She hunts on Halloween

I first met her on Halloween. That's when she hunts.

There’s a dark, secluded road on the south edge of the city. Black River Parkway, according to the maps, but there are no street signs. It winds for several miles through the middle of Black River Park. It’s ostensibly a city park, but you won’t find any gazebos or soccer fields or walking paths. Just miles upon miles of untamed nature, tucked away between the city limits and the suburbs beyond. 

Black River feels more like it belongs in the deep country. The road is lined on one side by a limestone cliff face and the other by dense forest, a winding river tucked a ways back in the trees. Branches arc over the roadway and form a tunnel. You’d expect the drive to be pretty on bright Fall days - the sun filtering through a canopy of orange, red, and yellow - but light has a hard time penetrating that gnarled tangle of limbs and leaves. Night is worse; regular headlights only penetrate a few feet into that darkness, and turning on the brights only illuminates the next curve, no way of knowing what lurks in the pitch black around the bend.

I always hated that goddamned road.

My husband, John, and I lived a few miles away from the park. We were high school sweethearts. He was the captain of the football team, and I was the shy nerd who tutored him so he'd be able to keep playing. We grew up in a small town, and I never really had any friends until John took a liking to me. He used to call me his “pretty little brain.” Demeaning, I suppose, but as an affection-starved teenage girl I thought it was sweet. Everybody thought we had such a cute romance. 

They didn’t see the bruises, of course.

It started after graduation. College wasn’t in the cards for us; whatever the townspeople might say, John wasn’t remarkable enough for a football scholarship, and neither of our families had the money to pay tuition. I might have scored an academic scholarship, but I was young and smitten, and I wasn’t going to go anywhere without John. We got married and found a little rent-to-own mobile home in a park near the city. I got my CNA certification and went to work in a nursing home. John found a job in construction. We got married a couple of months later. 

It was nice at first, just the two of us building a life together. I thought we could be happy, even if we didn’t have much. John, however, wasn't so easily satisfied.

In our small town he was king, but in the city he was just another grunt doing manual labor. A few months after we got hitched, John lost his job at the construction site. He’d been getting into fights, they said. They had disrespected him, he told me.  He jumped from job to job after that but eventually settled on drinking as his primary career path.

From the start, John blamed me for his lack of success. If he’d spent less time studying, he reckoned, and more time on the field, he could have made it to the big time. He’d remind me of this when he woke me up at 3 a.m. and dragged me  to the kitchen to clean his spilled beer, or when he screamed at me for spending too much money on new scrubs for work, or when he shoved me into the bedroom, demanding I fulfill my “wifely duties.” It didn’t take long for the screaming and shoving to turn to hitting and kicking. He started taking all of my paychecks as soon as they came in, blowing what we didn’t need to live on booze and cigarettes.

I tried to leave, once. It was about a year in. I didn’t have any friends in the city, and John took all my money, so I hitchhiked back home to my parents. I showed up on their doorstep one day looking like a real cliche - black eye stark on my pale face, a ring of bruises on my upper arm, rain-soaked and shivering. They took me in, dried me off, and nursed my wounds.

Then they called John.

Ours was a God-fearing town, you see. We didn’t believe in divorce. A woman’s job was to submit to her husband. 

“Natalie,” my mama said, pressing a frozen pack of peas to my eye socket. “You just need to try harder to make him happy.”

My daddy gave John a firm talking to when he got there, and we were sent on our way with a handshake and a hug.

I hate to say it, but I gave up that day, staring out the windshield while John fumed silently in the driver’s seat. There was a honeybee stuck in the windshield wiper, not quite dead, antennae and wings twitching in the buffeting wind. I watched its struggle get weaker and weaker, until eventually it stopped struggling at all. 

It was after midnight when we got back to the city. When we were close to home, John turned the truck onto Black River Parkway. 

“Where are we going?”

John tightened his grip on the steering wheel, knuckles white.

“John, baby, I’m sorry I left.”

He flicked on the brights, head swiveling, eyes searching the roadside. I squirmed in my seat. I tried to see anything out the windows - any indication of where he might be taking me - but it was all just darkness. 

“John -”

He swerved to the opposite shoulder without warning, making a sharp U-turn. I braced myself on the dashboard as he skidded to a stop in a small, dirt pull-off. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to face me, lips curled in a snarl. 

