A Halloween Love Story

Published last year at Sirens Call.

Cracked Spines

“Valoween only happens occasionally throughout history. Large groups of people disappearing has popularly been explained away as the Great Plague of London, the Black Plague, the Modern Plague, and most recently, the Manchurian Plague of 1910 which we, the writers of this scroll, have firsthand knowledge.”  

These are the opening statements made on an obscure scroll, recently unearthed by a reliable group of archaeologists, that records an occult practice known as Valoween.  The writers of the scroll were a small band of survivors who got overlooked in the last carnage and eventually made their way up into a mountain cave. They later recorded the particulars of that gruesome event as well as predicting the next and then hid the scroll.  Here are their words:

“They clawed their way up from the dirt and made their way down streets and across fields to where they used to live.  These beings of shiny bones, now bald of skin.  Their joints sounding like clattering as they marched along.  We could hear them coming, but nothing we would do could keep them out.  For these were the lonely dead and they came seeking the company of those who had loved them and still remembered. They marched forward, recalling cooing words such as, “You will always have my heart” or “My heart is yours.”  They gnawed through the chests of their beloveds to get to the prize.  To finally touch what had been promised to forever be theirs.  And, to relieve those living, whom they still treasured, of the burden of a life bereft of the ones whom they had once held so dear.  And who could blame them?”

“Not all who marched had been loved.  As those unfortunates weaved their way along, they fell apart and the jagged pieces of their cracked spines were used as tools while the desperate deceased sawed their way through doorways and windows to gain entry.”

By the way, according to the calculations set forth by this band of survivors from the early twentieth century, the next Valoween is coming Thursday, February 14, 2019. 

Rather than publishing the scroll, the archeologists who had recently unearthed it decided to rebury it.  They knew since there was no time for the victims of the next event to prepare, that it would only be cruel to inform them their days were probably numbered.

© Copyright.  Linda Imbler, 2018.  All Rights Reserved.