The Scar

Around a cozy fireplace, sat an old man and his two grandchildren. The old man held their interest by telling scary ghost stories and spooky tales, while the children smiled and listened. Their imaginations were ignited and while finishing another tale, suddenly he was interrupted.

“Grandpa, can you tell us where you got that big scar on your leg?” asked the younger of the two children.

The older gentleman paused, thinking about what to say to this. His brow furrowed and he responded, “Another time, it’s not something I really like to talk about.”

“That’s what you said last time! Come on please!” the other child pleaded.

“It was a large, scary, old barn owl. It had nested in my attic, and I unknowingly startled the old fellow, and it flew straight at me, tearing me with his razor-sharp talons.” he said with a slight grin.

“Oh, come on, that’s not true, what really happened?” the older one asked.

His eyes went back and forth looking at them. He was contemplating on what to say next.

“Okay,” the older gentleman spoke to them in a hushed, serious voice. He then motioned for them to gather closer around the crackling fire. “Alright, you are probably old enough to hear this now, but you need to understand this is the truth, this is not some made up bedtime story. I know I may sometimes seem like a crazy old man but believe me on this tale, as this is my early life as I remember it.

‘It was about 50 years ago, my best friend Jimmy, his sister Lillian, and our friend Tommy, who we all nicknamed “Truck” due to his large barrel shape, and I would play together almost every day after school. We were a close group, and we had a ton of fun weekend adventures.

So now on to how I got the scar, it is kind of a gruesome tale… It was late Fall, and all the kids in school were excited for both the big Halloween costume party, as it was quite the event and “Trick or Treating” that night.

Jimmy and Lillian had the best costumes, homemade from their grandmother. Their grandmother was a short, yet frightening creature. She was an old lady from Eastern Europe who lived with them. Lillian used to always say her grandmother was once a gypsy and used to travel the countryside in Europe from village to village. I often thought she was just a crazy old lady, with a nasty staring problem, but Lillian said she was quite well known for her handwritten book of prayers and healing in her day back in her home village. She used the book as a treatment of ailments. A book she referred to as her ‘Divine Cookbook of the Ancients.’ It contained writings of techniques collected and handed down from several generations in her family.

The costumes she made were amazing. Jimmy was dressed up as Dracula and was a perfect likeness to a young Bela Lugosi. I heard that she made the costume from memory of only seeing the original film once. He had his hair slicked back and his skin was powdered down to a pasty white complexion.

Lillian was a little witch, complete with a black hat, false crooked nose, a black skirt, and a broom. She had a very striking resemblance to her grandmother when dressed in this outfit. Lillian slyly ‘borrowed’ her grandmother’s old cookbook I mentioned without permission to complete the look.

I had this cheap costume from a cardboard box sold at all the old drug stores. It was a plastic wolfman mask, with a rubber band that fit around the back of the head. I hated that the costume just had a picture with words of the wolfman on the chest, so I wore a plaid shirt to cover it up and make it more authentic looking.

As bad as my costume was, Truck did not put much effort in his costume at all. He was disguised as a ghost, and it appeared that he just took the white sheets off his bed and cut two holes for his eyes. He brought his pillowcase for collecting candy. In other words. he wore his bed laundry.

We had a great Halloween party at school that year and Lillian won for best costume as we knew she would. All the other girls in school dressed up as princesses, so Lillian’s outfit was vastly different than the rest. When the votes came in, her costume represented the spirit of Halloween the most without challenge.

At the party, we had cupcakes and got some healthy veggie treats from the teachers, which most of us threw away when they were not looking. We bobbed for apples, played Halloween-themed games and everyone laughed and had a fun time trying to guess who one another were supposed to be dressed up as.

A few hours later after school, the gang of us four got together, still wearing our costumes to go collect some candy from the neighbors that night for Trick or Treat. We must have visited twenty-five or thirty houses and our bags were getting too heavy for us to carry.

‘We should stash some of this in a hiding spot because mom won’t let me eat this much candy! She will make me throw it out or donate it, which means our father will probably eat it’ Jimmy said. All the kids agreed as this was a common situation for all.

‘We need to find a really good hiding place, one where we can collect from throughout the rest of the week, but nobody else will find it!’ Lillian replied.

‘How about behind the bakery in town? There is an alley way where we can hide the treats in a bag behind the dumpster. Nobody will find the candy; they just dump the trash as quick as possible and go back inside the store.’ Jimmy said.

‘That won’t work,’ I said, ‘there are rats in that dumpster, and they will certainly find our stash!’

‘How about the old cemetery on Hilltop Road?’ asked Truck. ‘Nobody ever goes there willingly. We can find an old grave and bury our candy there under a bed of leaves.’

