This year’s fall story competition asked students for their best attempt at a Halloween themed story, whether spooky, cute or downright weird. Here’s the best the of the bunch:
First Place
Halloween Story
By Jay Tellini
You probably don’t believe in scary Halloween stories, do you? I used to think that, but that was before I found myself in the middle of one. As a witness of a paranormal occurrence, I can assure you that scary stories are all too real. Rest assured, I am not here to tell you a tale about some ghost in the cemetery or the resurrection of the Frankenstein monster. Every detail of my story is true.
It was the night of Oct. 30 in the University Student Center, as everyone anticipated the coming of Halloween. Doors were decorated with bats and skeletons, and the autumn smell of pumpkin pie drifted through the halls. Each lounge was filled with students discussing their costumes for the next day, as everyone seemed eager to show theirs off. The “Ghostbusters” theme song could be heard playing over and over throughout the evening, and marathons of scary movies ran all night. Nobody seemed to mind staying up late on a school night, as there was too much excitement for the day ahead.
The next morning is where things began to get strange. As I was walking down the hall, there was another student making his way over to the elevator. When he came into focus, I noticed something very odd about his appearance. He seemed to be dragging his legs, almost as if he were carrying something very heavy. His eyes were bloodshot, and his body was hunched. I greeted him in the elevator, but he did not respond. In fact, it was almost as if he did not even know I was there. I shrugged it off and proceeded to walk over to the cafeteria for some breakfast. There were a dozen or so students at the tables, all of whom seemed to resemble the same characteristics as the boy in the elevator. They all had blank expressions on their faces and seemed to move very slowly. Too creeped out to stick around, I went outside for some air.
What I saw next made me drop my books and cower in fear. As I exited the building, I saw swarms of these expressionless, zombie-like figures roaming the campus. One came up to me as I stood motionless like a statue. He was tall and had long brown hair. There were big bags under his eyes, and he seemed to wobble back and forth. He quickly looked at me with his half-shut blue eyes, and then walked away. I was filled with relief. But in that brief moment of eye contact, I noticed something about that man. He seemed to be longing for something, with a craving that could not be satisfied. As I took another look around the campus, it was apparent to me that these creatures were indeed looking for something. Perhaps it was an answer, an explanation as to what had happened to them.
My mind began to race, trying to think of something that could cause normal human beings to act like this; something that did not affect me for some reason. I began to backtrack to the night before. I went to bed early because I had a chemistry exam the next day, and everybody seemed to behave normally at that time. Unable to come up with anything, I cautiously walked back inside the USC. I took a deep breath through my nose and noticed something different about the smell in the cafeteria. There was something I usually smelled in the morning that was absent on this day. That’s when it hit me; the Coral Café was out of coffee.
Second place
Hallowed Ground
By John Ballard Pecora
The sun was setting as Mark and Stacey entered the old and forgotten Rose Hill Cemetery. Dead leaves crunched under footsteps, rustling noisily around them and the displaced tombstones as they ventured into the depths of the decrepit memorial to death and decay. The blood red St. Petersburg sky that hung over the graveyard on the way in had faded rather quickly to an inky black night, which seemed to drip down upon them. The young couple arrived at a mausoleum, denoting a mass grave of unnamed and escaped slaves killed upon capture and unceremoniously interred underfoot. Already creeped out by the morbid setting, Mark felt a dangerous animation emanating from the structure in his bones, as if the crypt itself was trembling.
Stacey was spreading out a bed sheet as he was reaching into his backpack for the pint of pumpkin-infused vodka he had pilfered from the batch his mother had prepared for tomorrow night’s Halloween party. In his peripheral vision, he saw the sheet floating to the ground like a ghost returning to its crypt. His nervousness — she was not a virgin, yet he had only been as far as second base — was electrified as Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried To Live” screamed abruptly from his phone. His skin felt as if it was going to crawl from his flesh.
His heightened anxiety was replaced by a burgeoning heat. The mausoleum behind the girl was indeed trembling — and began to glow like burning coal. In that instant, it exploded! Molten granite and mortar spewing outward, raining fire through the night. His skin turned the color of the erupted mausoleum, and his fingernails, suddenly elongated and sharp, rendered his hands into implements of evil. All the muscles of his body rippled with immediate hatred. He swung at her with his left hand in an open-fisted uppercut, caught her just below her abdomen and ripped upward, catching on her sternum and launching her suddenly disemboweled body upward in sync with the burning projectiles of the raging, ruined mausoleum. In the same instant, he swung his right hand down, severing her escaping organs and forcing her body downward. He caught her by the throat with his bloody left hand, just at the jaw, and brought her face to his, her eyes still seeing him. Shock! Horror! Failing breath. While keeping her gaze, he reached up with his right hand, grabbed her throat, just below the grip of his left hand, and ripped out her windpipe and larynx. Her blood sprayed and splashed, drenching him. He licked his lips and tasted her. “So this is sex,” he mused, as he looked into her still conscious eyes. Holding her up now by her ruined throat, he plunged in again — a satanic hysterectomy — third base, at last!
Still holding her face up to his, lips touching, his flaming eyes burning into the last scene of her life on earth, his hand swimming in her gory remains, he erupted like a volcano in Hell. The fury of demons and tortured slaves on fire erratically rushing around bleak earth and black sky, merging with raging devils ejaculated from ancient crypts, the swirling ruin of the mausoleum — a brilliant background to the light fading from her eyes — the wicked fire in this unholy night, the mutilated sacrifice to his adolescent agony. He tossed her wasted corpse aside, into the dirt and leaves like a soiled tissue. Awash in the chaotic flight of demons and drenched in hatred, vengeance and viscera, he raised his gore-imbued arms and face to the heavens, no longer a virgin.
