What October Brings

The War on Halloween

Cody Goodfellow

When they were ready to open the doors, the Devil took a velvet knee and led them in prayer.

“Lord,” he prayed, “we beseech thee, help us to touch the hearts of both sinners and saved who come to us on this unhallowed night, when the forces of darkness are at their most potent. Let our humble show be the hand on the shoulder that turns lost souls to the light of your divine countenance… And grant us the strength to forgive whoever wantonly vandalized our frontage with spraypaint and, uh… excrement today… I know they know not what they do, but they also know not whom they’re messing with… Amen. To Hell with the Devil!”

“To hell with the devil,” replied the assemblage of the damned, just before All Souls Southern Baptist Church of Shafter’s Devil’s Dungeon attraction opened its doors on Halloween night.

The attraction was Pastor Gary Horton’s brainchild, and he’d run it for six years out of the abandoned Wal Mart on Main Street with the devoted if not capable support of Leah Dupar, Wenda Orlick and Burt Coughlin. While the other pastors begged for pennies from their aging, underemployed flock, Gary summoned the whole county’s godless masses and shoved the wages of sin in their faces every weekend of October, the unholiest month on the calendar, at ten bucks a head. He was the reason the church’s youth group was so successful, and God-fearing families with theatrically-minded teens from up and down the state moved to the dying agricultural town to work the annual event.

Though they tried to take it from him every year, Horton had clung to the Devil’s Dungeon as his family left him and his middle school teaching job was ripped away for ministering to students in danger of turning to the gay lifestyle, and as servants of Satan throughout the county targeted him for advocating a ban on trick-or-treating and secular “Satanic entertainments.”

Pastor Gary was a Christian warrior, and Halloween night his annual battlefield for the souls of the youth of his town. But he had never stepped into an acting role himself, choosing to watch from on high and sometimes ambush teens making out in the dead-end corridors of the house.

Dane Duncan was their regular Satan. Waiting at the end of the maze, he judged the pie-eyed rubes as they stumbled out of the last of the five major rooms and were shoved down a spiral slide to the exit.

When Dane missed his call time and didn’t pick up his phone, Pastor Horton suspected it had something to do with Trisha, the young ingénue anchoring the abortion room this year. Eating all the snacks in the break room and crying a lot was expected. The role called for nonstop hysterics, but Gary had a director’s sixth sense for when it wasn’t just acting.

Gary was looking for a substitute when the spirit suddenly came upon him, and he sat down in the chair himself and told Wenda to get busy.

Acting was a dangerous art, but that was exactly why they used it to reach the sinners. They had to scrap the gay rave torture chamber, because the pressure of living such a role for two weeks plus rehearsals put ideas in one’s head that never washed out.

They were getting ready to open when Gary did the final walk-through. Every inch of the Cutting Room, a gallery of teen suicide and self-destruction, dripped pop and rap lyrics, scrawled in stage blood. The Rumpus Room reeked of fake vomit and stale beer, but the old drunk driver’s Honda Civic was replaced at great expense this year with a Burning Man scene, where wild-eyed hipster savages in day-glo warpaint put the torch to a screaming Christian family.

The Chat Room was a labyrinth of mirrors and old monitors streaming sexy ads, youtube vids and sexting messages, the screens dazzling you while depraved sex offenders and werewolf child molesters leapt out to ambush and drag you back to their blacklight suicide booths.

The Sacred Grove was set for its endless pagan ritual, where gay satyrs and lesbian centaurs frolicked to New Age Muzak and hooded acolytes chanted blasphemous factoids about evolution.

He skipped the Black Chapel, where he would judge the damned, turned for the exit when he heard voices, felt approaching footsteps through the plywood floor.

His pulse doubled, teeth gritted until he tasted flakes of enamel. Did he hear that rasp and thud, like shuffling, dragging feet? If those darned vandals came back—Did he smell that stink of ammonia, of mothballs and dead animal musk?

No!

