A Witch's Night Out

"Carol-Anne, there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with everybody. Let's get you home."

She tightened her grip on him and dropped to her knees. He was right, of course; there was something wrong. She just didn't care. She pulled the red tights down, revealing his half-erect cock and the wiry thatch of pubic hair around it. The night was, perhaps, a little too cold to be doing this outdoors, but she let her tongue slither up and down him before swallowing him. She was suddenly glad she'd taken the time to do her makeup, and picked this particular shade of red lipstick before leaving the house, as she liked imagining how her red, red lips must look like wrapped around him like this. Daniel froze like an animal caught in headlight glare. He summoned some words that might have been a final objection, but they died in a pathetic groan. Carol-Anne grabbed his legs and pulled him as close as he would come.

The flickering orange light of the jack-o-lanterns blazed around them as she knelt on the hillside, pumping his hard cock in one fist and feeding herself. Ecstatic cries came from inside. She could picture the person each voice belonged to. Her skin tingled and became entirely too hot for these clothes. Daniel throbbed. She could already taste what would come when he lost control, squirting into her and overflowing. The thought turned her skin to fire. She tried to strip off the rest of her costume but it kept getting stuck. She wanted to rip off the rest of Daniel's costume too, and she imagined stripping it away with her nails, as if they were a cat's claws. She liked the image of his young, naked body appearing through the slits as she tore at him. His cock dripped with wetness.

There was no telling how long this had been going on when the front door suddenly burst open, sending a mass of hysterical, naked people out into the night. Daniel jumped and tried to run, and Carol-Anne looked left and right for a hiding place, but when she saw what happened next she forgot the need. Dr. Toothaker, naked and glistening with sweat, ran into the yard and fell to his knees, snorting and lowing and tearing up the ground. He seemed to want to scream but what came out was a distorted, bleating cry, and now somehow he was changing. His outline shifted and stretched and his features melted and ran away, like candle wax, and in a few seconds he was no longer a man at all but a great black boar, bristles stirring in the autumn wind.

Rebecca the nurse joined him, falling to the ground in a kind of fit and rising a few seconds later as a sleek black dog. Both of them ran, leaping and gamboling as they disappeared into the woods, and all the townsfolk cheered. The few still wearing clothes lost them and then began shedding their human bodies too, until a jibbering, bleating, howling menagerie of pigs, dogs, cats, birds and goats filled the yard and spilled out onto the road, into the woods, down into the streets and all through the town, filling the night with their cries.

Daniel's jaw dropped. Carol-Anne felt stunned as well. With a start she realized they were right out in the open with the entire town only a few feet away, and she turned to run. She would probably have made it, but at that moment the black cat leapt from its perch and flew at her, hissing and claws extended. She screamed and covered her face, and those in the crowd who were still human turned. Daniel tried to run again but they were on him in seconds (at least he'd managed to pull his pants up in the meantime...), and they seized Carol-Anne only a moment later, a large man in a pig mask throwing her down in front of the crowd.

Shocked mutterings traveled from one person to the next as they recognized her. A wind extinguished most of the pumpkin's glowing faces, leaving them belching curls of smoke out of their sharply cut mouths. Daniel hunched over, as if trying to hide, but Carol-Anne looked each person in the eye and was pleased to see most of them flinch. It wasn't until she saw the horror on her mother and father's face that she flinched too, though only a little. Her father said, "Carol-Anne, you shouldn't be here."

She sat up straight. "You can't tell me what to do anymore."

"No, darling, you don't understand: You can't BE here," her mother said, and perhaps it was the urgency in those words that made her turn, just in time to see the man in the black goat mask, its every tiny hair bristling while wetness gleamed at its muzzle, looming over her. Her heart froze. Something awful was about to happen, she knew, but God help her, she could not imagine what. The man reached out for her, and from the corner of her eye she saw her mother trying to push forward to stop it. It took three men, including Carol-Anne's father, to hold her back. And then that cold, cold hand touched her cheek ever so gently, and she went cold through and through, and sleep came to her, and she did not resist.

***

Carol-Anne lay in bed and listened. The downstairs was filled with voices, sometimes talking and sometimes shouting, every few minutes someone new. She'd been in here all day and had no plans to come out now. Thomas had come to check on her once, half-heartedly (he had not yet told their parents that he'd snuck out with her, although she was confident he soon would), but other than that she'd seen no one. It wasn't until well into the afternoon that her father knocked on the door and sat at the foot of her bed. She glanced at him out the corner of her eye; he looked very old and very tired, in a way she'd never seen before.

"Last night wasn't something you were meant to see. It's only for the initiated."

"I know the rules," Carol-Anne said.

"It's not about that. You weren't ready. No one prepared you. You don't know..." He fumbled for words. Carol-Anne realized he was embarrassed. Not for himself but for her, as if he'd put her into some kind of compromising position, which she supposed in a way he had. "You don't know the history," he said finally. "Our families came here hundreds of years ago to get away from persecution. They used to kill people like us: hang us from trees and burn us at the stake, the whole bit. We wanted a place of our own, with a future for our children. That meant secrecy, always. Without it, the outside world would kill us all; our families, our children..." Here he choked up, and Carol-Anne looked at him in surprise. He sighed. "Well, it's done now."

"I guess so," Carol-Anne said, her voice flat. In truth, she understood a bit more than her father supposed. She remembered how the awful music had carried her away. It wasn't hard to imagine an older time, when people would seek out a place to let that music and those feelings grow. For a second she could almost accept it, and want it for herself...but the feeling passed.

"There are laws," her father said. "Things we have no say in." She detected a pleading tone in his words and nodded an assurance that she understood and accepted that whatever happened next was not his fault. "If you want to, you can stay and be initiated. There'll be a penalty for trespassing on the rites, but people will forget eventually. We can be a family."

"But?"

"You can never leave. Anyone who is initiated stays here. We can't risk the outside world finding out about us."

"And my other choice?"

He stood, and the bedsprings groaned. "You can leave now. But if you do, you can never come back. And we'll never see you again."

Carol-Anne had that gut-punched feeling again. Her father turned away, and she knew he was crying. He didn't even look back as he left. Perhaps there are rules about that too, she thought, bitter.

The last scraps of autumn leaves clung to the branches of the tree outside. She'd woken to the sight of that tree every day for 18 years. She thought about how old it must be, and how deep its roots must go. For a second she even had a fever-yellow vision of what similar trees must have looked like in ages past, decorated with hanging nooses and the dangling bodies of people like her mother and father, limbs still twitching as the mob pelted them with stones and prodded them with farm tools--

But no, there was no vision. The tree was just a tree. She thought about Daniel. Doubtless he'd been given the same choice. She wondered what he would do. She went to the closet and found her old suitcase, the one she hadn't used since the class trip in the 6th grade. Deliberately turning her back on the tree, she began to pack.