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Release #4 in the short horror story, Twilight-Zone-esque Tenebrosities series, “Trick or Treat,” is available now. I originally wrote this in 2012, but rewrote it this month to rescue it–I just liked the story and characters too much to completely blow it off 🙂
You can find it here:
books2read.com/tenebrosities-trick-or-treat
What’s the matter, Jake? Chicken?
It’s Halloween. Just over a month ago, Jake’s brother Dave died in Afghanistan, killed by an IED bomb. Now Jake is going trick or treating, dressed like a solder. Dressed like his brother.
He decides to take the same route that he and his brother took, cutting through a junkyard, walking down a big hill, and scoring candy at the kind of neighborhood where the neighbors actually leave the lights on and don’t pretend not to be home.
But something is waiting for him in the graveyard.
Is it the ghost of Jake’s dead brother?
A creepy horror tale about what finds us when we’re vulnerable, on Halloween.
Trick or Treat
Jake stood at the edge of the junkyard, dressed as a soldier and holding a fake rifle on a strap over his shoulder. The rifle had an orange tip in case anyone was stupid enough to think it was real. The sun had set and the dark sky was covered in low clouds, turned orange from the streetlights. Lone flakes of snow descended here and there. Did that really count as “snowing” or not? The air smelled like rust. A ton of sirens were going off on the far side of the junkyard, more of them every second, like they were headed toward a fire or a big accident.
This morning—Halloween—he’d decided to cut through the junkyard on his way to go trick-or-treating at the bottom of Cliff Avenue. Now he wasn’t sure.
Stuff had changed at the junkyard since the last time he had been there.
The fence had a new line of barbed wire at the top, one that hadn’t been there before, and there was a new sign up on the fence.
Beware of dog.
Jake had cut through the junkyard once before with his older brother Dave, when he was ten. But that was two years ago.
Last year Dave had graduated early, joined the Army and gone to Afghanistan. And then in September he had died from some stupid homemade bomb buried under the road. Mom had told the Government to cremate Dave’s ashes. They were in a memorial building that looked like a post office, with Dave’s name on a brass plate.
Nobody was okay at Jake’s house. Not Jake, who was always in trouble at school, and not his mom, who was an EMT and had a pretty good excuse, and not his older sister Amy, who was fourteen and just plain mean anyway.
Tonight she had yelled at him that he was too old to go trick-or-treating, and he had to stay home and pass out candy so she could hang out with her friends.
He had screamed back at her that she didn’t have friends and run out the front door, slamming it behind him.
Then realized he had forgotten his trick or treat bag.
He wasn’t going back. And he wasn’t going trick-or-treating in his own neighborhood, either. Too many people who locked their doors and turned off all their lights, except for the TV flickering in the living room.
A mocking voice seemed to whisper in his ear:
What’s the matter, Jake?
Chicken?
Before Jake could think too much about it, he threw his fake rifle over the fence.
It turned around and around through the air, the orange tip flashing under the streetlight, and crashed on top of a car before skidding out of sight.
No alarms went off, no dogs barked.
He was going in.
Read more at books2read.com/tenebrosities-trick-or-treat.