Chapter 6: Trick Or Treat
The way out was not a path; it was a surrender. The carnival, clearly having gotten what it wanted, simply released its hold. The garish lights of the midway flickered and died. The relentless music wound down with a discordant groan, like a dying music box. The smells of caramel, licorice, and mead evaporated, leaving only the cold, clean scent of night air. One by one, the towering rides, the taunting game stalls, and the menacing tents dissolved into the darkness, fading like a dream upon waking.
They stumbled forward, down the newly opened path, the burning sensation of the mead still a hot coal in their stomachs. The ground beneath their feet softened from hard-packed dirt to the familiar damp earth and leaves of the forest. The oppressive, starless sky of the carnival gave way to a canopy of real trees, their branches stark silhouettes against a sky dotted with faint, distant stars and a sliver of a crescent moon.
They didn’t run. They walked, a silent, shell-shocked procession, each step taking them further from the nightmare and closer to a reality they weren’t sure still existed. The transition was seamless. One moment they were in the heart of a supernatural prison, the next, they were simply walking through Black Hollow at night. The forest was still unnervingly quiet, but its silence was different now. It was no longer the watchful, predatory silence of a hunter, but the sated, sleeping silence of a beast that has just been fed.
Then came the sound of laughter—not the eerie giggling of the Hollow Children, but the genuine shrieks of kids out on Halloween night. And in that moment, everything clicked. They stopped short as pop music drifted through the trees, and they saw porch lights, glowing pumpkins, and costumed children darting between houses.
But it wasn’t possible. When they’d entered the forest, it was the equinox—late September. Yet now, unmistakably, it was Halloween. Nearly forty days had vanished. The group stared at each other in horrified disbelief, feeling the chill of unreality settle in their bones.
“Is this… real?” Willow whispered. The question trembled between them, a fear barely put into words.
A wave of dread followed. If so much time had passed, their families would have been frantic. The police would have searched the woods, maybe even found nothing at all. They had been missing for over a month, presumed lost. The world they’d left behind kept turning, just without them.
They broke into a run, haunted by confusion and panic, crashing through the final line of trees and emerging onto a familiar suburban street at the edge of Havenwood.
They were out. They were free.
The street was alive with the cheerful chaos of Halloween. Porch lights glowed, illuminating carved pumpkins that grinned from every doorstep. Groups of children in costumes—vampires, superheroes, witches, and ghosts—ran from house to house, their plastic jack-o’-lanterns overflowing with candy. Parents stood on sidewalks, chatting and laughing. It was a scene of such perfect, mundane normalcy that it brought tears to their eyes.
For a moment, they just stood there at the edge of the woods, a ragged, dirty, and bruised collection of survivors, staring at the world they thought they had lost forever. The trauma of the forest and the carnival was a physical weight, but the sight of home, of life, was a powerful anesthetic.
“We made it,” Jasper whispered, his voice choked with emotion. He laughed, a raw, shaky sound of pure relief. “We actually made it!”
The relief was infectious. They embraced, a messy group hug of shared survival, laughing and crying all at once. They had faced down the Wailing Oak, the Shadow Man, and the endless torments of the carnival, and they had won. They had escaped.
As they began the walk toward their respective homes, the strangeness of their own town began to creep in. They were so overwhelmed with joy that they didn’t notice it at first. It was small things. A trick-or-treater dressed as a clown, whose painted smile seemed just a little too wide, a little too toothy, reminding them of the operator of The Last Ride. A group of kids whose laughter, for a fleeting second, sounded unnervingly like the high-pitched giggles from the orchard.
“Did you see that?” Finn asked, stopping suddenly. He was staring at a small child dressed in a simple, old-fashioned pioneer dress, her back to them as she accepted candy from a neighbor.
“See what? It’s Halloween, Finn. Everyone’s in costume,” Raven said, though a prickle of unease ran down her spine.
The child turned, and for a heart-stopping instant, her eyes seemed to be nothing but hollow, black pits before she blinked and they were normal again, bright with the excitement of the holiday. She smiled a normal, childish smile and ran to join her friends.
