A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

JOYEUX PÂQUES

by Emma Ennis

Christine Lake inched her way over to the window. She planted herself in the corner, her hand shaking as she stretched it out to the curtain that was only ever closed on that particular night of the year. As her fingers probed a tiny gap between the material and the window, her body leaned away on instinct, as though she had no control over its various attachments.

Her fearful eyes scanned the garden in the gloom of early morning. Her heart hammered against her chest as she took in the eerie mist hanging low over the lawns and wrapping around the boles of the miserable trees that cried dewy tears. It was to the end of the garden, down by the fence that her eyes feared to travel the most. But she willed them, and her heart was stilled, her blood slowing to a more civilized trickle in her veins. There was nothing down there.

Suddenly the horizon pinked, a great slash of rosy dawn cut the gray sky and she watched it spread. The glow warmed her and one by one her knotted muscles began to unwind. After all those years of fear and hiding, of wondering, it turned out that the rumors were just that—rumors.

Light began to spread and now the dew glistened on the leaves. In the corner of the garden the hedge moved. Christine stiffened and almost jumped away from the window in fright before a gray-brown rabbit hopped into the clearing. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at the sight.

The little fella was in no hurry; its whiskers twitched as it glanced around, absorbing its new surroundings.

And then time seemed to slow down.

As Christine watched, her eyes wide, she saw a clawed hand creep from the hedge. With a swift swipe it captured the rabbit. Its snowy legs thrashed against the hold, but the gnarled fingers tightened around it, the filthy, pointed nails puncturing the little body.

From inside the house Christine could hear the creature’s agonized squeal as its captor squeezed ever tighter.

A bloody, coiled thing fell from the rabbits anus, still attached somewhere inside. Its eyes bulged like cooking egg-whites and were seconds from popping with the pressure as its head lolled around on its neck in a desperate struggle for air. With one final jerk its spine snapped and the writhing ceased. It hung like a used dishrag over the grotesque fingers.

And then she stepped into the garden.

Christine clamped her hands over her mouth. Air hissed from between her fingers as she screamed her throat raw, the sound muffled against her palm. She dropped to her knees when the thing on the lawn turned towards the window.

Fear and shock invaded her body, turning it ice cold. Her stomach convulsed and she braced herself against the wall as she vomited pools of bile and terror.

AH, EASTER. A TIME of yellow and green; of fluffy bunnies and downy chicks. Kids with chocolate-ringed lips grip colorful baskets in smeared hands, their teeth watering and fingers itching for the egg hunt. For a few hours there is an excitement in the air that is almost akin to Christmas.

But not in the town of Murrins. There the doors were locked and bolted, blinds firmly closed. And they remained so until the sun was high in the sky and the latter half of the day had begun. Nothing happened before then; there were no morning egg hunts, no early sermons in the church to celebrate the Ascension.

Families huddled inside in darkness and fear until the clock in the village struck twelve. Then cautious cracks appeared in curtains. Doors eased open and father figures emerged to inspect the lawns. The lucky ones got to walk back inside with such obvious relief that the difference in his posture from the man who had walked out moments before was as stark as if it were two separate people.

Small bonfires were lit around the backs of the houses of the less fortunate. Fathers, husbands, eldest sons could be seen toting shovels, grimacing and staying as far back as possible from the pulsating, oozing thing carried on the other end; big green globs that dripped mucus and trailed after-birth. They were tossed into the flames with a hiss and crackle. And then, as the heat set in, an unearthly wail like a cat being skinned alive would fill the air.

When the sound faded and died, and the town fell quiet, only then could the Easter festivities begin.

Murrins was not a pretty town. There was nothing in particular wrong with it. It had all the right ingredients; pretty flowers sprang from their perfectly groomed beds, litter was kept off the streets. The buildings all had uniform, old-world façades of wood and stone; no tumbledown shacks or ugly, unpainted edifices to break the charm. Livestock grazed contentedly in the lush meadows that surrounded the town and wild critters could often be seen darting from the woods.

It was like a dream, a postcard, but one had only to set foot in the town to sense the tainted air of the place. Especially on that day: Easter Sunday. No amount of town planning or aesthetics could mask it.

The town had a history, and not one that it was proud to tell. This was not something one would find in local tourist information pamphlets; it was known only to the inhabitants, passed around by word of mouth in whispered conversations designed to shock and frighten. Inevitably leaks occurred, rumors got out, and that history became a stigma that lay like a cloud over the town and stained gray the countenances of the inhabitants.

The story varied depending on the age of the teller and the shock-factor intended, but the basic plot was always the same.

It happened many years before, so many that those who could remember were long gone and only their great, great grandchildren remained. There lived a girl in the town. She was bubbly and pretty and outgoing, sometimes to an eyebrow-raising degree. Some called her feisty, headstrong; others called her a harlot. Perhaps it was due to the fact that her mother had died giving birth to her and she had never had that maternal figure to teach her the ways of ladies and coach her on decorum.

