The Halloween Store and Other Tales of All Hallows' Eve by Ronald Kelly

Author:Ronald Kelly [Kelly, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, supernatural, short stories
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2020-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Pretty Little Lanterns

Sheriff Jonah Townshend hated Halloween.

More than any other time of year, the last couple of weeks in the month of October filled him with a terrible sense of uneasiness and impending dread.

For that was the time that the jack-o’-lanterns appeared.

The ones that weren’t pumpkins.

It had begun three years ago. In 1925, there had been one. A precocious, teenaged girl named Sally Toller had come up missing the night before Halloween, during a walk home from a showing of The Lost World at the Sublime Theater in the rural Tennessee town of Green Hollow. The following night, she showed up… or, at least, part of her did. Her lovely, blond head had been hollowed out—brain, eyes, the sinuses, the tissues of her inner mouth and tongue, all discarded—and a lit candle placed within her empty skull. A group of trick-or-treating youngsters saw it first and had fled, screaming. Poor Sally’s body had never been found.

In 1926, there were two: the Whittaker Sisters, Maude and Marge. The spinsters, well into their seventies, had suffered a similar fate. Their heads graced the front windows of their little, clapboard house on Brighton Avenue. This time, a number of their upper and lower teeth had been removed, giving them the uneven grins of a traditional jack-o’-lantern. Their bodies were discovered in their beds… still dressed in their nightgowns with patchwork quilts pulled up snuggly around the stubs of their wrinkled necks.

1927 had been a particularly bad year for the victims of Doctor Jack… a name given to the killer by the Green Hollow Gazette. Four human lanterns had been discovered within a ten-mile radius. One had been Harvey Purdue at the filling station just past the city limits, two had been a young married couple, Frank and Amy Childress, and the fourth was, Janet McClain, the wife of the town mayor. Mayor McClain had returned home late the night before Halloween after a long council meeting to find Janet’s head impaled on the pickets of the front gate, her face pale and slack, an awful pinkish glow emanating from her empty eye sockets, nostrils, and mutilated mouth. The McClain children slept peacefully upstairs, unaware that anything had happened to their mother.

Sheriff Townshend had never found a shred of evidence or any clues to help him track down the one responsible. The state police had even helped with the investigation, but all their law enforcement savvy and knowledge had led them nowhere.

Absolutely no one in the little mountain town of Green Hollow, or Sevier County for that matter, had any idea who could have been deranged and evil enough to perform the grisly murders and constructed the hideous jack-o’-lanterns.

No one, that was, except the town librarian, Miss Gladys Willoughby.

Sheriff Townshend was sitting in a booth at the Anytime Café, nursing a cup of coffee, when she slid into the seat across from him. The lawman lifted his cup and hid a frown with a long sip. What the hell is she up to now, he wondered.

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