glow of household windows, seeing nothing, though imagining much. The thought of a large-breasted woman standing there, or sights of middle-aged suburban sex filled his imagination, and it was that alone which kept him going, and kept him ahead of worrying about what your mom would inevitably tell his mom the next time they spoke.
The thought of flashing himself to her pretty, open-mouthed gaze, and her saying his name in response, as terrifying as it all was, as stupid as it was to do to begin with, it also filled him with a lust for more which wouldn’t be quenched until orgasm, and would then only give way to disappointment at how anti-climactic it would all be compared to what came earlier.
He emerged from out the alley, the SUV still behind, its windows black. He walked down the street, passing almost nobody for a while. Not until he saw two figures coming his way.
He kept his head down, assuming they were a lot younger than they were. It was only when they neared, and he could hear their voices, that his gaze perked up.
“Just a little bit longer,” the girl said.
“But the psycho killer…” her sheepish friend in the dress said, slurring.
They were both stumbling as they got closer, larger, louder, and shapelier.
He, thinking fast, grabbed his mask, pulled it down off his face, and hid it behind his back, continuing forward at the same speed with his face down.
After the two girls, smelling equally of gin and perfume, passed him, he stopped and turned around.
“But what if my mom saw me?” Hazel said.
“She didn’t,” Emily said. I was looking. There was nobody there.”
Hazel said “but…” and turned around, and for a moment, she thought she saw a figure standing there, cowled, with a pitch-black void where its face should have been, watching the two as they went.
Emily looked at Hazel. Hazel looked back at her.
“Is she back there?” Emily asked, looking over her shoulder to see.
Hazel looked back, expecting to the see the figure still standing there. Instead, all she saw was darkness. The two girls continued onward into the night, even as it got blurrier and the darkness seemed to edge in closer from all sides.
Your hand, still moist and trembling, sat in your mother’s, still smooth and steady, and you swallowed saliva awkwardly down your throat.
The kitchen was well-lit and bright, and photographs sat stuck to the fridge’s metallic surface by magnets of quaint character. One of the guys who stood above you, looking down at your mother periodically, and at you seemingly only as a matter of course, sat within those photographs, smiling, living, being normal. But this only made him, in his weird flesh and blood eccentricities before you, more unnerving. Your mom only looked at you and smiled every so often. “Are you ready?” she asked, her eyes wide.
One of the young men stood in place, seeming to exist in a space between nerves and excitement.
The other friend stood, hunching his back, either genuinely or to appear more frightening, looming over a pot, stirring it, as if it were a cauldron which threw up no steam.
You adjusted yourself in your seat, and right during the moment of doing so, the young man spun around, frightening not only you, but also his friend, with his sudden movement.
He looked at you and your mother. “Now!” he said, pausing for effect with two goblet-like wine glasses cradled in his palms with their stems dangling down between his fingers. “Time for my special brew.”
He handed them to the two of you, and your mom looked at you and back at him concerned. His friend stood concerned behind him at noticing your mom’s expression.
“Don’t worry,” Vlad said, still smiling, aware of her concern. “It’s juice,” he mouthed to her silently.
Her expression melted into a smile. She turned at you and winked. “Just this one time,” she said. “You can drink a grown-up drink, sweety.”
“A grown-up drink it is,” he said. "If you drink it, you’ll live to be as old as me!”
Your mom opened her mouth in mock awe. “I wonder how old he is,” she said to you. “Maybe…” Her eyes were wide, looking down into yours to kindle your imagination. “Could he be a…”
You stared back at her. Your hand trembled in hers.
“Enjoy,” he said, leaning down into a bow.
Your mom nodded to you with a smile, then she lifted the rim of the glass to her lip.
You stared at her. She looked at you over the upturned rim of the glass, the red liquid emptying down her throat, noticing that she was drinking alone. Her eyes went wide and she nodded to coax you forward, letting you know it was truly alright. You lifted the glass to your lip, tipping it upward slightly, catching a small amount of the stuff in your mouth, it tasting vulgar like cranberries, you let your glass fall straight and swallowed only what you had resting on your tongue. And as you sat there, watching your mom drinking much more, you noticed something strange. A metallic aftertaste permeating the atmosphere of your tastebuds.
Your mom let the glass fall straight and she looked up at her server, a bare line of what was left sloshing around within its glass throne. “You want some?” your mom asked him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t drink...” He stopped for a few seconds. “…wine.”
Your mom’s mouth opened again. She looked at you. “What does he drink then?” she asked, her eyes wide with put-on wonder.