‘Wait! We can’t just walk in there on Halloween night! We have to place a few jack-o’-lanterns at each cemetery gate. It keeps any bad spirits from escaping the cemetery’ Lillian said. ‘My grandmother taught me that is what you have to do if you visit a burial ground on this night, otherwise an evil spirit may try to hitch a ride on you home.

There were a couple of houses nearby that had exceptional pumpkins with grinning faces carved on them. We stole four of them and we each carried our prized turnips with us in one arm, and our bags of candy like trophies in the other.

As we approached the old graveyard, we all hesitatingly staggered towards the entrance. It was a great idea for a hiding spot, but the cemetery was quite intimidating at night. There was an eerie ground fog and it seemed exceptionally dark as there was no illumination other than the moon shining down on us. The older tombstones looked like crooked teeth glowing coming up out of the soil. ‘There is strength in numbers’ I thought to myself to give me courage walking through the spooky pathway to the front. Together we opened the cemetery gates, set down our pumpkins, and went inside.

We slowly walked through the endless rows of headstones. There was an eerie silence between us. Suddenly the tense atmosphere changed when we heard our friend Truck shout out ‘Benjamin Crooks!’

‘What?’ I said …

‘Look!’ replied Truck pointing to an old headstone. “This guy died well over a hundred years ago, nobody’s coming back to visit him. Even if he had family, they are long gone. Let’s stash our extra candy here. It will be safe!’

We looked over towards Truck and saw an old, slightly collapsing stone that read ‘In Memory of Benjamin Crooks, who departed September 28th, 1832’

‘Yeah, Benjamin’s ghost will guard our candy for us! He will take care of anyone trying to help themselves to our bags’ I joked.

We agreed that this is the ideal hiding place and sat around his grave, eating some of our last prized treats. We passed the time telling corny cemetery-themed jokes.

‘Don’t make fun of the dead, especially not here!’ said Lillian.

Lillian opened her grandmother’s old book and leafed through the delicate pages, finding the scribbled writings on the subject of Halloween. It said that on All Hallows’ Eve, you can truly become whatever you are disguised as for this one night, if you speak the words scribed in the next verse on the old paper. We laughed and we didn’t believe her.

‘Go ahead then, read it!’ Truck mockingly said to her.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything Grandmother writes in her book’ Jimmy said, ‘she is kind of batty sometimes.’

Lillian ignored her brother then lit a candle she had taken from one of the stolen jack-o’-lanterns and read the mysterious incantation aloud. We laughed again at how completely serious she was taking this.

Our attention was diverted as we heard some yelling and saw an older teen that we recognize from town sprint across the graveyard towards us. Our stomachs sunk and we all recognized him immediately. This was Richard Elkins, the local psychopath. He saw us, grabbed onto Truck’s shoulder, and shushed us. He swore someone was chasing after him.

Richard was the last person we wanted to see. Rumor was he had been on the run from the law for supposedly beating a guy for talking to a girl he was interested in. Richard was bad news and he had quite a reputation. He was known for starting fights, breaking into businesses, stealing other’s property and was just a rotten person. There were even some far-out rumors that he killed some guy just for the fun of it, but that was never proven. Everyone in town gossiped about Richard and his family. As a result, we feared and hated him, as did everyone else from the many stories about him.

We were afraid that Richard was going to start attacking us, so we maintained a safe running distance about three steps away from him. Suddenly we saw a hulking figure come out from behind a tree wearing a devil mask carrying a pitchfork screaming with a horrific growl.

‘It’s Judge Stevens,’ whispers Richard towards us. ‘He always had it out for me. He saw me earlier and has been following me, trying to kill me!’

Richard ducked and said in a worried tone, ‘He’s not a good guy you know, has the whole town fooled. He takes bribes and kickbacks on the side and blames half of his crimes on me. You wouldn’t believe half of the stuff he has been involved in!’

‘Why would the Judge be dressed as the Devil?’ Jimmy asked.

‘You tell me kid, I don’t know, probably some sleazy costume party in town he was at tonight with the gang he spends time together with when he is not wearing his fake smile and dressed in his Sunday best.’ Richard said. ‘Just hide from him and don’t say a word or you’ll live to regret this! I mean it!’

The figure dressed as the Devil walked through the cemetery methodically, looking behind each row of graves to seek out Richard. Somehow, he seemed different, his mask looked like real skin, and he seemed extremely menacing. He appeared to move with stealth, and you could sense a presence of evil surrounding him.

We were still…quiet as could be, hiding behind old Benjamin Crook’s headstone. I could not tell if Richard was lying and this was a shady friend of his trying to set us up in a compromising situation, to rob or beat us or worse. I was on guard and was trying to size him up to see how big he actually was. I was quite young but was wondering could I take him if Truck joins in? I played out this heroic scenario in my head, but I didn’t dare act upon it.

