A short excerpt (a short story, after all!).
The town of Flarant is abandoned to its fate, year after
year.
Year after year the people of Flarant lose their children to
the ghosts and ghouls on All Hallows Eve. They cannot flee. They are beyond all
hope.
And then a stranger enters the town in the days leading up
to the event. This year, there is difference in the air. This year, the
children are not alone.
HALLOWEEN. All Hallows Eve.
Some call it a pagan
festival. Others know it as an evil feast. Time and technology have 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.
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