Thursday, October 31, 2019

Best Halloween story EVER

So says a reviewer: Best Halloween story Ever!

From Latticework, Feast Night:




The living and the dead are inseparable.


HALLOWEEN. All Hallows Eve.
Some call it a pagan festival. Others know it as an evil feast. Time and technology has not yet forced it into the recesses of memory and myth. Some see it as a carnival of fun. Others regard it as the worst manipulation humankind has confronted, and continues to face. Relegate it to the past, bury it in layers of legend and let us be done, they say … and are ignored.
This is the greatest night of all dark nights for the dead.
On this one night the lifeless are awake and aware after waiting in impatience and agitation too many forgotten nights, again to stalk the innocent and unwary, a nocturnal forage of feasting on souls after spilling fresh, warm blood.
They will not surrender to memory and myth.
Dark, starlit and moonless are the heavens, the wind ghostly in towering leafless and gnarled trees. It is cold and fog swirls as apparitions. In mist-ridden shadows death appears once more.
Tree limbs are like old women's spectral fingers reaching out to anyone who happens to pass, anyone creeping along the path of blood and gore on this night, hoping to remain unnoticed, unseen. There is no hope.
Children out trick-a-treating are snatched by black-cloaked figures and what is left to remind their parents of terrible tragedy are fear-ridden, hollow screams, and wicked cackles from the shadows.
Children are sacrificed as living victims to the gods, gods who enjoy the spilling of guts over paths while fire dances its erratic rhythm around sacrificial altars. Gods with names from ancient, mythical times. Their names should be scrapped from every record, and yet even a whisper of a name keeps them alive.
This horror happens annually in the town called Flarant. It is a town isolated by nature and fear, given the widest berth by strangers near and far; a town to be forgotten by humankind, a sacrifice of the few to save the many.
Year after year the townspeople hope for change. Year after year they attempt to leave Flarant in the aftermath, and year after year an invisible force drives them back.
Fearful of the terror and tragedy, no one leaves home; everyone is indoors and barricaded inside before the sun sets for All Hallows. Year after year they hope to remain safely inside. Year after year they hope to save their children. Year after year they are terrorised and haunted out into dark and menacingly quiet streets. Children slink from house to house with their pails to entice sweets, terror dogging every step.
Half will be sacrificed, year after year.



Find out what happens when Flarant is besieged once again on Halloween!


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