Halloween Night

Part title

l.
The killer was about to leave the body they left in the woods, but as they saw the body, they threw up.
ll.
The police were eerily hesitant about releasing the details and information regarding the body they found in the woods, before dusk, on the night before Halloween. The body was found by a jogger that takes a path through the woods, to come out on a path adjacent to the highway, and was, rightly so, spooked out. He wasn't supposed to talk about it with anyone, because it was unanimously considered, by all the detectives and patrol officers, a homicide, and an ongoing investigation into one, but the jogger was too scared to even mention it to his husband. Who knows if the killer was still lurking around the woods at midnight to see who reported them. He had heard about killers doing that. He could very well be next.
Wilkes brought the coffee for Detectives Robbins and Camp. The body was laid on its back, with its face completely mutilated. The mouth and jaw were cut open, leaving little chunks of skin and decaying flesh spaced out into the "smile," like a jack-o-lantern's. The eyeballs were still present in their sockets, but once flipped over, they would dangle right out, looking like something meaty, primal, and horrifying. It looked like one of those animatronics from a Halloween store, the type that scares you when your foot presses the "Step Here" button taped to the floor. It looked like the edges of their sockets were scooped out and were the dark, unheard-of color of blood you never see until an injury like this. The part that was the most confusing was the nose-or the absence of one. Where the nose used to be, stung in a burgundy, fresh oval-shaped wound, dried up, but still that dark, unheard-of color as the eye sockets were. The rest of the body was fine.
"Maybe it has something to do with the face," Detective Robbins said, walking up to the crime scene. "Maybe some killers see pain and this huge resentment with the face, but like, symbolically the body doesn't have any 'value' or meaning to them."
"Well, we shouldn't make any theories yet," Detective Camp, his partner, a more experienced and seasoned homicide detective said, walking with him to the crime scene. "We haven't even notified next of kin."
The night was so bright outside, it looked like the day. The moon was out shining and illuminating the sky, which was clear with no stars. Camp's men set up a perimeter around the forest and had men with dogs and flashlights scour the whole forest to see if the killer was still there. The coroner's truck was parked outside of the woods and the coroner was making their way with a stretcher down the bumpy, rocky path into the forest. Forensics and CSI had wiped the place as best as they could, with the limitedness of darkness and the pudgy, kind of wet atmosphere in the mud and in the leaves. There was compiled dew that possibly wiped away evidence the cops could find useful. Cops couldn't even get an I.D. on the body, so they swapped some DNA from the hole in their face with a Q-tip and sent it to the lab with a rush on it to identify the victim as quickly as they could. Murders didn't occur a lot in towns like this. This was an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood, where the worst thing that happened was a robber who tied up a family at gunpoint and took all of their stuff. Now, there was this brutal, disfigured killing, with little to no evidence to go on and a killer still out there. Halloween was tomorrow night, and a ton of the cops' kids were trick-or-treating that night, going up in their rooms with their friends and getting a sugar high from all the mass consumption of Halloween candy. They didn't want to worry them or the town. They already had a rush on the DNA, the victim was already en route to the morgue, and they had a forest swept for evidence and the killer. They thought they had it all under control.
They thought.
lll.
"Billy, your mask is here!" his mom said, pointing to the hockey mask on the counter. "Ok, mom," Billy retorted. He always copped an attitude when his friends were at the house. They were all dressed up for Halloween. The mom saw right through the facade.
"Stop trying to look cool in front of your friends," she said, and walked away, prompting all of Billy's friends behind him to go "Ooooh!"
"Alright guys, come on," Billy said, turning a little scarlet in the face.
"Don't talk shit about your Mom, Billy," his friend Ryan said in a fake, so-matter-of-fact way.
"Language!" his mom yelled from the other room.
They laughed and went outside into the dark night and chilly wind that can only come from fall time. Billy loved the fall, as it was always nice and breezy, it was the precursor to winter, and his favorite holiday, Christmas, but it was also because he loved Halloween.
