Chapter Text
Birds are chirping and the gentle autumn breeze embraces your face, one that has already started to lose its tan. The days have turned shorter, darker, colder – much earlier than ever before, or so it feels to you. It’s odd, things feel different, emptier. Colors are greyer.
Some things never change, like the leaves that turn to shades of orange, some already falling off the branches, but the scenery still, in its decaying form resembles a painting from the better days. But even with the weather getting harsher, the golden sun smiling down onto earth is still enough to keep the air comfortably warm, allowing the most dedicated ones to keep dressing in their tiny crop tops and thin, colorful cardigans.
Halloween is right around the corner, the sideways and porches quickly filling up with carved, bright orange pumpkins, and of course, the myriad of different decorations; like those plastic skeletons and zombies rising from the dirt and neatly mowed lawns.
On your way home, or more like; your dorm room, with each step you keep reminding yourself of its temporality. One more year, it would pass quickly. One day you’d wake up and all of this would be over.
You walk past a group of kids gossiping and giggling about their costume ideas for later today, and you can’t help but to overhear the obvious classics: witches, little riding hoods and super mans. A smile takes place on your face, the group reminding you of the golden times of your own childhood. The good old times. That is if you try your hardest to ignore the parts that weren’t so peachy.
You sound like an old lady. You shake off the thought.
Fall has always been your favorite season next to summer, and not only cause of the weather but Halloween too, even now as a so-to-say-grown-up.
It’s friday, you have the weekend off school, free from studying; you had promised to relax, but as a full-time student there's pretty much no way to acquire true peace, not really. It’s not only Samhain that’s due.
Growing up in a small town where everyone knew one another, their cousins and for fucks sake, even their best friend’s pet rock by name, caused you to be grateful for the fact that in this new town you were just a stranger to most. That, oh so, mysterious someone who they could get a glimpse of, never figuring out more than they were given. You prefer to stay in your own company, just making a few friends out of your classmates.
After cutting almost all ties to your hometown, you try your best to forget about the past.
It no longer haunts you like it used to.
Even with all those new people around you, after that desired fresh start in life, there is, still, this massive, unfillable hole in your chest that keeps leaking, leaving an ugly print everywhere you go. To fill it, you tried men, women too, quickly learning how it only made you feel worse about yourself. Alcohol, those fifty-fifty cocktails did the job for a bit, made you forget and bear the agony of being alive. Studying and working so hard that you did not have any extra time to get lost in thought, but God, it made you so damn tired, an empty, burned out shell. But guess for that exact reason everything, for a moment, was perfectly fine. It did its job. And you were fine.
You slowly started to understand the people back home – though you didn’t want to. The thought made you disgusted, despise yourself a little more each day. You would never be like them.
Chasing after something you cannot name or place, you lost the grip for a bit. But it’s fine, too, you’d always land on your feet. Mom said that once, you think. You’re holding too much, where would you put it?
Sometimes you think about calling home. You almost pick up the phone.
You didn't.
Who would answer, anyway?
Old, bad habits make an appearance every now and then. Standing in the kitchen, in the middle of a Halloween party, trying to quit drinking, you really are, but your friends drunk and having the time of their lives right next to you, makes declining nearly impossible.
You’re not going to be young forever, is what you keep hearing. But in that case, and in all honesty, you feel like you’ve lived enough.
“Relax, it’s going to be fine.” Your friend keeps giggling while gulping down some mysterious liquid from a red plastic cup. ” It’s just one drink.”
“It’s Halloween.” She continues her mission to make you loosen up a little, not quite understanding the damage she’s causing, which only proves your point – none of these people know you, and you don’t let them.
A man dressed as a mummy bumps into you and doesn’t even bother to say sorry. Something ticks. God, maybe you are just that easy. You cringe and bring the plastic cup into contact with your dolled up lips. Fuck it. It’s Halloween after all, could be the very last one, because who knows with all those Ghostface murders going on.
So, even with all these warning signs flashing red and screaming danger, call it the voice of reason if you will, you pour a drink, another one even, gain some confidence that actually has been lurking underneath the surface all this time and dance till your legs ache. You had borrowed your girl pal’s old costume from last year, too busy and maybe a little lazy, to make your own.
Flashes of red and blue, glitter on your skin. Stranger’s hands on your body, seeking, searching, inpatient on your skin, wondering what you’re hiding underneath your clothing, desire, lust, whispering sweet things in your ear, an angel on your left shoulder, devil on the other. Too bad though. You’re fixated onto the blasting music, your earthly body drunken, higher mind fleeing somewhere beyond, to a world with only goodness and happiness.
Everything is good. Really.
You’re not afraid. At least not as much as many others are. You know about the killings, the bloodbaths that were happening all around the campus and in the little student town surrounding it.
Just earlier this week the police had gotten themselves a new suspect. That made things calmer around the campus. Nothing bad had happened since then – guess that’s why people agreed into having the party. No, it would have happened either way. Who’s to tell students not to party? Yeah, they could try.
But as you dance, you feel untouchable, invincible even.
Punch is spiked with too much vodka, you can’t taste it anymore, it’s like sipping water. You remember that actually being a symptom of blacking out. That’s when you’re supposed to stop – actually, a good few drinks before that point would be ideal. It’s alright, you don’t care, not right now.