Seconds later, the shape in the Devil costume approached closely towards our location. I could see the moonlight reflect on his mask, revealing a pointy beard and two coniferous horns. It was not a mask at all, he was the Devil!

That’s when I looked at my friends and realized Lillian’s incantation had worked! Truck was floating in the air, Jimmy looked like he had real fangs, and Lillian looked much the same, like a little old witch. I looked at my hands and arms and they were now completely covered with thick matted hair. I had become the Wolf Man!

As Judge Stevens or ‘The Devil’ came closer to our row of headstones, he spotted Jimmy and tried to ensnare him. Richard tried to stand up to confront him. The town bad guy appeared to be trying to defend us, or at least save his own skin. They scuffled back and forth for a few seconds and then the Devil did a little trick with black smoke which confused Richard. He quickly got behind him and drove his pitchfork straight into his back lifting him high off the ground. He growled with excitement as Richard’s eyes went wide while he gasped his last breath. His lifeless body dangled before him at the end of the pitchfork.

The Devil then turned his head and locked eyes with me. He removed his weapon from Richard and quickly thrust it in my leg, causing this massive scar you asked about. I let out a howl of pain from the sting, jumped backwards and then instinctively lunged at him in retaliation. I tried to scratch at him with my newly formed claws and I managed to get a bite on his arm.

He reached his bloody hand out to grab Lillian and Jimmy tried to gnash teeth at him to protect his sister. Truck joined in and attempted to swoop down on him from above in his ghastly apparition form. The Devil grabbed the bottom of the sheet that made up Truck’s costume and burned it with a blue flame that arose from his hand. The sheet ignited and disintegrated into ash. I knew Truck was suddenly gone, dead from this world as we heard his final screams fade to silence.

The Devil laughed antagonistically at our sorrow and said gleefully ‘Too bad about that, I am the ultimate evil; you can’t defeat me! You will all die tonight! You will all die by my hand!’

Lillian quickly hid behind another old tombstone and opened her spell book looking for a way to reverse this situation. She scanned the pages back and forth, but there was nothing she found that could reverse the spell. It appeared this change was now permanent at least until this day passed.

We kept up the assault on the Devil, however Jimmy and I were repeatedly getting tossed around like rag dolls, and with each defeat the Devil laughed harder at us. We were wounded and exhausted. It seemed without a doubt like we would be joining our friend Truck soon enough.

I remember running on all fours as fast as I could like a racetrack dog sprinting around the perimeter of the cemetery, getting fireballs hurled at me as I panted hard trying to catch my breath.

Jimmy was caught by the Devil’s massive arm and could not escape his grasp. He held his pitchfork upright and was about to ram it in Jimmy’s chest cavity. Jimmy put up a pathetic and exhausted fight, trying to strike his newly formed fangs at him.

Lillian then loudly chanted some words she found in the book that I did not understand. She stated them repeatedly and with authority. The Devil looked at her and smiled in a taunting manor. He realized Jimmy was trying to transform into a bat so he grasped him tighter so Jimmy could not and raised him in the air to prepare for a final blow.

Suddenly, there was blinding flash of white light and the ground around us started shaking and rumbling like a tremor. The earth started opening. From the graves, the dead started rising, making their way to the surface, and grabbing at the Devil. There were some fresh bodies and some in a more advanced state of decay. The Devil was strong, and he was able to fight off a couple of dozen easily but was soon overwhelmed by the horde of bodies coming at him simultaneously. The ones with muscle tissue still attached were able to use it to their advantage to grasp him hard and pull him with the horde.

A skeleton had clawed up from Benjamin Crook’s grave and pulled the Devil from behind. The team of dead pushed him back to the pit in the ground with the opened casket at Crook’s gravesite. The Devil was sealed in the old coffin by the weight of the dead. Lillian commanded the dead to hold the coffin shut for as long as they can. Even Richard’s body had risen, joined the mob of bodies, and fell into the open grave to help seal it up. We heard muffled growls and screams and then eventually inaudible murmurs.

We packed the ground they were in with soil and concealed it with leaves. When the task was finished, we slowly made our way towards the cemetery entrance. I paused, with tears streaming down my furry face, overcome with emotion.

‘Can’t you do another spell to bring Truck back?’ I pleaded to Lillian.

Lillian looked at me and just shook her head with a sad look in her eyes. ‘I think we will be back to normal after midnight, but I don’t see any way to undo what happened to him, I think he’s gone. I’m sorry, I never should have read that.’

We closed the gates together and left while the jack-o’-lanterns we had placed earlier grinned, guarding the hallowed grounds. Shortly afterwards we somberly said our goodbyes and parted ways. Taking a long path through the outskirts of town on my journey back home, I eventually experienced a change in my body and reverted to a normal state of being. It must have become the first of November.