You only sat there, your glass near full. At a little more coaxing - the silent friend standing behind the other, seeming to be as nervous as you were – you took another sip. It would be the last sip you took for the night.
Timothy stalked through the shadows, as nervous as he was unnerving, and as terrified as he was terrifying. He was nearly alone, the night, having gotten long, had stranded him there within a world of decorations whose current existence was already fading in relevance with each moving second. The mask on his face faded the same. The following morning, all of this would be a burden, its every shape and tassel being taken down by sighing figures, burdened by their own excesses, punished with labor by their own Halloween spirit.
Occasionally, he’d see window lights be snuffed out, and if he consistently looked for them, there wouldn’t be a single minute where he wouldn’t witness one or many fall into blackness somewhere out there.
He squinted through the eyeholes of his mask, looking for the two girls who had somehow evaded him. Earlier, he had heard the sounds of giggling getting distant, as if they were running, and, filled with indecision, he just kept on with his usual pace. His being identified by name, and then being stopped from later machinations via SUV, had sucked the wind from his sails, and the free mischievousness the night had promised had now made itself apparent to him as what it was: a lie. A lie no different from that of the ghouls and goblins which usually stalked the night and the imagination of the same public which was now finding sleep in their beds. Every transgression had its cost.
He continued on ahead, his mind frantic with the possibility of what he had just let get away. A single SUV passed him in the night. One which should have been familiar to him, if he weren’t so lost in thought about the moment he let slip through his talons. Likewise, the driver of that SUV should have saw that skull mask and recognized it. And he would have, if he himself weren’t so lost in regret over the opportunity he had just abandoned.
Timothy continued on, feeling like he should turn around and go home. And he would have, if it weren’t for the realization that he was already headed in that direction. Because of that, and that alone, he kept on in his current path.
It was lucky he was, because as he continued on, nearing up on a back alley, something caught his attention. In a world of pitch black and stillness, something fluttered in the void, and he looked over at it to see it was a white fabric, light and heavenly. Drawn to it, he stared. And then, he noticed something else. Something beige sitting just next to the moving fabric. He squinted and looked at it, the circles of his eyeholes like a frame with the mystery sight at its center.
And then his eyes stopped squinting, and instead went wide, within the darkness behind his mask.
What he was looking at, sitting there, peeking out at him from within the back alley, was the sole of a smooth feminine foot, and it lay there on its side, accentuated by the white skirt fabric which fluttered in the wind above it.
Your hand lay there on the kitchen table, alone. Your mom’s glass sat there, next to yours, empty. Yours was still mostly full.
The two young men stood there, still never finding a seat, just looking down at your mom, who looked up at them wordlessly.
“What’s next,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Because unless you were planning to have us for your next meal…” She smiled at her own playfulness, and keeping with theme. “It’s well past my little boy’s bedtime.” She looked at you. “Getting tired, hey?”
You nodded quickly, too anxious for exhaustion, but eager to leave.
The two figures loomed over you, their very presence frightening you as to your own answer. The fact that one operated with absolute confidence, while the other stood there, both nervous and silent, only drove the unease home further.
Your mom reached over and grabbed your hand. And that’s when you noticed it. Her fingers had gone cold.
She looked into your eyes with hers. She smiled with her eyes, but even as she did, you saw she was looking past you somehow. “Home,” she said. Her eyelids seemed to be getting heavy. “Home. In our beds. With our…” her eyes shut. “… with our sweet nightmares.”
Her hand went limp in yours, and a sudden terror, one beyond being promised by even the most extreme manifestations of this holiday, hit you rather than rose up in you. When her head fell down to the kitchen table, harder than she could ever commit herself to acting out, you realized something truly horrible: You were now alone.
“Home,” The young man said, standing over her, looking down. He turned to look at you. “Home,” he repeated at you, softly, as if it were an act of hypnotism. “… where you can… sleeeep.” He shut his eyes softly.
Behind him, his friend stood, looking down at your mom, astonished, watching as she breathed there.
“Sleeeep,” his friend repeated, “where nothing can hurt you.”
That word, “hurt,” shot through you as if it were a sudden pain. Taking it as a threat, you began to shut your eyes, doing so only enough to appear as if they were shut (a trick you learned counting for hide-and-seek on the playground) and slowly resting your head on the table, fearing that your whole body shook, betraying your con. A weird sensation ran through you, one you had only assumed was fear. But as you lay there, looking at the two figures, and the blonde hair of your mom’s head, through the tiny slit between your eyelids, you saw glimmering red in your peripheral, and you pivoted your head a slow inch to see the slightly nipped glass of cranberry juice sitting there, the space between its surface and the rim once filled with what was now inside you, doing something, but doing it less than it was to your mom, who had swallowed her entire glass.