Someone ran into him. He screamed and shoved the assailant into a painted flat. The other fell ass-first through the canvas, clutching his throat, giggling like a lunatic.

“Trick or treat, Pastor Gary,” he croaked. “Smell my feet.”

“Quit clowning, Todd.” Gary offered his hand. “Are you high on something?”

Todd giggled maniacally. His glasses hung askew on his face, which was the ashy gray of soap scum, slimy with snot and tears. His hair was shot through white streaks, his eyes like puddles of mud. If it was makeup, Wenda had really outdone herself.

Jaws working, one hand clutched at his neck just under his ear and a gush of glistening red shadow came out his mouth. Then it was gone, just a trick of the light.

Half the time, the kid smelled like pot. Maybe he’d given Gary a “contact buzz.” Todd Chicoine was the haunt’s semi-official photographer. Never a member of the church, Todd lurked in the corridors and snapped flash photographs of patrons screaming, which generated a nice extra revenue stream.

“Todd, get your act together, we’re about to open.” He reached for the kid’s hand again, but Todd scooted backwards until he hit a solid wall. His movements had the spent, underwater quality of a marathon runner collapsing on the finish line. His camera snapped off a couple pictures, the flash stunning Gary.

“I can’t believe it… I’m not… I’m not really out, it wouldn’t just let me out…” He touched his neck, then looked at his hand. “You did it… Was it you? It wasn’t you… was it?”

“Where have you been, Todd?” He began to wonder if he hadn’t solved the mystery of today’s vandalism, in the bargain.

Todd stared at him like he’d never seen him before. “Why, right here, Pastor Gary. In the Black Chapel. I tried to leave, but it won’t let me. Where have you been?”

“Looking for you, Todd. And praying for you.”

A giggle like a seizure shook Todd. “Oh please, Pastor Gary, pray for me!” He pounded the floor with his fist. A blood vessel seemed to burst behind one eye like a shadow leaking out, as he coughed, “Looking for me… I… oh, God… I’ve been looking for you, too. And I found you, at the end…” He laughed harder, and then he was crying, clearly a candidate for the Burning Man room tonight.

Gary tried to lift Todd to his feet, but the kid screamed, “Get off me, God damn you!” Gary dropped him. For just a second, when they were pressed together, Todd felt wet, sticky, like he was covered in fake blood. Or the other kind…

“Stop talking like that, Todd.” He couldn’t stop wiping his hands off on his cape. “You don’t know the first god—the first thing about God or the Bible.”

Todd giggled. “I know all about that part where God and Satan are like, wrecking this guy’s life just to see if he’ll curse the Lord. Like a rich man making a bet with his chauffeur, about if a loyal dog will bite you, before you kick it to death?”

“That’s enough.”

“I have it straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s the only part of the Bible that’s true.”

“Shut up, Todd.”

“I’m just the message in this bottle, man. What did you build this place to show people? It wants to show you, Gary. Go look in the last room. You’ll see… You’ll see who wrote the message…” He laughed again, harder. Gary was barely reining in his temper when Todd went into convulsions, swallowing his own tongue. Gary tried to hold him down, shouting for someone to call 911.

It was too late. His eyes fixed on Gary’s hairline, he just stopped. Gary set the kid down. Picked up his camera and flicked the screen on the back to review the pictures he took, to find out what the heck happened.

He wanted to drop it. Smash it and stomp on it. There could be no doubt, unless they were both losing their minds.

Todd had indeed been to Hell, and come back with pictures.

They were blurry, lit only by fire, rendering the capering silhouettes into literal devils, demons, monsters and witches. Amid the flames they reveled in and worshiped, bodies hung like rotisserie chickens just above the heads of the crowd, dangling from the lamppost in the parking lot out front of the Devil’s Dungeon—

He dropped the camera. The floor squirmed underfoot and nearly missed him when he fell on his ass. He saw it watching him.

