Authors note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This story is my submission to the 'Halloween Story Contest 2024'. It's set within my Rutwell College Chronicles universe.
Hair-Raising Halloween
Chapter One: Rutwell College Campus, Founder's Wood, 8pm, October 31
st
.
She ran like her life depended on it. Her lungs bursting, legs burning, slipping every few paces on wet leaves that lay thick on sodden, muddy grass. A slip might lead to a misstep, a fresh graze on a hand outstretched to grasp one of the trees beside her, knuckles skimming over rough bark. Some slips made her fall and her gait now bore testament to a number of bruising tumbles and an ankle that had turned awkwardly. The difficulty of her path was writ clear on the clothes she wore, blue jeans and dark jacket streaked with mud and dirt.
Her auburn hair, shoulder length and flowing, had managed to pick up some twigs snarled in its locks as she burst through undergrowth and ducked beneath low branches. The trees in this wooded area had been planted over a century before by the college's founder and had grown dense over the intervening years.
Hazel eyes, frightened eyes, darted about as she ran, looking for a path to follow. Her ears strained to catch signs of any pursuit but the hollow drum, her heart beating in her chest, seemed to drown out all but the snapping of twigs beneath her own clumsy feet. The silvered disc of the moon hung low in the sky. The tree's, denuded of their leaves by Autum's onset threw confusing shadows in her path as the branches rose like skeletal fingers into the night sky. The moon's glow made her white skin seem paler than normal, though shock and fear had much to do with her pallor. Only a streak of grime on her right cheekbone offered any relief to the bone white landscape of her gorgeous face.
The young woman, still clinging to her status as a teenager but only barely, paused for a moment. An arm wrapped around the trunk of a tree for support as she gasped for air. Her chest, small but well formed, heaved as she sucked in deep breathes to ease her lungs and settle her fear. She needed to find safety. Intelligent, a college student after all, she took a moment to run through her mind the path she had followed when she'd begun to flee. Making a rough guess to her location, she turned ninety degrees from the direction she had been travelling, lurching into a shambling jog towards what she hoped was safety.
The ground beneath her began to grow steeper, the incline of a hill she couldn't really see in the dark. Encouraged now, her deduction regarding where she was apparently right, she began scrambling up the hill, using her hands to seize tufts of grass as leverage, slipping twice more as she climbed the slope, keeping her feet beneath her though.
With a gasp of relief, the young college student reached the summit of the low hill. Before her she could see the sports fields of the college, a few hundred of her fellow undergraduates gathered there, celebrating Halloween in true collegiate fashion... with a party. Only a couple of hundred yards separated her from safety and she allowed herself a smile before starting down the hill.
As she put her bad foot, the one with the injured ankle, tentatively forward to begin navigating the downward slope of the hill, a sound like a twig snapping came from behind her. She half turned, even as she prepared to hurl herself forward down the hill, positive that a tumbling fall down its gradient was preferable to meeting her pursuer.
The young woman was a hair too slow, or her attacker was just super naturally fast. An arm, matted with dark hair so dense it seemed like fur, curled about her waist dragging her back up and over the brow of the hill, lifting her feet off the ground as it did so. A terrified scream tore through the night, cut off by a large hand clamping across the frightened woman's mouth.
Down below, the entire gathering of students slowed to stillness, anxious faces turned to the direction the scream had come from. The music was switched off as everyone strained their eyes towards the hill and the wood behind it. Some low mutters began to snake their way through the crowd, other young women nervously gripping the red plastic cups filled with beer to their chests, drifting towards friends for the comfort of numbers.
Another scream, this one echoing out from the center of the crowd. A young man from one of the 'wilder' fraternities on campus, naked except for a rubber Michael Myers mask, bounded through the crowd, the young woman he had startled into a scream now laughing at his antics. Within seconds the music and the revelry resumed, the original scream now forgotten.
Chapter Two: Rutwell College Campus, Chemical Research Wing, 4pm, October 31
st
. (Four hours before the attack).
The click of glass beakers and vials, the hum of the centrifuge machine, the odor of chemicals, all of these were comfortingly familiar to Professor Alphonse Devlin, stimuli that took him to his happy place. Since he'd been old enough to read, chemistry had been his life. From mixing ingredients in his mother's cupboards into a secret potion, all the way through to becoming the youngest tenured Professor of Chemistry in Rutwell College's history. Of course, that had been ten years ago. Since then, he had been striving to become a Distinguished Professor, his life, and his wife's goal.
He wanted the position because it would mark a significant breakthrough in his profession, a recognition from his peers of his accomplishments. His wife wanted it to happen as the position came with a significant pay bump, tied to endowments at the college. So far though he had been coming up short, something his wife found unacceptable.
Professor Devlin had been leaning on one of the stainless-steel lap tables, idly scanning the latest test results, results he knew so well he could have recited them from memory, when he closed the laptop with an irritated jerking of his hands. Picking it up, he wound his way through the orderly clutter of his personal lab and over to the small area he considered his real office, a simple desk and chair in the corner of the room. As a tenured professor, he had his own office in the campus's main building, but he never felt he was going to achieve anything there. He needed to be where the action was, in the lab. Not that the word 'action' was one people would label him with. A little below average height, a lot above average weight, the black man had begun balding in his early twenties and now at forty-five only a narrow band of hair encircled the outside of his head.