“I told you…” one of them said to his silent partner.
You saw a looming, floating head. You again tilted your own, seeing his wide eyes come into view, staring down at the side of your mom’s face. Her elegant throat open with soft breath. He opened his mouth.
Your breath stopped.
His lips fell shut and puckered. They landed themselves on her soft porcelain skin, and the sound you heard was as terrifying to you as it would have been had it been the sound of teeth puncturing the red skin of an apple.
It was puckering smooch.
*mmmmpppppphhhhaa*
“Okay,” he said, leaning back up. “Lets get this bitch going.”
He grabbed your mom, his friend, finally finding the nerve, grabbed her with him, and you watched through your limited field of vision as they dragged her out of the kitchen.
You heard her feet sliding over the hardwood floor, then you heard the living room couch springs squeak with the sound of a soft, slight body falling to them with sudden violence.
You slowly began to get up, hearing the sound of fabric tearing, falling, and flying through the air as you did, and you then stood there, awake and wide-eyed in the kitchen, you slowly turned around, trying not to make a noise. As you did, the images on the fridge of the terrifying figure, happy and plain in the daylight of mortal society, crawled past. You were then looking at the open kitchen doorway into the dining room.
You took a deep breath and then took a few steps forward, the living room coming into view. You felt like you were floating, as if you were a ghost doomed to witnessing a world beyond your control or influence.
“Ugh fuck,” you heard, stutter out.
You moved forward another inch.
You froze.
You stood there in a world of disbelief, or rather in a world without any coherent thought. Your mom’s face distorted before you into an expression you had never seen in it. It was only once the big, stiff thing, the thing you had seen for the first time in your parent’s bedroom earlier, left her mouth that her familiar face mercifully came back to you, ensuring for you that it wasn’t lost forever.
The two figures, now naked and throbbing hard, as mature and authoritative to you as your mother, stood there, startlingly you with their nudity. Their bodies tough and sinewy and hard, and their expressions ghoulish, goblin-like with a menacing glee, your mom below them like some treat being devoured by them through mouths which were invisible even as it was her mouth which did the devouring.
“Do you recognize her?” one of them said, in between groans.
“No,” the other one let out breathily.
“She was in Kenny’s year. She’s Carol’s friend.”
“Fuck yeah,” the other said, again in an exhale. “She’s so fucking beautiful. I don’t know how I don’t remember her.”
“She got married and had a kid right after high school. She was shy, but she was dating ______.”
“Holy shit. Lucky guy…”
“Lucky us.”
You had never seen below your mom’s shirt before, and you were fascinated by what she apparently had looked like below your awareness this entire time.
You watched as her nipple was squeezed, feeling it as if it were your own, not liking the thought, wondering if it felt as uncomfortable to her as it did for you watching.
You watched, understanding now you father’s behavior in your parent’s bedroom earlier, as well as Timothy’s behavior on the sidewalk in full view of everyone. This was what they wanted your mom to do with their things. And you now were a little confused as to why she didn’t. The two men here scared you to no end, but their things, even with the way they poked them out aggressively toward your moms’ face, were the most likeable part of themselves.
When they grabbed your mom, lifting her, pulling her pants down, you braced yourself, readying to see what her “thing” looked like. If it was as big as theirs.
You stared, shocked, almost gasping audibly (and maybe even doing so, but while being washed out by the sound of your mom’s ass being smacked).
“Look at this fucking asss!” one of them said. “Somebody gets to fuck this…” as if jealous.
“We do,” said the other.
Where was it?, you thought to yourself. Did they take it? Where is her thing?
The thought of pieces of her disappearing, combined with all the other ghoulish circumstances, lead to quite the shock when you saw one of them burying his face between her butt cheeks to begin gnawing on her.
You almost felt like running out to protect her, but fear kept you nailed to the floor, even as you watched your mom being eaten alive in front of you.
His fingers, like strange tendrils doing god-knows-what, disappeared and reappeared from within her body.
You wondered at what strange monstrous form of vampirism you were looking at. What experiment or ritual or witchcraft you were witnessing before you.
Why was it all so terrifying, so spectacular, and so exciting to behold?
