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Bite-Apple

by D. Matthew Urban

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Oh yes, I’ll be sure to give her the pills every morning. Thank you for coming all this way, Doctor, and on Halloween, too.

I’m sure you’re eager to get home and take your children trick-or-treating, but could you spare a minute to join us in a game before you leave? It won’t take long, and it would make Sarah so happy. We don’t get trick-or-treaters out here, and I can’t take her to town, not with her condition. A holiday game would make it feel like a real Halloween.

Thank you so much, Doctor. You’re so kind, so generous.

The game is simple. All we need is an apple, a string, and a hook. I bought a beautiful red apple at the market this morning, and there’s a hook in the ceiling where Sarah used to hang her little fern. I’ll cut a string from my old apron, and we’ll have everything.

My grandmother taught me this game when I was Sarah’s age. Grandma grew up very poor, and this is the kind of game even the poorest can play. Nothing fancy, just an apple you can pluck from any tree, a string you can dig from any trash-heap, and a hook—well, in the hovel Grandma grew up in, there must have been hooks sticking out all over.

How that old woman loved Halloween! The one night of the year, she used to say, when all the poor children go to the big houses and demand their due. A shadow of the reckoning where the last shall be first. A pious woman, my grandmother, in her way.

There, I’ve tied the string tight around the stem of the apple. Here’s the other end of the string; would you mind looping it around the hook? It’s a bit too high for me. I’m lucky to have such a tall playfellow!

Before I fetch Sarah, let’s have a quick practice round. I’ll set the apple swinging, and we’ll take turns trying to hold it. The rule is, you can’t use your hands, only your mouth. Bite the apple and hold it. Ready?

Oh, Doctor, didn’t I just say you can’t use your hands? How did you ever get that fancy degree if you can’t follow a simple rule? I’m only teasing, of course. I know how hard it is, when that apple comes swinging right at you, not to reach up and grab it. Goodness knows how many times I grabbed the apple when I was a girl. Grandma used to smack me right across the face. “No hands, child!” she’d shout.

I won’t smack you, Doctor, but if you’ll allow me, I’ll cut off the other string from my apron and tie your wrists. Not a tight knot, nothing you can’t get out of. Just to remind you of the rule.

There, how’s that? Good. Let’s try again.

Why, Doctor, you’re a natural! Such healthy teeth. I’ll bet when you were a boy, you went to the best dentist in town. Not like me. When I had a toothache, my father would take me into the garage and yank the tooth out with a pair of pliers. I’d wake up the next morning with blood all over my pillow.

I know you’re anxious to get back to your big house and your children. Two girls and two boys, isn’t that right? Such a lucky man. So blessed.

Wait one moment. I’ll fetch Sarah.

Sarah, honey, don’t be frightened. This is the doctor, the one who took your temperature and felt your pulse. He’s going to play a Halloween game with us. Isn’t that nice? Aren’t you grateful? No, don’t speak. I know it hurts to speak. Just smile. He’ll know what you mean.

I’m sure your children look wonderful in their expensive costumes, Doctor, but can any of them match my Sarah? Look at her thin arms and legs, her sunken, shiny face, her eyes so big and bright in their sockets. Have you ever seen anything like her? My darling skeleton girl.

Sarah, put your arm around my neck. I’ll hoist you up. Now reach out and take the apple. Ready, Doctor? All right, Sarah, give it a good, strong swing!

Well done, Doctor! Another excellent bite.

Sarah, why do you suppose the doctor’s gone pale? Why are his teeth clenched around the apple like that? Is that sweat trickling down his forehead? Are those tears in his eyes? What do you suppose is wrong with him, Sarah?

I know what’s wrong with him. He’s bitten the apple, and he can’t let go. His hands are tied, and he can’t break free. He’s caught.

I really can’t thank you enough, Doctor. You came all this way to see my Sarah, and you stayed to play a game and raise her spirits. You’ve been so very generous. There’s just one more thing I’ll ask from you.

