by StalkerShrike“Aw, c’mon, Rue! She’s not really a witch. The grown-ups just say that so you won’t go near her.”
I hesitated, looking up at the house looming before me, the only lights inside it coming from more of those horrible lanterns. “I know that, Tobe. Don’t be stupid.”
“Then what’re you afraid of?”
“She has skulls in her trees, Toby!”
Toby snorted, his derision visible even through his cheap ghost costume. “It’s Halloween, Ruby! Mrs. Whittle had skulls in her trees, and you weren’t scared of her.”
“Yeah, but…” I trailed off, watching Ellie go marching up the sidewalk, the big plastic eyes of her frog head rattling as she walked. “This is different.”
Of course, I knew Toby didn’t want to be standing in front of old Mrs. McKay’s house any more than I did. We had come to an agreement before we went out tonight that if anyone would give out bad candy, it would be her. Best to avoid her entirely. And besides, it wasn’t as though any of us had the first idea where she lived.
What we hadn’t reckoned on was that Big Billy Kent had thought along more or less the same lines – and that he had known. Billy Kent was in the sixth grade, and was a bit embarrassed by the fact that he had once called third-graders his friends in elementary school. Now he and a gang of other sixth-graders were trying to work their way into other friend groups by making a show of their dislike for the younger kids. Usually they limited themselves to the occasional stolen lunch or nasty prank. But they had recognized Halloween as a night when children chasing each other in scary costumes and screaming was considered harmless, and they hadn’t hesitated to take the opportunity.
And so, we’d ended up here. Mostly lost, no flashlights, and worse, no candy, in front of a house that even the grown-ups said was haunted. Toby thought we should go and ask her for help, or at least some candy so the night wouldn’t be a total loss. I thought we should run before she did something horrible to us. I hoped he was right.
Ellie got to the front door and knocked.
We waited there for long minutes, listening to the creak of the wind in her trees and the tap, tap of the skulls knocking against each other. Mrs. McKay had been predictably weird in her choice of Halloween decoration. Sure, Mrs. Whittle had had skulls in her trees too, but she had other things – giant spiders, plastic gravestones, a cheery construction-paper vampire beside her door. Mrs. McKay had none of that. She only had the skulls, hanging from skinny, gnarled trees that could almost be considered Halloween decorations themselves. There must have been hundreds of them, suspended in little clusters like weird fruit, each of them with a flickering candle inside that shone out through the eye sockets like a morbid jack-o-lantern. They lit up the yard almost by themselves, and I wondered suddenly how much it had cost to buy that many of them.
Ellie turned to us from the still-unopened door. “I don’t think she’s home.”
“But there’s lights in her windows.”
“Yeah, but she’s not coming to the door. I say we leave and don’t – what was that?”
Toby and I jumped in unison. “What was what?”
“Something moved! Inside!”
“Don’t be dumb. That just means she is home.”
“No, it wasn’t like a footstep movement. It was a bump. Like something falling.”
“Do you hear it now?”
“No…”
Toby was backing away from the house. “Rue, I changed my mind. Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” I said, suddenly angry. “We’re not going to let this whole evening be a waste. It’s Halloween night. If you’re a grown-up and kids knock on your door on Halloween night, you have to answer. You have to give them candy. That’s how it works.” I stormed up onto the porch, Ellie stepping aside as I pounded on the door. “Mrs. McKay? We know you’re in there. Come out and give –”
I stopped, suddenly, my eyes going wide.
“Rue? You okay?”
I started backing away from the door, staring at it, pulling Ellie away with me. “She’s right there.”
“What do you –”
“I heard her, Tobe! Right there, on the other side of the door! She scratched on it…and she…she sounded…”
“Rue, come on, let’s go…”
I was almost in tears as Ellie pulled me back down onto the drive. “She sounded like her breath was on fire…”
We made our way slowly down the drive to the sidewalk, where the light from the skulls puddled and died. “You okay, Ruby?” Toby asked, looking nervously at me as we sat shakily there on the concrete.
“Yeah…” I wiped my eyes and stood. “Yeah…Come on, let’s go home.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said, standing and walking down the street, the flounce in her step masking the fact that her knees were still shaking.
“Um…Ellie?” Toby said, staring after her.
“What?”
He pointed, and we realized what he already had. The houses were dark. The streetlights were dead. The sky was cloudy and the moon had set. Even if we had known how to get back home, we could see nothing beyond Mrs. McKay’s picket fence.