Part of what calmed you (yet only just enough to allow you to breathe) was the fact that no matter what they did, no matter how aggressively they did it, your mom didn’t seem to be hurt, changed, or diminished in any way. You had no notion of impermanence, but some primordial part of you was immediately ready for it, only for it to settle itself down just as quickly at evidence of the opposite.
You felt as if you were witnessing some form of werewolf transformation, but one whose occurrence happened far more often than you were ever lead to know.
The three of them, all ostensibly adults, had deteriorated now into howling beasts, figures of horror and sacrilege. Mouth opened in snarls and sucking parasitism, and hands curled into claws.
All you knew for sure was that your mom’s hole being invaded looked good to you. It felt good to the men, if their groans were anything to go by. It would have felt good to Timothy or your dad had they been doing the same to her now like they seemed to want to.
And you, how good would have felt to you had you been doing it?
Or even sucking and eating on her flesh. Grabbing it, pulling it, like prey into the dark woods. How would that feel? Grabbing her, tricking her, prowling for her. Chasing, lunging, cursing.
“Fuck this bitch,” Viktor said. “Goddamnit. This is so good. Fuck her.”
It was exciting watching the prey she had become. Even with all the mystery, the eerie absurdity, and the fear, nothing could downplay the wonder and thrill of it. If anything, of the former only could hope to spice the latter for your wondering tastebuds.
The thing was going inside her deep, getting to some important hidden zone. It was some zone your dad wanted to get to. Some zone Timothy wished he could. And as the man pushed, again and again, to get to that zone, you could tell it was the work he had to do to get to this point which only made him push harder, with more aggression and rage. Your mom was an enemy to him, and obstacle to be surpassed, and you were watching now as he surpassed her.
The bodies of all three of them looked like candy to you. Candy beyond the sweetness of any you had sitting in your pillowcase by the kitchen chair leg.
You had always wondered at the moderation at which adults indulged on candy, not understanding how they did it, how they held themselves back from pigging out on what they had infinite access to. Now, witnessing this, you knew that they had a candy of their own, and they were just as eager to pig out on it as any child once Halloween night ended.
When the thing exited your mom’s hole, its gaping opening reminded you of the opening of your pillowcase, and before you could wonder if the thing itself was a form of candy, you saw the man straddle your mom and put it in her waiting mouth.
The smell which permeated the room, wafting toward you in small waves, implied to you that the taste of those things was tangy and rich. It was no wonder to you then why your mom sucked it back so thoroughly.
“Oh fucking christ, fucking christ,” said the ghoul over top of her.
Your mom’s pubic hair excited you, its very nature seeming private. So did her belly button and her breasts and her thighs and the discoloration between her legs. You wanted to touch those parts of her, play with them, put your mouth on them and squeeze them. But you somehow knew through the way that she denied your dad, and the way she had to be tricked by these monsters, that this was something she’d never let you do. Timothy himself ran in fear at even being discovered wanting to do it to her. Whatever all of this was, it was something extremely private, dirty, and taboo, but somehow also nearly universal. Something which existed everywhere, but only behind closed doors, and hidden in speech through euphemism and innuendo.
“Come on, give us this ass, bitch.”
Every bad word stung, yet it kept you watching, enthralled. Rather than sympathize with the victim, your own mother, you found yourself increasingly sympathizing with the ghouls which surrounded and pawed at her, and they did so with all the monstrousness of beasts trying to pull her apart. Yet she continued to maintain her form, and somehow you could tell they wanted nothing from her than to be what she was. In some way, some strange and unknown way, they loved your mom as much as you did. In some ways, it was a stronger love, a more aggressive one, and one they resented her for. One that was thrilling rather than comfortable, and which involved taking instead of giving. But it was love all the same.
You were here for the ride, and whatever they wanted to take from her, you were eager to see it now.
Your mom’s butthole seemed to peek back at you, the only eye there which noticed your presence. It seemed to wink with every thrust. Your mom’s body was its own funhouse. Its own hall of thrills and horrors, the two being the same. You couldn’t believe how familiar everything around these hidden parts were, because the parts hidden, now exposed, were among the strangest and most viscerally frightening things you had ever seen.
Her butthole looked over at you, wide-eyed and frantic, terrified at the way the rest of its face was being manhandled and abused. Even if you had the courage to step in and help it, you wouldn’t. You were too fascinated now, too stuck within your own voyeurism, watching the events as if they were the things on screen your mom always assured you weren’t real. But for once, you didn’t want to cover your eyes.
