Onscreen, a young man steps back from the camera and into frame, which sits at a slight angle, as though the camera is on a fence post or rock.
“Alright,” he says, “Here we go. I’ve arrived at the location I was given by our host, who shall remain unnamed. This dirt road wasn’t easy to find, I actually drove past it twice! I wasn’t sure I was in the right place until I saw the other cars. Check this out! I’m out in the middle of nowhere, heavy forest all around. Total Blair Witch feel going on here! Just want to do one more technical check before we get going.”
“This part is on Youtube,” Arthur said.
“Just keep watching,” Angie admonished.
On the computer screen, JSkel picks up the camera, and slips it into a holster designed as part of his costume. He starts off down a small trail leading off the clearing in the woods where the cars are parked. The video is unsteady, it swings and lurches a bit, as JSkel walks. The forest grows dark, details hard to make out. At some point, the camera is turned off, the timestamp in the lower corner jumps ahead.
JSkel appears onscreen as the video picks back up. It’s dark out, but his face is illuminated by the light from his phone.
“I switched off for a while back there to save on memory space,” JSkel states, “Just as well; I realized I lost my signal when I switched over to another battery on the camera, so I haven’t been livestreaming for who know how long, anyway. I’ve walked over two hours following this trail in the darkness. I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s this big metal door, totally out of place, just built into the hillside here, hidden among the trees.” JSkel turns the handheld camera away from himself and toward the darkness. The door isn’t visible until he slips the camera back into place on his costume and walks forward, closer to the door.
A small panel opens at his knock. “Password?”
“Trick or Treat.”
The door opens, and JSkel is ushered into a small, unlit room, not much larger than a closet. A thick curtain hangs opposite the door through which he just passed, edges of light from the room beyond slip in where the curtain meets the wall. A black robed figure— is that a skull mask under the hood? It’s so dark, makes it hard to see details— sweeps the curtain aside with a large prop scythe, ushering JSkel into the next room. There’s a riot of lights colors; the first impression is a monster mash of orange, green, and purple, underscored with black. Candlelight is prevalent, though there are strings of electric lights in the shape of small pumpkins with faces painted on them. A mist or fog, rolls across the floor, pouring out from a large cauldron in the corner, likely dry ice. Cobwebs drape from the ceiling, more Jack O’ Lanterns, carved rather than painted, sit on shelves and tables as decoration, candles inside casting a flickering, eerie glow. Other people mill about the large, cavernous room, all wearing costumes as well, all with different designs and markings.
“Ah, you’re here!” calls out an older man, wearing formal, yet slightly fancy, clothing, face partially hidden by an ornate Venetian mask. “Last to arrive, but just in time!” As if punctuating his sentence, a clock starts to chime, it’s one of those old, antique pendulum style clocks, standing in the far corner. The chime is deafening, conversation stops. Upon reaching twelve, it stops.
“The clock is off,” Arthur said, “A few minutes ago, when we saw JSkel’s phone screen, it was just a bit after nine.”
“Shush,” was all Angie replied.
“Welcome to The Hollow!” says the older man, acting as the party host, “By far the best place for the Wild Hunt.”
Several of the party-goers gathered in the room shrug, or turn toward each other with confused, questioning looks.
“The Wild Hunt?” someone asks.
“Halloween!” calls out another voice.
“I forget, sometimes, that you’re all so young. Well, comparatively speaking. You probably don’t have all the tales from the old country, you wouldn’t remember... oh, the tales my great grandparents used to tell! Halloween used to be far different,” the host says, slipping into the soft voice and tone barely above a whisper, yet somehow able to reach the furthest recesses of the cavernous room, likely carved out of the hillside.
“Halloween was not this fun-filled affair it is today, it was no holiday, if you will. It was a day of reverence for our departed ancestors. It was a day their spirits could return, and if you didn’t honor them, oh, would they be angry! And there were the harvest festivals as well… but enough of the memories from my youth! We have food and drink; we are hidden away in a bunker in the middle of nowhere, hidden away from the eyes of the world, on this night of the Wild Hunt. Let us eat, drink, and partake in the joy of traditions long faded!” The host raises his glass, the celebrants all follow suit.
