Raising Hell for Halloween

Raising Hell for Halloween

To everyone, we were the ‘weirdos’ in town, but these guys were even weirder. It only figured that they moved in on Halloween day, with dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes and black wood furniture. They were settled and moved in within only a couple hours time, and the moving truck left hurriedly down the street, passing stop signs, pedestrians, and crosswalks alike. I sensed a death early on from reckless driving, and looked to my companion, Macabre, to ask if she also had the notion. But she wasn’t focused on me.

She was focused instead on a tall, gaunt figure, shrouded in the deepest black I’d ever laid eyes on standing in the front yard of the house that the family just moved into. I yanked the carving knife out of the plump pumpkin in my lap and wrinkled my nose. She did the same, and we stared, unimpressed. Across the street, I detected the slightest movement from the figure, and it was enough for me to know that he didn’t like us, either.

He had wrinkled his nose back, and where Macabre and I came from, that was a sign of extreme disrespect, and an invitation to fight. We did it to others because regular people recognized it only as a sign of disgust. This person somehow knew he was calling us out, and I took the challenge.

I set my pumpkin aside and shoved the knife into its cap. After that, I stood, fists clenched. “Why don’t you come over here and say that to my face, bone bag?”

Macabre stood with me, three heads shorter and only half as old. She stamped her foot territorially. The tall boy only shrugged and walked casually inside his home. We saw nothing else of him until that night, when Macabre and I wandered outside to light the candles inside the freshly carved pumpkins. I lit hers for her, afraid that she would take the match and light everything else in the neighborhood on fire with it, as she had where we lived last. She yearned to hold the match only for awhile before she wasn’t focused on me anymore once again.

I lit the last pumpkin and waved the match out, only to straighten and see the buttons of a black dress shirt in my face. I leapt back, startled, and Macabre pulled her pointed, wide brimmed hat out of thin air and placed it atop her head, as she did often times when she wanted to assert herself.

“So that’s what you are,” the boy from across the street murmured, kneeling down to Macabre’s height. “Little one.” Macabre hated this. She threw a frog in his sandy hair to keep the feud at a low, inconspicuous level, instead of using her full force on one person and alerting the whole word.

The boy took the frog in his hands, stared at it a moment, and then squeezed it until it died and cast it to the side. Macabre hissed venomously, and a spark of fire lit in her eyes.

I sympathized with the frog, but it wasn’t worth waging an underworld war over. “Macabre,” I reminded her. “You have other frogs.” I then turned my attention to the boy, and made a point to stand my ground. He came to his full height and faced me, and then wrinkled his nose, like I’d challenged him to earlier. “Did it really take you that long to get the gonads to come over and say that to my face?” I taunted.

His expression gravened, and he dismissed my remark. “And what, may I ask, are you?” he inquired, tilting his head. “The witch’s keeper?”

Macabre reached for my hand and opened her mouth for the first time in many years to anyone else. Despite her outside age, her soul was mature, and so was her voice. It was simply the only body she could find. “She’s the most revered demon you’ll ever hear of in your whole goddamned life,” she spat.

“Really?” he countered. “Because the most revered demon I’ve ever heard of is one called Massacre.”

“They call me Jean up here,” I said in response to my name. “And they call Macabre Liz.”

“Prove to me that you two are really who you say you are,” he mumbled, unconvinced. Macabre whipped her hat off her head and her carrot-colored locks fell over her shoulders.

“Amiss abrii,” she said in our foreign tongue, and promptly after, spun in circles. “Who will die tonight?” She shook a glass ball from her hat and rolled it down the driveway, after which, it proceeded to travel down the street on its own. Macabre smiled when it stopped in the middle of a four-way intersection down the lane, where a group of rowdy, bullying teenagers were preparing to jaywalk. In the distance, a sky blue Chevy truck came rippling down the street toward us; toward the intersection. The teens weren’t paying attention to anything but the candy they had collected.

The driver dropped his cell phone and slammed on the brakes, but nothing could be done. I smiled slightly, and looked back to the boy, who also smiled.

“Very well,” he agreed. “And you, Miss “Massacre”?”

“Two “accidents” in one night are bothersome,” I said casually, hearing sirens in the distance, and not particularly interested in showing off for him. Macabre would, because she enjoyed causing havoc in the middle of the trick-or-treating society and ruining the holiday known as Halloween. We stared blankly at each other, and eventually, the boy bowed.

“Only you,” he worshipped. “Only you would refuse showing by killing, Mistress Massacre.”

“I do my fair share of killing, young man,” I sighed. “But not for anyone else’s pleasure except Macabre’s.”

He nodded. “I know of the two of you. But I didn’t know you worked as a team and lived on the surface world.”

“We have more fun up here,” I yawned. “Underworld is boring because nobody dies.”

“But we only have a certain amount of time here each year,” Macabre said gloomily. “We have to go back by morning tomorrow.”

“That’s a shame,” he murmured. “I’ll wreak plenty of havoc while you’re—

“Who, might I ask, are you?” I interrupted him, bored with the conversation. He didn’t seem like and Underworldian, but instead a fanatical human that worshipped the undead.

“Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know who I am?” he laughed. “Miss Massacre, Mistress Macabre, I’m surprised. I even took my family with me here and everything, and you still have no guesses?” His slate eyes gleamed. “I can raise Hell here better than you two put together, even though I do so admire your work and came to the surface to find you.”

Macabre and I glanced at each other and grinned in a deadly fashion. It was clear to us now who this was that moved in across the street from us the night before we had to return to the Underworld. His cold, lifeless eyes, love of a black blacker than black itself, and tall, proper position told us who we were staring at. He was only in the form of a boy, instead of an entity millions of years old.

“Hello, Master Satan,” Macabre and I greeted in unison. His smile crept further up the sides of his face than any human’s physically could.

“Since you’re going back tomorrow morning, and there are all these marvelous, susceptible people roaming…” he said thoughtfully. “…Should we raise some Hell?”

Normally, I was opposed to making scenes on human holidays. But it seemed like loads of fun now, and I wouldn’t get to wreak any effective havoc for another six months, especially not alongside Satan. Macabre and I looked at each other again, and then back at him. She held her hat in between her fingers, I sprouted my bony wings and talons, and he brought our pumpkins alive as vicious, bloodthirsty monsters.

“Yes, sir,” we agreed.