We Thought We Found A Dead Hooker In The Woods, But It Turned Out To Be Something Much Worse

By

[I mentioned in my previous story that I lived with my grandfather as a kid and how during that time “almost nothing even remotely scary happened to me.” And this is the internet, where authors straight up dare their readers to contact them (go ahead, WATCH what happens. I hope you like thoughtful responses!) So of course, I received a number of emails and DMs asking what that “almost” in the above sentence was referring to. The answer is, “Two things.”

The first one I’ve talked about before in my book (the fucking nerve of this guy.) The second story, I’m saving for a special occasion because it takes place on Halloween night and you can’t just tell something like that whenever you feel like it.

Wait, no way. It IS?! Well that’s convenient…]

The crux of the American education system is divided into three sections: elementary school, middle school, and high school. Now, it’s not uncommon for an elementary school to also house an accompanying middle school, as was the case with the one I attended growing up. It had been a Catholic school (which are still really popular in New Orleans, mostly do to our less-than-stellar public education system) called Saint Louis King of France Elementary. And yes, someone actually named a school all of that.

Most of the boys from my class had wanted to attend stand-alone middle schools after 6th grade but I’d decided to stick it out at S.L.K.F. because it was close enough for me to ride my bike and plus, like most socially awkward 12 year-olds, I had been more than a little apprehensive about the idea of starting over at an entirely new school.

Unfortunately, 12 year-old Joel also sucked at foresight. It wasn’t until I showed up on the first day of 7th grade and discovered I was one of only three remaining boys in the entire class that it finally dawned on me: Since all of my friends had been male and almost none of them were returning this year, my old school might as well have been a new one.

And those other two male classmates I mentioned? They were both awful. I mean just the worst. Dwayne and Richie were their names and they were best friends. To paint you a picture, Richie was that one kid your teacher would never leave the class pet alone with and at 12, he was already an expert-level creeper who’d had a habit of dropping his fork under the lunch table so he could secretly look up girls’ skirts.

And if Richie was a fucked up kid, then Dwayne was the poster child for vasectomy. For some reason, he perpetually smelled like vegetable soup, and was two years older than the rest of us because he had been held back twice. I found out a few years later that the second time had been the result of an incident in which he pinned down another student at recess and used a red paint-marker to inscribe a racial slur on the kid’s forehead. It was of course no coincidence Dwayne’s victim was our school’s one-and-only black student.

“But Joel, how is that possible? You live in one of the country’s most racially diverse cities.”

That’s true, conveniently well-informed man in my head, but roughly 100% of all private schools in the South are also run by racist pricks. Which is why Dwayne’s hate crime had only resulted in a two-month suspension (which, granted, caused him to fail the year) instead of outright expulsion.

Though, at the time, I wasn’t aware of any of this. All I knew was that Dwayne had shown up the first day of fifth grade and when the teacher asked him if he’d like to say a few words about himself, Dwayne shook his head and replied, “Nope.”

Later that same day, I ended up behind Dwayne in the line at lunch where he promptly informed me, “New Balances are for pussies.”

Those were Dwayne’s first words to me. Needless to say, I wasn’t a big fan. But at the start of seventh grade, I had found myself with limited options for friendship. It was either buddy up with the 14-year-old bigot and his social-pariah sidekick or hang out with girls. And as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, at 12-years-old, I wasn’t quite evolved enough for the latter.

At first, things were pretty bearable as long as I made sure to keep our conversations geared toward comic books and video games. Dwayne absolutely loved the Punisher (every hardcore comics fan reading this just rolled their eyes and went, “Of fucking course…”) and even at that age, I already knew way too much about everything Marvel.

Whenever Dwayne did say something ignorant, I simply ignored it and since I was usually the one leading all of our discussions, after a while he simply stopped trying to commiserate his white pride with me and it was pretty smooth sailing after that. As far as I was concerned, my whole “who am I going to eat lunch with” dilemma had been mostly resolved. Then Halloween happened.

I’m not sure which led to the other; my love of Fall or my love of horror movies (thanks to Halloween, they pretty much go hand-in-hand) but obviously October is my favorite month. There are people who say that Halloween is their Christmas, but I literally set aside money all year simply so I can buy the new franchise horror movie props put out as accessories for costumes. Things like:

An officially licensed photo-accurate Leatherface mask from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, complete with stitched-on quality wig. Or a toy Freddy Krueger glove, circa 1984, and yeah bitch I got one of those too! AND the sweater. What smells like green jelly?