Following that night, the aftermath was mentally challenging to us. Days and weeks went by. Initially there was a lot of interest in the disappearances. Search parties and investigations were in full force for several months. Nobody in town knew what became of the Judge, of Richard, or our friend Truck. When questioned about what happened to Truck, we merely said we got separated and didn’t know what happened to him after we went out that night for Trick or Treat. It was terribly sad to lie to his family and is a secret we must take to our own graves; well, you now know, so it’s no longer a secret. It tore us apart. Eventually interest in this mystery faded as time went by.

There were many rumors and theories of what happened. Richard of course was the main suspect and blamed for the disappearances by the townies. They continued to act like he was the root of all their problems. Most of them assumed Truck and the Judge were his latest victims and he went into hiding from the law. The Judge was honored like a local hero and a town bridge was eventually dedicated in his name. The town was weird like that, most people knew the Judge himself was a shady guy with unorthodox businesses he was mixed up in, but they acted like he was the pinnacle of the community. Small-minded people that believed their own illusion of a picture-perfect society.

Since the events of that night, every Halloween, I go to the cemetery to place Jack o lanterns at every gate. Our curse kicks in and we become what we were pretending to be. Unfortunately, that also means Stevens tries to come back as the Devil and escape the confines of the graveyard.

It’s for everyone’s safety, you see Lillian’s curse was not for that one night, it was forever, literally every Halloween night. Anyone wearing a costume in that location will become his or her disguise, every year for the rest of their life. That was the curse Lillian invoked by reading aloud the forbidden section of her grandmother’s texts. Once a year, I become the wolf man, Jimmy is Dracula, and Lillian a witch. Even Truck’s ghost and the Devil come back in the confines of the old graveyard. Luckily, he has not been able to claw his way out yet, but we go back just to make sure.

I recall about a decade ago, a group of teens went to the cemetery to drink and smoke, dressed up as assorted items of food like eggs, hot dogs, fries, and pizza. When the curse kicked in, they became real food, and a pack of wild coyotes came by and had quite the meal. Some of the crime solver centered podcasts still discuss the mystery of their disappearances to this day. Local legends stated that Richard returned after all these years and claimed new victims. He has become this town’s boogeyman.

Frequently when we first started doing this ritual, whenever I arrived at the cemetery, I would see that Jimmy or Lillian had got there first and the grinning pumpkins would already be placed and lit to keep evil locked in. We sadly have grown apart and haven’t spoken to each other in years. Initially after that night I would see them at school, but we eventually stopped hanging out, and gradually they became just strangers around the campus. I sometimes really miss my friends. I never had friends like that again and pretty much became a lone wolf, so to speak. I believe the stress of that night stole our innocent friendship and the guilt on Lillian had weighed heavily on her heart. Even though we don’t speak, we still honor this promise we made during our childhood, so the Devil never gets a chance to get out.

In the past five years, I take care of things and am gone before they arrive, so I have not seen either of them in quite some time, and honestly, I don’t know if they are even still alive. Sometimes when I return, I see a flicker of Truck’s ghost appear just for a few moments and I’ll leave him some chocolate candy as tribute in the same spot we were gathered at years ago. Truck always enjoyed his chocolate. If a sheet could show the emotion of glee, it most certainly did when he finds the candy.

Once I set up the protection over the graveyard with the jack-o’-lantern guardians, I go off into the woods and chain myself to the trunk of a large oak until morning, because the wolf man is of course unpredictable and sometimes I bite!'” The old man said with a tear twinkling in his eyes.

He wrapped up the conversation while the children stared at him in disbelief.

“That’s not true, it couldn’t be!” said the older child.

They didn’t want to believe it but could see it written on his face, he was lost in thought and very serious. He suddenly snapped out of it and smiled.

“No, no, just kidding. It was an old barn owl like I said. A wingspan of about four feet long… His golden eyes widened, and he swooped down and caught my leg when I tried to kick at it. That’s what happened, that’s how I got the scar, enough of the bizarre story.”

They both knew he just said that to lighten the mood and the first story, although unbelievable, had to be the truth.

Epilogue:

It is not a wise idea to tell kids a story about magic, danger, and to stay away from something harmful, as they often tend to do the exact opposite of what they are told not to do.

This year on Halloween, after witnessing their old werewolf grandfather set up a row of guardian pumpkins and leave the cemetery, the grandchildren emerged from the shadows and entered the old iron gates dressed in their superhero and Jedi costumes.

“This year we will finish off the Devil once and for all for grandpa, so he doesn’t have to do this anymore!” said the one child.

“Yes… we will… for grandpa!”