In the doorway of the Black Chapel. He saw a thing of black glass. Regal and rigid, a faceless pharaoh. Its skull opened like an orchid and a crown of mouths did say his name, and the sound of its wings was a voice like frigid mercury knives rasping between his teeth that did tell him the wicked would be winnowed away from the righteous, and he would be the instrument of their deliverance.

Nearly tearing his velvet-trimmed cape when he stood in his cloven-hoof boots, Gary unclipped the pepper spray off his belt and ran to the Black Chapel. He took no notice of the sound of a massive door slamming behind him, for he knew the Black Chapel, like every room in the haunt, had no door.

“Gary, do you still believe that Todd’s death was a sign from God?”

Gary blinked and resisted knuckling his eyes like a kindergartener at nap time. Lean back in the leather recliner, try not to make fart noises the microphone under your sweat-sticky shirt will pick up. “Nancy,” he said, then remembered to look at the host, “I’ve asked myself so many times… Look… What happened to Todd was between him and God, but every one of us can draw our own conclusions.”

It still rankled him that he had to answer these questions, but resisting the revisitation was all part of the act that had, in the twelve months since that fateful night, propelled him into the national spotlight.

Nancy dragged the bait back in front of him. “In your sermons, you still call him a casualty of war.”

Gary shrugged and tried out a disarming smile that looked better on almost anyone else. “I know I should go off foaming at the mouth and giving you the soundbytes you need to throw more gas on this fire without ever teaching or convincing anyone… but here goes.

“I’m not afraid to say it. We’re fighting a war against evil. And I still believe poor Todd Chicoine was struck down by a vision he had of the world to come, if we continue to lie to ourselves about the nature of evil, while we’re all marinating in it.”

The host simpered, “I think everybody’s onboard in the fight against evil… but why Halloween, Gary? It’s America’s second most favorite holiday. It’s about fun and fantasy, not Satanism.”

He pivoted to mad-dog the host’s eyeline, though she’d wandered off the set to refresh her drink. “People don’t need to cut up black cats or listen to Judas Priest backwards to worship Satan, Nancy. They just have to sit back and please themselves. Halloween is the second most lucrative holiday for retailers, so speaking out is a threat to America’s real religion. It mocks God and celebrates darkness and evil in the worst way possible, with a nod and a wink that says it’s all a big joke.”

Turn to look dead into the camera. “But it thrills the Devil to see folks who think they’ve outgrown faith wallowing in pagan idolatry, and giving in to their most self-destructive urges. It exalts him to see empty people playing at cartoon monsters while real monsters walk among us every day, because we all believe there’s no plan, no God watching, no reason to be good.”

Drink discreetly out of frame, Nancy cut him off and took Camera 2 for a tight close-up. “A lot of people are taking your message seriously, and they’re saying this Halloween, they’re not going to be silent. But a lot more people are pretty angry at you, Gary Horton.”

Gary sipped water from a coffee cup, noticing he had white curds of foam in the corners of his mouth. These cable hosts were easier to work than a pro wrestling referee. Gary smiled, and said what he always said. “I’m not even the messenger, killing me won’t stop what’s coming. I’m just an envelope, containing the message. It’s up to you folks out there to take it in, or stamp it RETURN TO SENDER.”

It’s never stopped feeling like a miracle, he thought as the segment cut to commercial, and the kids watching in the break room burst into wild applause. He shut off the TV, told them to get back to work and went to check the crowds.

If he didn’t believe before that the Lord had a plan for him, then the last eleven months had made him a knower. Without setting his foot on the path, some force had not so much guided as pushed and prodded him up out of obscurity. Presidential and congressional candidates wanted photos with him, and knitted their brows seriously as they endorsed his crusade. Many authoritative voices on the national stage agreed that the seeds of this “innocent” children’s holiday had blossomed into pernicious weeds of adult lawlessness and violence, and statistics showed ever-escalating acts of hostility towards the church and anyone who opposed vice and blasphemy, that would only worsen with every return of that cancer on the calendar.