The night before, Billy and the same group of friends he was with tonight, Ryan, Amy, and Bertha, all were at Billy's house with a copy "The Red Barn," in the form of a VHS tape that Ryan stole from his father. It was a horror movie that they procedurally slid into the VCR. It was classic and shot with a low budget, so the effects looked so real that it gave the film a trailblazing status in the history of cinema. It was one of those movies they "had to see," according to Ryan, a provocateur in the culture of movies and filmmaking. He had a ton of movie posters in his room, and this was the biggest one out of all of them. The movie scared the shit out of them, with all of the jumpscares, the blood-painted barn, and the killer chasing his soon-to-be-victims around it. Billy noticed Bertha squeezing up next to Ryan, holding his hand. "Oh, shit," Billy thought. "If this shit is enough to bring them together, hopefully, Halloween could do the same."
Their friends all walked out the front door and Billy saw Ryan and Bertha graze their hands up against each other's for a little bit. Billy smiled, happy that his friend was finding love on Halloween night. It was romantic. Billy would set them up like Claudio from "Much Ado About Nothing."
He was determined to get them to become a thing by the end of the night.
The four friends walked down the crosswalk that led out of the house into the street, where a bunch of other kids were trick-or-treating. Billy was dressed up like Darth Vader, Ryan as an astronaut from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Amy as Spider-Woman and Bertha as Swamp Thing. It was like some weird Purge-like event, where everyone was out doing the same thing, and it was a little anarchic. Parents watched a lot of the younger kids, middle school kids, like Billy, Ryan, Bertha, and Amy, would be out on their own, and the high school kids were probably smoking weed in a tree somewhere or dropping acid.
"Which house are we hitting first?" Amy asked the group.
"Any is fine with me," Billy replied.
"Yeah, any is cool," Ryan agreed.
"You know Amy, the cool thing about your neighborhood is that every house is like a mansion! All these houses are going to have huge candy bars, like king-size Reese's and Hersheys," Bertha said.
"I'm more of a Twizzlers guy," Ryan said.
"My step-brother likes Rolos and Whoppers," Billy said.
"Yeah, but the thing about Whoppers is that they bust your fucking teeth in," Amy said. "It's like chewing on marbles.
"For real!" Bertha emphatically agreed. "It's like 'Happy Halloween!'" she said sarcastically.
"M&M's are the shit," Billy said. "Tootsie Rolls, lollipops, Kit Kats. All the shit."
"Yeah, I agree, I just hope I get some fucking candy," Amy said, looking over at Billy and cracking a smile. They both laughed. They had a good sense of humor with each other, and they both cursed way too fucking much, which added to it greatly. They cursed so much for someone their age. They used to get in trouble for it all the time before they started communicating with facial expressions more in the classes they had together. Billy could even see himself with Amy in a more romantic and holding-hands-cuddly kind of way. He had feelings for her, the type that people describe as "butterflies in their stomachs," but he was scared of acting on them, scared of rejection, and Billy locked all his emotions down deep within his stomach, for nobody to see, not even him. It would have to take some life-threatening situation for him to confess his love for her, like a Romeo-and-Juliet type of situation, except the ages are normal and the rapport is there.
And then they could all go on a double date!
Billy and his friends rounded the corner to go to the first house, which was guaranteed to have, like, ridiculous-sized candy, a caricature of what candy was supposed to be. The friends kept to themselves for this little moment, Ryan and Bertha talking to each other quietly, and Amy determined to get to the house in front of them, with Billy trailing behind, having the same agenda. Their formation was a little scattered, but they remained a tight-knit clique nonetheless.
The woman at the first house handed out king-size Hersheys and these rectangular bags of M&M's, which definitely beat those little mini ones, just like Bertha had predicted. The friends walked down the crosswalk that led out of the house and continued their journey onto the next house. The next house was brightly lit and was grand. The friends walked up the long crosswalk to the house and knocked. It was a man who answered them. They said the customary password to get candy, but as they were about to leave, the man briefly interrupted them by pointing his finger out at them, as if about to say something.
"You guys need to watch out tonight."
Billy and his friends all snickered underneath their masks, trying to prevent the man from seeing them laugh.
"The humans," the man added vaguely and bluntly, almost with a scared toneless candidness. "Sometimes the humans are much worse than any demon you could see out there. In fact, they are the demons. Watch out for the ghosts. The apparitions. They exist."
Billy and his friends were a little confused by this statement. Yeah, they knew to stay away from razor blades in candy and unmarked white vans, but this scared them. The seriousness in the man's face, a frank, seasoned expression that was no-nonsense, struck through them like straight lightning bolts. "What?" Billy asked, questionaly.