Anyway, Halloween has always been kind of my jam. Though, when I took my seat at lunch that October 30th and Richie asked me what I had planned for Halloween night, I froze up. Typically, I would’ve been hanging out with Hunter, who was my one-and-only real friend. We’d been BFFs since like the second trimester but unfortunately, Hunter had spent the previous summer battling bacterial Meningitis and he was still recovering, which was fucking miserable. I’m sure it was no picnic for him either.

I tried not to sigh as I finally replied, “Nothing yet.”

Ritchie nodded at Dwayne and said, “We’re going to Sheriff Foti’s.”

Sheriff Foti’s Haunted House was admittedly pretty fun, if not a bit tame compared to more infamous New Orleans-based Halloween attractions like the House of Shock, which was apparently run by people who thought they hadn’t done their job right if the cops didn’t get called to investigate their set-pieces at least once every year. Seriously, that’s not even an exaggeration. Freaks go hard in the N.O.

“It’s half price if you have a costume,” Dwayne added. “I’m gonna be the Punisher and Richie’s going as Batman and then we’re gonna ride our bikes around and probably egg some shit. You wanna come?”

Only slightly more than I wanted to sit at home alone, watching horror movies (I already spent the other 364 days doing that), so of course I told him I did. Cue John Travolta going, “You should’a fuckin-better-known-better.”

But I guess if I was capable of that, most of my stories would be little more than me going, “I made a lot of logical choices and then nothing cool happened. The end.”

As per official Halloween custom, that night I donned my red-and-green sweater, vintage brown fedora and of course my toy Freddy glove before starting off towards Sheriff Foti’s with a feeling of apprehension that I couldn’t shake.

I was still too young to fully grasp the subtler nuances of human relationships, but I knew I didn’t like either one of the people I was heading to meet. No matter how many lunchtime conversations about comic books we had, I never fully trusted Dwayne or his motivations and Richie just plain made me nervous. So why was I going?

Because they invited me and I couldn’t think of a single good excuse. Because it would make the rest of the school year awkward if I didn’t. Because nobody wants to be alone all the time.

I had been peddling down Marconi Drive and was about a block and a half away from Sheriff Foti’s when I spotted the line of costumed people waiting outside that was already to the sidewalk by this point. The sun had just begun to set and Foti’s wasn’t scheduled to open for another half hour but we had agreed to get there early because we knew there would be a line. Apparently so did everybody else.

I quit pedaling and used my foot to slow to a stop as I reached the corner of the next block. Foti’s was located at one end of City Park and this block of Marconi ran adjacent to a large expanse of cypress trees. The whole area was overrun with a thick layer of Spanish moss that the fading sunlight couldn’t penetrate and everything past the treeline was shrouded in darkness.

FUN FACT: Spanish moss is roughly 90% of the reason why New Orleans seems so fucking creepy all the time. I tried my best to remind myself of this as I turned to check the ever-lengthening line outside of Foti’s. And that’s when I heard a faint voice coming from the park that sounded eerily similar to a woman whispering my name.

I felt my grip unconsciously tighten around the handles of my bike as I peered into the the shadowy expanse of trees to my left and hoping it had just been the wind. There was a sudden flicker of light about twenty feet from where I was standing and my breath caught in my throat.

It was Richie turning on a flashlight as he leaned out from behind a nearby cypress tree. I saw that he was wearing his Batman costume, though minus the mask, as he held the flashlight under his face and once again whispered, “Oh, Joooooooel…”

I affected my best tough guy tone and said, “You sound like a girl.”

“Fuck you,” Richie replied as I started toward him. He aimed his flashlight at Dwayne, who was leaning against the trunk of an adjacent tree with his hair slicked back and the Punisher’s distinctive skull logo crudely painted onto his black t-shirt. Richie said, “Are you really gonna let this guy talk to your boy Batman like that?”

Dwayne shrugged. “Batman doesn’t kill. He’s a poser as far as the Punisher is concerned.”