Honorable Mentions
The Elevator
By John M. Funke
Mr. Rawlings was older than anyone Tommy knew. The old man lived in the rickety hotel building across the street. Mr. Rawlings had been their neighbor for as far back as Tommy could remember. A stiff old gentleman, austere, very quiet. Tommy’s mother said he was a recluse; she said this with sadness, her voice trailing off. Tommy knew the old man never had any visitors, at least none that Tommy ever saw, and as far as he knew, the old man never went anywhere. He just seemed to stay in his room all the time. Sometimes, Tommy’s mom would take him things from the market. She did a lot of nice things for Mr. Rawlings.
One day, in late October, Tommy’s mom cheerily announced that she would bake a pumpkin pie for Mr. Rawlings for Halloween. She insisted that Tommy deliver the pie in his cute little trick-or-treat costume she was making for him. It would surely bring a smile to the lonely old man. Tommy shuddered at the thought of going inside that creepy old hotel, and especially at a time when who knows what sort of real ghosts were sure to be lurking in that spooky place, which was as likely haunted as not. The boy wondered if real ghosts would be quick to kill him once they saw that he was impersonating one of their kind. He hoped not.
The ghost costume finished, the pumpkin pie baked. It was the Day of the Dead. Time to go to the creepy old hotel. The hotel really frightened Tommy. He was going to be 9 years old next month, he told himself; he needed to be brave. The pint-sized ghost trudged out the door and across the street.
When Tommy entered the old hotel, he felt a wisp of chill nibble at his skin as he heard the old elevator come clunking down to the ground floor. It was just a cage made of metal bars, like a bird cage of sorts. The boy froze dead still when he saw that there was no one in the ancient elevator, no one at the control lever that makes the thing go up or down. He eyed the door behind him, seriously considering a bolt for the street.
It took a few minutes for the boy to regain his courage. He cautiously slid the gate open and stepped into the flimsy cage. Tommy carefully studied the control lever, afraid to touch it. Suddenly, the cage gave a little quiver, and then it began to ascend. Now the boy was nearly out of his head with fear, his mind bombarded with questions. Why was the elevator moving on its own? Will it stop at the third floor? Will it stop at all? Or will it reach the roof rafters and just leave me hanging there? Or worse, fall crashing back down to the ground in a tangle of cable and twisted metal.
The old elevator continued to ascend, moving past the floor marked with the Roman numeral “IV.” Tommy felt his stomach pitch, nearly causing him to throw up. The elevator just kept on climbing, clanking slowly upward. Though the building was four stories high, Tommy had never been beyond the floor marked with a large “III.”
Now, his eyes closed and nearly scared to death, he felt the elevator slow to a stop. Still carefully holding the pie, he opened his eyes. The ghostly image in front of him, shimmering there in midair, was that of Mr. Rawlings, a fiendish smile on his lifeless face. In a scratchy voice he said, “I’ve been expecting you, Tommy.”
Pumpkin Pie and the Pier Pelicans
By Arianna Reybitz
It’s been almost a year since the Pier shut down and plans for anything new in its place are still in limbo, or so I’ve heard. It’s a shame they couldn’t leave it open until they decided on something. For a rickety old pier with a dinky aquarium and bird poop-splattered sidewalks, this was a fun place to hang out on the weekends. Even tonight I kick myself for not going as often as I should have.
Funny how we never really appreciate what we have until it’s taken away.
Even so, there’s no stopping me from walking along the soon-to-be-demolished poop-splattered boardwalk tonight. There’s something I must do. Besides, I’m too old to trick-or-treat anymore — last year I’d decided enough was enough after all the strange looks I got from parents when I went door-to-door, not even bothering with a costume.
By the waters, the cool evening is salty and pungent with the stench of rotting fish flesh and bones. The pier used to have a shack where you could pay $5 to stand over the local pelicans and drop dead fish into their eager, open beaks for your amusement. More so if the pelicans fought with each other over the morsels. From a certain point of view, I guess that is kind of barbaric.
It was bad for the pelicans too. They got so comfortable with their free meal ticket that most of them forgot how to hunt for their own food and ended up starving to death. Their troubled, hungry spirits appear now and then to beg for food by the space where the shack used to be, and there they flutter around all night until sunrise. I hate to admit it, but I may be at fault just as much as anyone else who fed the poor guys, and it is this guilt that has brought me here tonight.
Humming from under my breath Pink Floyd’s “Take it Back,” I trot up the dilapidated former altar of fish sacrifice with a new offering. It’s around that time of year when my mother breaks out the pans and crust to bake her pumpkin pie. As with all of her cooking, she’s very proud of it, but it always comes out awful. Too much pumpkin, too much cinnamon, overcooked. Sometimes it tastes more like the jam that grows under your toenails than actual pie (don’t ask me how I know what that tastes like). No one in the house has the heart or gall to tell her this though, and this year it might be necessary for it to suck after all.
I hope pelicans have good enough taste, even in death.
I stand at the top step and watch the wispy outlines of birds materialize into view, clapping their long beaks up toward me like fish nibbling at food floating on the water’s surface. I cut the pie into slices small and thin, thin enough to be mistaken for fish, tossing them out among the birds. They dive for it and catch the bits in their flappy pouches as they had in life. But this time, they vigorously shake their heads and drop the pieces that haven’t already fallen down their throats. The most guttural, most unholy, undoubtedly pissed off sounds squeeze out from their otherworldly throats.
I lean in for a closer look, and out go both my eyes. That’s going to be a hard one to explain tomorrow.
Funny how we never really appreciate what we have until it’s taken away.
