A Halloween Massacre

a short story about an innocent vacation that turns into a brutal nightmare.

Vacations were supposed to be something joyful and memorable; this vacation wasn’t like that at all. This vacation was the opposite. It was a traumatic nightmare and would haunt Veronica until her death.

When you watch horror and thriller movies you never expect something like that to happen to you. It’s something that happens to other people and to characters in fictional books. We forget that these things do happen. They can happen at any time. They can happen to you.

Veronica was only gone for fifteen minutes. In that span of time a bloody massacre had happened and she was completely unaware that it could have happened. She could clearly remember laughing with her family before she left to run to the store. They were alive fifteen minutes ago.

Now, they lay lifeless in the body bags as the ambulance drives them away to a morgue.

It had been dead silent when she had unlocked the front door to the quaint little cabin. It only took a few seconds for her to discover her family scattered throughout the house; their throats messily slashed and wounds all over their bodies. Their blood leaking out onto the floors, walls and furniture.

Her mother was the first she found. She was sitting in the brown reclining chair the family room. Her father was a couple feet away from her on the floor. The detectives could determine that it was a blitz attack; they hadn’t expected it. They said the attacker must’ve slashed her mother’s throat then her father heard the commotion and came running in, but soon met his tragic fate by the edge of a blade.

His face was barely recognizable.

Veronica’s two younger sisters were outside behind the house; their bodies had been dumped into the small pond. They were floating face down. The water was blood red. The police guessed they had tried to run, but were unsuccessful.

She couldn’t stop picturing them flailing and choking on their own blood as they bled out. She only hoped that the killer was merciful enough to wait until after they died when he had cut out their eyeballs and chopped their fingers off.

The last thing Veronica found, which chilled her to the bone, were the words “Happy Halloween Veronica.”

It was written in their blood on the wall.

A few days later she received a package from an anonymous sender. In the package, she found her family’s fingers and eyeballs. There was also a note.

Trick or treat! You get a trick since you didn’t accept my offer to treat you to a dinner date. Tsk tsk. Wrong choice Veronica. Hope you enjoyed your Halloween.

There was no signature but Veronica knew who it was from. The massacre hadn’t been a random act of terror and worst of all the killer wasn’t just some stranger. She knew him and now her family was dead just because she had refused to go out on a date with her best friend. 

Author's Note

enjoy! feel free to review anything about this piece