The man never broke eye contact with the children, as he backed up to shut the door in front of him. It wasn't like a movie where it was cliched, but more intentional, more natural, like violence in a Martin Scorcese movie.
"That was some weird shit," Amy said, as Billy turned towards her and their friends.
"What the fuck was that about?" Bertha asked the group, rhetorically.
"I'm not sure," Ryan said. "But fuck it, he was probably just kidding around with us. It's like those people that wear those scary costumes when they give out candy to scare you."
"That was extreme," Billy said, thrown off and feeling a queasy, rotten cheese feeling inside of his stomach, with some voice beginning that tonight was no good, that he needed to get out of there and run as fast as he could, back to his mom, apologize for how he was acting earlier, and get comfortable in his own house. He wanted to run so fast into the night sky, back home, away from any bad humans, or "demons." It was scarier than anything "The Red Barn" could have offered.
"We should probably go to the next house," Billy said, and his friends nodded in agreement.
"We got to get the fuck out of here is what we need to do," Ryan said.
The friend trick-or-treated at more houses after that, garnering and getting massive amounts of candy, hoisting loads of it into their bags, their bodies operating as construction machines to carry it all. It wasn't a whole lot of weight, but it was a tiresome load on the wrists and biceps nonetheless.
"We have to head home," Ryan said through his 2001: A Space Odyssey helmet. "Bertha, I have a lot of candy to give you."
"And me to you, too," Bertha replied. Ryan was cheesing underneath the mask.
The friends were walking down the sidewalk underneath the dark, cool night sky, blowing a swift, cool breeze over their heads like the wings of doves. It was relaxing. Ryan and Bertha did more of that maybe-unintentional body contact, but seeing it lifted Billy's spirits some more. He was anxious about getting home ever since that guy told him and his friends that stuff. It was like he put a curse on them, casting a spell to have them spiral in their worries. Demons. Humans. There was so much to be worried about.
Billy looked up at the sky a little bit as he was walking. It was something that calmed him down whenever he felt scared or worried as a kid, and this skill still worked now. It felt like he was falling into the sky, like the world was turning upside down and he was falling through bliss: calm bliss and his body was propelling back and forth into flips as he was falling. It wasn't a bad type of falling, but a freeing one. It was a state of euphoria, a state of ecstasy; he was an angel in the night, an asteroid in space. Rolling and rolling through the clear air.
The friends were confronted with the strobing, glowing lights of a cop car in front of them. When they had gotten closer, they were confronted by even more strobing lights, orange ones. They had seen cops patrolling the neighborhood all night, but this was something different. To Billy and his friends, it looked like they were doing road work.
"On Halloween?" Billy thought, flabbergasted at the timing of this project. There was a detour sign that had been set up, bathing in neon orange, reflective light, and told them through brightness and illumination that they had to go to the right on this path through the woods where Billy and Amy's houses were. There were already some houses on the side, but the main road with Amy and Billy's house was on the other side, and, therefore, had to be taken through a trail. The wind misted and was hissing them towards the detour path, almost guiding them like it was some gravitational force. The friends made a right and walked down the path through the woods along the choppy wooden and leafy terrain, wet and mushy with dew and a pudgy feeling from the fall.
Billy thought, "This would be the perfect time for Ryan to put his arm around Bertha. Just so, y'know, she won't be scared." Billy and Ryan have always dreamed of holding their partners in the lines of those haunted cornfields or asylums where people scare you in line and the partners bury their heads into their partners' chest and armpits, seeking shelter and safety. They dreamed of those things, guessing that they were both romantic, because that's where their minds led them. This would be the time to do it.
He couldn't telepathically make Ryan do it, or go over and tell him because it would look suspicious and, if anyone heard him telling Ryan to put his arm around Bertha, it could be awkward for the whole friend group. Billy gave the thought a place on one of the shelves in his mind, when suddenly, he felt himself get hit on the head, sending a quick, thin stream of blood down the right side of his face.
lV.
