This story is based in a real incident.

Names and places were changed to protect the

innocents.

Halloween Night
Time past and we felt as if Lacombe had left us stranded, she was supposed
to take us trick-or-treating that Halloween night. The nine of us were dressed
in our respected Halloween costumes. We were into the macabre in those
days, other than my sister who dressed as Dorothy, all of us were sprayed
with fake blood and fake sharp objects piercing our frail bodies. My best
friend Nelson wore the white mask of the movie Screen guy. While I was a
bad imitation of Freddy Kruger, I hated the plastic mask so I put paint over
my face in trying to look like the Nightmare in Elms Street character. My
other friends were as grisly as we were, now that I think about it, we were
bad imitations of the horror flicks of the time.

We were pissed at Lacombe, she was the oldest sister of the corner lot
family, and of all of us she was the only one that could drive. Us, guys,
depended on a seventeen-year-old fat girl that thought that she was hot.
But, when you are thirteen -- almost fourteen -- to get out of your house you
attach yourself to the devil.

“She’s here,” my sister shouted at the bunch waiting in the garage.

“Shit . . . about time,” Nelson said.

Lacombe drove a bright blue, with white stripe lines, El Camino -- a half car,
half a truck thing, which she inherited from her bold head Dad. She and her
two sisters made us a group of twelve teenagers, trick or treating around
town on an El Camino truck. The nine of us got on a tie squeeze on the truck
bed and inside the cockpit, and headed to do the Halloween thing in the
many subdivisions that our hometown produced.

We went where everyone went at first. A parade of goblins, witches,

mummies and vampires line up with use in front of every house door that will
give us candy. The competition was fearless; the cute young kids with their
Disney’s costumes were preferred by the candy givers. Nelson egged three
houses, because their owners refused to give us candy, they said that we
were too old to be trick or treating that night. So, after ransacking all the
small subdivisions near downtown, we decided to move into the large
subdivisions placed on the town outscores. We were going to target more
than a hundred homes, where many of our classmates lived at the time.

“Let’s go to Hunters’ Creek,” Lacombe shouted over the loud music playing
in the radio.

“Yeah,” a unison voice of affirmation answered her.

Lacombe made a U-turn in the middle of downtown Main Street; it felt as if

we were going to be rejected out the truck bed.

“Gee, shit,” Tito, the son of the only dentist in town, shouted as he pulls out
a brown bag from his long black trench coat. A small Bacardi bottle came
out of the bag. “Nelson,” Tito made a gesture offering a swig to my best
friend.

“Where did you get that shit?” Nelson asked.

“My Step Dad’s, the old fart thinks that we don’t know where he kept it,” said
Tito.

The bottle went around the truck bed, everyone took a drink, and even
Lacombe and her sisters drank from the container. This was my first time,
the liquid burned my throat as it went down it, and I was as having a severe
heart burn in my esophagus.

The road to mega-subdivision was as dark as my grandmother’s closet. Pitch

black was an understatement! During the day the road was beautiful, two
lines of mango trees in each side of the path covered the asphalted road,
when in bloom the mango flowers that felt on the ground made the place
looked as if has a pink carpet. However, when at night, it was as dark and
gloomy as an outlandish trip to Transylvania.

As boys, Nelson and my buddies tried to show some gallantry in front the
girls that accompanied us that night, the girls that came with us that night
were all related to my buddies, the sisters to be specific. I had something for
Nelson’s sister, Wendy. She was her fraternal twin, but she was as different
from him as I was to my younger sister. The road we were traveling has
some eminence and it was not a pretty one, it was the corner choice for
people that wanted to take their lives. And some months ago, it was the
scene of a mafia style, double murder. Someone set a car on fire with two
bodies inside the trunk. All that history and the fact that it was Halloween
made the girls to embrace of with their heat.
Nelson was the best in everything, the star quarterback of the Junior Varsity
team, and the top scorer of the Middle School basketball team. All the best
looking girls were after him, but he has his eyes on Anna Parish, the girl that
was sitting next to him that night. They were French kissing in front of all of
us, while Wendy and I were afraid of what he will say if we make a move.

And as the Bacardi bottle moved in its second round around the El Camino
truck bed, without knowing it we trek into the strangest night of our life.
However, we were care free; we were young daring and audacious to
everything.