“I’m just… seeing things,” Finn said, shaking his head, trying to dismiss the image. But he couldn’t. None of them could.
They started seeing more of it. A man walking his dog, who for a split second, appeared unnaturally tall and thin, a faceless shadow under a streetlight. A reflection in a car window that seemed to move on its own. The world was the same, but their perception of it—or the world itself—had been tainted. They were seeing echoes of the carnival everywhere.
They reached Willow’s house first. Her parents, so relieved to see her after she had been missing for so long, were too caught up in the moment to notice the raw terror still etched on her face. One by one, the group dispersed, promising to meet at The Crypt the next day, each of them retreating to the tear filled renions with their families.
Back in her room, Willow collapsed onto her bed, the events of the night replaying in her mind in a terrifying, disjointed loop. The hollow eyes, the falling roller coaster, the rotting apple, the burning mead. She felt a crinkle in her pocket. Reaching in, she pulled out the ticket the ancient woman had given her at the entrance to the funhouse.
In the dim light of her desk lamp, the cheerful slogan—“The Carnival of Eternal Night—A Thrill You’ll Never Forget!”—seemed like a cruel joke. The colors looked faded, the paper ancient and brittle. She had forgotten all about it in the chaos. She was about to toss it into the trash, a final act of severing herself from the nightmare, when she noticed something on the back.
In a small, cramped font that was almost impossible to read, was a block of text. It looked like the fine print on a contract. Her blood ran cold as she began to read the words aloud, her voice a horrified whisper in the quiet of her room.
“By redeeming this ticket, you bind yourself to the will of the Carnival of Eternal Night and its master. You agree to any and all conditions placed upon you by the carnival’s owner, whether spoken or unspoken, known or unknown.”
Her breath hitched. She kept reading, her hands beginning to tremble violently.
“Beware: To partake of the carnival’s offerings is to carry its mark. To eat or drink is to invite its shadow to linger, to take root, to grow. What you consume within these grounds shall not leave you, but shall follow you, and through you, the world beyond.”
The final lines delivered the killing blow to her fleeting sense of safety.
“The forest watches. The carnival binds. The master waits.”
The ticket slipped from her numb fingers and fluttered to the floor. It all clicked into place with horrifying clarity. The apple. The latte. The mead. They weren’t just traps. They were transactions. They were instruments of infection. The toast they had made in the tent… “What’s lost returns, a new found home.” It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a spell. A release.
They hadn’t escaped. They had been sent.
They were Trojan horses, filled with the seeds of the forest’s ancient, hungry evil. They had carried it out of its prison inside their own bodies. The strange things they were seeing on the streets—the glimpses of the carnival’s denizens, the flicker of hollow eyes—weren’t their imaginations. They were symptoms. The infection was spreading. Wisps of the dark force were already leaking out, beginning to influence the world, to test their newfound freedom.
Willow scrambled for her phone, her fingers fumbling with the screen as she tried to call Raven. It went straight to voicemail. She tried Finn. Busy. Ash. Jasper. Luna. All voicemail. They were all discovering the same horrifying truth, all trying to reach each other in a frantic, simultaneous wave of terror.
She ran to her window and looked out at the street. The cheerful Halloween scene was still there, but it was different now, viewed through the lens of the terrifying truth. The shadows seemed longer, the spaces between the houses darker. The laughter of the children no longer sounded innocent. Every costumed figure held a potential threat. Every smiling neighbor could be a vessel.
Her gaze fell upon a group of trick-or-treaters across the street, gathered under a flickering lamppost. Their backs were to her. One of them, a small child, turned, as if they felt her gaze. The child’s face was pale, their features indistinct in the gloom. But their eyes… they weren't hollow, instead their eyes glowed with a faint, malevolent red light. The child smiled, a wide, knowing, unnatural smile, and raised a small hand in a slow, deliberate wave.
It wasn’t a trick of the light. It wasn’t a costume.
It was real.
The carnival was over. The gates of Black Hollow were closed. But the show was just beginning. They hadn’t ended the nightmare. They had just released it into the world. And it was hungry.
The Legend Of Black Hollow. © 2025 | Horrified Candles. All Rights Reserved.
