Lake of Fire

do you need a little horror for halloween? how about a lot?

You get one last warning: this is a horror story.

Where do you want me to start, Halloween night?

Before? Oh, ok. I know what you’re getting at.

On October 30th, DJ and his boys got into the cemetery and started kicking down gravestones.

That’s what you want me to say? Somehow that goth idiot DJ caused all this?

Listen, he dyed his hair black with grocery store hair dye. At the mall, he would show up with this “satanic bible” he called it. It was just a notebook of his terrible poetry and all the high school girls went gaga for him in between starving themselves and drawing on their jeans with sharpies. That’s who he was.

I do not think he was Satanic, no.

DJ probably wanted to go to juvie for a few nights, work on his cred. That’s it.

Let me go back even farther. The summer before, someone’s kid got encephalitis from a mosquito and died. Anyone tell you that? Well, it’s part of my memory of that night because I remember all the kids smelled like bug spray. Funny what sticks out.

It made me miss the smell of a jack-o-lantern. You know that smell of a candle wick hissing when it gets to the bottom and burns itself out on the pumpkin skin? I miss that. I’ll probably never smell that again.

All the parents were anxious about mosquitos, so on Halloween every trick-or-treater was wearing long sleeves even though it was eighty out. Bet they’d trade it all for a mosquito bite now.

I remember that dusk, everything was amber. The trees looked sickly in the yellow light. The porch lights were washed out so it was hard to tell who was giving out candy and who was a Jehovah’s Witness.

The kids seemed to know something was off—I know everyone says that now but I believe it to be true. The kids were weird, wound up, whining and fussing that night, their dumb little costumes dripping and tearing all over the place.

I remember opening the door to this crowd of kids and they were so gnarly. All messed up, sweating in their ugly polyester costumes, crying and itching, carrying their costume heads and dragging deflated candy sacks across the porch. It wasn’t even dark yet and they were already crashing. High-pitched screaming TRICK OR TREAT like it was an emergency.

I remember this one kid on my porch, she had a little tiger face painted on and she had clawed her own face, scratching off the paint and leaving red scrapes where the stripes were supposed to be. She looked feral out there yelling for candy. It gave me the creeps.

Those kids were onto something, huh? Just as soon as the sun winked out below the roofs, and the dark blue night settled in around us, all hell broke loose.

It started with the earthquake, you know don’t you?

Oh, you want me to tell it? Ok, it started with the earthquake.

It felt like a truck had backed into my house— that’s really what I thought had happened. And I went outside in my pajamas to look and of course there was no truck, but outside was already chaos.

People were running around in the street in a panic. I remember wondering why everyone was so upset that a truck ran into my house. I really thought that. My brain was slow — too much to take in.

The fire hydrant on the corner busted open, spewing water like a cannon, and I remember this little kid in a dragon costume took off running and ran right into that water cannon and it shot him across the street. He landed in someone’s yard, a crumpled up little dragon, and I heard someone scream, and that sort of brought me around. I thought, I need to call 911 for that kid. But before I could go back inside, the smog blew through, and I sorta realized I had more to worry about.

Looking back, maybe that fire hydrant kid was lucky.

People say it smelled like sulfur. Well what the hell does that smell like? To me it smelled like hot metal and burning hair.

It was this sick yellow color and it rolled over everything, and everyone was already in a panic from the earthquake. You have to imagine— car alarms going off, sirens, people screaming, kids running around, and then all of us are buried in this yellow smoke. Coughing, puking— people thought the world was ending.

I should say they knew the world was ending.

I don’t know when we noticed the kids. I don’t have any myself, so maybe it took me a little longer to figure it out. But a lot of them were gone. In the panic they slipped away. Something told them go to the lake and they marched down there while the grownups ran around trying to put books back on the shelves or something. Stupid.

The lake? It’s nothing special. Right at the end of my street. It helps with property values, believe it or not. Well, it used to.