Whatever the reason, when a passing battalion stopped in the town, she became besotted with one of the soldiers and no laws of chastity could keep her from him. The whole town looked on with clucking tongues; nobody took the time to tell her.

And so the soldier passed on and the girl’s belly grew so that it could no longer be ignored. It was a disgrace; the talk of the town. Something had to be done before word spread to the neighboring villages.

She was hidden away, and for nine months that was how she stayed.

On Easter morning her child was born. All pink and wriggling it was taken away from her. She heard its first cries as the door closed on her lonely prison, her arms clasped over her empty chest. She never knew if she was mother to a son or daughter.

Nobody knows for sure what became of the child. The most PG rated stories told of it being sent off to an orphanage in a far away city. Other versions were not so kind to her progeny. There was a well in the center of town. For many years it had been closed up, cemented in, and water was drawn from a spring in a less convenient location on the outskirts. There is no documented reason why. The stench and toxicity of decomposing flesh after a time made for undesirable cooking water perchance? Maybe that was the ill-fated infant’s first cot, its newborn cries replaced by watery gurgles as it was held down with a stick like the unwanted litter from a stray cat, the dark and the cold closing in around it as its short life ended. I leave each to make their own conclusions on the matter, but the general rule of thumb is: the deeper buried the truth, the more heinous the crime behind it.

All that remained was the question of the girl. What to do about her? She was tainted, used, an embarrassment. No man would have her for a wife. And worst of all—she was the weak link in the town’s secret.

So she stayed locked up, and it soon became evident that she had her uses after all. There were men in the town who had needs that their wives could or would not satisfy. And of course there were those who had no wives—widowers, bachelors. You know, the upstanding citizens who could afford a penny or two for a ride of the corrupted daughter.

No one ever questioned why every nine months or so a fresh, moist squealing bundle of joy was brought from the house; there was the reputation of the town to think about. The whole town participated in her lifelong rape, whether they laid a hand on her or not, whether or not they were the ones who wielded the throbbing, twitching rods that plugged at her womb daily and nightly, sometimes mere days after she had given birth.

And then something happened.

Monday night was Bridge night in the local hall for the ladies, and hence, it was the busy night at the house. It didn’t run on an appointment system; the men just dropped by when they felt the stirrings. The women were away, the men were left unattended…and we all know whose hands the devil makes work for.

It became poker night at the house, mainly because the queues were getting longer by the week and the patrons needed a way to amuse themselves while they awaited their turn. On that particular night the parish pastor was downstairs with the girl. It was not in his habit to call to the house on Monday nights, usually coming instead at quieter, more clandestine times. But, when nature calls…

He was a respected and busy man, so naturally when he showed up he skipped to the head of the queue. He had been down there for some time when an inhuman roar rose from the bowels of the house, shaking the foundations of the town. In homes all along the street, people stopped what they were doing and shivered; the Devil had come to Murrins.

In a stumbling body, the men rushed downstairs, the loving father at the forefront, anxious to protect his business interest. He flung open the door and a wave of that awful howl buffeted them with its force.

On the floor by the bed was a man, naked and bloody. Where his penis should have stood, proud and erect, was a jagged stump, a geyser of blood spurting from the center, the flow already ebbing as his life did. The detached appendage was lying on the floor by the door like a giant fat slug; a slimy streak marked its track down the wall where it had been flung.

She was crouched over him, her thumbs dug deep into his eye sockets. Vitreous fluid leaked from around her fingers, getting sucked up his nostrils with each agonised breath he took. His leg twitched as her long nails shorted some circuit in his brain.

Her head snapped up and she glared at the string of shocked faces outside the door, faces she knew only too well, faces that would, at some point in the night, have been hovering over hers, sweating and contorting with exertion and unrequited ecstasy.

Her eyes flashed red and black, something very alive and very diabolical behind them. Her hair was a tangled black mass around her pale, sunken face. Her dry, abused lips cracked and split as they stretched in a deranged snarl, her teeth ringed with blood.

All the torment and torture, the pain and injustice had broken through that feminine shell and manifested itself into the demon that stood before them.

The growling sound was coming from deep within her throat. It grew and rolled up through the house, filling the foggy night air. People set down their forks or newspapers and listened in fear.

A blue flame licked the house, flicking out from under it, forked and pointed like a dragons tongue. Within minutes it had consumed the house and everyone in it.

That night, all through the town, every infant disappeared from under the watchful noses of their loving parents. Mass panic erupted the next morning when beds were found cold and empty. Terrified parents met at the ends of driveways, wringing their hands in despair, tears cleaving tracks of worry down their cheeks.