Richie turned back to face me as he rolled his eyes and muttered, “More like the Pussy-sher…”

Dwayne furrowed his brow, leaning forward as he asked, “What was that?”

“He sure is,” Richie quickly replied as he gave Dwayne a thumbs up.

I turned to Dwayne to divert his attention as I said, “Is there any way we can have this conversation one block over? I really don’t wanna spend my entire Halloween standing in line.”

“Screw the haunted house. I got something WAY creepier for us to check out,” Dwyane said as he and Richie exchanged a mischievous grin.

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“A real live dead body.”

“That’s not even the best part,” Richie added. He nodded at Dwayne and said, “Tell ‘em.”

“It’s a girl and she’s fuckin’ hot. She’s dressed like one of those high-class hookers like that chick in that movie. The one with that guy and she’s got those boots?”

Richie turned back to face me again, aiming his unsettling grin in my direction as he said, “I bet. Hey, guess what? We’re gonna see some titties! UNGH!

Richie punctuated the end of his comment with a groin-thrust that was particularly un-Batman. Dwayne slowly shook his head and then finally he began to elaborate, telling me how there was this patch of woods by his house that he liked to explore and earlier that day, he was out there with his pellet-gun, hunting squirrels.

That’s when he found the dead body of a woman who looked to be between 25 and 30 years-old (“younger than my mom but definitely older than either of my sisters” was how he had put it) wearing a skimpy red dress and high-heeled boots. Her dress had been torn open in the front and a sheer black bra had been yanked down around her stomach to expose two large perky breasts.

The woman couldn’t have been dead that long when Dwayne found her. If it hadn’t been for her slack jaw and wide lifeless eyes, he would’ve thought she was still alive. Of course “bullshit” was my initial response because I was 12; not an idiot. But I figured…

Fuck it. Why not let these two morons try and scare me? It might actually be halfway amusing and maybe there will even be an opportunity for me to turn it around on them. Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do.

So Dwayne and Richie led me back down Marconi and over to an ancient set of overgrown train-tracks. We followed the tracks West for about a mile and a half, during which time the last bits of daylight quietly faded from view, turning the sky overhead from a dark purple to the ever ominous black of night.

The tracks wound their way over the Pontchartrain Expressway before eventually bringing us to a densely wooded area that bordered one end of an affluent neighborhood. Dwayne pointed us toward an unmarked dirt path that seemed to cut through the woods, which is when I almost started to panic.

I didn’t trust these two asshats in a well-lit classroom, so what the everloving fuck was I doing following them into the woods at night? I thought about refusing to go with them but at this point, what was I gonna do? Ride my bike back alone?

I only had the vaguest idea of where the bordering neighborhood was located and going that way would mean having to ride my bike across the expressway rather than over it like we had done on the way here. Plus, it would take twice as long. I would probably end up spending the rest of my night just getting home.

Then I thought about those derelict train tracks encased in trees on either side and what it would be like to take those back alone with nothing but my bike’s headlight to illuminate the way…

Yeah fuck that, so I decided to stay and see this thing through. Hopefully, I would still get a chance to turn the prank around on them. That had been the plan anyway but now that we were actually here, I was starting to have my doubts.

“Here we go,” Dwayne said as he slowed to a stop beside a thick patch of shrubbery and Richie and I followed suit. Dwayne’s gaze was fixed on the bushes to our left. He lowered his bike to the ground and then suddenly held up a hand as he whispered, “Wait…”

Dwayne’s eyes narrowed as he quietly muttered, “Holy shit, someone’s here.”

I squinted through the treeline and saw that, in fact, holy shit someone WAS here. Behind the shrubbery was a small moonlit clearing and in that clearing was a man. He was kind of big. Not fat per say, yet undeniably large. The man was on the ground, propping himself up by his arms with his hands flat like he was doing push-ups.

Then I realized there was something beneath the man. I could just barely see her highheeled boots sticking out from under his much larger frame and I instantly thought of the Wicked Witch’s sister pinned under Dorothy’s farmhouse. Because even at twelve, I related everything to movies.

Dwayne gasped and quietly announced, “He’s FUCKING her… Sick bastard.”

