The Halloween Host

Which Halloween will be your last?

When it comes to visit no one knows who the Host's next victim will be. Every Halloween in a small town, the people don't party, they don't trick or treat or pass out candy. They huddle together in their houses, passing whispering prayers to each other in hopes that maybe this time, this year it will spare them all. Every year those useless prayers go unanswered.

They've given up on church and rituals; no amount of lambs' blood stops the Host from coming and taking another victim, forcing the town's people to hear their blood curdling screams from sun up to sun down.

No one has ever seen it, everyone who possibly has is dead or too traumatized to speak. It rarely leaves its victims alive and in one piece. At a point they thought maybe one of the senior citizens of the town until they heard his torturous pleads in the middle of the night. They came to a conclusion that whatever it was, couldn't be human.

They all had their theories; a vengeful spirit, an angry god, a deadly curse. No one ever figured it. Those that research it never live long enough to find answers so they gave up.

Anyone would think: why not just leave the town? If only that was possible.

Those born on the town soil were imprisoned there until it was their turn. Those that crossed that dirt line were subjected to unimaginable pain that took too long to kill you. So, they decided to take their chances every year and wait.

You were lucky to die of natural causes, lucky if you were unintentional murdered or came down with a fatal sickness, then you were spared of the Host. Suicides and murder were impossible. This is what hell on Earth is.

They deterred any outsiders that happened to find their little town from coming in and planting their roots. Even those that were just stopping by for a fill-up were run out before they could even think the town was "quaint" and "cute". They've failed a few times.

A husband and his pregnant wife took a detour through their small town, leading their car to break down and having to stay. When thinking about the chain of events some believed that the cruel chain of events was orchestrated by the Host itself. No one knew the extents of its power.

While their car was sitting in the shop and they were held up in an downtrodden B&B the wife goes into the labor. When word spread, the townsfolk did everything they could to get the couple out of there. They told them of the fate of their child but the husband's reluctance and stubbornness coupled with his wife's inability to actually move, their child was born in their B&B bed.

The next morning when the husband went to take his wife and newborn out of that crazy place before the break of dawn, the town was woken up by the screeching wails of grieving parents. No one was able to forget the smell of burned, rotted newborn flesh.

They tried to fence their boarders, put up road blocks and failed at being most unappealing, unattractive town to look at. It was like folks' ears were full of cotton when the town told newcomers to leave. Instead, those newcomers are forced to witness the visit from the Host. Once you've experience one visit you were never allowed to leave.

The Host is an unmerciful, cruel entity that doesn't discriminate. It takes any living breathing human being it so desires, devours their souls and leaves a mess behind for the town to clean on November 1st.

The graveyard was too small to bury all the dead, so people had to start burying what's left of their loved ones in their backyard.

No one ever knew who was next on the Host's list. Every year that you were left alive was another year of waiting, of hugging your loved ones until they turned blue. When the clock strikes midnight you're left to wonder if you were going to meet the Halloween Host.