One by one they found them; their mangled bodies scattered across the woods and fields like discarded dolls. Some bobbed face down in the well, all bloated and sodden. The lifeless forms of others dangled from the trees as though dropped from a height, their necks twisted, limbs shorn. Others lay on the cold ground, broken and bloody, spines snapped like twigs. They all had one thing in common—there were none left alive. She had exacted revenge for each monster that had been planted in her belly, and for the only one that she had cared about.

And so, according to the legend, that was how it began.

On Easter morning she came, The Easter Bunny, stalking through the gardens of the town. In some she left her mucus-coated gifts to the inhabitants, others she passed right through.

When Christine was a kid she remembered warnings from her mother not to look out the window on that night before Easter, and never, under any circumstances, to go outside before her father said it was okay. She remembered vividly the burning rituals in the back yard.

Her mother told her once of a time when she herself was a child, when she dared to look out the window. She screamed so loud her ears rang and Christine’s grandmother had covered her eyes, comforting her and chastising her in equal measure.

“You don’t want to see that, Christine,” she had said.

Now her mother was gone. She had died old and gray and peaceful in her sleep on a blustery day the previous autumn. Christine had a child of her own. A two year old with bouncing blonde curls that she refused to trim.

Her father lived with them, supported by a walking stick those days. Countless times Christine had tried to move from Murrins, but life had always gotten in the way and thwarted her plans. Now her father did not want to leave her mother and she, Christine, must look. For the sake of her son and all the unborn children she and her husband wanted to create, she got up with her boy at dawn and stood at the window on Easter morning, to see if the legends were just horror stories, or history.

CHRISTINE DRAGGED HERSELF TO her feet, her legs shaking. Her gut contracted and her whole body screamed at her to run away, but her traitorous hands once again reached out and lifted the curtain. Her heart beat like a drum when she saw that she was still there and it had not been her imagination, her tired eyes conjuring falsities.

She stood on the lawn, looking down at the grass. She was naked, scraggy black hair sprouting in patches from her wrinkled skin. Her hideous, saggy breasts dangled like excess flaps of skin against her stomach. As Christine watched, she squatted low over the ground. The window was open a crack and the smell of her wafted across the garden on the breeze; the smell of blood and filth and sex.

From the dense black bush at her pubis something began to emerge. A gelatinous goo slipped from between her legs and hung there like a string of clear snot. She shifted on her feet and an oval, membranous thing fell to the ground with a wet plop. Blood and amniotic fluid splattered with its exit.

It lay there, pulsing between her feet. Something moved beneath the transparent shell; something pink and green and monstrous.

She moved over a few paces and squatted again. Christine could see her tense up as she forced out another seed.

And as if her eyes weren’t abominated enough, they took in something worse.

A thousand ‘what-ifs’ lashed at her in a successive assault: What if they had thrown out the rancid meat they found in the fridge the night before instead of feeding it to the dog? Then it wouldn’t have started to squirt its reeking diarrhoea all over the floor and have to be put outside for the night. What if Carl had pushed him out the back door instead of the front? What if he had not gone to bed so early and hence been so befuddled that he had not latched the door after him? What if Christine had been watching her son instead of the gorgon on the lawn with her slimy discharge?

All those little links created a chain of events that led her to the point where she was now watching them both.

Christine was frozen in fear as she watched her little boy wander into the garden, his blonde curls bouncing as he walked. The two outside were unaware of each other.

She willed the hag not to turn around; she tried to catch her son’s attention; she struggled to make her legs move.

But nothing worked.

The hag suddenly pivoted, her black and red eyes fixing on the unsuspecting toddler. She bounded across the distance between them like some grotesque rabbit. His curls sprung when she grabbed him. His high-pitched wail of terror pierced Christine’s heart. In a single movement she cracked him in half like an egg. His juices flowed, his cries ceased.

She lowered her horrible head to his back and with teeth as sharp as razors, tore away a chunk of fabric and innocent flesh. She spat it aside and ducked down again, ripping away pieces of his little body until she got to the good stuff, the marrow in his bones, the fluid from his severed spine. She drank it down with relish, her horrible lips wrapping greedily around the bone.

Inside the house Christine found her voice. She screamed until her throat felt like it was going to bleed.

A hand clamped over her mouth and she was dragged away from the window. She spun around to face her father. Tears streaked both their faces.

“My baby!” she wailed. “What’s she doing to him?”

Her legs went from under her and her father followed her to the ground, his arms gripping her tight with a strength that had not wasted along with his body.

“You have to let him go,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “We must bear the sins of our forefathers. It is the burden of our town.”

Christine hiccuped huge sobs that racked her body.

“My baby,” she moaned, lying down on the floor and curling up in a protective ball while her father tried his best to soothe her through his own pain.

How some things always stay the same. Just as people never asked where the newborn babies came from that were carted from that house long ago, now they turned a blind eye when the younger members of the community failed to show, their presence replaced by red rings around the eyes of their parents.

Nothing much had changed in Murrins over the years; nothing much at all.