One More House and One More Day
A Trick-Or-Treat Scary Story for Halloween
Happy Halloween!
To celebrate, I’m sharing a brand-new Halloween story inspired by Trick-or-Treating titled One More House.
I’ve also got only One More Day of the Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: The Killing Stone graphic novel Kickstarter. The campaign ends on at noon (PST) tomorrow! Thanks to everyone who has joined the school, and welcome to anyone else who decides to join today. You’ve all been great!
Necro is off celebrating with her supernatural buddies tonight so I’m taking over and sharing my Trick-or-Treat inspired scary story. Halloween makes me think of my family, especially my mom who is still alive and wonderful. So, of course, I decided to write a story where Halloween makes the protagonist think of her mom, but those memories are not very good at all. Get your popcorn and hot cocoa and prepare to get spooked. And maybe skip that last creepy house of the night. You’ve got enough candy!
One More House
Halloween is the time of year I think about my mother the most. Every mini candy bar, child’s costume, and giant skeleton reminds me of her judgmental voice rattling, “absolutely not, Anne-Marie. Halloween’s the devil’s holiday.” She would continue prattling on about horror stories of children who had gone out trick-or treating and never returned or worse returned but were damned to an eternity burning while Satan jabbed them with not-so-tiny pitchforks. As you can imagine, Trick-or-Treating was strictly forbidden which made it delishly irresistible. I have a gnarly crescent-shaped scar just above my left eyebrow proving that temptation is stronger than my will at times, an ever-present reminder of the one night I broke her rule. It was well worth it, even if my mother was certain that night damned my mortal soul, and my only hope of salvation was her metal spoon beating the devil out of me. She spent the rest of her living days trying to violently cleanse me of that sin, and my many, many others. In one way, I was relieved that I didn’t believe in her heaven so I wouldn’t have to see her again. In another twisted way, I sometimes missed her rantings and certainty about the way of things.
“Mom! We’re gonna miss it!” Lily’s squeal snapped me out of my macabre trip down memory lane. The make-up on her hand left a light gray smear on my white shirt’s sleeve. Her dark hair was teased up in a conical updo with the iconic skunk stripe and her face lightened with white make-up and accented with black. The white smock I had sewn completed my daughter’s version of the undead Bride created by Frankenstein for his monster. We had watched those old movies together, and Lily had become obsessed with the hair and the look. I had been obsessed with how the bride was only allowed a short time in this world and not allowed any mistakes.
“Miss what?” I teased.
“The candy!” I laughed as she dashed to the front door, grabbing her pillowcase along the way.
Hours later, my elbow ached, a bulging pillowcase swung over my shoulder, as we trudged up an incline and another porch light turned off. Lily and I had hit four neighborhoods and carried enough candy for a small army. It was creeping past nine, and I wasn’t having fun anymore, but I didn’t want to steal one moment of this hallowed night from Lily. I watched her twirl and howl at the full moon, beaming. I smiled like the Cheshire cat one moment and then teared up like Alice the next, grateful I wasn’t my mother but wishing I had been allowed to feel free and wild like Lily when I was young.
My toe caught on a raised bit of sidewalk that a large oak’s roots had pushed up. I cursed as I stumbled forward, barely saving the candy and myself from a horrible fall. Lily gasped, “Mom! That’s a really bad word.”
“Sorry, bug.” I shook my throbbing foot and kept the rest of my curses in my head as we arrived at the top of the hill. Six houses loomed around us; all the porch lights off. These houses were some of the oldest in the area, the whole cul-de-sac deemed historic a few years back.
“I think we might have to call it a night. Everyone’s closed up shop,” I sighed. Halloween always had to come to an end, but that reality was hard to accept for a ten-year-old jacked up on sugar and ghost stories. It was almost as hard on a mother who never had this moment or any like them as a child.
“You promised one more house,” Lily said, just a hint of a whine.
“We’ve had a great night, Lily. Let’s just be grateful for what we have,” I said, trying to preempt a meltdown.
“But mom, that house has a light. Look!” Lily pointed at the two-story house set back furthest from the sidewalk. The front door was made of frosted glass, a very dim orange light shining from inside. I could make out a dark outline of a woman standing behind the door, watching us. “We talked about this. That’s not a porch—"
The figure from within the house moved quickly to the left. The porchlight flickered a few times before it glowed steady, illuminating a front porch badly in need of a paint job.
“That’s a porchlight!” Lily flashed a triumphant smile back at me before dashing off the sidewalk, down the dirt path leading up to the porch.
“Lily, just wait…” I stopped. There was no point. She was already at the stairs. I shook my head, smiling at her exuberance. I counted six wooden steps leading up to the porch, no railings, just a drop into the plants on either side.
As I moved toward the house, it grew more decrepit. My foot stepped off the sidewalk onto the dirt path that cut through the dying grass as Lily rang the bell and yelled out, “Trick-or-Treat.”
The smell of the rosemary plants hit me as the door creaked open. I gagged, bile rising up in my throat as my heartbeat quickened. My neck and left cheek began to tingle, and I couldn’t swallow. I squinted at the plants by the steps again. They were rosemary. Shit. The smell of rosemary almost always triggered one of my panic attacks. My mom kept rosemary all over our yard when I was little. She always smelled of it.
A loud smack sounded across the yard followed by Lily’s screams. I was struggling to breathe as my adorable monster sprinted toward me, holding her hand over her eye, screeching.
“She hit me!”
Anger snapped me back from the brink of my panic attack. Everything stilled, and I could breathe again as Lily slammed into my stomach. I kept my gaze on the front porch, the door still open but the figure gone. The porchlight flicked off and only the dim orange light remained. “What do you mean she hit you?”
Through sobs, Lily choked, “S-she hit m-me on my eye.” Lily howled the word eye.
“You’ll be okay, bug. I promise.” I gently pulled Lily away from me and bent down so I could examine her face. “Just let mommy see, okay.”
She nodded and let her hand drop. I hissed in a breath. There was a red cut and welt just above her left eyebrow. Blood dripped over her eyebrow onto her eyelid and then joined her tears to cascade down her cheeks. With a trembling hand, I wiped the blood with my shirt sleeve to reveal the wound. It was a crescent shaped just like the scar over my left eyebrow. I put pressure on the cut to stop the bleeding and glared up at the porch. “What did she hit you with?”
“A big metal spoon.” Lily wailed and leaned against my arm. “Why would she do that?”
A metal spoon is what my mom had hit me with when I was sneaking back into my house after my one glorious night of trick-or-treating. She whacked me with such force when I stuck my head into my bedroom window, I had slammed back into her rosemary bushes and scratched up my legs and arms. I remember her shouting the Lord’s Prayer at me as I bled all over my makeshift ghost costume and struggled to climb out of the bush. I had truly hated her in that moment. I could feel that same rush of hatred, my own crescent-shaped wound throbbing.
I pressed my palm on Lily’s sweet, innocent forehead, watching in horror as a petite figure emerged from the orange glow of the house to the threshold of the door. The figure’s hand clutched the long handle of a large familiar metal spoon. I couldn’t breathe again as her arm moved to the left. The porchlight flickered on, and I pulled my daughter close to me.
My mother stood in the doorway dressed in her spartan uniform—a white turtleneck and gray long skirt with nurse’s shoes and white socks— while the glow of the porchlight illuminated the self-righteous face I had buried long ago. I shook my head as I scooped Lily up and backed away from that house, vowing not to let my mother ruin Halloween.