And the frantic horror of that little black eye only thrilled you more, especially as it was swallowed up within the throws of the shaking cheeks which surrounded it, like a woman screaming at sea until she was pulled down underneath by some mysterious evil.
You couldn’t put into words just how thrilling it was to see these big vulgar things thrust in and around your mom, as if they lived to be there. Your mom’s face, her hair which you adored the smell of, the eyes which gazed lovingly into yours, the nose that tickled you when she leaned in for a kiss, and the mouth which kissed you, now did all the same for one of those things, but with an intensity much more beastly and primal, and with a character which was much more direct, uncivilized, and even unhuman.
You watched them circle her ritualistically, less like vultures and more like wolves together in hunt. And even more than that, like figures dabbling in some dark art, their cloak their nudity, and the ingredients for their recipe derived from her, and her alone.
These activities even had their strange preparations and 1-2 step of a firmly determined tradition. Even your mom, in a state not quite conscious, seemed to know them and react to them based on sight and touch alone.
Her butthole didn’t seem to look out to you with fear anymore. It only stared, dead-eyed and content, assimilated into these practices now, one with them and beyond defiance.
You knew your dad had no clue what was happening now. Nothing like this had ever happened on your Halloween trick-or-treating, and your mom didn’t even seem to suspect this, even while you yourself began to develop and wildly incomplete sense of it. These two men had pulled off some sort of successful subterfuge, one not unlike what it like felt when you had once snuck cookies before dinner. They were violating your mom very directly, and your dad indirectly but still somehow worse. What you were looking at now was neither trick nor treat, but both together as one. Or, maybe, it was your mom who brought the treat in the form of herself, and these two ghouls who brought the trick, and you were watching exactly what it looked like when both collided.
It looked good, and you weren’t unhappy that it was happening. It felt naughty to watch it. It scared you, but not in a way that was dangerous, and it made you feel adult, but not in a way that demanded any adult responsibility. It felt good to watch your mom in danger. And it felt good to feel the ghastly injustice of these ghouls winning.
It felt good to be on the losing side for once, and it felt good in submitting to this loss. It felt like something you wanted to brag about, yet something you knew you shouldn’t. If felt like something it would be exciting to tell your dad about, while also feeling like something you knew you never could. Even though they had bought your ruse, and mistook you for sleeping, they still somehow felt the need to remove this all from your presence, as if even they felt how important this privacy was, and how irresponsible it would be to let you see any of it.
Yet in seeing it, you were experiencing a joy beyond anything candy could provide.
You thought about rolling around with your mother and poking her with your miniature thing. You thought about rubbing your butt on her face, or seeing all the scary kids from school rub theirs on her face. You imagined biting her butt, or pulling her hair, or yelling and snarling at her butthole, scaring it more, threatening, in words and action, to eat it.
You thought about having her locked up in your cage, like you were a witch fattening her up to eat, and she were both Hansel and Gretel together as one. You imagined prodding her with a sturdy stick, taunting her, and poking tootsie-rolls into her trembling hand through the bars. And then when her butt got just big enough, you imagined opening your door, and inviting in your friends and enemies from school for their turn with that very butt.
You had no idea what was to come next. If you would just walk out of here, or whether there was a much darker end in store for you and your mother. One which was final, the D-word not being something you truly understood yet.
Either way, you didn’t mind. You just wanted whatever to come to come. You wanted your family to suffer it, your mom most of all. And you wanted the whole world to know that you did.
Even still, a warmth and a sense of safety came over you at seeing those things throbbing and twitching about. There was something reliable and fatherly about them, something which defied the horror of the bodies they were attached to. These things were too jovial to want to hurt anyone. And where they did hurt people, they only hurt people enough to get what they needed from them.
You felt then, as strange as it was to feel, that if only these things were guaranteed their needs taken care of, everything else would fall in place as a consequence; that the world was crazy for prioritizing anything except this. That it wasn’t these things, or the men they were attached to, which were the horror. The true horror was the attention toward these things that women denied.
And in a way, what you were witnessing before you on this night was not Halloween at all, but a break from the 364 days of Halloween which was the rest of life.
The sense of relief on the men’s faces, not too dissimilar to the one made by those rescued from the terror of a practical joke. Like they finally could breathe easy, finally feel free, like a kid did, that one night of the year, when they dressed like somebody or something other than themselves, and went wild into a world eager to give them sweet things from its various doorsteps.
Your mom’s butthole looked back at you, calm and serene. Perhaps even its fear was a trick after all.
Because even it knew that it was exactly where it should be. Just like everybody and everything else in the universe.