In 1976, the Santa Ana winds blew miraculously and grandly along the night sky in Southern California, as dusk settled in. It was Halloween night, and the kids were rushing their dinner, waiting for their parents to be finished cleaning up, while their friends tried to contact them through the rotary phones on the wall while their moms were talking with their sisters. Upstairs in their room, a kid was playing Pong on their Atari, while those images coincided with flashbacks from the parade at school. Everyone laughing. Everyone was dressed in costumes, friends were together, and it was a good time. The teachers getting him. The kid began to feel nauseous. The images kept flickering back and forth, which drove the kid wild, making him want to smash the Atari into bits. They turned scarlet at the thought, like they were holding their breath, embarrassed and ashamed that the whole school was in on what was being replayed in his mind over and over again, like an intrusive thought.
Their mom called them and told them they were going to work at the doctor's office for the night shift, which wasn't an unusual thing. They always did that, it was actually common for the kid to go on walks home at night by himself. The kid responded, figuring they could eat a heat-up TV dinner with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and a brownie treat inside of it. They took a break and went downstairs into a living room that was mostly lit dark. The whole place, except for the kitchen, was exceptionally dark. The rotary phone hung up on the wall, lonely and like a single gargoyle perched on top of a gray building. The kid walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, causing it to extend its fluorescent white light into a square opening across the kitchen, like a glacier in the Arctic. There were heat-up TV dinners, a corndog from Weiner King, and a ton of Coke soda. Anything would do for this kid, as anything had for the past twelve years of their life, as they took a heat-up dinner, the one with the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and brownie treat, and stuck it in the microwave for one minute. The TV was blaring in the other room and the kid went to turn the dial that changed the channels on the TV, hoping to find something good to watch while they ate. There was nothing but some game shows, the news, and scary movies. He opted for one of those, although he was not much of a horror person.
Once the microwave beeped, signaling that the dinner was done and heated up, the kid took a stand-up placemat and set it up, taking their hot dinner over to the placemat. The kid sat and watched TV. They knew it was Halloween, that they should be out trick-or-treating with their parents, not worried at all about any killers that could be out there, but they were crushed after today. They didn't want to be around other kids. If not one kid in the neighborhood who probably went to the same school as them knew about what happened to them, that would be unlikely.As they were watching the TV, suddenly, it switched to something else, a view of the school parade. "What was happening?" the kid thought. Was this another flashback? Everyone laughed. Kids his age, his peers, all marching around in their homemade costumes, one a fairy godmother, one a scarecrow, one a knight. The teachers getting them. The sun was out during the day, rising to the eighties, and shining down brightly on all the kids laughing and having fun looking up. It was a celebration of costumes and of getting candy later, and this kid went to the parade as a werewolf, something that they had always wanted to be and never got the opportunity to until when their mom bought hair and a bunch of other fake fur from the craft store down the street, braving the two mean dogs at the front yard, behind the iron fence of the house that was along the way, along with some glue, to make this costume come to life, to resurrect this costume, to turn it into Pinocchio. Their own, little Pinocchio. The werewolf costume was glued together on a brown shirt and brown pants and the mask was constructed out of rubber and hair attached to it, with eyes, a nose, and a mouth cut out of it. The kid was excited and ecstatic about their costume, feeling proud that their mom put something together like this for them to show it off. They had plans to howl into the crowd, in hopes other people would howl with him. He had all these hopes that got ruined. The parade commenced with the sun shining and the kid looking up at the sky, feeling like the world could turn upside down and they could fall into it, blissfully. As they were spinning around in this bliss, a group of kids, their own peers, pulled them off to the side from the middle of the parade and threw this kid down to the ground and beat them up. There were four kids holding them down, a lion, a bandit, a soldier, and a king while this one person already had a pumpkin, carved and gutted and placed it over the head of this kid. The kid got up and the kids, dressed like the devil, holding them down let go, letting the kid watch all the reaction over them. They spun and spun, confused in an orange, pumpkin-smelling haze as people laughed at them, like he was a clown or a jester at a carnival. The werewolf mask was still on the kid with the pumpkin over them, and the heat inside both masks were hot and smelled like pumpkin. Through the holes they could see out of, the holes of the werewolf mask and the carved ones of the jack-o-lantern, the kid saw the whole school parade laughing at them, pointing their fingers and obnoxiously laughing, which was the kid's worst nightmare. Pumpkin guts had gotten on their werewolf costume and tears had streamed down their hot face. The kid looked like a mess. They couldn't keep it in any longer, the kid broke down crying, falling to their knees. Everyone was still laughing at them, as if their emotions made it funnier. The teachers had rushed over, taking the pumpkin off of their head and carrying it, wiping off the seeds and string that are inside of a pumpkin walking the kid inside holding their hand. The kid went home that day feeling gutted like that pumpkin. The TV switched back to the horror movie, the double antennas getting their signal back. There wasn't much of a difference between the horror movie and what had happened today. Today was his horror movie. While the kid was watching the TV remembering this, they remembered some words that the kid who put the pumpkin on their head said.