I felt the shakes coming on again, and managed to stand before they could take me over and crumple me to the ground again. “We’ll take her lanterns.”
“What, the creepy skulls?” Toby said, looking at where they swayed and flickered on their coarse twine. “Won’t we, y’know…get in trouble?”
“She wouldn’t give us candy. She wouldn’t let us call our parents. The least she can do is give us some light. And besides, she’s got so many. She’ll never notice if we take a couple.”
“I…” Toby opened his mouth and closed it again. “I don’t know…isn’t stealing wrong?”
“Ruby’s right,” Ellie said, scrambling up onto the peeling fence. “We’re not stealing. We’re returning the favor.”
She handed down three of them, one to each of us, with enough twine that we wouldn’t have to hold them with both hands the whole way home. The twine was rough and left splinters in your hands, but it was better than holding the skulls themselves. Those were made of some kind of delicate plastic, both soft and hard at the same time, with rough patches here and there along it. I had never held actual bone before, but it felt disturbingly like how I imagined it would feel.
But they lit the way, at least, in little bobbing circles of orange like miniature headlights. We picked our way nervously along the route that we thought Billy’s friends had chased us in, jumping occasionally as stray cats or looming shadows moved suddenly at the edges of our vision. But the way back looked different when we weren’t being chased along it, and it didn’t take us more than a few minutes to lose ourselves among the confused, tangled alleyways.
“No, no, I swear I remember the Santa,” Toby was saying, staring up at a huge, decayed inflatable that the garbage men hadn’t bothered to pick up since last Christmas.
“Really? ‘Cause I don’t,” Ellie said, picking up a tattered bit of latex that had fallen off it and staring down the alleyway. “And besides, do you remember seeing it or do you remember passing it?”
“I think I remember passing it? I don’t know…” He looked down the other alley, then worriedly back at the one we had come from. “Rue, do you remember this thing?”
“Huh?” I said, my attention snapping away from the jack-o-lantern grinning improbably from the roof of the building before us. “I don’t think so…But it’s not like I was paying attention.”
“Okay…” He kept looking up at it, seemingly mesmerized by the way the light from his skull played across its hollowed-out form. “Well, I’m going this way. You guys can go the other way if you want.”
“No, I’ll come with you,” I said, watching Ellie peer down one path and then the other. “I have no idea where we are.”
“You guys do that, then.” She turned and started walking away from the Santa. “And when it’s a dead end, you’ll all be really sad that I beat you home.”
“Fine,” Toby said. He started walking past it in the other direction, and I followed him, the skull held up to my chest like a shield.
It wasn’t a dead end.
We had gotten to a place we almost recognized – the back of the Pink Elephant Bar and Grill, which Toby at least thought might be near the mall – when we heard Ellie scream.
Between the panic and the flickering light, it took us almost five minutes to find our way back to the Santa. The alley she had gone down split again and again into a twisting maze, but none of the paths led to an actual exit. All of them stopped at some kind of garbage-can-blocked fence or wall. And though we searched and called through all of them, Ellie was gone.
It was only when we trudged back past the Santa that I noticed the jack-o-lantern was gone, too.
Toby and I were both shaking uncontrollably, trying and failing to stem the tears leaking from our eyes. Where had she gone? She couldn’t have come back past us. Could she have gotten over one of the walls? Then why hadn’t she answered when we called?
“Rue…” Toby said, though between my fear and his I could barely understand him. “Rue, what do we do?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know…”
“She’s gone, Rue!” He collapsed onto the ground between the piles of trash. “She’s gone! Something’s out here, and it got her, and it’s going to get us…”
“We’ve gotta get home…Mom and Dad’ll know what to do…” I started walking again, knees almost literally knocking, and I heard Toby get up and follow me. “It can’t be far now…”
The Pink Elephant, as it turned out, was not by the mall. It was on a street we didn’t recognize, despite the fact that we had both driven past it more times than we could count. Lights glowed on the bottoms of the clouds in the distance, but the streetlights here worked no better than they had in front of Mrs. McKay’s house. These houses were still dark, too, and our lights flowed over forgotten Halloween decorations and bits of shrubbery as we walked. Neither of
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The original Spooky Boo's Scary Story Time telling spooky, scary stories since 2016. Here you'll find true scary stories, fiction stories, urban legends, creepypasta, and other tall tales from the darkest corners of the internet.
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