It has an official name Lake Something-Or-Other but everyone just calls it The Lake. Our big pond really— covered in green scum in the summer and filled with brown mud in the winter. I think people used to dump their trash in it.

Let me go back though. I came out of my house and I saw that fire hydrant kid and then there was this guy in my yard, I remember. He was dragging his foot behind him kind of weird. I went up to him and I was shouting what happened and asking if he needed help. He opened his mouth and then closed it again, like a goldfish. I grabbed him by the arm and his eyes finally focused and he looked at me and said “the lake is boiling.”

Those words sent ice water down my veins. I don’t know why I believed him, why I didn’t just turn around and go back inside but I didn’t. I took off running with everybody else and we were all headed to the lake.

When I got there—well—people say it was a Hellmouth and those people are right. Fuck that acid rain story. I’m not a scientist and I’m not a believer, but I know I saw Hell on Halloween night.

Describe it? Well, it was boiling. Listen to me—boiling. Whatever someone else tells you about acid or algae or some other bullshit they’re wrong. That lake was boiling like a pot on the stove. Raging in a white froth. All around the edges was this dense foam and the smog was belching up from the water itself. The air was steamy-hot and wet, so thick it was hard to get a good breath.

Yes, some people still think it was DJ started all this— kicking over those headstones and preaching that Satan shit. Maybe it was. He doesn’t seem important enough to me. And why would they take our kids? I mean, what’s the connection?

The kids. That’s what you came to ask about, right? The kids?

They went in the lake, most of them.

I was there, watching it with my sorry eyes. Dozens of kids, clusters of them that were ringing doorbells just five minutes before, ran straight in to the boiling water like they were called to it, dragging their pumpkin candy buckets, and their little kid sisters and brothers behind them. All the kids, ducking their heads under the water like it was a swimming lesson, and never coming back up.

I’ll never forget there was this melted plastic film gathering at the edge of the water. Bright blue and red, from their costumes, I think.

I caught one, maybe four years old. She was running down the bank in a pink tutu and I saw her coming and reached out my arm. She hit me hard, and when I lifted her up she fought me like a wild animal, kicking me and scratching my face, screeching like she was possessed. I guess she was.

A handful of kids were caught on the banks but a lot made it in. Pretty much all of them, as you know. They were biting, kicking, vicious. I saw some other people diving in after them and boiling themselves too. Others couldn’t help, they couldn’t even scream. Lotta people just fell apart.

Yes, I can confirm not everyone was helpful. There were— some— who did not help. They wanted it I guess you could say. People were praying out loud or speaking in tongues, while they wrestled children away from their parents and sent them running into the water. They decided the kids were supposed to go in the lake that night, it was the will of some terrible god they wanted to appease, and they fought anyone who tried to stop them.

This wasn’t God’s doing. I’m sure of that. But those people- they were at least as guilty as DJ ever was.

I held onto that little ballerina for hours, running and dodging those freaks. I had to pin her arms so she wouldn’t claw my eyes out. Eventually, a bunch of us gathered at the high school, carrying the kids we could catch, and locked them all in an office.

And then?

On November 1st, the sun came up and it was done. The reaping was ended. That was the worst part in some way— having to see the sun the next day, the grass still being green, birds flying. It felt like a trick. No one was saved that I can tell — not those of us who tried to stop them or the ones who shoved them in the water.

The kids were all gone. Sorry— should I say ‘bodies’? The bodies were not in the lake. They were gone.

People say the lake was a portal. Some door opened up because of DJ’s stupid vandalism and all our kids were dragged to Hell. Because of that. It’s a theory I suppose.

Me?

I don’t need a theory. A hundred little kids walked into a boiling lake on Halloween night, I saw it with my own eyes. I never bothered to blame DJ or anyone else. Seems very little point to blame anyone.

This town will die soon. We lost a generation of kids that night. And the ones who were left moved away. Now there’s me and a handful of others who can stand to be here, and researchers like yourself who come through every Halloween.

I wish you luck in figuring it out. I really do.