I wanted to wonder why Dwayne hadn’t sounded a little more disgusted by this fact and a lot less jealous, but now was not the time. Richie, who was shorter than me and Dwayne, attempted to nudge us aside as he nearly shouted, “Let me see…”

Dwayne tried to shush Richie but it was already too late. The man had heard him. That much was clear by the way he instantly froze before glancing in our direction. Dwayne grabbed Richie by the shoulder and shoved him down as we quickly ducked behind the bushes bordering the clearing.

Dwayne held a finger to his lips, signaling to remain quiet as we stood crouched like that for several very tense seconds, straining our ears to listen for the sound of approaching footsteps. My pounding heart suddenly skipped a beat as I heard the CRACK of a snapping twig meer feet from us.

That’s when Dwayne removed the finger from his lips and mouthed the word, “Go.”

The three of us stood at once and began to run, nobody daring to even glance back as we grabbed our bikes and started to pedal our happy asses out of those woods as fast as our little legs would allow.

When we finally reached the clearing adjacent to the train-tracks, Dwayne skidded to a stop and spun his head around to examine the dirt path we had just exited. After squinting into the darkness for a few beats, he muttered, “Could’a sworn I heard somebody chasing us the whole way.”

I nodded and turned the front of my bike, using its light to illuminate the clearly empty path as I replied, “Me too… Probably the adrenalin messing with us.”

Richie snapped his fingers and said, “Yeah, like that thing you get ‘cause of cavemen that Miss Warren was telling us about in class, remember? A  fight-or-flight response. And we definitely flight’ed just now.”

Dwayne and I exchanged an amused smirk and the two of us suddenly erupted in a fit of nervous laughter.

“WHAT?” Richie said, his brow furrowed in confusion as he looked at me and then Dwayne and then took a moment to think back before finally shouting, “Fucking FLEW! Whatever…”

But that only made us laugh louder.

“You guys are assholes.”

I managed to stop giggling long enough to reply, “Why, you think we should’ve fight’ed him?”

Dwayne’s laughter amplified as he pressed a hand to his stomach and bent forward, tears welling in his eyes. And sure, I never really liked Dwayne. I’ve made that much clear and let’s not forget that he turned out to be a violent racist, but I’ll give him this much:

He is still the only person who has ever doubled over with laughter at one of my grammar-jokes. Though in retrospect, that was probably the endorphins as well. When he was finally able to speak again, Dwayne pointed down the tracks and said that he knew of the perfect place for us to chill for a minute and catch our breath.

About 20 yards up, the tracks formed a bridge over the 17th street canal, which had a 10-foot high retention-wall running along either side of it. Usually, you would need either a step ladder or boot camp training to scale these walls, but the train-tracks were on a gradual incline that led right over them.

Of course, the other side was all water. At least, that’s what I thought until we took our first step onto the bridge and Dwayne pointed down. There was a small dirt beach which ran beneath the bridge and acted as a base for the cement posts supporting this end of the tracks.

Dwayne demonstrated how to safely get down by sitting on the tracks before slowly lowering himself with his arms. Shortly after, Richie followed behind him, mimicking his technique. I approached the edge of the tracks and sat as I glanced down to see Richie start beneath the bridge. I didn’t see Dwayne but figured he had done the same thing, so I lowered myself down just as I had been instructed.

“And he sticks the landing,” I said as I dropped down and then turned to face the area beneath the bridge. It was pitch black under there, which I thought was weird. And then suddenly it dawned on me:

Oh shit! This is it! This is the prank and you walked RIGHT into it. You. Fucking. Dumbass.

There was a small spark a few feet in front of me and then, for the second time that evening, I watched a light appear out of darkness. Only this time the light was red and also on fire. The road-flare flickered to life, revealing Dwayne’s face as he knelt down and tilted the flare.

Another much larger fire suddenly sprung up out of the ground in front of him. Thankfully, this one was contained by a ring of bricks encasing a small pit. After Dwayne was finished lighting the fire, he and Richie took a seat on one of several milk-crates surrounding it and then Dwayne looked over at me and frowned.

“Still trying to pick your favorite one?” He asked in a condescending tone as he glanced from me to the crates and then back.

I shook my head and finally started to approach as I said, “Sorry, spaced out for a moment.”

Richie looked at us and rubbed his hands together as I took a seat beside the fire. He said, “SO… What do you boys wanna do now?”

