The Best Night Ever

Chris Kandera finished her final check of the control console. All systems were functional with no threats indicated. Her shift was over, and her relief was ready to take over. It was Halloween night, her favorite night of the year, and she was headed to a party.

“Hi Chris, is everything good?” her relief Janet Sarandon asked.

“Yeah, we didn’t have World War 3 on my shift, I don’t know about yours.”

“Funny! Go enjoy your party.”

She left the Denton Missile Command to enjoy the rest of her night. This party would be unlike any other, performing onstage was a big part of her private life and most of her fellow actors in the Denton community theater would be there, including him. She was deeply attracted to a male lead actor named Peter Hinwood.

Most of the other actors in the group were very common and uninteresting but Peter was different, very different. She had performed with this group for the last six years playing parts ranging from Cinderella to a hardened cynical street whore. None of the male actors in the group attracted her; they all seemed self-obsessed and sexually ambiguous. Peter was tall muscular and blond; he was every inch a man yet seemed to have an almost childlike innocence to him.

The theater group had a very successful summer playing to sold-out audiences for a few of their plays. They had just finished performing a spooky Halloween themed play about Dracula and were about to begin rehearsing for a stage version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. She was cast to play several scenes with Peter and couldn’t be happier.

Chris was the only member to work at the missile command. All the other actors worked at dull and common jobs, waiting tables or shuffling paperwork. She got to watch over nukes.

When she got to the party, she donned her costume, striped shorts with a gold sequined top hat with matching coat with tails. Peter was dressed in only gold bikini briefs and gold boots. His well-defined muscles immediately caught her eye.

Two dances and three drinks later they went out on the back deck for a private moment, and to talk. As the night wore on, she felt drawn closer to this handsome blond muscleman.

At the end of the party, they left together for her place arm in arm. She thought to herself, as they got in her car, that this was easily the best Halloween party she ever attended.

As she drove down the lonely, darkened road to her home, she saw a pair of headlights on the other side of the road coming towards her. She thought nothing of it she was too engrossed in her plans for her and Peter for the remainder of the night.

The driver in the other car was returning from his own Halloween party, except he was drunk, very drunk. He nodded off at the wheel and swerved into Chris’s lane of traffic. She hit her brakes and swerved but it was too late! The two cars collided head on.

They all died simultaneously. Chris’s best Halloween night ever came to a sad end. Then, a strange thing happened. Her spirit rose from the mortal shell of her body. Chris wasn’t an ordinary woman; in her private life she was a witch and a highly developed one. She practiced both black and white magic. She looked down at her love but couldn’t help him, his spirit had departed. The drunk driver that caused all of this hadn’t quite died yet he was barely alive and bleeding out. She paused to put a curse on his soul and walked away.

Chris took a moment to take in and absorb her new surroundings. She had astral projected many times and was accustomed to the spirit world, but this was different for the first time she couldn’t return to her body this time it was permanent. She never actually soldher soul to evil and knew plenty of protection spells, but this time was different and unsettling.

She looked around her trying to decide what to do next, when a portal opened before her. At the end of what looked like a tunnel was a bright light. From all her reading and studies, she knew better than to go for the light, it was a trap. She looked down at the costume she was wearing and while she loved performing onstage, regretted that this is how she would go through eternity.

By now, the police and ambulance had arrived, but they were all dead. All they could do was body bag them up and take the remains away. A man walking his dog stopped to watch and the dog barked furiously at her. Few people know that animals and very young children can see spirits. Chris started to walk home she might not be alive anymore, but it was still her home and haunting her own house had to be better than a lonely stretch of road. It started to rain but that was irrelevant she couldn’t feel chill or damp anymore.

She hadn’t gotten 20 yards when she hit an invisible wall, she turned around to walk the in the opposite direction and discovered the same thing. She couldn’t move far beyond the spot where she died. It dawned on her; this was the spot she would haunt throughout eternity. She started to weep. All she wanted was a fun spooky Halloween night not anything like this. She wondered how to access heaven from here or whether the devil would come for her.

She moved away from the portal with the light, vowing not to fall for the trap, when a new portal opened before her except this one stank of sulfur and three shadowy figures emerged! As the entities reached for her, she learned that witchcraft is witchcraft, white or black, and god frowned on all of it. She screamed and begged for mercy, but to no avail, the demons dragged her off to hell. Halloween was supposed to fun and spooky to laugh at small fears. Now she would experience true terror for all eternity.

THE END

Bio: Ray Prew was originally from Rhode Island, but now lives in Florida. He is a graduate of the New England Institute of Technology. Ray has been a blue-collar worker all his life, and started writing as a hobby. He spent 9 enjoyable years as a phone psychic. Ray’s work has been published in Spinetinglers magazine (6 times) one of the stories was used in a trivia quiz. Two Spinetinglers stories are on You Tube, one story called Some Monsters Are Real is narrated by someone, and the other was made into a short video called "Let Me Out by Ray Prew." He has been published in Blood Moon Rising (7 times including 2 poems), Aphelion magazine (12 times including 2 poems) as well as several other magazines. He has an anthology book of published and unpublished stories available on Amazon called Delightful Nightmares. His work has also appeared in the anthology vicious circle season one put out by sinister grin, and one poem in an anthology of vampire poetry called vampoetry.

E-mail: Ray Prew

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