Your mom, Viktor, Vlad, your dad, Timothy, and even yourself.
And as you heard a dog howling in the distance, you imagined it to be a werewolf, knowing full well you were playing tricks on yourself. But that was okay. Because you knew that on Halloween, it was the trick which was the biggest treat of all.
Timothy tried to keep himself from moaning as he thrusted his hips, feeling Emily’s fat butt cheeks slap against his pelvis. Losing his virginity was one thing to accomplish tonight, but to lose it to the two hottest girls from church was beyond his wildest anticipations.
Hazel lay aside, her dress tore into ribbons, and her plastic halo held in place between her butt-cheeks.
Emily’s head lay there, beyond the mountainous surface of her rippling ass, rocking back and forth, with her cat ears holding firm. He leaned down to her face, still thrusting, and began to lick her painted whiskers. She opened her groggy eye, looked at the nightly apparition which pawed, licked, and ravaged her, then she shut that solitary eye and fell into blackness.
Her ass was still wet from the way he had been eating it minutes earlier, and Hazel’s ass, cast aside, was wet for the same reason. Timothy’s balls were smeared with black and pastel hues from smearing them on the faces of the girls, destroying their nightly make-up and painting his testicles with it as if he were a witch doctor collecting souls.
He found these girls, motionless, as if he really were the reaper he was dressed as, and rather than take their shades with him, he took their dignities, one youthful thrust at a time. For a split moment, as if distancing himself from the scene, he was able to ponder on just how astronomically small the chances of this current predicament were, and the inverse quantities of luck possessed between him and these two unfortunate souls, their asses propped and ready, making the irony of it physical.
Emily’s ass mixed its sweat with his pelvis, lubricating his good time with it, adding a little more nip to the nighttime chill, and filling it with a sweet feminine aroma, one which rose above the scent of gin and perfume, and the processed rubber of the ominous mask he looked down at her through.
“This is it,” he whispered, broken to himself. “It’ll never get better than this.”
All of a sudden, his shaded privacy was obliterated in a transfiguration of blinding light.
Timothy instinctively fell to the smooth body below, engulfing it with the numerous black folds of his costume, engulfing his visible white mask along with it.
Hazel sat outside of the beam of light, only the sole of her foot within.
A van door opened, and its interior beeped. Timothy ducked down harder on the soft body below him, its ass compressed as tightly as possible within the nook of his sweating pelvis.
“Over here,” a voice said. “This side.”
He heard a van door being slid open.
He heard rustling.
“Be careful with the kid,” the voice said. “That’s- he’s upside down. Here, I’ll take him. Grab his candy.”
He heard footsteps approaching, followed not long after by a second set. They stopped near his head. He hard something being placed delicately on the pavement. Then the figure stood back up. “I think he’s waking up,” he said.
“His candy bag is heavy enough.” He heard a bag fall to the floor.
“I told my mom she bought too much. At least it went to good use. It would have just rotted in the basement for a year.” The figure seemed to move. “Okay, now let’s do mommy.”
Both the figures stepped away. There was more distant ruffling, and they came back. He heard something, something much heavier being set down, even closer to him, only a little less delicately.
One of the figures seemed to be dusting off their hands. “You ready for seconds?” he asked.
The other figure was silent for a moment. Then: “you know that feeling, on Halloween night, when you’d get home and just obliterate half your bag in the living room?”
“…. Yeah?”
“That’s me right now.”
The other one laughed, and then he heard the two figures walk off. He heard the van door slide and slam shut, and heard the driver and passenger doors open and close near-simultaneously. And then, he heard the van drive off, the light which filtered through the black folds of his cape disappearing with it.
He lay there for a moment, Emily’s naked body below him, maddeningly soft and warm, his pillow keeping him above concrete.
He turned his head. He lifted his cape.
The skull looked ahead at what sat before it, its expression unchanged. Behind that rubber skull, things were very much different.
Because laying just in front of him, shut-eyed and open-lipped, lay his third victim for the night, perhaps the one he desired most of all. He slowly rose.
You lay there, in the blackness, eyes shut enough to appear as if you were sleeping, getting used to it. You watched as the horrible figure, its face like that beyond the grave, loomed over your mother, nearing her inch by inch, ready to strike, eager to do so while she lay there, as vulnerable as she was innocent, and as beautiful as she was both combined.
And as you watched the figure of nightmare, and its twitching thing, get near her, you did so with complete calm. It was just a creature of the night, and just on the strength of that alone, you knew you had nothing to fear.