Dwayne looked at me and I shrugged, saying, “We already narrowly escaped a necrophiliac. What can top that?”

When Dwayne began to speak, there was something in his tone that made us both turn and listen…

“I’ve been thinking. What… What would you guys say if told you…”

“Hey, any of you got a light? Or maybe I can just use your fire,” said the tall man holding up a cigarette and standing roughly where I had landed when I dropped down from the bridge. Yet somehow none of us had noticed him until he spoke.

How was that possible?

Richie and I exchanged a nervous glance. This was the man we had seen in the clearing. I was almost sure of it and the expression on Richie’s face confirmed my suspicions. I turned to Dwayne, expecting to see the same look of recognition on his face, but he just smiled and patted his pocket as he nodded at the man.

“I got a lighter,” Dwayne said, sounding friendlier than I had ever heard him speak to anyone before. He reached a hand into his pocket as the tall man started toward us. Dwayne pulled out a dull metal cylinder and looked up at the man as he asked, “You seen one of these?”

The man bent down to examine the object in Dwayne’s hand, which was actually a spring-loaded telescopic baton that suddenly extended with a surprising amount of force and a hollow THUNK as it jabbed the man in his eye. This stunned him long enough for Dwayne to stand and swing his baton down against the man’s back.

The still partially-blinded man dropped down into a kneeling position as Dwayne continued to wail on him hard enough that the man was eventually driven to the ground and was now lying on his side, arms over his face and several fingers already broken as a result of his futile attempts to protect himself from Dwayne’s continuous salvo of baton swings.

Me and Richie just sat there, our mouths hanging open and both of us looking utterly clueless. It was as if someone had hit pause in the middle of our best Keanu Reeves impressions. Dwayne reached behind him, pulling something from the waistband of his pants as he knelt down beside the whimpering man and rolled him over.

“Jesus, that’s not a gun, is it?” I said, finally snapping out of my stunned silence.

Dwayne held up a pair of handcuffs and replied, “He should be so lucky. That’d be too quick.”

I gestured at Dwayne as he cuffed the man’s hands behind his back and I said in a sarcastic tone, “Oh, they’re just handcuffs? Okay. Hey Dwayne, why the fuck do you have handcuffs?! …Holy shit! You’re not Twenty-One Jump Street’ing us, are you?”

“Twenty-One WHAT?” Dwayne asked, narrowing his eyes at me. This was well after the show had aired and long before the movies. The only reason I knew what it was is because my mom had a thing for Johnny Depp.

“Are you an undercover cop who just looks super young and they say you got held back so you can infiltrate our class?”

“Why would a cop want to infiltrate a middle school?”

“I don’t know. Why would YOU have handcuffs?!”

The man finally stopped whimpering and let out an unsettling giggle as he looked up at Dwayne and said, “Go ahead… tell ‘em.”

Dwayne raised his baton in a threatening gesture as he turned to glare down at the man and screamed, “Shut your fucking mouth!”

The man began to laugh even louder than before. It was one of the creepiest sounds I’d ever heard. He was still looking up at Dwayne as he said, “Go ahead, pussy! Do it! I fucking dare you! Crush my skull in!”

“You don’t think I will?!”

The man scrunched up his face and said in a mocking falsetto tone, “You don’t-thu-duh-duh?”

“I swear to god, I WILL kill you!”

“Then DO IT, you fucking woman! Do it or I’ll tell them how that girl ended up dead in the wo-”

His words were cut short by a wet cracking sound as Dwayne drove the baton down onto the man’s head, followed by a faint hiss as his fractured skull began to separate. From behind me came another wet chorus of noises and I glanced back to see Richie vomiting.

“Oh, shit…” Dwayne muttered and I turned forward just in time to watch as the man snapped the chain on the handcuffs. He suddenly sat up and wrapped his arms around Dwayne, forcing him to the ground and pinning him there by kneeling on Dwayne’s shoulders.

At first, the weirdest part was that the man’s eyes were closed during all of this but a strange noise (like a newborn chicken trying to peck its way out of an egg) was also underscoring everything now. Finally, I spotted the source of the noise and by comparison, the whole “closed eyes” thing seemed downright charming.

Something was struggling to push its way out through the side of the man’s skull. I wanted nothing less than to find out what this something was and yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the man’s now-pulsating head wound, even as Dwayne began to scream. So did someone else and I thought it was Richie, but he was still throwing up.

