Chuc and the Bad Pran

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"What do you have against the old widow anyway?"

The gang was at happy hour across from the college campus, and Chuck had just announced his intention to toss eggs and stink bombs at the home of the local psychic. The woman was 70 if she was a day, and nobody knew why Chuck would care other than wanting to do something for Halloween.

"She's old, she's ugly, she's got that really weird overgrown organic stuff in her yard - I don't know why the city lets her when we've got to mow our lawns and trim our bushes. So I figured it's Halloween, what's one more prank in the city? It'll get blamed on high school kids or gang members."

The next round of drinks arrived, and talk turned to other things. But the night before Halloween found Chuck dressed in camouflage and set up with motor oil, eggs, firecrackers and dog poop. It was an overcast night, slightly humid, and the widow's garden patch gave off smells that made Chuck's stomach turn. He figured it would be best to start around back, and stepped carefully up the rickety wooden stairs to the rear porch. Setting his pack down, he brought out the plastic bags of doggy doo and started squeezing them over the threshold of the back door.

The motor oil made a heavy base on the bottoms of the window frames, and he started laying out the firecrackers. The smell from the back door was hanging close because of the humid air, and the motor oil didn't help matters any. He peered through the shaded screen of the back window, wondering whether the inside of the house was as ratty and run-down as the outside.

Lightning flashed suddenly, and right in front of his eyes a horrid visage barely human leered at him, discolored sharp teeth snapping, Chuck screamed, threw out his hands for protection, and stumbled backward. His heel caught on a broken slat and he fell backward, breaking through the railing of the porch and hitting his head on a rock in the ground.

When he managed to swim up to consciousness, past the killer headache that made opening his eyes a painful effort, all he could see were two withered ankles over house slippers that even his grandmother would have thought outdated. Great, he thought, caught by the widow.

It wasn't until he tried to lift his head and found he coudn't look up that Chuck started to worry.

Not only couldn't he move his head, he couldn't move his arms or legs - and if his head was at the widow's ankles, then the rest of him had to be down in the ground. He was still trying to work out what that meant when the widow started talking. Her voice was not at all what he expected - it was low, silky, hypnotic, almost - the thought repulsed him - sexy.

"Ah, good - you're awake. Didn't your parents ever teach you not to go around defacing people's property? Honestly, kids today have no manners. Well, you'll get a lesson that should last you a lifetime." She laughed, for no reason that Chuck could figure out. He tried to answer, but his throat wasn't working right - all that came out was a hoarse animal-like whimper. Some experimenting had established that he couldn't move anything other than his eyes and mouth, and his entire body felt like it was clasped in a rough, scratchy blanket. Oh, gross - the old woman had taken his clothes off!

"I'm more than a psychic, you know. I used to be a teacher, but mostly I'm a witch!"

The woman squatted down in front of Chuck's face, her knees spreading and opening the tattered robe she wore. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see what a 70-year-old woman looked like down there. She kept on talking.

"Do you know how witches work? We serve Mother Earth - that's why I have my garden. And Mother - well, she needs to be fed."

The woman wasn't making any sense, but that wasn't what Chuck was focused on. The very ground around his body was shifting, getting warmer, creeping and scraping against his flesh, enfolding his limbs, separating them, compressing them in rolling waves.

From human hands, the effect between his legs would have been enjoyable. Under the scattered moonlight with the widow's shadowed thighs drawing closer to his face, his arousal only added to his rising fear and revulsion. The widow examined his face, nodded, and smiled. With a low sensual purr she whispered into his ear, "Mother's hungry!"

Chuck's eyes were wide and bulging, his face swollen and dark red, the sounds from his throat pure animal. The heat suffusing his groin was growing, aching, pulsing, and something was working its way up inside his bottom. The widow was still talking, but Chuck couldn't make sense of the words, his brain scrambled by the way his body was swirling out of control, his hips thrusting against the enclosing earth. With a silent scream of pure terror Chuck began to convulse, fertilizing the ground around his straining limbs, his mouth stretched wide.

The next night, all the neighborhood kids agreed that the great big scary jack-o-lantern in the widow's garden was the best Halloween pumpkin they'd ever seen.

/ END /