With Todd’s death, the Devil’s Dungeon was shut down by the Sheriff last Halloween night, but the notoriety of the hell house that scared a man to death, fueled by the video of Gary railing at the deputies who dispersed the rowdy crowd, went viral. Most folks laughed at the wild-eyed hick ranting about the Devil in his cheap Devil costume, but god-fearing folks from all over reached out, telling him they felt his message, they saw the same signs he did, and they wanted to help.

Within three months, he bought the old Wal Mart and made the Devil’s Dungeon into a radical new youth church. Their numbers were still small, but his web-sermons racked up a couple million views every week, tax-free donations rolled in, and people started to take notice. Within nine months, he had the mayor and town council on his side.

This year in the town of Shafter, celebrating Halloween was against the law.

And he was just getting warmed up.

Something like this would never fly in Sacramento, but his congressman had tried to force a floor vote on the Save America’s Soul Act, which included, among other things, a national ban on children trick-or-treating, and restrictions on going masked or wearing lewd, provocative or blasphemous costumes in public.

But would it be enough, on the day of the vision that stopped Todd’s heart?

Gary knew he should welcome their anger at his work, but weathering it took its toll. He had to flush them out in the open, had to make the good people see what was coming for them before it was too late.

Whenever he came away exhausted and angry from a TV appearance, he went straight to the mail pile and read letters until he felt grounded again.

Facts were important. And the fact remained that the local authorities could find no evidence to discredit Gary Horton’s account of what happened last Halloween night.

He told them he saw someone lurking in the haunt when he discovered Todd, but they escaped. He didn’t tell them what he saw. He insisted it was one of the vandals who’d defaced the haunt, and let them conclude that they somehow caused Todd’s death. The inquest concluded the cause of death was heart failure caused by an acute shock. The only evidence of trauma was mild abrasions and bruising around the photographer’s throat and traces of skin under his fingernails, which proved to be his own.

It was just enough to set the public imagination on fire. The Devil’s Dungeon was the only working haunt in America with an actual body count. Attention focused on Gary Horton and his hell house, opening only on Halloween night in the town that banned it, on the anniversary of Todd’s death.

And it would be the only attraction in town tonight.

Outdated laws forbidding masks or facial coverings dating back to the days of bank-robbers on horseback were trotted out, and public nuisance laws were beefed up to cover the rest. No public events could represent or allude to Halloween unless they were affiliated with a church. The only other attraction in the whole county was a corn maze just outside town limits, which was supposedly attracting a big crowd with nowhere else to go.

A lot of people were out front of the Devil’s Dungeon, though not many seemed to be on God’s side. The crowd spilled out of the serpentine roped area into the parking lot, where a wall of angry protest signs chopped up the orange light from the street into a fitful, fiery glare. They looked defiant, rowdy, drunk and hateful, those who were recognizably human at all.

Leah came over and took him by the arm. “We’re not going to open while there’s people out there wearing masks, are we? Isn’t it against the law now?”

Gary looked out where she was staring. “Nobody out there is wearing a mask, sister.”

She grabbed Gary’s arm and leaned on him. “C’mon hon, let’s get you into makeup.”

In the dressing room, he looked at himself in the mirror, and saw not his blunt, balding pate or lopsided mustache framing lipless mouth clenched between musclebound jaws, or the fire engine red greasepaint and goatee and rubber skullcap with droopy horns devised to make him a cartoon.

Instead, he saw the Real Thing, looking back at him, as it had in the Black Chapel.

He averted his eyes, feeling his blood turn to salt. First, he thought it must be a prank. How could he not? He knew not how, but nothing was impossible when smartass boys set out to make a fool of you.

The cold returned, a blade of frozen nitrogen stropping his brain and lightning frying his temporal lobes and his agony squealed, brain tumor.

If it was cancer, then let it be cancer… for this was what he prayed for, this was the divine hand touching his soul as it did the prophets in the gospels. If it was just an epileptic fit that struck down Saul and turned him to Paul on the road to Damascus, then strike me down, too, Lord, shake me, make me your instrument—Let me show them the Way, let me change them—

But answer there came none.