“Shut the fuck up, Nat.” 

The beating he gave me was the least of it. With no neighbors to worry about, there was no need to hold back. 

So he didn’t.

He apologized on the drive home, after. Begged me not to make him that angry again. I curled in on myself in the passenger seat, body one massive, aching bruise. I didn’t respond. It didn’t matter whether he was sorry or not, really.

I had nowhere else to go.

After that, Black River Parkway became his favorite place to dole out punishment. I changed my bus route to work just to avoid driving past it. It took me an hour longer to get there, but that was just two extra hours a day that John couldn’t lay hands on me. 

I knew that someday, the cops were going to find my body on the side of that goddamned road. 

Ten years ago, I thought it was that day. John had made some new drinking buddies, and we had gone to a Halloween party at his friend Al’s. I wore the sexy cheerleader costume he’d bought me and covered my black eye with concealer, determined to be the perfect date. I was all smiles and docile obedience, but it was no use: by the end of the night, John was shitfaced, and I was nothing to drunk John but a punching bag.

“Useless fuckin’ whore,” he seethed, swerving across the center line of the parkway. He reached over to smack me with a clumsy hand. 

“John, watch the road,” I begged, dodging to avoid his knuckles. He was going to crash into a tree and kill us both before he even had the chance to kill me.

“Don’t tell me how t’ drive, bitch.” His hand almost connected with my nose but slapped across my cheek instead. I blinked back tears at the sting. 

“John, please, I know you’re angry…”

“Angry? Angry?” John laughed, ugly and low. He looked over at me with a sneer. “Slut flirts wi’ my friends all night and wonders why I’m angry?”

We swerved close enough to the cliff face that the passenger side mirror scraped across the rock, crumpling its plastic housing.

“John! Please," I sobbed, trying to shrink against the passenger door.

John pressed his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. His hand tangled in my hair, and he wound it around his fist, pulling me toward him across the armrest.

“Keep begging, won’ do no good.” His breath was hot against my ear. The scent of stale beer wafted to my nostrils, and I tried not to gag. 

“John,” I whimpered, “I -” 

A figure loomed ahead in the headlights. A tall woman in a white dress and a strange mask was standing in the center of the road just before the next curve. 

“JOHN!”

My scream startled him enough to actually look. 

“Fuck!” 

He pulled the steering wheel hard to the left. We crashed into the treeline, branches cracking against the glass of the windshield. I barely had time to register the large trunk looming out of the darkness before we hit it with a sickening crunch.

Everything went black.

My senses came back to me slowly. Sharp pain lanced through my collarbone where the seat belt had caught it; my nose felt wrong, loose and crooked, and blood streamed from both nostrils, red saturating the nylon of the airbag. A repetitive chime sounded in time with the throbbing in my head. I groaned and blinked my eyes open.

The front of the truck was crumpled against the tree, the windshield twisted and crushed in its frame. I shook chunks of safety glass out of my hair and wiggled my fingers and toes. Nothing seemed broken. I looked over at the driver’s seat to check on John.

The seat was empty, and the door was hanging open.

“John,” I croaked. I got no response.

I stumbled out of the cab after struggling with the passenger door in its bent frame. I looked back in what I thought was the direction of the road, but I couldn't see anything but the dark silhouettes of tree trunks. 

“John?” I called again, little more than a whisper in the oppressive silence. A breeze rustled the leaves overhead. Aside from the wind and the distant roar of the river, there were no sounds of any kind - no crickets or owls, nothing rustling in the bushes or in the branches above. 

I circled the truck bed, fighting off waves of dizziness and nausea. Part of me wanted to just walk away, leave John for dead in the woods and make my way back to the parkway to check on the woman we'd almost hit, but the woods were dense. I was injured and alone, the night was pitch black, and I was starting to think John had already had the same idea about me.

I'm not an expert tracker or anything, but my daddy used to take me hunting when I was a girl. I studied the ground on John's side of the truck, looking for any clue to where he might have gone. The leaves and brush heading straight out from the driver's door had clearly been disturbed. It seemed as good a path as any to follow.

I leaned back into the cab to find my phone, and I pulled up short when I saw John's still sitting in the cup holder next to mine. He may have been a drunk and a bastard, but he wasn't an idiot; why the hell would he wander off into the woods - possibly injured - without his phone? I pocketed his and opened the flashlight on mine. As I started to exit the cab, something else caught my eye.