I know you’ve done your best to help my girl, but what she needs isn’t medicine. She needs life, new life in her veins. Every creature that breathes deserves life. And you’ve had plenty, Doctor, with your big house and four beautiful children. You’ve had enough. I’m only asking for what’s due.

Sarah, do you remember what I told you about your great-grandmother? How she taught me to summon and bind? How she taught me Halloween isn’t a frightening time, it’s a wonderful time, when the thieves and tyrants who rule this world feel the breath of the coming reckoning?

Do you remember what else she taught me, Sarah? That the blood is the life?

Look at the doctor’s throat, Sarah. With his chin tilted up to bite the apple, look how his throat is stretched out. Can you see his pulse throbbing there, fast and strong? Can you see the redness beneath the skin? Doesn’t it look so sweet and delicious, Sarah, like a beautiful, shining apple?

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The 2026 Halloween Parade

by Alasdair Stuart

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You smell of packing tape, dust, and grief. Another week of packing the house away, having the same conversation with a dozen people, riding the endless waves of emotion that grab you, crush you, dump you back on the shore. You’re not doing it alone, and you’re exhaustedly grateful for that, but you’re still doing it. Treading these dark, deep waters.

You almost didn’t come out this year. It took effort to get out the door. You bought your churros without quite remembering doing so. You sat down because that’s what people do at parades. You watch and you laugh and you clap at the warm up acts. You know, people stuff. Like people do. You are a REGULAR guy.

A gloved hand lands on your shoulder. It feels like an entire forest against the window of your mind. No force — that’s not necessary — but an undeniable presence. You stand.

The Director. As certain as entropy. As present as air. She holds out a hand the way a glacier moves. You take it.

‘Our condolences.’

You sit back down in stunned silence and watch as she walks to the head of the Parade and speaks, her voice carrying without effort.

“Last year I told you there is always a price. For shelter. For safety. For hope. This year, some of you have paid that price. We thank you.”

She walks off. The Parade begins.

It starts with cops. You feel the crowd’s visceral, instinctive urge for ACAB chants and a thousand phones recording. Your arm jerks to join them, before you realize these two have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Or perhaps The Wall. One is a Saxon, broad shouldered, big coat, copper’s swagger and public school haircut. The other is a Celt. A little slight, a little withdrawn. Haunted and covering it well, but not convincingly. The woman in the long grey coat, walking through the crowd on the other side of the street, is keeping pace with him but careful to remain out of eyeline. Where would the fun be in that. You think, perhaps, when her eyes cross the crowd, she winks at you. You think she might have winked at everyone.

Behind them, riding a ridiculously handsome centaur, is a young Filipino woman with an enormous smile and lightning in her eyes. She dismounts, chatting amiably to her companion. They’re clearly more than human, jostling and giving each other good natured shit.

Statues follow, and they hurt to look at. Overclocked Ray Harryhausen nightmares of stone and metal, masks and screams. You pick out a road sign with teeth, and a beetle the size of a tank, made of glass and fur. They flicker in and out of motion and existence, an oil slick intense haze over them as they move. You glimpse figures stepping into the world the way you breathe in and out. You pray they don’t see you. Today, your prayers are answered.

Rounding out this first section of the parade is a young woman and her brother. Their very presence causes the hairs on the back of your hand to stand up like plants anticipating rain, like a boxer knocked straight before being knocked out, like the kindness of defiance in the face of establishment cruelty. Flowers grow where they pass, watered with blood. They are some of the most beautiful you’ve ever seen.

The tension is cut by a pumpkin. Vast, like a Buick that’s been hitting the gym, radiating that cheerful orange colour. It’s being tended by two people, a tall nonbinary person with immaculate dress sense, and a man who looks like the police sketch of smalltown racism if it was a person you could arrest. Neither let you see the other side or the gourd, and that’s thrashing back there. And the capering little child with the pumpkin on his head who dances up and down the street? Well this is clearly his favourite float.

Fog rolls in, and out of if emerges a ship. An honest to god sea-faring vessel, tall masted and pushing out of the fog like every classic horror movie. As it draws near though, the pleasure of seeing it fades. The railings are broken, the rigging tattered. There is something unspeakable on the blood-soaked deck and no lifeboats to be seen. Just a woman, glimpsed at distance, staring intently at a stop watch as something like heat haze flickers over the deck and the fog falls once again.