If he was slipping, it was long overdue. Seven years of year-round work on the Devil’s Dungeon had finally broken him, and it would surprise nobody. He had already chalked it all up to a pending nervous breakdown and prayed for serenity, when he turned and witnessed a pulsating mound of flyblown entrails and offal whimpering at him to say if he liked how he looked or not.

Jolted by sheer terror, Gary laid hands upon the abomination, only to find it was Wenda, wailing at his feet. Wenda the haunt’s den mother, the jovial spinster. Wenda the gossip. Wenda the glutton, the bloated husk of thwarted lust…

Worst of all was the look she gave when he apologized, the leer that turned to pus encrusting her doughy face as he stormed out of the dressing room.

The show must go on, he told himself. And it had, up until the passing strange moment at the opening prayer huddle. Some of the kids stared at him oddly as he went through the obligatory pep talk. It was easier if he didn’t look right at them. Lice, earwigs and worms infested their scabbed and flaming features, and the fecal stench of unborn and aborted sin washed off them like the outgassing from rat carcasses.

It took Gary’s breath away. Babies fresh from Sunday school, innocent kids, thoroughly screened, disqualified by the slightest sign of risky behavior, but not one among them was untouched by the vile parasites of sin in thought and wish, the ravages of a million petty transgressions.

And these were, Gary had to admit, the cream of the local crop, the kids who never really had the chance to sin, because they were fat, acne-scarred, spastic losers, or they never would’ve come to the haunt. Even in a town where possession of a single joint by a minor triggered asset forfeiture laws designed to knock down drug cartels, so many homeless families living under bridges because Junior snuck one of dad’s PBR’s when the deputies came about a noise complaint… Even here, there were plenty of parties, make-out spots and cool things to do that none of these kids ever had the opportunity to turn down.

When he looked them over, he saw only one face unblemished by the mark of sin… the stolid, back-of-a-shovel profile of his right hand, Burt Coughlin—who, everybody was pretty sure, was deeply mentally impaired—absently scrubbing his few remaining teeth with the toothbrush he always carried in his hip pocket.

He heard Wenda and some others buzzing about the news back east. In Fort Lauderdale, five kids were dead and nineteen hospitalized for strychnine poisoning. Police were conducting an extensive neighborhood search, and the mayor was ordering every household outside the suspect neighborhood to throw away its trick-or-treat candy.

A retired Sunday school teacher in Muncie was under arrest after a child bit into a candy apple with a razorblade in it, and similar foreign objects turned up in all the treats sold at a local elementary school Halloween fundraiser. Before lawyers retained by an anonymous donor took her away from the cameras, she claimed that the forces of darkness possessed little children at Halloween, and she couldn’t abide it any longer. She cited the same passages from scripture that Gary had invoked again and again in the last year. She said she was just an envelope. Her Master had written the message for all with eyes to read it…

Just the envelope—

There were others, too many to keep track of. Rumors and instant urban legends ran amok, but this Halloween came after a hot, dry summer and two weeks before the ugliest, most divisive election in modern history. People were looking for any side in any argument as an excuse to fight, and the War on Halloween had come at a perfect time.

People all over America were throwing out their candy and keeping their children at home, trashing their slutty cheerleader costumes and Donald Trump masks and praying for God’s forgiveness, if they knew what was good for them.

Two crying boys hugged and blessed him before he hit the stage. One of them wept into his ear, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t believe you… but sweet Lord Jesus, I can see them…”

“You’re spreading His message,” a teen girl said before she kissed him full on the mouth, smearing his makeup. Another one he didn’t recognize hugged him against her bosom until his manhood stirred, then pressed a box cutter into his hand. “Be safe,” she said. “Be ready.”

The prayer meeting with the cast had been an ugly revelation. Stepping out onto the stage and looking at the crowd was like cracking open a long-sealed casket. Expecting it didn’t begin to prepare you for the overwhelming, septic stench of their sin.