“To Halloween!” a voice calls out.
“To Halloween,” a chorus of voices reply. The host shakes his head sadly.
JSkel works his way around the large room, sampling candy and sweets from trays, watching people play games much as they did when at the Halloween parties of their youth. There are caramel covered apples on sticks, thumb-sized chocolate bars of a several varieties, small sugar pills, licorice sticks, stacks of candy corn left mostly untouched, and other old-treats and delicacies.
“No way!” a voice calls out from the corner of the room. JSkel, and the camera he wears, turn toward the shout.
“You moved it on purpose!”
JSkel draws near to the source of the commotion. A group of six sits on the floor around a Ouija board.
“What’s going on?” someone asks.
“It’s this Ouija board thing. I swear he moved it on purpose!”
“What did you ask it?” JSkel inquires.
“I asked “What should we do tonight,” and it just said “Run”! Then I asked why and it spelled out “danger”.”
“What kind of danger?” someone asks.
The woman turns back to the group around the board, and two different people place their hands on the small indicator piece. After a moment, it starts to move, someone calling out the letters as it momentarily stops.
H
U
N
T
S
M
A
N
C
O
M
E
S
A shudder passes through those watching.
“Did you spell that on purpose?” the woman asks.
“No,” responds the frat boy, though he can’t seem to hide a smirk. JSkel turns and moves on, leaving the game behind.
A screen on the far wall shows old movies, black and white monster classics. Onscreen, Abbot and Costello are running from Frankenstein’s monster. JSkel stops and watches for a while.
“What do you think these Jack O’ Lanterns were for, originally?” a fellow partier asks, indicating the decorations on a nearby table as JSkel, and the camera, turn toward him.
“I don’t know,” JSkel replies. “Ward off evil spirits, maybe?”
“A fair guess.” The host’s voice breaks in. JSkel jumps and turns. “As I said before, Halloween was believed to be a time when the dead spirits could return to the world for a day. Some posit that these makeshift lanterns were set in windows and on porch steps to scare away the evil spirits. Other theories, based off an old Irish story of Stingy Jack, who tricked the devil and was cursed to wander after his death, carrying a lantern. It became associated with the phenomenon of ignis fatuus, lights seen in marshes and bogs at night.”
“Will o’ the wisp?”
“Ah, you’ve heard the name? Also known as Faerie fire. Other stories say they were the lanterns carried by the Wild Hunt, as they set out to harvest souls. It’s one of the few Halloween traditions that does not come from Harvest Festival traditions, though I suppose the carving of the gourd would have coincided with the Feast of Samhain.”
“The Celtic lord the dead?”
The host laughs. “No, no… Samhain was no god. Samhain was a festival, marking the transition from the harvest season to the winter. In some ways Halloween was always about death. If you dig back far enough, most of the traditions started as harvest festivities and watered down beliefs from forgotten religions.”
“Harvest festivals and ancient religions?” JSkel asks.
“Yes, both of which involve death. Symbolically as the season changed to winter, and physically as livestock were slaughtered and plants harvested & culled, all made into provisions set aside for the winter months when the fields lay fallow and nothing grew. A final celebration of life before the long dark, if you will.
“Over time, life became less dire. Technology advanced. Winter became easier to bear. Traditions and symbols became detached from their religious meanings. Gathering food for harvest festivals turned into kids dressing up and going door-to-door, Trick or Treating for candy. Carved lanterns and disguises meant to ward off or fool evil spirits became these Jack O’ Lanterns and costumes. The harvest festivals changed from a necessity of life to a fun celebration at the turn of the season. As people grew to fear the coming winter less, they began to forget the Wild Hunt. It’s relegated to myth, now, I suppose.”
“You mentioned that before. What is this Wild Hunt?”
“Hm,” says the host, then pauses. “The Wild Hunt has gone by many names, but it appears in one form or another in the folklore and mythology of many regions. Mostly Northern European, but you can find a corollary in the folklore of some Native American tribes, and some regions of Asia. Depending on where you go, the hunt is led by Odin or the Valkyries, or Gwyn ap Nudd in Wales, biblically by Gabriel or the Devil, or legendary heroes or villains, the Fae or unnamed lost souls. To see the Wild Hunt was interpreted as a sign of imminent death, or a warning, at the very least. Some think it was just a mythological explanation for thunderstorm, these spirits riding through the sky with a horrible noise, but I would say it’s far more than that.