That’s when I realized it was me. There was one last wet crack from the man’s protesting skull and then what vaguely resembled the leg of a giant tarantula suddenly protruded from the side of his head.

Once it had extended out to about three feet, the front of the leg’s carapace folded back to reveal a long vaguely translucent needlelike appendage that was then jabbed into Dwayne’s ear and his horrified screams turned to moans of agony.

Thank god he turned out to be a racist and possible murderer because that was the point where I finally ditched Dwayne. Now, I’ve never been the most graceful guy, but there are certain physical activities that I’ve always been naturally good at, especially when I was still young and nimble. For example, climbing…

I snatched up the milk-crate I had been sitting on and quickly propped it against the retention wall, using the additional eight inches of support to increase my vertical range just enough that I was able to jump up and grab onto the lower edge of the bridge.

I swung my legs up, bracing them against the retention wall as I reached a hand over the top of the bridge and took a moment to ensure I had a secure grip before swinging my legs up over the top and locking them into place between the wooden planks lining the track. From there, I pulled myself up onto the bridge by my legs.

All of this took less than five seconds and I bet it was pretty badass to watch, but at the time I was barely even aware of what I’d just done. At that moment, all I was worried about was not getting my brain skewered via my ear, or really any comparable organ/orifice combination featuring the thing coming out of that guy’s head.

“Joel, wait! PLEASE!” This was Richie screaming to me as I stood up on the tracks. His voice managed to snap me out of my tunnel vision and I glanced down to see him standing on the milk crate I had left propped there.

I bent down and he took my hand just as the man shouted in a strange distorted voice, “Really?! No goodbye?! You two are SO RUDE!”

The man lunged out from beneath the bridge and attempted to grab Richie’s leg just as I pulled him out of reach. We hurried over to our bikes and started to pedal away as the man, his eyes still closed and the giant tarantula leg thing still protruding from his skull.

I started down the tracks, heading back the way we had come but then Richie pointed at the woods and shouted, “We should take the path! It goes all the way back to Lakeview!”

The man started to chase after me as I swerved to follow Richie into the woods. This guy was incredibly fast, especially considering his closed eyes and fractured skull. No matter how rapidly we pedaled, it seemed like he was always right behind us.

As I glanced back to make sure he wasn’t about to snatch me off my bike, I heard Richie scream and turned just in time to see what I assumed was the dead hooker Dwayne had “found” in the woods earlier that day (the boots were a dead giveaway.)

The woman’s face had been caved in by something heavy and a long black appendage similar to the one sticking out of the man’s head was protruding from about the spot where her nose used to be. The hooker plowed into us, knocking me off of my bike and sending both me and it tumbling into the woods.

I caught a glimpse of Richie being dragged off as I sat and tried to pull my bike free of the thick underbrush, but it was no use. I could hear the man stomping toward me as I scrambled to my feet and started to fight my way through the forest, trying to put as much foliage between me and him.

Of course, you can only run through the woods at night for so long before you trip over something and that’s exactly what I did about 30 seconds into my mad sprint. I let out a startled gasp as I stumbled and fell face-first onto the ground.

I immediately sat up and spun around, expecting to find my pursuer mere moments from pouncing on me, but all I saw behind me now was a still, moonlit forest. I gave my surroundings a slow scan, assuming that the man had decided it would be more fun to flank me… But then I heard the chanting. Emily would later explain that it had been this chanting which probably saved me.

It was a mesmerizing sound. I stood and let the enthralling throng of female voices guide me toward a clearing that had seemed to appear from out of nowhere. There was a roaring fire and all around it stood naked women of various different ages and ethnicities, their exposed breasts swaying hypnotically in time with their movements. These women were the source of the chanting.

Someone suddenly shouted my name, sounding genuinely startled. A 12 year-old girl, who was thankfully the only fully clothed one there, was seated on a log off to the side and giving me the most confused smirk.

“EMILY?!”

Emily had been in my class at S.L.K.F. since the first grade and we had been in Drama Club together and performed in a few of the same plays (that’s right, laugh it up. Though, I’ll have you know that our production of Charlotte’s Web was the stuff of legend!) The chanting had stopped and the naked women were all turning to face us. One of them approached and gestured down at me as she turned to address Emily, asking, “You know this boy?”