Gary pinched the bridge of his nose, his earlobes, until his head stopped spinning. They’d spit on the message and cause trouble, but he saw news cameras out there too, so he rallied.

The opening was rocky, but he stayed calm, oddly disconnected from the nerves that seemed to extend out past his body like antennae, conducting bad luck and entropy into everything he touched when he was least able to cope. It was just another massive crowd, if he didn’t look too closely, idly curious shading to openly hostile, frustrated young locals grudgingly checking out the hell house because it was the only show in town.

But he couldn’t stop seeing, even as he whipped out his bullhorn and played the role. Looking out over the crowd, he pointed here and there and called out what he saw. He couldn’t seem to stop egging them on. It was the reason his hell house was a national sensation, and angry money spent the same as the cold kind.

“I see a secret drunk,” he witnessed, “and another who steals from his church to gamble every night. I see a righteous man who sponsors starving children around the world to assuage his guilt over the children here at home he’s molested, and I see a beloved teacher who delights in sex tourism with little children overseas. I see faithless women and two-faced men, liars and shiftless idolators, drinkers and druggers and masturbators. I thought this was a god-fearing town, but just about all of you are bound for Hell without any help from me!”

The crowd was angry, churning and growling. Catcalls came thick and fast. Gary turned up the bullhorn. “What the hell did you rubes expect, I’m the Devil! You want to taste the fruit you’re going to reap, then come ahead and buy a ticket. Maybe this Halloween, you’ll be saved from ending up on my plate!”

Someone threw a pumpkin. Their aim was lousy, but the smallish jack o’ lantern burst at Gary’s cloven-hoof feet. A wave of nauseous rot splashed him. People laughed. Lit cigarettes and a few beercans followed. Gary tried to reclaim his self-control. He knew how to deal with hecklers.

“I hope you didn’t sell your soul for that throwing arm!” A few laughed and he felt like he’d won them back. He reminded them not to touch the performers inside, or there’d be real hell to pay. He waved for Burt to start taking the tickets.

Someone threw a bottle.

It hit him in the back of the head. The glass and foamy backwash caromed off his skull in a thorny corona. The impact sent him down on one knee, like he was going to sing or propose marriage.

“Close the doors!” he shouted, but he restrained himself from diving for cover. Give them enough rope, let them show the world what they’re really like. If the martyrs could walk into lions’ dens and brave arrows and torture and the stake, he could stand for a little rough heckling.

More bottles, cans and pumpkins, candy and trash and rocks. “We’re not going to sell a single ticket until you people move back,” he said, and then he heard the sirens.

All over town, they howled like hollow dogs, but they seemed to come together at the far end of Main and fade to the east, where the fat orange harvest moon was obscured by a column of black smoke.

Gary ran off the stage to the doors. Without a word, Burt turned and ran away, the stinking coward. Leah had closed the ticket window, but the monsters in the crowd were burning trash and pushing it through the bars.

“Someone set fire to the corn maze,” Wenda told him.

“Dear Lord,” Gary said, but he felt only that insidious, seeping cold under his ribs.

“There were at least a couple hundred in that field, Gary,” she said. “All of them dark-sided.”

“I know, it’s terrible,” he said, but he didn’t know anything. A couple hundred people in this town, it was like lopping off a limb. But a rotten, sick limb could only be amputated. “Did you know anyone who was there…? Do they know who… who did it?”

She shook her head. “God bless them, whoever it was. If those godless creatures were struck by lightning, it couldn’t a clearer sign of God’s anger.” Her eyes bright, brimming with joyful tears. “All those idolators and arrogant unbelievers, they’re gonna find out what real fire feels like…”

He could tell she saw it too, when she looked at them. Saw what they did, knew what they were… And once you saw it, how could you turn a blind eye?

The crowd simmered as the breaking news spread from their phones. Gary was thinking they could let things settle down for a half hour and then try to reopen, when the truck came.