"In your face."
They were wearing a devil costume.
The kid went out into the night not dressed as anything, seeing the shadows of other kids with their parents trick-or-treating, their parents taller than their children. Nothing could stop the kid, as they were determined, walking, to find who did this to them. They would get retribution. The kid would get payback. They were looking for the devil costume.
V.
On her break outside, smoking a cigarette, Margaret had been looking over her shoulder periodically, scared that the man who called himself the kid's father would be there, going to kill her. He had threatened it a bunch of times, after she rejected his proposals to visit with the kid on weekends. He seemed more serious after the restraining order was filed. Margaret always thought that he would wound up as one of the patients in the hospital she would have to take care of.
She went to the payphone to call the kid, to let them know that it was okay to go outside trick-or-treating, that he had to wear a coat, though, if he was too cold. Margaret began spinning the rotary on the phone, putting it the home phone number with the speed and grace anyone trying to make a call on a rotary phone had, when suddenly, she felt a knife stab through the side of her neck, striking the internal carotid artery in her neck, piercing it so that it was spraying all over the right glass pane of the phone booth. Gerald, the dad of the kid, pulled the knife out from the entry point he stabbed it in, and let Margaret fall, like an unhinged marionette doll. She was spraying everywhere, bleeding out like something had bursted in her body and she had lost control of it.
"Don't fuck with me about my kid, Margaret," Gerald said, before escaping into the night.
VI.
A bunch of kids were trick-or-treating, and they were all with their parents. The kid needed to find someone alone, they thought. The devil costume. Everyone looking. The teachers getting them. In your face. The kid screamed, just as a father was talking to his wife about how he left a pumpkin in the freezer overnight, so that is was incredibly heavy. Their kids and the husband and wife looked at the kid with a concerned look of shock.
"Sorry," the kid said, running off ahead of them into the night.
"Uh, anyways," the husband continued, "so, I left it on the porch, this huge frozen pumpkin, because I figured it needed to thaw out and...oh, gosh, I can't believe I left it out..." he said with a laugh.
After looking for a couple minutes, the kid in the devil costume appeared at the corner of Whicksham and Evesdrop. He was alone. Hoisting his bag of candy over his shoulder, like it was straight out of a horror movie, the kid in the devil costume walked to the right, disappearing from the kid's view, but the kid followed him, like an undercover cop. The kid trailed this kid in the devil costume incredibly far, keeping an eye on him and maintaining distance away and into bushes if the other kid turned around. He stopped for a moment at a corner of a house that was on a block that nobody was on. It was like a ghost town. No one was on this block at all. Embarrassment flooded the kid's face scarlet, like a pint of blood being filled up. They were both red. Both probably saw red, too.
The kid came charging at the kid in the devil costume and tackled him, striking him in the left side of his back, causing him to fall down with a "AGHHH!" There might have been a crack. The kid didn't care. The kid started pummeling his face, their knuckles getting sore from all the hits they were punching. The kid in the devil costume was yelling, pleading for the kid to stop and for him to be let go. He was waving his hands in the air and his devil costume mask came off. The kid beat him down, knuckles getting purple and blue from hitting him.
"You fucking asshole!" the kid yelled to him. "You fucking threw that pumpkin in my fucking face, you asshole! You're gonna pay!"
The kid looked up and looked around, lost in their rage, red in their eyes, like the torch inside of a jack-o-lantern. You could see the fire inside of him. They had seen a pumpkin on the porch of one of those houses on the block, frost developing on the sides of it. The kid knew he wasn't going to run. He couldn't. The kid walked over to the porch to get the pumpkin. It stung his hands with how cold it was, and its heaviness pulled their shoulders down a little bit as they carried it over. The kid looked down at the kid in the devil costume and said those fateful words that were said to him earlier.
