“Don’t come any further!” Axel yelled at Sandra who was on her way through the pumpkin patch. Everything had been a blast as they had gone trick and treating, but Snick ran off as he tended to do, and Axel and Sandra was stuck running after him, as they tended to do.

Things had been fine until they reached a patch of pumpkins, seemingly abandoned. There wasn’t any people around, nor houses. Not even a scarecrow or the like to keep birds away. It was oddly empty, only with pumpkins all around.

Axel had gone first, as he tip-toed around the patch, looking for traces of Snick. Just as Sandra was about to join, he spotted something weird. Something that instantly made warning sirens in his mind go off, as he yelled at her.

“Why not?” She asked confused, feeling her pulse raising a bit at his sudden yell. Axel was normally not one to yell. He was diplomatic and level-headed, and tended to be the one finding Snick pretty quickly, while Sandra just joined him in the search, being good company and brute force, if so needed. So a yell was far from normal.

“There’s just… Something here…” Axel couldn’t explain it. A chill had gone down his spine the moment before he yelled, as he thought he saw something spelled out on the pumpkin. Something he wasn’t entirely sure he read correctly. ‘Stay?’ was what he thought he saw carved into the pumpkin in his direct line of sight, but after the yell, he had blinked, and it was gone.

“Uhm… ‘Leave?’? Did you see this one said that when we got here?” Sandra read off another pumpkin as she looked up at Axel. He shaked his head, gears churning, as he looked around for a new message.

“Is it still there?” He asks, not taking his eyes off the bigger patch as he goes in a little bit further.

“Of course it is, it wouldn’t just dissap-“ Sandra cuts herself off as she looks down. That’s all the answer Axel needs as he continues to look around.

“’Fun?’” Axel reads as the words on a new pumpkin becomes carved, one letter at a time. He sees it happening. No knife. No hands. Nothing. Only letters being carved out, one by one, by an invisible force he can’t explain.

“Sandra, we need to get out of here. This isn’t right.” Axel says, looking around horrified. He doesn’t like things that can’t be explained, and self-carving pumpkins writing cryptic messages was above him. He wanted to be gone. Now.

“But Snick-“ Sandra tries as Axel goes towards her.

“Snick isn’t here. Nobody is here. We will find him elsewhere.” Axel is short on words as he stops in his tracks, only a few pumpkins before he is out.

His eyes fixate on a pumpkin as a new word gets carved.

Feeling in his gut that he should run, that the word is a word he wouldn’t want to see, he is frozen in place.

An S gets cut out, followed by an N. Axels gulp as the I and C follows. Axel looks at Sandra as the final letter is written.

“S-N-I-C-K” Axel spells, as he can’t get the name over his lips.

Sandra starts crying. She doesn’t know what it means, but the entire situation is too… Wrong. There is nothing about self-carving pumpkins that spells her friend’s name that makes sense. Axel jumps out the pumpkin patch, finally, as he tries to breathe.

“What does it mean?” Sandra can’t help but ask, as she look over the pumpkin field, automatically searching for a new word.

“Stay? Leave? Fun? Snick. That’s all the words so far.” Axel concludes without really answering the question, as he too doesn’t know.

“Did Snick have a question mark?” Sandra asks, noticing something. Axel gives a slow shake with his head.

“Maybe… Maybe the messages are from Snick? Maybe he signed it so we knew it was from him? Do you want to stay, do you want to leave, do you want to have some fun – Like that?” Sandra knows her hypothesis doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if the messages were written and signed by Snick, how was he able to make them without them seeing him.

Axel looks around, for once hoping to see another word. But a word he didn’t want to see is the first that greets him.

“’Bye’…” Axel reads as the pumpkin patch disappears in front of them, leaving behind an empty lot of dirt.

“What. What? What just happened- Axel? Did you see? Did we imagine the whole thing?” Sandra panics, not being able to think clearly, she starts running around, as if the patch they had looked at would appear if she stood in the exactly right place.

“Sandra…” Axel doesn’t know what to say either, as his gears continue to churn, making some kind of sense out of everything.

“I wanted to stay… Now I can’t leave… I had fun… From Snick… Bye…” Axel mutters, making himself more and more hopeless in the process. Sandra turns to look at him, horrified.

“How can you say that? He wasn’t gone for more than a few minutes before we noticed! He couldn’t have become – Whatever he needed to be for THIS to happen? This wasn’t him! There must have been something in the air, making us both hallucinate. You need to find him, Axel. I’m sure he’s not far away. We need to get out of here, find him, and go home. The three of us. Right, Axel? You can find him? Right?” Sandra started shaking as her emotions took over. She couldn’t handle whatever had happened, she couldn’t process any ideas of what might have happened. There was nothing she could do, other than denying whatever she had just seen.

“Snick is okay. I’m sure he’s just lying in wait somewhere to pull a prank on us!” She continues, while Axel continues to stay silent. After she calms down a bit, he looks her in the eyes.

“I’m sure Snick is fine.” He says as he reaches out a hand for her to hold. They walk back to the city, hand in hand, as neither of them mention Snick with a word.

Nor do they go look for him. Deep down, they could feel it. He vanished along with the patch… They would never see him again.