When The Bell Sounds

Everyone knows the saying. Not everyone pays attention, though.

So when Eve moved into the town of Ashveil Hollow three weeks before Halloween, she didn't think anything of it when the flyers and notices started showing up— signs nailed to the door of the old church no one really went to anymore.

Father Lucien Graves would fuss over her every time she popped in to do her "duty," the kind her mother would've been proud of: a weekly allowance dropped into the collection plate, even if she didn't agree with half of what the Church did. Besides— this was the age of social media. God wasn't in the pews anymore. He was on TikTok, if anywhere. Go where the masses are.

The masses were lining up to do stupid dance trends and thirty-second challenges instead. She disregarded the warning two nights before Halloween.

"If you hear the last call of the bells on Halloween, get inside. Lock every door. Don't answer if someone knocks." Father Lucien's grey eyes fixed on Eve's small frame as she scrolled through her phone, not listening.

"Yeah, I hear you, Father." She mumbled it, clicked her phone off, and smiled brightly up at him before turning and walking out— collection plate a full forty-eight hours ahead of Sunday. She was really nailing this Christian thing.

Twelve hours.

Twelve hours to go until midnight on Halloween, and she was still getting warnings. The townsfolk were nothing if not diligent. Still, Eve just smiled and nodded at each one. Agnes Wren, the baker, handed over a scone and gritted her teeth.

"Luv, you did board your windows, right?"

Eve barely heard her, still scrolling through some trend the Gen Z kids had started. Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? She mumbled something to Agnes, nodded, and stuffed her face with the plain scone, still warm from the oven. She groaned her thanks and headed out.

Back pressed to the bakery's glass door, she pushed her way out into the crisp autumn air. Summer had been her month — except she'd spent it packing up her mother's things from the old folks' home. That was how she'd found the deed to this place, tucked among the boxes.

Eve had a horrible knack for finding the wrong person at the wrong time, bouncing from one man to the next in a string of mistakes an almost-forty-year-old really shouldn't still be making. But she wasn't going to let this opportunity slip past her.

She saw an investment in the run-down house. Worn, sure, but nothing a bit of paint and a few tight screws couldn't fix before she flipped it for a tidy profit. She scrolled through renovation reels, trying to figure out how to do it all on the cheap. Able-bodied, thin enough that hauling lumber wasn't a chore — if the girls on TikTok could do it, so could she.

Only she couldn't. Not even close. Her fixes were questionable at best, disastrous at worst — the house was turning into cheap junk painted over a stuck pig. Still, she kept at it. Said it was her calling.

(She'd said the same about dancing. And cooking. And painting. Before those took off, too. So there's that.)

Five hours.

Halloween was a drag. No children came trick-or-treating. She'd bought candy and everything, and still — nothing. Come to think of it, Eve had never actually seen a kid in this town. She figured there had to be a school somewhere, though she'd never once looked up long enough to find it.

She flicked her hair off her shoulders and leaned against the porch rail with the full candy bowl at her hip, and sighed. The town has to have kids, right? But no one was out walking. No one was ever out walking.

She tore through the first box of chocolates as the clock crept toward midnight.

Twenty minutes.

Eve stepped outside to grab the jack-o'-lantern off the steps as fog started rolling in off the field behind the house. Not creepy at all, she thought, turning back toward the door.

A creak startled her. She dropped the pumpkin, and it split open on the porch boards. A yelp cracked into the darkness as she groaned, bent down, and swept the broken gourd aside with her foot.

Five minutes.

She didn't hurry. Just kicked the last of the ruined pumpkin off the steps and walked calmly back up to the house, phone still in hand, thumb still scrolling. Somewhere off in the distance, the bells gave a low, first toll.

Midnight.

The bells chimed. Last call. Last warning. But Eve never saw the signs — she'd ignored every one of them. Hadn't locked the doors. Hadn't boarded a single window. She walked straight into the house and pulled the door shut behind her without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Now it was too late.

The door had barely clicked shut when the knock came. Eve rolled her eyes, turned back toward it, and pulled it open just as her phone screen finally went dark.

Two beady eyes stared back at her out of the dark. The figure stepped into the porch light — short, shorter than her, grey-haired, sharp-nosed. Her mother's dead eyes looked out of a stranger's face.

"Eva."

The voice in front of her was a warped, muddy echo of her mother's warmth.

Mom?

Eve blinked. Eva had always been their private joke, hers and her mother's — and now this thing, this bony, wrong-shaped thing, was wearing it like a costume.

She drew a breath to snap back, but it was already too late. The figure lunged, landing on top of her in the hallway. Its smile split wide with jagged teeth as it grinned. "So nice to have you for dinner, Eva."

Then the wet snap and chomp of flesh and bone echoed off into the empty night.

She should have listened to the warnings.

To the last call.