When the man wearing blood-soaked clothes answered the door holding a bowl of candy in one hand and a huge butcher knife in the other, the Witch shrieked, Frankenstein dropped his plastic jack-o-lantern half filled with treats, and Yoda literally jumped backwards off the cement stoop. The Ghost froze, Wolfman shook so hard he started to cry, and down at the end of the driveway the cluster of parents gasped and then laughed at what a good scare it was. The man's shirt and pants were saturated in red and vermillion spatters dotted his round white face. Thick crimson streaks dripped off the shiny steel blade. Very effective.
A chorus of "Trick or treat!" went up from the kids. The parents all complimented on what a realistic knife it was and how good the fake blood was and all, and some of them lit cigarettes to hide how truly frightened they had been. Nobody thought anything was really wrong until the children started to scream and the blood started to fly, but by then, of course, it was too damned late.
******
Three years at college had taught Tina to understand the difference between making love and fucking. She appreciated them both in their proper places, which was rare for a gender that seemed trapped in mistaking lust for affection.
She loved Randy, a name she thought incredibly appropriate for a guy with what seemed like a permanent hard-on, and she adored making love with him, what he called a celebration of their souls. She also adored fucking him, which he called a celebration of their bodies, and had just spent an hour and a half doing just that. They lay together on his bed in the apartment he shared with two other guys who were mercifully somewhere else. They were exhausted, and lay supine listening to their bodies stop tingling, the way the planet's vibrations subside slowly after an earthquake.
"I gotta pee," Randy said, and he got up and walked naked across his bedroom to the hall and then down two doors to the grungy bathroom they all shared. Mike had kidded that they should add a fourth to their group, preferably somebody gay so the place would have a chance of being cleaned once in a while. It was the sort of irreverent, politically incorrect idea they had all come to expect from their resident poli-sci major. The third roommate, Bob, was pre-med and couldn't care less what the place looked like. He always said if they caught some rare disease from the accumulated filth he'd have just what he needed for his dissertation.
Tina watched Randy walk naked away from her and then return a few minutes later. There was no certain aspect of him that Tina found exceptional. His attractiveness was more in the absence of anything negative. He was of average height and build, with brown hair, green eyes, and a three-day old growth of beard on an ordinary oval face. He shaved only once a week, his face and balls, and both were currently scratchy. The latter were shrunken and drained and they ached like hell. Nobody made him cum as hard as Tina did.
He lay back beside her. Tina was a bit shorter than he, with almost militarily short red hair which she considered a sign of confidence in her own femininity. Girls express their femaleness with their hair, but only the truly secure wear it so bitingly short. She had green eyes as well, with flecks of gold in them. Her skin was milky pale and smooth, her belly flat and her breasts perfect round hemisphere's of pleasure. Her only flaws were some odd scars on her back which she attributed to an old accident she never wanted to talk about. He didn't mind them. He said they gave her character.
"Hungry?" he asked her, and she said she was as if the idea of being so seemed surprising.
Randy rolled over and his top half vanished beside the bed. "I think I have something down here," he said, and Tina could only imagine what sort of snack he had stored under his bed. Probably a mummified pizza.
He came up suddenly wearing a full-head rubber mask based on the monster from a recent horror film. He raised up on his knees and held his hands up in menacing claws and made what he supposed was a blood-curdling noise.
Tina glared at him coldly. "Take that fucking thing off," she demanded.
Randy tugged the mask off. His hair stood up in ragged spikes. "I'm wearing it tonight," he said. "You like it?"
She obviously did not.
"We're all going to the party at Delta Tau," he said. "Then some of us are going past the Porter place. You know what that is?"
She knew, but didn't say anything.
"That's where that crazy guy hacked up those treat-or-treaters twelve years ago," he said, as if having to remind her of the town's most infamous landmark, the one that wasn't located on the Chamber of Commerce maps handed out to tourists. "Right after carving up his family."
The history was common knowledge, and it was dredged up annually at the same time each year. The story seemed to grow with each resurrection. Tina knew the truth of the matter, however, and the truth, in this case, was more horrible than anything the legend had managed to fabricate.
"Have a nice time," was all she told him, and rolled off the bed to start getting dressed.
Randy already knew the answer to the question before he asked it. "You're coming with me, right?"
Her shirt half on, she froze and stared daggers at him and then resumed putting her clothes back on.
"You know I don't like Halloween," she said. She'd told him -- how many times? -- over the past few weeks, ever since he'd brought up the subject of the Delta Tau party.
"It's the best party on campus," he said. It always was. "Everybody's gonna be there."
She was already aware of the party's reputation. "I won't," she said, and found her jeans and tugged them on, foregoing her panties which she couldn't find at the moment anyway. Maybe that antique pizza under the bed had eaten them.
Randy sat up. "What is it with you and Halloween?" he asked. "Is it some religious thing?"
She almost laughed. "No, it's not a religious thing," she said, mocking his words. "I just don't like anything about it."
"You're not a Jehovah's Witness, are you?"
She stared at him, naked in the bed they had just shared for the umpteeth time in less than a year and he silently rescinded the question.
"Then, I don't see what the big deal is," he said. "Even if you don't like Halloween, you could come to the party for me."
That was a hard argument to counter.
"I can't," she said honestly. "You go. Have fun. Do...whatever it is you do at these things. And, I'll see you tomorrow."
She slipped into her sneaker loafers, ran her fingers through her hair once, more as a formality than anything else, came back to the bed to deliver a chaste kiss on his cheek, and left. Randy sat naked in bed and watched the empty place in his room where a minute ago his girlfriend had been and shook his head sadly. Then, he got up and got dressed, and carried his mask downstairs.
******
Four of them stood at midnight on the cold, wind-swept street and stared at the darkened, boarded up house partially hidden by trees and brush untended for over a decade.
"That's it," one of them said, as if the rest needed to be told. It was the sight of their annual pilgrimage, their Halloween haj to the town's solitary Mecca of terror.
"Which one of us gets to do it this year?"
It had been Mike's turn the year before, and Paul the year before that, and Tim three years ago. They all patted Randy on the back and urged him to start his walk down the cracked and overgrown cement path that led to the front door of the Porter house.
Randy held back. The chore was stupid, the challenge non-existent actually for anybody over the age of ten. Walk up to the house and knock on the front door. The way those kids had twelve years before, when Donald Porter had opened the door with his candy and knife, the knife still dripping with the blood of his wife and daughter. But, nobody had lived there since. The most that anyone ever heard at that door was mice scurrying about inside in the dark. Still, Randy hesitated.
"I think that ditzy girlfriend of yours is starting to rub off on you," Mike said. "Pussy-whipped, I can understand, but, geez!"
