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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