This Is Halloween

"I-it's fake," Christie said, staring at the head. "It has to be."

"Look at his face," Frank said. I dared to look. The room was filled with a foul stench, which wasn't helping me not puke as my stare was glued on the disembodied head that lay on the floor. It looked like a zombie's face; dirty skin with holes in it, bugs crawling in and out of them. The skin was graying and I was disgusted. In spite all of that, it looked familiar...

"The guy in the photo!" I said, looking away and holding my breath.

“What photo?” Ray asked, his hand over his mouth.

“We’ll tell you downstairs,” Frank said.

"Yeah, we should leave," Bob said. "It stinks here."

We went downstairs. Frank and I explained the picture to Ray, Bob, and Christie.

"Her own dad raped her," Christie concluded.

"I suppose," Frank said with a shrug. “Did you guys find anything?”

Bob and Christie looked at each other.

“What?” Ray, Frank, and I said in unison.

“We found a collar,” Christie said. “For some kind of pet. It said Cookie.”

“Wow,” Frank said flatly. “A collar. Thanks, Chris… That’s very helpful.”

I smiled at Christie. Her eyes narrowed at Frank. Frank winked. Ray sighed.

"Where are Gerard and Mikey?" Bob asked.

"Probably still downstairs," I said, suddenly wanting to just run to the door.

The five of us stood around in the living room. Bob snuck around Christie trying to scare her. We laughed as she punched him with no real intention to hurt him. Then she stood a good ten feet away from him, next to me.

“Do you think that’s blood?” Ray asked me, pointing at the couch. I shrugged, thinking about the broken piece of glass in the bedroom that Frank and I were in. Then I thought about almost kissing him. I looked up at him. He’d been staring at me. We smiled.

Mikey and Gerard came through the door that led to the basement, looking mortified.

"What's wrong?" Christie asked them, horrified.

"Journal," Mikey breathed.

"Journal?" I asked.

"Her journal," Gerard said. "W-we read it. It was terrible."

"Terrible like how?" Bob asked.

"It was her dad," Mikey said. "Her dad raped her."

"We know," Frank said.

"On a swing," Gerard said. "In her front yard. In front of her friends."

There was silence. I remembered the tire swing in the picture.

"And her friends?" Christie said nervously, breaking the silence.

"Laughed at her," Mikey said. "They thought she deserved it for being psychotic. All the guys, anyway. The girls wouldn't dare watch."

"Psychotic?" Ray asked nervously. It was obvious we were all getting scared. All the talk about blood and killing and ghosts was getting to our heads.

"She was diagnosed as a psychopath by a town doctor for killing a cat," Gerard said.

“Cookie…” Christie breathed.

"It's horrible,” Gerard went on, too engrossed in his own fearful explanation to have heard Christie’s comment. “She described the whole thing. Even all the guys she killed and how she killed them."

"And you read it all because...?" Frank said.

"Once we started, we couldn't stop," Mikey said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. It was getting tiring, all of us standing and staring. But I wouldn't dare sit on and old, bloodstained couch. And I was a bit concerned for Mikey and Gerard. Their faces were beyond scared. The way they breathed made it seem as if they'd been holding their breath for a long and had finally let it go. Their face lacked color and there were circles under their eyes; as if they hadn’t even blinked.

"It was like...someone was making us do it," Mikey breathed nervously. "It was like...her spirit wanted us to know."

The light bulb on the wall started swinging as if on cue. We all looked up at it. Then it flickered. It went out completely and we were surrounded by a void again. There was a crash that sounding as if the light bulb had fallen to the ground.

"Turn on your flashlights," I heard Bob's voice say. My heart beating erratically, I lifted my flashlight and turned the switch. Nothing.

"This isn't funny," Christie said. "Mine isn't working but why aren't you guys turning yours on?"

"These are new batteries," Gerard complained. "They should work."

"But they don't," Frank said.

"Who's got a lighter?" Ray said.

I heard the click of a lighter and saw Bob's face behind one.

"Let's leave," Christie's disembodied voice said.

"How do we find the door?" Frank asked. I stared at Bob, my only form of light. The flame of the lighter began to flicker in a nonexistent wind. It consumed the lighter, sending it in flames in Bob's hand. He dropped it, groaning in pain, and there was no longer a light at all.

"Was that a plastic lighter, Bob?" Christie asked, her voice shaky.

"Yes," Bob's voice said.

"Then how the hell did that just happen!?"

There was a sound. It sounded like...a fire starting. I was hoping the lighter didn't start to light up the entire wooden house. But it wasn't the lighter that gave us light...

"The fireplace," Ray said, pointing. Everyone's faces looked ghostly with the red glare of the fire.

"How is that possible?" I asked, my own voice shaky now.

No one responded. We were all mesmerized by the flame. There was a paper beside the fireplace that caught fire. The fire on the paper abruptly stopped, leaving a small corner of the paper still there.

“The missing corner,” Gerard gasped. I looked at him. He was shaking, breathing erratically. His eyes were glued to the paper.

“Huh?” I managed to breathe out.

“One of the pages in her diary had a missing corner,” Mikey muttered, just as scared as his brother. Minus the shaking.

"Go get it," Christie whispered frantically to Bob. When he didn't move, she shoved him. "Bob, go get it!"

Christie pushed him towards the fireplace. He glared at her for a moment, then looked at the rest of us as if searching for some kind of reassurance. Just the thought of Bob being even slightly fearful of anything at all made me scared; nothing scared him. But he went by the fire and picked up the paper anyway. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

"Does it say something?" I asked. Bob looked up at me, horrified.

"Yes it does, Miranda," he said quietly.

"Well, what does it say?" Frank asked.

"'Men are scum'."