Happy October! Here’s an all-new story, free to read!

The Cruel Bite of Autumn

by Jeremy Thompson


Within my oft-hazy memory, one Halloween remains detail-armored, though the decades have dissolved so many others. A child I was then, hardly older than you, Son.

Jittering in bed, bouncing the night’s treasures from palm to palm, I rode my sugar rush, when an unmistakable creaking signified my parents’ bedroom window sliding open. The gentlest of thuds next sounded—two feet alighting—followed by the rustling of sheets. Eyes growing ever wider, I waited…and waited.

At last, mere minutes ’til midnight, when I half-suspected that I’d imagined those sonances, a twisted doorknob permitted a masked figure’s entrance. Day-Glo orange was the skull that he wore over his face. His sweatsuit matched that shade perfectly.

“Did you come here to kill us?” I asked, recognizing an urban legend brought to life. “To pose our corpses in ghastly ways for policemen to find?”

“Indeed, I did,” the man singsonged, as if a graveyard breeze had attained speech, “but it seems I’m entirely tardy. Tell me, what did you do with the rest of them?”

“Uh, well, here you go,” I said, tossing over my treasures.

After collecting them, my visitor spun on his heels and made an exit.

Well, my ingenuity that night spared me much suffering; that’s for sure. That’s why every All Hallows’ Eve, while their kids trick-or-treat, we bludgeon parents with hammers until their faces are all mushy, and leave their teeth in a bowl for the Hallowfiend.



For more of the Hallowfiend, check out his cameo in The Phantom Cabinet 2, out today!

https://a.co/d/97oJhbs

Description:

Martha Drexel’s long, lonely years of catatonia have ended, but what now steers her body? What makes shadows weighty? What collects and enslaves the ghosts of tortured-to-death Southern Californians?

Let’s give cyclical violence another whirl, shall we? Let’s revisit old friends and enemies and wonder which amongst us will be dismembered.