A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous by ed. Shane McKenzie

call it sleep. I think I passed out.”
    “He said something to you, didn’t he?”
    He let her call the hooded beast a “he,” figured to correct her by saying “it” would only add to her anguish. “He told me the trees laughed. And to remember my greatest sin.”
    “Your…what the hell does that mean?”
    “I don’t know.” Lawrence lowered his head, closed his eyes against the barrage of remembered mistakes that suddenly assaulted him. But they were mistakes, not sins against his fellow man—fights by his middle school flagpole that he should’ve ended before throwing that final, nose-crunching punch; lies to college bedmates when they pressed him for his phone number the morning after; an extra few lines on his resume here, a few too many intoxicated drives home there, but nothing, nothing, that justified this hell.
    “I’m a good man, right, honey?”
    “The best man.”
    “I never hurt you, did I? Never hurt anyone on purpose when I could help it, right?”
    “No, Lawrence, you never hurt me. You’re a good man. I don’t know what this is all about either. Maybe we hurt his family or something. Caused an accident we didn’t know about? A car wreck or something?”
    “So he makes us eat dirt? I feel like I could throw up for anoth—” He looked at the vomit puddled on the ground beside him. The mess was thick, putrid, but free of soil. “Brooke, where’s the dirt? How could I not have thrown up the dirt?”
    Tears cleared a path through the mud on her cheeks, and her soft sniffles watered his eyes. He touched his belly, imagined his stomach absorbing a mountain of mud, making it as one with himself as his blood and bone. God, I want a smoke.
    “I’m gonna get you out of here. Look at me. I’m gonna get you out of this.”
    Brooke answered with a scream. Lawrence followed her eyes. The hooded lunatic stood in the crude doorway. A saw dangled from his hands.
    The mind bends, stretches, conforms to its surroundings with elastic resiliency and rabid stubbornness. It takes the mysteries of the universe, all the darkness and wonder, the wicked and the miraculous, the unknown and the unknowable, and molds itself into a state of either comprehension or ignorance. Only the purest experiences, the Grand Truths of the world, unhindered and unbound by any attempt at understanding, immune to man’s feeble pokes and prods, can transform the human mind into the babbling mass of jelly it is at its core. And as the towering demon strode into the room and lowered its saw to Brooke’s feet, Lawrence’s mind imploded.
    He heard her sanity dissolving with her screams—gurgling, inhuman shrieks that warped his reality into a cacophony of drivel. He was aware of thrashing, screeching his own mad song. Brooke kicked, over and over like a crazed cyclist, but the thing grabbed one of her legs and jerked it straight, wrenching it into stillness. Lawrence could only see its cloaked back, but with an echoing crack its arm bent, descended, and began to pump back and forth in rhythm with the crunching of blade on bone. Blood soaked into the dirt at Brooke’s feet, pooling as the ground swallowed its fill. A toe dropped to the floor, plopped into the puddle of blood, followed by another, another, one more. Brooke’s shrieks faded into nothing, her eyes rolled back, her beautiful brown eyes, and as the creature raised its saw to her fingers, it spoke.
    “Eventually everyone sins against my bride.”
    As the first finger fell to the floor, Lawrence joined his wife in blackness.
    HE CUT OFF HER fingers, he cut off her toes, and soon he’ll be coming to cut off my nose.
    The words rolled through his conscience, high and singsong like a child jumping rope. They giggled and kicked and nudged him awake.
    “You’re a rude man, Mr. Lawrence.”
    Brooke. But no. She had never called him Mr. Lawrence, or rude for that matter. And her voice didn’t slice through his flesh like a rusty blade. He kept his eyes closed.
    “I