Silent Hallow

Patsy Cline’s Walking After Midnight was playing in the background of a full mooned night. I looked out the window in the front room - the old hawthorn tree was swaying in the chill October breeze. Dad’s fireplace released a steady burn of warmth, but there was no comfort for me here.

I looked down at the shining promise ring that had been sitting for a year on my index finger. At first, I had marveled at the way it sparkled and shone in the morning sunlight. Here in the dimness of our living room, it seemed nothing but dull.

“I’m going out” I said in a whisper as I grabbed my purse from off the front table. My nerves would never be still in this old house - not with my father’s disappointed silence to keep me company.

He said nothing as the hinges of the front door squeaked once, then twice, before I locked the deadbolt behind me. The click of it rang through the night’s silence with finality.

Molly Anne barked at the woods as I stepped into the driver’s seat of my white 1967 Cadillac. Her yellow eyes stared into mine while I pulled out of the drive - for the first time, she didn’t follow.

The drive into town took only fifteen minutes. All the lights of Silent Hallow were turned out, as with any farming community after eight. I could almost hear the snores vibrating out from the houses in their pristine little rows.

I turned off my headlights as I took the turn down old Pine Drive. The sky was like pitch underneath the cover of so many tall evergreens, but I knew the way better than I knew myself. There had been so many days of childish happiness on this property, so many days of Summer.

I notice the Johnson’s have grown a thriving pumpkin patch for this year’s Halloween ceremonies. Their orange skins gain an eerie glow as I pull up into David’s gravel drive.

My keys jingle as I gently open their front door. His grandfather clock chimes twelve times, and my head is filled with their reverberations. Slow steps in my red high heels clank clank clank on pristine wooden floors.

His door is cracked open an inch. I approach his sleeping form, his face soft and serene. I lean in close, close enough to smell the slight scent of aftershave lingering at his neck.

In his soft sleep next to her bare skinned body, I feel that ravenous hatred. I lay my hand down on his warm cheek,then slide my fingers into his mouth through pink lips.

I feel the creature squirming for release from my chest. The pain is so terrible, unbearable, unimaginable. The Thing writhes out of my heart as I gasp for air. It moves down, crawling over my collar bones and into my arm. Slithering, slithering across under my skin, into the muscles of my right hand.

I bite my tongue hard to prevent from screaming as the thing bursts out from the palm of my hand to crawl into the traitor laying on the bed.

It is a long, sharp toothed worm. It is three inches wide, and as it uncoils from inside me, I notice it is over four feet long.

The thing can be felt pulling it’s length away from every part of my aching body. I can feel it unfurling, pulling out from my feet, head, heart. This parasite is long as a tapeworm, but black in color. A black scaled thing, covered in the blood from my own veins.

Just when I think my torment will never end - I see the worm's forked tail leave the broken skin of my palm. The last I see of the thing is when those two little spears disappear behind his undisturbed pink lips.

My right hand has been ruined.

There is almost no skin left, only glowing red muscle tissue and a few tears where I can see the bone. The thing had destroyed it all, and taken that golden promise ring in it’s fangs.

Better his than mine.

I hear my blood dripping onto the floor, the scent of iron rich in the air of the bedroom. There is only one more thing to do - one last part of this ritual.

I use my intact left hand to remove a single serrated kitchen knife from the top of my purse. I feel like Zeus holding an almighty lightning bolt as I raise it to the ceiling.

The blade comes down. Red colored iron flies everywhere while a desperate gurgling noise comes from her throat. She is sputtering blood as I take the second strike - this time the neck has been severed. Her bright blue eyes are frozen in an eternal expression of horror as it falls to the floor. The woman’s long blonde hair catches the dust from under his bed while it rolls.

My once future husband has slept soundly through it all.

But in the morning, he will wake with nothing and no one. Only the immortal hatred swirling around his weakling’s bones. May it writhe there forever and a day.

“Goodbye, David.”

I look at the head near my feet, the head of my once closest friend.

“Goodbye, Elizabeth.”





“Jesus, Phil, you ever seen anything like this?” The rotund officer asks of his skinny underling.

He was, however, too busy vomiting his breakfast onto the ground to reply.

The two officers saw a scene of unnatural brutality in the lover’s bed. A beautiful young woman decapitated, and Pauline Amherst laying on the floor missing one of her hands.

“Thing’s like this...just don’t happen in Silent Hallow.” The sheriff said ruefully as he examined the scene on bent knees.

The investigators were all too distracted to notice the subtle sound of slithering as a great black worm left through the back door to bury itself out in the pumpkin patch.