You want it. You need, crave it, this. You wonder why you ever stopped.
You dance till you can’t go on.
Till you need a break.
The party is still very much alive when you decide to wander up the stairs and escape into your and your roommate’s little hobbit hole to clear your head, cause knowing yourself, it is bound that sooner or later you'd most likely do something you'd regret.
Your room is dark, only some dim fairy lights giving a faint glow on the painted walls, allowing you to see where you step.
You have just enough time turn on the light before you get yanked from behind. You think it’s Janet, your roommate, trying to pull a funny prank on you – just like last year. It wasn’t funny back then, but looking at it now, you view it as a happy memory.
“Jan, I’m not fee-“
You land on your back, finding yourself fighting for your life as a stranger, dressed head to toe in black, hiding behind a cheap screaming Halloween mask, tries to poke your eye out with a very real looking hunting knife. He slices your right arm as you go to block the blow. Blood gushes down onto your face and for a second you simply lay there, on the floor of your room, your safe heaven from the cruel floor, stunned.
Soon enough the basic survival instincts kick in and without making a conscious choice to do so, you kick, bite and scream. Only the alcohol invading your system eases some of the pain that your body experiences now in nonstop.
The sounds of the party, music and laughter echo from behind the door, muffling perfectly your cries of help. It’s almost comedic, mimicking a scene straight from a slasher horror movie. Michael Myers wannabe.
But never in a million years you expected to meet your doom this way; in a stupid party with your classmates and a punch of strangers, everyone high or drunk off their asses.
You’d probably laugh about it if you were able to, but as the man above presses down on your windpipe and pins you down, a complete desperation starts to kick in, your vision going blurry and the sound of music dies. Instead, what you hear is a mix of your own heart beating, heavy breathing, and the blood gushing in your ears.
It would remind you of the humming of the seas if only the time and the place were different. Instead, you’re, um, drowning in the odd sensations, like experiencing your pulse in places you’ve never felt it before and probably shouldn’t without dying, so, without doubt, that building pressure in and behind your eyes, throat and chest must be one the most unpleasant sensations you’ve ever felt. And not very healthy.
The amount of will to live in you surprises you, although all the way from the start, somewhere in the back of your head, you acknowledged and agreed into the slim chances of survival, the terms and conditions.
All these years of apparently lying how you wouldn’t mind. It comes when it comes. We’ll, the Grim Reaper is knocking on your door, ready to reap and collect, and you would do anything for it to go away.
You’re not ready.
You lied.
This isn’t what you want.
The knife cuts your chest even though you’re doing your best to kick and push your attacker away, but nothing seems to work and now starting to fully panic, you don’t really registering much anymore. Not really longer feeling your toes or your fingertips, cold sweat forming on your skin, and you just know that the knife hovering above your chest is just seconds away from sinking into your flesh for good.
You’ve heard of animals, people too, going numb in the face of certain death, and right now, it’s oddly comforting. So, without thinking and fingers slippery from blood, you let go, not fully accepting your fate, but simply growing tired from the loss of blood.
You experience this cold, stinging, sharp pain as your gut greets the blade. It causes you to cry out.
Knowing for a fact that Ghostface is looking down on you from behind his bloody mask, you stare at him with glossed, weak eyes, trying to get a glimpse of something, perhaps, human.
There is absolutely nothing there.
Seconds feel like eternity, and for a moment it's completely silent, but you’re probably just imagining it.
“Why?” You whisper, voice cracking and breaking. You don’t expect to have time to hear the answer as you are rapidly bleeding out from the blows before, withering away from reality as you know it.
“Unlucky timing.” He answers. Unlucky timing, that’s all, nothing more, nothing less. At the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s unfair. You don’t deserve this, right?
But oh, oh, the fact how you are just a silly little victim, when you are a living breathing thing, how casual it’s for him, fuck, how he said it, what he meant: how you are but a bag of meat for him, and how you’d simply become one of the many lost to the murder spree, but years would go by and no one would remember, you’d be nothing but one more murdered college girl: it gets your spirit fuming, and for a second you think it’s enough to keep you going.
You are wrong.
This is karma.
It's not what you want. You wanted more; of what? You didn’t even get to find out. You barely even got to live; you now understand.
So, as your last act on this earth, you hang onto Ghostface’s arm when he goes to pull out the knife but manage to keep it in place, just a little longer. Purely out of spite.
It’s almost like he allows you to do so.
You never feel him get off you or remember letting go yourself. Instead, you have this distant memory of coughing dark blood from your filled lungs.
Life never flashed before your eyes; you remember thinking. Just a myth. Just a stupid, massive lie that they feed to people to glamorize death in movies.
You never see the world-famous bright light at the end of a tunnel either; another tale to make people on their deathbeds be a little less frightened of the inescapable death. That’s right, walk into the light, Timmy, it is the gates of Heaven, Paradise after all those good years you spent on planet earth being a good little sinner.
No light, no flames of hell, nothingness, void.
There is nothing, you see absolutely nothing as the dark, endless void consumes you. That’s the worst part of it, you are so very alone.
It’s cold.
You feel like crying, but your body is no longer there, or to better describe it, you are, no longer in it.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
...
You wake up, and before your eyes see a strange campsite and on your left a fire that doesn’t feel warm. It’s hell after all, you suppose.