The big old blue Ford Ranger jumped the curb, V-8 engine screaming, and pounced amid the thickest of the serpentine crowd. It bore down several dozen people, screeching wheels grabbing horrible traction on a road paved with bodies. They tried to run, but tripped over the ropes and turned to stacks of screaming meat.

Gary ran out onto the stage and screamed at Burt to stop, but he couldn’t even hear himself.

The truck stalled, the axles choked with limbs, quivering on an unsteady terrain of dead and dying sinners. The door flew open and Burt climbed out onto the bed of his old Ford with that stupid toothbrush in his scowling mouth and an AR-15 with an extended banana clip on his hip, and commenced firing into the sea of survivors.

“You’re monsters,” he kept shouting, “You’re all monsters…”

Gary looked around for someone to help him stop it, to bring order and peace, to block the damned cameras—

Four kids dressed in hippie costumes came out onto the stage. One of them lit something in the hands of the other three, and they lobbed bottles with flaming rags stuffed in the necks into the crowd. Most of the people still in the lot were dead or wounded. Burt patrolled the perimeter, shooting anyone who still moved.

Gary ran in the only direction he could, back into the haunt. Something had gone horribly wrong, the message he sent was meant to unify people against the adversary, it wasn’t meant to inspire hatred or violence.

He ran into the Black Chapel and collided with Todd.

“Hey, Pastor Gary,” Todd mumbled in a cracked voice. His hair was shot through with white, his features drained, hollowed out by horror.

“It sure as hell works,” Todd said, “this hell house of yours. Did you ever really experience it, do you know what it really does…? I went in and got lost… and then I got out, but I wasn’t really out. It trapped me in something that looked like my life…

“The first room, I got sucked into a cult, and… we… sacrificed babies… and worse… We all committed suicide when the cops came, and then… oh, God… I died, and guess where I went? To Hell, right?

“Wrong! I woke up in the next fucking room!

“I was molested by a priest… It was like a false memory I couldn’t make myself forget… and I didn’t want to do it, but I was going insane with the nightmares, the wanting. I never touched them, I just took pictures… but people found out, and I went to jail, and they really, really don’t like child molesters in jail…

“See, after the first four rooms,I realized the only way out, was to die… So I took the easy way out… but I’m still stuck… and here we both are, what a surprise!”

Gary shook his head, this was not just impossible, but wrong. “You don’t understand, Todd. You died a year ago, and everything after that…”

“No, you don’t understand, you fucking idiot! We’re inside the hell house! We went into the Black Chapel last Halloween, and we never left! The last time I saw you, I was twenty-four, but I’ve lived four fucked-up lives since then, and I still can’t find the exit…”

“Todd, get a hold of yourself. Things are a mess outside, but come with me. I can prove that God does miracles…”

“Miracles?” Todd cracked up. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a miracle, in here. This is a miracle, right now. How do you like it?” He pushed past Gary and ripped down a black curtain to bare a window overlooking the parking lot.

The survivors from the crowd were long gone, and the police and fire were still busy across town. The Devil’s Dungeon cast and a big mob of the faithful had gathered the bodies into bonfires, and were stringing them up on the lampposts. The faces of the ones doing the burning were monstrous, things he thought must be cemons when he’d seen them before, on Todd’s camera. They were singing a hymn he didn’t recognize as they fed the fires.

Todd took pictures.

“Do you want to know the best thing I saw, in the Black Chapel?” Todd asked. “I saw God. No shit. I was an agnostic… I guess that’s why I saw God… and heard Him… constantly. Telling me what was good and what was evil and making His miracles until I ate rat poison, just to shut Him up.

“God is just one of its masks, Pastor Gary. It never created anything but misery, but it sure likes to be called God… But you know what? The Devil isn’t God’s enemy. He’s just the garbageman. And we’re the garbage. Maybe behind our masks, we’re all God, burning ourselves….”