"In your face."
The kid pummeled the pumpkin, smashing it into the kid's face, feeling his nose crack underneath. There was no stopping the kid, this was pure rage, in its freshest extract. The kid was hoisting the pumpkin, bashing the other kid's head in, like it was some kind of workout machine or carnival game. Soon the head began to crack some more, and then, in one sudden swift motion, the other kid's head split open, like a bursted melon, flattening it out on the concrete pavement. The kid kept hitting the kid in the devil costume, hitting him until they couldn't anymore. They looked down at the kid and the nothingness. His body wasn't moving. It seemed like there were already flies in his stomach with the pumpkin crushing his head. There was nothing left but the kid's spirit floating down.
The kid looked at him and scoffed.
"Huh. Piece of shit."
The kid then ran to throw up away from the body.
lV.
Billy awoke in a distant haze, the right side of his head pounding relentlessly. He felt wet dirt underneath the backs of his arms, and underneath his costume, as he looked up at the black sky. It was a starless sky.
Billy felt the hot, wired tension of rope tightly against his chest and arms, as well as a burn against his wrists that were bound with rope as well. Billy's heart was pounding and his chest was filled with the flutterings of someone who was scared. His eyebrows winced, he looked up at every corner his eyes could take him, like an owl's neck, trying to look around, to see if there was a way out, to see what was going on. It was a dark forest with torches, or kerosene lamps, at the four corners of this little space in the woods with them in the middle of the square. There was also a fluorescent light shining from a patio of a shed in the distance.
His eyes took him to see Amy in the right corner of his eye, also bound in rope around the chest and wrists. Her eyes had tears streaming down from them in dirt, she had been crying. The panic and terror in her eyes looked like glass. Her eyebrows were the same shape as Billy's and she winced. Billy couldn't see anyone above him, but he could hear them: the sounds and cries of what sounded like Ryan and Bertha tied up in the same way next to each other.
This first person point-of-view was filled with the darkness of trees and a slight view of Amy, with nothing else. It felt like a nightmare, like a lucid dream that went horribly wrong. Soon, a figure came into his vision. It was a man, a white man. The lights bleakly and dirtily illuminated the side of the man's face. Well, it wasn't their face, but a mask of one, Billy horrifyingly found out. It was bloody, stretched out and distorted. There was a thin, dark line and stream of blood that was dripping down from the inside of his mask. What Billy saw and realized caused him to try to scream, until he realized he couldn't. He had something in his mouth, a cloth to keep him silent.
It was the face of Ryan's father. It wasn't him, like he knew him. But it was his face cut out on someone else's face.
Billy weeped and winced at the sight of that horrifying double-face, one that was now ingrained in his memory forever. However long that memory would last.
The next few seconds could be crucial in saving his life. Billy looked around for anything, anything sharp, the lost hope of finding a razor blade, but the gripped, harsh reality of finding a stick or something of that stature.
This figure stood over him. Billy noticed it was a cop's uniform. The last name above the right chest pocket was Wilkes.
"You think you're so clever," Wilkes started out. "Out here on Halloween, trick-or-treating, friends at your age, looking to hurt somebody. To fool them out here. You think you're so smart. But you've no idea what I'm capable of. You want to trick me? Well, I have a treat for you."
Billy started to scream, but it was muffled. Nobody could hear him, and that was one of the worst feelings he ever felt in that moment. In the torch-lit perimeter of the woods, he would have thought someone would have seen them. That was far from the case. The flesh dangled off of his jaw and lip as he talked some more, like a scrap of meat a dog would like. It was like it was peeling off of his face.
"You think you're so interesting and fun, that you can go out and have fun with your friends on Halloween night. Maybe scare some kids, take away their candy. Everyone laughing. The teachers getting them. In your face. Ruin their lives. That everything is okay for you, that you don't have to worry about killers roaming the street." He paused for a second. The silence was horrifying.
Wilkes then went over to what Billy thought was the place that Ryan and Bertha were. He heard something clicking, something snapping into position, something faint, but metal, possibly sharp. Then he heard some cutting, some carving, and dissecting noises, the kind that sounded like a butcher killing an animal. Those sounds prompted the most excruciating screams he had ever heard yelped from his life. It was the sound of a blade being sliced through skin. It was a blade cutting through skinIt sounded like cutting open the skin of an orange, gritty and fruity, with a meaty feel to it and to how Billy perceived it. Bertha was screaming and it was muffled.
