Chapter 1: Feast Night

 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.

FEAST NIGHT