“That’s enough, Gary. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I won’t hear your blasphemy—”

“You already know it, Gary! You didn’t build this place to save people. You just want to rub their noses in where they’re going. But where are you going, Gary?”

No more.

Gary punched out with his fist. The box cutter made a neat slot in Todd’s neck just below his ear.

Blood sluiced down the front of his shirt. His voice was a relentless, breathless locust buzz. “God doesn’t want our love… It just wants to watch us burn… and hear us say its name… Do you know God’s true name, Gary?”

Gary stabbed him in the neck again.

Todd fell backwards, gasping, “You finally saved somebody.” He staggered out of the corridor and collided with a man in a cheap devil costume, who screamed like a little girl and knocked him down.

Gary turned and ran, rushing to the empty crimson throne that loomed over the three chutes that exited the hell house, but he couldn’t remember which was for the saved, which for the damned and which was the one for really bad kids. He dove into the middle one and closed his eyes and he was sliding and then he spilled out into darkness and kept running—

He was running, he was so scared he’d dropped his candy, somewhere back there, but he was never going back for it.

It was the first Halloween he was big enough to go trick-or-treating on his own. Dad helped him with his costume. The ones in the store were silly, he pointed out. The real Wolf Man would never run around in a rubber jumpsuit with a picture of himself on the front that said “The Wolfman” on it. He dressed Gary up in old torn up clothes, and swaddled his arms and legs in strips of an old, moth-eaten bearskin rug, painted his face with brown shoe polish.

Gary was beside himself with glee. He was scary! He was the Wolf Man! He’d never have a nightmare again, never wet the bed after watching monster movies on weekends. He was the monster, now. The world would cower in fear of him.

He went out with an old Space: 1999 pillowcase, growling in the back of his throat. He told his dad he was meeting friends, but knew Dad wasn’t fooled. Gary Horton had no friends. But the Wolf Man needed no friends.

The first house he came to, there was a garden party on the lawn. A bunch of people in funny costumes were drinking and carrying on over his costume, he was the most adorable werewolf of the night. They told him to go ring the doorbell for his treat.

He went up on the porch and pushed the button. The door opened. He looked up and wet his pants.

Its skull was a black orchid that opened and breathed mist in his face. A straight-razor claw unfolded from its radiator ribcage to hold out a box of Cracker Jacks.

Gary stumbled backwards on the porch, stepped in an overripe pumpkin and lost his balance. He fell on the ragged old couch on the porch, sank into it, felt the cushions tense underneath him like muscles, felt its arms wrap around him and clasp over his pounding heart—

He hurled himself off the couch, stumbled down the porch and across the lawn, explosively wailing and hot piss splashing down the insides of his legs.

Behind him, a big grown-up got up off the couch, wrapped in the old sheet covering it, and ran after him screaming, “Fucking kid peed on me!”

Gary ran to the edge of the property and turned around. The adults were all bent over with laughter, dropping drinks and swatting each other on the back. Dracula and Darth Vader and Wonder Woman and kids in stupid rubber costumes that said “Barbie” and “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” on the front laughed and pointed and laughed.

“Thanks for being a good sport, kid.” An old man in a pirate outfit tried to give him a fistful of Tootsie Rolls, but Gary’s terror had already turned to hot, righteous rage.

“All of you can go burn in Hell!” he shouted, and he ran, he was running, he was almost home, but he had no home, but next Halloween, he’d show them all—

Gary crashed through the turnstile at the exit to the Devil’s Dungeon. Wenda and Leah were taking the tickets. Burt looked at him expectantly.

“Something wrong, boss?” Burt asked, toothbrush clamped in his teeth as he discreetly averted his eyes.

Gary pulled the cape across his velvet pants to hide the wet spot. His heart was still pounding, but—

None of it was real, it was just a vision. But not of the future, he knew that. It was just a vision to test his resolve.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, looking out over the crowd of monsters and mistakes and empty vessels waiting to see the light. Or at least the fire…

“Open the doors,” said the Devil. And in his heart, he prayed for the strength to show them where they were going.