As the fog sweeps away with the ship, a man in an immaculate suit and a tight smile walks straight down the road.

Behind him comes a podcaster. You know she’s a podcaster by the bags under her eyes and the fact she’s never more than six feet from a microphone. She looks terrified, and tired, and desperately sad and ENTRANCED. She’s onto something, she’s got her teeth into something, or maybe it’s got its teeth into her…

A young man in a bulky coat stumbles down the road, looks panicked, confused, not quite frightened. Not yet.

Cops. Again. But you instantly realize these cops are different, in every worst way. These men — and they, of course, are all men, white men — may be missing their hoods but their true loyalties are undeniable. They smile with metal fangs, cover stories as loaded as their side-arms, and wait to decide who’s lucky tonight. Their eyes are locked on the community following them. Diverse in every way, furious, terrified, and DONE with this. Tonight they’re in the Parade, but they’re ready for war.

A man in an immaculate suit and a tight smile walks straight down the road.

A family of perfect suburban mundanity, thrumming with togetherness and the suppressed rage of being alive. Successful and not successful enough for it to matter to them. They’re all bloody, feral, one of them holding a car head rest in his hand, swinging it with a jaunty air. There is something terrible stuck to it that you do not want to see. They’re looking for someone. They’re HUNTING. A woman picking her way through the back of the crowd, horribly injured, incandescently angry, prepares to fight back. You all know exactly where she is. None of you say a word.

A young man in a bulky coat stumbles down the road, looks panicked, confused, terrified. He catches himself, thinks. You see him count faces, steps, measure how far he is from the sides of the street. This time, when he moves, he’s in sight longer before disappearing.

The blonde sisters covered in blood drag themselves down the road, all trauma and exhausted done with this BULLSHIT horror. The one in a wedding dress — her second — is soaked in blood yet again. Her sister’s holding a sword in the hand that isn’t shaking with rage. Both of them have the panicked look of cornered animals, mixed with the terrible joy of knowing they’re about to take a bite out of something awful. They’re terrified, jubilant. They’re alive.

There’s no immaculately suited man this time…

The brother and sister don’t look up as round the corner into view. They’re hunched over an old fashioned camcorder, arguing with that casual informality of siblings. The brother is intense, focused, just this side of manic. The sister is more aware, a little more wry, a little more calm. They both see something and stop… dead… for a full ten seconds. When you look up, they’re gone. You didn’t see them leave.

The young man, soaked as though he’s been dunked. He’s running, flat out, and you watch as he takes a hard left through the crowd and sprints up stairs you swear were never before here before disappearing. He looked so resolute. So determined. You clench a fist by your side, cheer internally.

The woman who follows is a samurai. Unarmored, but focused, drawing light to her like the horizon at the end of the day. She’s wearing a blood-soaked henley and sweatpants but she has that PLEASE TRY IT look of people who’ve been pushed to the edge, along with the focus of a warrior fully prepared to turn their entire body into an instrument of vengeance. She’s holding a flaming axe. The fog rises a little and an inhuman porcine screech echoes. She turns, raises her weapon, and backs out of sight, ready for the duel she knows is coming. She knows she’ll win.

Two women, united and uniting as they walk down the centre of the street. Covered in blood, skin glowing, fingertips brushing against one another. One skips, the other chuckles, both entwined in something you can’t, and shouldn’t, and aren’t allowed to see. A split diopter reality, in focus but not in charge. Behind them, somewhere, somehow, you hear a VCR start to play.

There’s a manner in which some people carry themselves that tells you what they do. This man, despite his iodine red skin and the great heavy metal eyeshadow, is a Doctor. He’s bowed under the weight of the dead, and he’s terrified. But as the music starts up and he starts performing, you see something impossible in him. Hope. And peace. And just a little fun.