John's shotgun sat in its holster above the rear window. I hesitated for a second before deciding it was better to be safe than sorry. I grabbed the gun and a handful of shells from the box in the backseat.

Phone in one hand and gun propped on my shoulder, I set off to follow the path John had laid. Even with the flashlight, it was impossible to see more than a couple of feet. I kept my eyes focused on the ground so I wouldn't lose his trail.

John hadn't been trying to conceal his route, that was for sure. Small branches were snapped and hanging loose where he'd plowed through them. A blanket of flattened, wet leaves and packed dirt stretched ahead of me, almost as if he'd been dragging something behind him. I thought back to the woman on the road. Something settled heavily in my gut. John usually only took his anger out on me, but I shuddered at the thought that some innocent stranger had gotten caught up in our mess. 

I tightened my grip on the shotgun and pressed on. That eerie silence followed me, but the sound of the river was getting louder. The trees were thinning out, but it didn't do much for the darkness. When I looked up, I could make out the sliver of the crescent moon high in the sky. I squinted at the stars, trying to get a sense of what direction I was heading.

A slimy, wet hand closed around my ankle.

I flailed backward, losing my grip on the phone, and kicked out wildly. My foot connected with a fleshy thud, and the figure on the ground let me go with a pained moan.

My phone had landed a few feet away, flashlight smothered by rotting leaves. I couldn't make out who had grabbed me, but they looked too bulky to be the slender woman I'd seen on the road. Trembling, I crept toward my phone, eyes trained on the shadow on the ground. They gurgled.

I lifted the light with shaking hands. 

"...John?"

He let out another choked gurgle that might have been my name. He was laid out on the ground crawling on his belly, arm stretched toward me, fingers scrabbling weakly at the forest floor. Four deep gashes marred his handsome face, his lips mangled and shredded. The back of his jacket was slashed and splattered red, and he dragged his limp legs behind him, Levi's soaked through with blood.

Before I could say or do anything, melodic laughter rent the silence. John's eyes went wide, and he was yanked back into the darkness.

It might not have been my brightest moment, but instinct and adrenaline kicked in, and I was after him like a shot. I tossed my phone aside to grip the shotgun in both hands, barrel aimed forward into the dark. A high scream echoed through the woods around me, and my blood froze; it was a clear, cold cry of triumph.

I emerged from the trees on the bank of the river. The dim light of the crescent moon rippled on the water's surface. On the shore, the woman from the road towered over John's broken body.

Only she wasn't a woman at all.

Most of her looked human enough, though she stood well over six feet tall. Thick black hair tumbled over her shoulders in a wild tangle. Black antlers curved proudly skyward from the mass of curls, regal as a crown. Her face was obscured by a mask made from the skull of a buck. From a distance, her eyes were nothing but empty black pools.

Her white dress was almost sheer, the curve of her breasts visible through the fabric, and the hem fluttered about her thighs just above the knee. Dirt and blood stained the bottom few inches of the skirt. Toned muscles shifted under skin that shone ethereally in the moonlighting, so pale it was almost translucent.

Black veins emerged in tendrils from under the mask, snaking across her pale skin until they converged into thick, iridescent black scales on her forearms and calves. The scales covered her hands and feet, and her long, bony fingers were tipped with gleaming black talons several inches long and curved to a wicked point.

As I stood frozen at the treeline, she reached one arm up toward the sky, talons extended. With another inhuman shriek, she brought those claws straight down onto John's chest. I could hear the sucking squelch when they pierced his skin, the crack of his ribs giving way, and blood sprayed over her dress in a fine mist. John's limbs spasmed, but she twisted her wrist with a sickening crunch, and he went still.

I remained frozen, finger trembling on the shotgun's trigger, while the creature rooted around in John's chest. When her hand emerged, red and glistening, she was clutching his heart in her claws.

I think my mind meant to scream, but all I managed was a pitiful whimper. The creature's head shot up to look at me just the same.

She dropped John's heart back onto his chest, where it landed with a wet thud. Black eyes trained on mine, she stalked toward me, unhurried. She moved with leonine grace, long strides swiftly closing the gap between us, until her belly was pressed to the muzzle of my shotgun. I had to crane my neck back to keep looking at the bleached bone of her mask. Slowly, she brought a hand up to rest on top of the gun's barrel - gently, not pushing - and I watched her claws retract to a less lethal length. My finger slid off the trigger, and I let the gun drop to my side. 