Billy pieced together that it was Ryan. He realized it in the death of his gut.
"You like that?" Wilkes asked Ryan, rhetorically. He turned over to Billy.
"Y'know, the reason I cut up people's faces like jack-o-lanterns is not because it's a work of art, although it is a good work of art." He paused for a second. "It's because faces disgust me," he said as his mask was hanging off his face some more, like a piece of beef jerky.
Billy, again, heard the sound of meaty, wet leather being chopped and gushing and spurting from all over the place. It sounded like an autopsy, or the chopping of a grapefruit.
Wilkes came back over to him, said "I cut the eyes out," and walked back over to Ryan's body, as more of that gushy sound emitted into the cold, lonely, scary atmosphere and Ryan was gutturally crying, emitting sounds that were not from this world, but was pain personified in its own sense. There was a short amount of time when the screaming stopped, although Billy couldn't exactly remember when. He thought it might have stopped after Wilkes scooped out Ryan's eye sockets, but then, there was the sound of cartilage cracking, like the sound of a chicken's neck being grossingly snapped. The gruesomeness of this nature almost made Billy barf, but the thing in his mouth made him stop. As this was all going on, Billy heard the muffled cries and grunts from Bertha and Amy.
"Uh," Wilkes started, more in the direction of Bertha. "Star-crossed lovers."
Billy could realistically infer that went over to Bertha and did the same chopping, cutting sounds that Billy heard for Ryan. The same slicing, the same gushy, wet leather being chopped, and the same cartilage being snapped and cut off from the body.
Wilkes then dragged both Amy and Billy with one hand pulling the other through the dirt road in the forest, leading to the haunted-looking, dilapidated shed Billy saw earlier, like the sheds in the haunted cornfields or asylums. From what Billy could see, this setup was dimly lit by smokey white light bulbs, and featured a decaying desk that had an array of horrible tools, such as a meat slicer, a meat chopper, hung-up cleavers, and these serrated slicing machines on top of it. Billy whimpered, his larynx feeling used up from all the crying and whimpering that he was doing, his throat dry and his forehead sweaty from all the crying he was doing and from all the breath he was losing. "Please," Billy thought, "Please make it stop.
Somewhere in Billy's fight-or-flight system, he pulled a trick out of a hat, then finding momentum to lift his way over to one side of the wooden shed floor, like a fish on a dock breathing for their last gasp of air. He was close with Amy.
"Get over here, you little shit!" Wilkes said, but as he came over there was a faint pitch coming from the lightbulbs. They were white and looked like they were getting slightly brighter It almost sounded like screaming. Wilkes turned his head and looked towards the light, pupils dilating and him using his hands to block his eyes from the light. Billy did the same, flopping himself back over to see where the source came from. Amy did the same.
Suddenly the light bulbs smashed, and the flash looked like a camera taking pictures from the thirties. A mist sprayed from each of the three lightbulbs. Billy knew. These were the apparitions. They were these bleak, white streaks of light that howled with the wind in that same pitching tone they met before. They whirled around the wooden ceiling of the shed and circled around Wilkes, flowing in and out of his body, causing him to scream loudly, to howl at the moon. His body lit up with a white glow, he looked like a ghost-demon and went collapsing like an unhinged marionette doll, his color quickly deteriorating back to what it normally was.. The two kids looked at Wilkes on the floor, presumably knocked out, or dead for all they know about what these ghosts could do. There weren't any signs of them anywhere. Billy and Amy looked up at each other, and smiled through the muffled things. They were happy to get out of it alive. They weren't sure what to do.
In the distance, red and blue sirens howled throughout the edge of the forest, as the police came over to kick the door down. It was Detectives Camp and Robbins, and they looked down at the scene of them in sheer horror, the two mutilated kids' faces and Wilkes down. What the kids didn't realize at this point was that a pumpkin, carved like a jack-o-lantern, appeared on his face over his head like a mask.
"Oh, fuck," Detective Camp said.
He took the walkie talkie from his pants and said, "I need a bus, Officer down."