Halloween Nightmare

Halloween Nightmare

 

On Halloween night, Tammy picked the wrong alley to walk through.

He made her pay!

 

R.R. Ryan

 

© Copyright 2025 by R.R. Ryan

 

NOTE: This work contains material not suitable for anyone under eighteen (18) or those of a delicate nature. This is a story and contains descriptive scenes of a graphic, sexual nature. This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

Halloween Nightmare

 

On Halloween night, Tammy strode through the riot. With her head high, skirt straight, high heels a shade too white under the streetlight’s glare. Fake blood spattered the cement in curdled puddles, and orange streamers snaked above the street, fat with wind.

 

Three girls in catsuits lurched past, giggling. One blew a kiss, smeared with glitter and malice. Tammy shot her a wink. The girl tripped, howled wolfishly, and kept moving.

 

The bar’s windows pulsed with purple light, and the bass drum boomed. The line outside swelled against the rope, costumes mashed into one garish mural. One Donald Trump, four inflatable Minions, a knot of vampires with $12 fangs, and more eye shadow than Tammy wore in her life.

 

She angled between them with a practiced lean, arms close, phone zipped in the nurse’s pocket. She’d have to text Eli soon, or he’d start pacing.

 

Her own getup came together this morning. White dress, tights, and thrift store patent Mary Janes. A cap with a wonky red cross. The skirt hit above the knee, but the look was classic, not slutty. Maybe a little slutty. It pleased her to see people notice, to see the little flickers as she passed.

 

The guys leered, the girls measured, everyone made mental notes.

 

When she ducked a flying streamer, the ends sticky with spilled whiskey, fluttered above her. The guy in a werewolf mask grinned at her, lost interest, his latex tongue wagging as he bared past. It was all staged menace, all bark, zero bite. She never felt safer than on a night like this.

 

Traffic shrieked one block over. The cold bit Tammy’s knuckles, but her core stayed warm from all the bodies jammed together on the sidewalk. Tammy fished her phone, thumbed a text. The screen glowed: Party’s on, u in? She hesitated and thumbed: Already here, nurse on call. U?

 

Moments later, Eli’s response: Party in the lot. Stash me a shot.

 

Staring at the screen, Tammy grinned and shoved the phone away. In the shadows of the night, her shortcut took her between a boarded bodega and a vape store. The alley was packed with costumed folks. Two witches in fishnets, a pirate groping his parrot with one hand and his crotch with the other. Some guy in boxers and a neon-green wig. The smell of weed and sour apple vape.

 

A girl cackled so hard, she rattled a milk crate.

 

Marching through the gathering, her pace didn’t falter. Someone catcalled. But she ignored it. She was almost to the parking lot, her shortcut doing its job, when the sense hit her. Just a breath on the back of her neck. Dragging it out, she pivoted, feigning a need to fix her shoe.

 

Nobody obvious.

 

The same chaos, the same swirl of limbs and laughter. Maybe the guy in the trench coat, standing stone still at the far corner, with no costume except the face paint—bone-white, with a slash of black for the eyes. His eyes were so blue they looked fake. Contact lenses. Hiding her smile, Tammy turned away. Halloween always drew out the creeps.

 

With nothing to worry her, she moved on. The lot was half-lit, the overhead busted. Her sneakers crunched glass and gravel. The crowd thinned here, a few lone stragglers and a couple making out behind a parked Civic. She saw Eli first—tall, in his red devil horns, flask in hand, arguing with someone in a moth-eaten banana suit.

 

“You’re late,” Eli said, his breath ghosting in the cold.

 

“False,” Tammy shot back, “You’re early.”

 

Unscrewing the flask cap, Eli handed it over.

 

The rum burned her throat. Coughing, she wiped her lips with the heel of her palm.

 

“Classy shit, Eli.”

 

He shrugged.

 

“You look good. Real Florence Nightingale. You got the hair right.”

 

Tammy grinned. Even when he laid it on thick, she liked Eli’s approval.

 

“You try to get blood out of curls,” she said. “It doesn’t wash.”

 

The banana interrupted: “We’re partying, or what?”

 

Distracted, Eli turned. The moment broke. Rolling it between her fingers, Tammy held the flask, feeling the dent where someone had dropped it last spring.

 

Out on the street, the blue-eyed guy in the trench coat waited. He did not move. He did not blink.

 

Tammy felt the weight of his gaze, even with the crowd between them. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. Pretending not to, making believe she was interested only in Eli. And the flask, or the way the wind pushed empty chip bags across the lot. But the guy did not leave. He studied her.

 

In a brief salute, Tammy lifted the flask, gave him a half-smile, and turned away for good. Let him stare. He was harmless, probably. If he followed, she’d duck into a bar or ask the bouncers for help. People took care of each other on Halloween.

