Chapter 1
This morning is fraught with the delicacy that is death as the tell tale cries of despair invite my ax, Elvira and I, to the task at hand in preparation for the Lurker Feast. I walk across the wooden planks of the gallows. The hangman’s noose removed, I stand behind my blood soaked block and eye the gathering crowd.
Aileen and Kathy have placed themselves directly in front of the block. They smile madly and hold empty chalices out toward me in hopes of filling it with the last remnants of my victim’s liquid life.
The crack of a whip sounds and the shackles and chains rattle as Robert herds the future dead to my stage. The homicidal crowd begins to drool...Cheers resound as the first sacrifice is brought to her knees I, myself must wipe my chin as my hunger grows.
My arms flex as Elvira is raised high in the sky. With one quick downward stroke she easily slices through flesh and bone. Her head rolls to the end of the stage and flops to the ground where toothless and grimly looking children giggle. They kick her head back and forth in a gruesome game of soccer.
Nine heads have rolled from my block leaving nothing but a trail of blood leading to their gnarled stumps. Their headless bodies writhe in a finale of jerks and squirts. I run my finger along the blade and taste the sweet nectar of death and still...We are hungry for more!
Fifteen more heads now lay at my feet. I raise Elvira in the air and rejoice with the crowd, as the bulging eyes of the dead now become their feasts. Some are carried away in baskets while others are nibbled on like snacks. Aileen and Kathy now gulp from their full chalices. Blood drips from their mouths in long, sticky tendrils. Elvira hums in my hands and I know she is still hungry. So now we hunt for more lurkers in the woods around Scaredy Cat Village.
We have hunted down forty-one more terrified lurkers.
Kathy is now stirring the boiling pot of bobbing heads. She foams at the mouth, her stomach a grumble with anticipation. Robert can be heard among the many lifeless bodies singing his favorite Holiday tune as he ushers them into a massive BBQ pit.
" They’re eyes bob in,
They’re eyes bob out,
More heads will roll, there is no doubt.
Time after time Elvira hums,
While cries of dread ebb out their lungs...”
Evening is beginning to fall on the Feast of Heads. Kathy is setting the huge tables that will host all the villagers of Scaredy Cat. She carefully places delicately folded napkins to the left of every plate. Aileen follows, brandishing her tiny torch to light the candles set in the vacant eye sockets of the newly departed heads she’s made into center pieces.
Elvira now sated, the lurkers dispatched, my stomach a grumble!