“Yeah, mom. He goes to Saint Louis. He used to carpool home from rehearsal with us, remember?”

The woman’s expression softened as she turned back to examine me and said, “Oooohhh, okay. What’s your mom’s name again?”

“You’d actually probably remember my grandfather, Jim?”

“Yes, Jim from the carpool! That’s right. Sweet man. So nice. How is he?”

“Good,” I said and smiled at Emily’s mom, trying my best not to reveal how fucking awkward all of this was, but she had already stopped listening. One of the older women whispered something in her ear and she suddenly frowned.

“Tell me why an abomination stalks you,” She said, her tone now utterly serious.

It was pretty obvious what she was referring to and so I explained everything that had happened that night. When I was done, the women exchanged a few knowing nods and then Emily’s mom finally said, “This fire has been purified. Remain in its light until we are done here and you will be safe. Afterwards, Emily and I would be happy to give you a ride home. Do your grandparents still live in Lakeview?”

I slowly nodded as an immense sense of relief washed over me. Emily’s mom gestured at her and said, “Em, dear? Can you entertain your little friend until mom’s done?”

As it turned out, Emily and I actually had a lot in common. For example, we both loved horror movies and agreed that Next Generation was the best Star Trek. “Which obviously means Picard is the best captain.”

Emily grinned and held her hand up to request a high-five as she replied, “THANK YOU! I hate when people try to tell me that Kirk is cooler. I mean, maybe in the movies and only then in the good ones… But in the original series, he’s just a womanizer. And not even a fun one.”

“EXACTLY,” I said and earnestly slapped my raised palm against hers. After that night, I spent my lunches eating with Emily and her friends. Poor Richie had shown up to school Monday asking where Dwayne was and having no memory of the Holiday weekend. He started eating with the sixth graders after that.

Of course, I had been more than a little surprised to find Dwayne waiting for me on my grandparent’s porch the morning after Halloween. I started to ask how he’d gotten out of there alive, but the words caught in my throat as I saw the large man from the night before waiting behind the wheel of the minivan that was currently idling in my grandparent’s driveway.

Dwayne saw my expression change and glanced back at the van as he pointed a thumb over his shoulder and said, “My dad wanted me to apologize for last night.”

“Wait, your DAD?!”

Dwayne looked down and gave the ground an embarrassed smirk as he replied, “Kind’a freaky, right?”

I thought for a moment and then nodded as I said, “Actually, it explains a lot.”

“Yeah, well you were never supposed to see any of that… We’d had this huge fight because he didn’t want me going out on Halloween. It’s a bit of a faux pas for our kind and last night was his idea of embarrassing me in front of my friends… But, anyway, we’d both appreciate it if you kept all this to yourself. My dad told me to then say ‘or else’, but I don’t think that’s necessary. You saw what’ll happen.”

I nodded again, unsure of exactly how to respond. Dwayne winked and fired a finger-gun at me as he said, “My man.”

With that, Dwayne turned and started back toward the idling minivan. As he made his way there, I locked eyes with his dad one last time and he gave me a single nod, his lips slowly curving into a smile that chilled my blood.

How many times has that smile been the last thing someone saw?

Dwyane climbed into the passenger seat of the van and waved goodbye as he buckled his seatbelt. His dad shifted into reverse and the minivan began to back down the driveway while I returned the wave out of sheer force of habit.

That was the last time I saw Dwayne “in the flesh,” as it were. He never returned to S.L.K.F. and about a week after Halloween, we were told that Dwayne’s dad had gotten a promotion and that they’d moved to Japan. Then, last year, Dwayne sent me a friend-request on Facebook which I accepted because why the fuck not?

A few months ago, he posted an obituary for his father, whose death had been listed as “the result of a hunting accident.” Reading those words sent a chill up my spine because I just knew that it was a lie and the truth was probably something most of us couldn’t possibly fathom.

But hey, at least now I get to tell you guys this cool story! Hopefully, the knowledge that the thing known as “Dwayne” is still out there somewhere, just waiting to lure more unsuspecting people into wooded areas so he can do God knows what to them doesn’t give you too many nightmares.

Happy Halloween, suckers!