(This story is off the beaten path for me, but I wanted to have some extra
Halloween
fun! Enjoy! Love, Chloe Hunt)
*
"I hate Halloween..." Claire grumbled as she dumped a bag of the cheapest crap candy she could find into the treat bucket by the front door.
She usually didn't give out candy. Her house was egged two years in a row because of it. She decided giving out candy was easier than cleaning dried egg yolk off of her front windows.
Claire was a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee. She lived alone in a nice townhouse in the middle of a sizable city. Her day job was mundane and her coworkers were rather boring. She had received three different invitations to Halloween parties across town. She knew being single and fairly attractive got her invited. A lot of her coworkers were swingers. That was one interesting thing they had going for them. She had to admit some of them were very tempting, but she would not be able to face them at work again after a night of dirty fucking. She didn't need that kind of stress in her life.
So, she turned down the invitations and continued not giving a shit about Halloween. She never understood why anyone did. Her parents never took her trick-or-treating so she failed to develop any nostalgia for the holiday. The only Halloween decoration she put up that year was the red glow stick bracelet she dropped around her garden gnome's neck. She had found the glow bracelet on the sidewalk in front of her house earlier that day. She assumed a Halloween reveler dropped it, so she hung it around Smiley's neck and forgot about it.
Smiley was her trusty ceramic garden gnome. She bought him at a yard sale three years earlier. He had a pointy red hat, a handsome blue coat, and a somewhat sinister smile on his chubby face. Claire thought Smiley's sinister little smile was hilarious when she first laid eyes on him. She had been going through a bitter divorce that year and Smiley was the first thing to make her laugh in months. That endeared the little statue to her heart.
As Claire placed the candy bucket on the table by the door, she thought she saw movement just outside the front window. Her eyes shot in that direction. She gasped to see Smiley's red glowing face gazing at her through the glass. It was a very startling sight. His little sinister smile looked outright demonic from the red glow of the bracelet around his neck.
"What the fuck, Smiley? Stupid neighborhood kids," she grumbled, realizing what likely happened. "I better bring you inside. I don't want any trick-or-treaters breaking you," she sighed as she opened the door and picked him up.
She smiled at him as she sat him down in front of the low window next to the door. She was hoping he would scare approaching trick-or-treaters. She picked up a piece of the cheap candy from the bowl and ate it. It had such a bitter aftertaste she immediately regretted it. She grabbed a glass of wine and sat down in the living room to watch reruns of her favorite shows.
Five minutes later, she heard a noise in the front foyer. Her first thought was someone had egged her door.
"Little shits. I even bought candy this year," she grumbled as she jumped up and hurried towards the front foyer.
She stopped in the middle of the hall and gasped to see Smiley facing into the house. She knew she had set him to look out the window earlier. She had seen his little sinister smile reflected in the glass before she walked away. She slowly walked to the end of the hall keeping her eyes on the little statue. She stopped in the doorway that led into the kitchen. She heard something small clatter to the kitchen floor. She quickly looked to the right.
She gasped to see someone had scribbled a blaring red note on the dry erase board on her fridge.
"What the fuck?" she breathed in horror at what it said.
"TAKE me to an orgy, CLAIRE, or I will KILL you... love Smiley," she read with her throat going dry.
She quickly looked at the statue again. It was now standing a few feet away from her. His little sinister smile looked more wicked in the red glow of the bracelet. She screamed in terror and ran back down the hall to the living room. She dived over the couch and hid behind it with her heart in her throat.
"Holy fuck! What is going on?" she squeaked. "I need my phone. SHIT! My phone is charging in the kitchen," she whimpered as she looked across the room at the kitchen counter.
In that instant, Smiley peeked around the edge of the couch like someone was tilting him into her line of sight. Claire screamed in horror again and scrambled away from the couch until she bumped into the wall under her hanging fern. She saw the refrigerator door slowly opening. She looked at it with a start. She could see the whiteboard again with the door open. The eraser for the board shot up and quickly erased the old message. Then the red marker rose off the floor where it had fallen earlier and began writing a new message.
"CLAIRE, I'm horny. Take me, and the candy, to the closest party. I'll do the rest," the marker wrote before it dropped to the kitchen floor again.
"What the fuck? You want me to take that shit candy with us?" she asked in a trembling voice.
The marker quickly rose and wrote, "YES!" across the top of the fridge door.
"Okay, okay, fuck... okay," she stammered.
She felt like she might hyperventilate as she slowly climbed to her feet, keeping her eyes glued on Smiley. She gasped when he suddenly disappeared behind the couch again. Her heart was pounding with compounded terror to have lost sight of him.
"Oooh fuck... what did I do to deserve this shit?" she whimpered as she hurried into the kitchen to grab her phone.