She crouched down to meet my gaze, head tilted to one side. Shining black eyes studied me from behind the mask, an endless void, and the longer I stared, I swore I could see galaxies swirling in their depths. She raised a hand and lightly brushed the rough pads of her scaled fingers across my temple, down the bridge of my nose, across my collarbone. The pain from my injuries faded to a dull ache.

I was bone tired all of a sudden, and I felt my knees start to give way. The creature caught me under my arms and guided me down to the forest floor, settled on a blanket of leaves and dirt with my head nestled in her bloodstained lap. She ran her fingers through my hair, careful not to scratch me with her nails, and started to hum a melody I didn't recognize, haunting and deep. Staring up at the stars in her eyes, I drifted out of consciousness.

I dreamt of a cottage by the river. I was dancing in the backyard around a roaring fire near the shore, hands clasped with a beautiful woman with long, dark hair and eyes as black as night. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.

I was awakened by a racket of sirens and shouting voices. My head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton, and I struggled at first against the hands curled around my upper arms. When the fog lifted, I found myself strapped to a gurney staring up into the faces of two worried paramedics. One of them slid a needle into my arm, and the world went blissfully dark.

The cops came to talk to me at the hospital later that day and helped fill in the gaps. A driver on Black River Parkway spotted my bloodied body slumped on the side of the road and assumed the worst. They were shocked when I turned out to be alive - a miracle, they said - and rushed me into an ambulance. It didn't take them long to find the crashed truck a few hundred feet into the trees. 

Thankfully, nobody asked too many questions. They pieced together a narrative that made sense and stuck with it: John was driving drunk and nearly got us killed, and he got lost in the woods when he went looking for help. Happens all the time, they assured me. I was lucky I went the opposite direction and found the road. After a few days, their search for John turned to a search for a corpse, and after a few weeks they stopped searching altogether.

It seemed easier to go along with their story than try to convince them of the truth. Figured they would think I was talking nonsense, or else I hit my head too hard and had one hell of a fever dream.

I reckon that's what you all think too.

Whatever you want to believe, that night changed me. I got my shit together and thought for the first time about what I wanted to do with my life. Without John taking all my money to fuel his vices, I was able to save up a nice little nest egg. Without John, turned out, I was able to do a lot of things. I went back to school and got my nursing degree and landed a well-paying job. It took a few years of hard work and frugal living, but when all was said and done I sold the mobile home and got myself a two-bedroom cottage near Black River. I've never remarried, but that's alright. 

Every year I have a date on Halloween.

There's no shortage of men like John in this world: self-proclaimed alpha males who find themselves at the bottom of the pack when they step out of their mama's den. Their impotent rage feeds into a bottomless well of cruelty, and they vomit it out through their fists on those they perceive as beneath them.

I know those men see me as an easy target: a scared little rabbit to their big bad wolf. I've got big doe eyes and soft brown curls framing a baby face that looks a good deal younger than my 35 years. All I have to do is bat my eyelashes at them, and they go on the prowl.

This year's wolf is Gary. He's married to my coworker, Jill. I normally wouldn't pick a guy so close to home, but I took one look at the black and blue fingerprints ringing sweet, timid Jill's neck, and I knew he was the one.

It didn't take much to hook him. I went out for a smoke break while he was waiting for Jill to finish up her shift, making sure my scrubs were just a little tighter than usual. He leered at me, and I offered up a shy smile and a pretty pink blush in return. He rolled up to the curb and asked for my number.

Gary is picking me up this evening. I got my costume all laid out, same as every year: a sweet little deer, complete with pointed ears and a white fluffy tail. He'll follow that tail through the dark of the woods without sniffing a hint of danger in the air, just like all the others before him. 

There's a party out in Black River Park, I've told Gary, where we can do whatever we want, secluded from prying eyes. I know the way, I've promised, and I'm happy to lead him there. He'll try to paw at me on the trail, eager to taste his prize. But I'm quicker than a wolf, and I won't be caught in his claws. I've got places to be.

At the end of the path, by a river bathed in moonlight, my date waits for me. I think she'll like my gift this year. She always does. I meet her every year on Halloween. 

That's when we hunt.