“There is more to it than mere legend. There are those who disappear on Halloween. There are those who claim to have seen the riders of the hunt. There are conspiracy nuts who claim the government is behind it, a black ops organization fulfilling the roles of judge, jury, and executioner, separating the wheat from the chaff in some form of morbid culling of the population. Others claim it’s organized by a cabal of the rich, a chance to hunt the ultimate game: people. Still others believe in the supernatural, the proverbial Wild Hunt made real, a parade of demons riding through the sky, searching for souls to harvest, filling the quotas of Hell.”
“Ghost Riders in the Sky?”
“In fact, there are some who claim that song is based on the legends of the Wild Hunt. Whatever the case…”
The host’s words are lost as the clock strikes again, but not just once, as expected. After the thirteenth tolling, the clock falls silent. The room grows calm, even the music and the video have stopped.
Red-robed servants appear and begin making rounds with a tray upon which tall, thin glasses balance precariously. As they weave throughout the room, giving each celebrant a glass, the host calls out to wait for the toast.
The glass JSkel holds comes close to, and passes by, the camera. “Absinthe?” he asks, to no-one in particular.
Finally the host picks up his own goblet, not from one of the trays but from the table, and raises it in the air.
“To Halloween!” he says.
“To Halloween!” a chorus of replies calls out, and everyone sips from their glass.
Except for JSkel, whose glass remains in his hand, which doesn’t move.
“Yeah, I’m not drinking this,” JSkel mutters into the camera, close enough that the microphone can pick up his whisper. “Long time followers may recall that my previous experience with Absinthe didn’t go well, which is an exercise in understatement.”
The silence holds sway over the room. Then shatters, along with the tinkled crash of a dropped glass. Then another glass falls. Onscreen, people start stumbling, reaching out for chairs, tables, the walls, anything for support. Some fall to the ground. Not just Absinthe, then, the drinks are laced with something else.
“May the Wild Hunt begin!” shouts the host, a wicked, leering smile blooming below his mask.
The Music system kicks back in. Orchestral music plays. Ride of the Valkyries. The curtain through covering the entrance of the bunker slides aside as the doorman steps into the room. He’s still draped in his black robe, the skull mask now glaring from under his hood. In his hands is the large scythe, but it’s no mere prop. The blade gleams in the candlelight.
The specter of death advances, and the room becomes an uncoordinated, drug-fueled stumble as people try to back away. The reaper steps forward and swings. Many collapse to the floor in fear, JSkel stands, frozen. The scythe rises, then buries itself in some poor soul, and catches. JSkel breaks into motion, slips past the reaper, through the door and out into the night. He runs, the path impossible to see on the camera in the darkness, until moments later there’s a break in the cloud cover, the moon providing a bit of light. Not much, but better than the pitch black from earlier. On the trail ahead, figures move, a deeper blackness against the dark trees. JSkel steps off the trail, into some brush, and tries to control his breathing, to quiet the gasping breaths that would give his position away. Three dark robed figures pass by on the trail, scant feet away. JSkel waits for a moment, then scrambles backward through the brush, away from the trail.
The frame goes dark again as JSkel slips into the space beneath the large pine. He swears. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he says as the camera, now detached from where it hangs on his costume, turns and looks into JSkel’s scared features, barely visible in the dark. JSkel places the camera on a branch, tucking it in securely. “I hope I can get a signal here,” he says as he pulls out his phone. The screen illuminates his face, making the fear even more apparent in his features.
A sudden rush of movement from behind, and JSkel falls to the ground, out of frame. A figure slips through the hanging branches and steps into view, looming in the frame, a scythe in its hands. The phone’s light reflects off the still-dry blade.
“The Huntsman never goes unsated,” the voice of the host whispers, “The quota fills when he doth ride. If you wish not to be taken, lock your doors and stay inside.
“Happy Halloween!” says the host, just as the scythe starts its downward arc.
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