You shake your head, the fog clearing as the next float comes into view. A collection of smaller vehicles, it looks almost like an exhibit. You can see it’s been sponsored by a company. Very corporate, very friendly in that manner that suggests they don’t know who you are, or care if you live or die. Their logo is everywhere, a series of straight lines, one broken. There are vehicles with screens showing witness testimonies. Movie posters for films you could have sworn you’d seen, a rollercoaster cart baked in the sun, an open door you know you must not walk into. Behind it all two men, equally enthusiastic, wearing hoodies that may as well have WRITER on the front — they’re unsure whether to be scared or overjoyed and you’re pretty sure they’re both.

The final float is … odd. It’s heralded, if you can herald something on an e-scooter, by two immaculately dressed men. One of them, honest to god, is carrying a scepter. The other has the best jerry curl you’ve ever seen. You’ve nearly finished processing this when the horse drawn carriage comes into view, driven by a man who looks like a homunculus made of Billy Idol videos and a woman so immaculately dressed she looks like she’s been tailored into existence. All four of them are smiling, and they all look… hungry. Behind the carriage, a long flag flutters in the wind reading REBEL PURPEE. You feel a rush of air, like The Night itself moved. Sense the presence of bats. And make a note to look it up when you get home. Looks kind of rad.

Then they’re gone, and the Director returns. Of course. She turns, arms wide and smile warm as a pyre.

‘We have led you into the dark. Finding your way out is your right.’ She is looking straight at you.

‘Chart your path. Return to us next year.’

Applause. Some cheers. They register for you like the early seconds of rain, present but not yet tangible. Because you notice the Director is talking to someone as she leaves. A tall man in an opera cloak and hat. Shock of white hair. A woman next to him, precise like a medical instrument, warm like fresh bread. The idea of a dog trots next to them. You know, in your bones, if you thought of throwing something he’d be off in a flash. Good boy.

The Director looks at you. She says something to the couple. The woman waves with unreserved enthusiasm and your heart skips. The man bows. Then he thinks better of it and waves.

You wave back until they’re out of sight. You sit there until you’ve stopped crying and the crowd has moved on. Then you stand, dust yourself off, and join them.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

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Thanks for everything, Mum and Dad. Miss you.

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Host Commentary

‘A shadow of the reckoning…’

 

What a story! Holding two different magnetic poles in dynamic tension and finding something extraordinary in the tension between them. On one side, we’ve got the reassuring banality of daily life. You get sick, you get a doctor’s appointment. You’re a doctor, you see sick patients. If you’re a high-end doctor, or this is a few decades ago, you make house calls. There’s something Norman Rockwell around it. A white picket fence turned into a telescope, wrapped around and hiding us from the truth of our existence and showing us something kinder, simpler, smarter, so close we can almost smell the apple pie cooling on the window sill and hear the chalk scratch as someone writes the Hobo Code for GOOD ROAD TO FOLLOW on a nearby wall. It’s nice, it’s safe, it’s reassuring, it’s JT Walsh saying:

 

‘Well, we’re safe for now. Thank goodness we’re in a bowling alley.’

 

And then there’s the other pole. The reckoning casting a shadow. The seething, quiet, terrified rage of being denied health insurance. Of a credit card bouncing. Of catching a pitying look from a stranger, or worse, a friend. The shopkeeper who turns down the half ton of pennies you’re using to buy the sweets that are the only thing you can afford on your latest excuse to get out of the house for ten minutes. The gnawing hunger that tastes, somewhere behind the bile and fury and the sick guilt… sweet. Delicious. For a while because the system is broken and you know it and surely other people will too if you shout loudly enough. Then, the darker, chemical sweetness of knowing no one is coming to help you but you, and that vengeance costs nothing you wouldn’t give away freely for a second chance. Or even just the chance to take a bite. There, under the shadow of a reckoning not arriving fast enough.

 

Stories like this are one of the reasons I love horror as much as I do. The way the situation is the true antagonist here is extraordinary, as are the depths of motivation and ethical structures in each character. My sympathies changed twice in under a thousand words and they might again when I listen again. Incredible work, thanks everyone.