Lacombe drove her El Camino through the mango trees’ road. The long patch
of tree leaves was almost invisible to the eye. The darkness masked the
woods in both sides of the narrow road. Lacombe drove as fast as she could
through long way. But out nowhere she broke the silent, the fat girl shouted
from the truck cockpit, “Hey, guys, look what I can do . . .” She slowed down
the truck and then turned off its headlights.

“What -ta-f . . . you’re doing?” a voice came from the back; I still don’t know
who this person was. However, the rest of the gang cheered the prank.

Lacombe turned the lights on, and said, “Wow, that was dark, I couldn’t see
my hands!” Then, she did it again; she turned off El Camino headlights.
Screens came out of the back of the truck, the same voice that I still don’t
recognize, said, “F . . . king fat bitch! Don’t do that . . . “

Lacombe turned back on the lights; she hurt the boy’s voice and responded,
“What did the idiot say?”

“What’s that . . .” my sister said, she was sitting in front with the sisters, so
she got a good look too whatever it was there.

“What did you say?” Karen, Lacombe sister, asked.

“There . . .”

“Where,” they all said at once.

“There . . .”

Lacombe stopped the truck in the middle of the patch; we, in the back,
weren’t aware of what was going on. “Why she’s stopping?” Nelson said to
me. I was sitting next to the driver window.
“What’s going on?” I asked Lacombe.

“There is something on the trees . . . there” she said as she pointed outside
the car with her left hand.

There it was a grayish color animal of a kind, with wings and flecks all over
its body, with big red eyes and two large fangs coming out of its mouth. Its
tale moved from side to side, like a lizard’s tale, as its wings were similar to a
bat’s.

“That looks like a gargoyle,” my sister murmured to herself.

The animal jumped in a big leap from one tree to another, as if it wanted to
move away from us. “Let’s fallow it,” Lacombe screeched very excited about
the discovery they have made. She flicked the vehicle’s headlights to its
high beans and began to fallow the thing.

Nelson and I stood up in the back of the truck so did the others, we could see
the animal leaping from one tree to another, all that while Lacombe slowly
fallows it.

Then someone shouted, “come and get us, bitch . . .” And as if it knew what
was said, the animal turned to look at us, and with one leap it landed on the
front part of the El Camino, it was bigger than a regular man, with a thick
fiber muscle frame for a body. The thing moved forward with the quickness
of a wrestler, grabbing Nelson’s head with one hand. Its claws squeezed
Nelson’s head so hard that it broke between his fingers, beheading him in an
instant; his brains were spread all over our faces and clothes.

We stood still facing the animal in dismay as it killed my best friend with one
hand. It looked at us and then smiled as if it was joking with us and with
what was left of Nelson’s head. Then it leaped away from the El Camino, and
as this occurred, we all screened in a unison expression of horror.

We didn’t see it again; Lacombe drove us back, as fast she could, to her
house, while we carried backs what was left from Nelson. He was the only
casualty of that horrible incident. He didn’t deserve to be killed that way; he
became the blemish toy of the strange creature that visited us that night.

When we tried to explain what, happened to us that evening, no one

believed us. We found ourselves under an investigation, but Nelson’s body
saved us from being thrown in jail for the rest of our young life. The autopsy
proofed that there not force on earth that can damage a young man like
that. But that didn’t matter, many of our friends stopped talking to us, we
were guilty in their eyes. Tito became the first casualty; the peer pressure
destroyed him, his family moved to Orlando, Florida. Some said that his
parents couldn’t take the talking behind their back, and the finger pointing.

Lacombe’s father died of Cancer a year after, so the oldest daughter sold
their corner lot and moved to the capital. Wendy wasn’t the same after
what happened, she began to have doubted our story, her father
brainwashed her. Nelson’s death destroyed them, one day they were there
and the next day they weren’t. As little by little, the others did.

Of all of the people involved in the strange incident, I was the only one that
stayed in town. I became a school teacher, got married and have two kids. I
later bought the corner lot, where the Lacombe family once lived. As for
what happened twenty years ago, every day in and out, I see someone
behind me pointing at me. However, things are a lot better than what they
were in the beginning. Sometime, I drive my car through the mango trees’
road and nothing has happened through it since that Halloween Night.