 

The party was two blocks over. Tammy and Eli and the banana peeled off (ha) from the parking lot, and the noise ramped up again. Tammy’s cap fell sideways in the wind. Eli fixed it, his enormous hands awkward but gentle.

 

They rounded the corner at Fisher and Main, and Tammy checked her phone, half-expecting another text. Instead, she felt the itch—someone tracking her from behind.

 

She glanced. The trench coat guy moved now, long strides, slicing through the crowd with surgical precision. People swerved to avoid him, or maybe he saw their paths a second before they took them, always in the right place at the right time. He didn’t even pretend to look away when she caught him.

 

The cold edged up her spine. Not fear, not yet. A jolt of something—animal, not rational. Tammy put a hand on Eli’s arm.

 

“That guy?” she said, as subtly as she could.

 

Eli glanced, unimpressed. “He’s not even in costume.”

 

“Exactly! Amateur hour.” Tammy said.

 

Eli grinned and forgot about it. Banana needed help crossing the street; he nearly wiped out on a patch of ice. Tammy hung back, giving them space. She watched as the trench coat guy slowed, pretending interest in a storefront, fingers to his lips as if lost in thought. He waited until she started walking again.

 

She pulled out her phone, held it up, and took a selfie with the street as a backdrop. She made sure he was visible, blurry but distinct, a shadow in the crowd behind her. The flash caught his eyes; they glinted blood red, icy, and bright.

 

The party was up a flight of stairs in an old dental office, now rented by college kids with more ambition than taste. The hallway was too narrow, the banister sticky with spilled punch. Careful not to trip, Tammy led Eli and the banana behind her. She heard his footsteps on the stairs outside, clear as day. Measured, deliberate, not drunk at all.

 

The host wore a sheet and called himself the ghost of student loans. He greeted them with red Solo cups and a howl. Tammy beelined for the bathroom, locked the door, and stared at herself in the mirror.

 

Her cheeks flushed pink under the smeared blush. The red cross had come unpinned; she straightened it. She laughed, silently, at her own reflection. Was she actually worried? About a guy in a trench coat with too-blue eyes?

 

She took out her phone. The photo was there: the stranger, behind her, closer than she’d thought.

 

Tammy pocketed the phone, splashed water on her face, and dried herself with the hand towel. When she unlatched the door, she stepped out into the chaos. The banana was dancing. Eli was making drinks in the kitchen, pouring too much vodka for a cluster of superheroes and anime girls.

 

Finally, she relaxed. The world closed in again, warm and alive. The music thumped, the lights strobed. When she found Eli, she handed him a drink, and they leaned on the battered kitchen counter together. He told her a story about a haunted fraternity house, and she listened, nodding and laughing at all the right parts.

 

The world was safe.

 

Until, hours later, when she left to smoke on the fire escape, she saw him again. The blue-eyed man in the trench coat. He stood on the opposite roof, watching, his eyes fixed on her through the dark.

 

This time, she stared back for a long, long time.

 

With her shoes squelching in spilled beer as she threaded the old stairs, Tammy left the party at midnight. The air outside hit her full in the face, sharp as bleach. Most of the crowd had migrated uptown or collapsed in the bar. So the streets felt hollow, swept clean by the last rush of wind. Halloween always faded fastest after midnight.

 

Letting the leftovers wash past her, she drifted toward the main avenue. Tortoise-like, superheroes with capes drooping, a drag queen in six-inch stilettos lighting up under a streetlamp, the crowd passed by.

 

A clown offered her a hit from his vape pen. Grinning, she shook her head and snapped a photo of his rubber chicken. People like him kept the world upright.

 

She moved with purpose, but not urgency. Her shift started at eight, plenty of time to sleep if she got home soon. The walk would clear her head. Tammy checked her phone, saw the time, and weighed the options. The shortcut tempted her: three blocks over, cut through the warehouse district, half the distance but ten times creepier at this hour.

 

She didn’t mind creepy. The real creeps were the ones who hid behind masks and never left their basements. Staring at their pretend girlfriends on the screens, whacking off, with their mothers shouting down, “What are you up to down there?”

 

Twenty- to fifty-year-old INCELs who are still living at home. Too weird, ugly, or awkward to maintain a relationship. Pissed off with all the rejection, hating women, hating themselves. Too creepy, so much so, meeting a girl and having a one-night stand can’t happen. Whores won’t hook up with most of them.

 

She set off down the side street. Her steps sounded too loud, and she liked the echo. It made her appear taller. The world here was different, drained of its party colors and left to the burned orange of dying streetlights.

 

Someone had tipped a dumpster, its contents vomiting onto the curb. Scattering, shredded cardboard, a half-eaten bag of candy, a severed Barbie head. Tammy kicked the head and watched it bounce into the gutter.

 

Past the corner, the shops all slept behind rolling gates. The only light came from the grimy windows of the all-night bodega, its sign blinking anemically. She waved to the owner, who always dozed behind the counter. He didn’t wave back.