HALLOWEEN WEEK 2025 CONTEST
Runner-up
BY N. V. MORRIS
Copyright is held by the author.
WE FILLED the second jar much easier than the first. Countless bodies, frail and ambered, clung to each other in a lovingly mindless embrace. The cicadas were already whining, urging their newly-emerged kin to join their chorus. Here and there, ghostly forms were straining forth from skins we would soon claim as our own. It was a bounty unmatched in 13 years. We traversed the yard, harvesting all we could, and when we were done, we carried those jars inside as carefully as could be.
Our ritual was soon to begin.
“Should we get another jar, d’you think?” I asked. Hiro had lit a candle with his good hand, and the shadows on his face danced as he considered our supply.
“This should be enough,” he said. “They’ll stretch farther than you think.”
A human chalk outline had been etched on the floor of the basement. It looked like something from an old crime drama. I would have laughed if my stomach didn’t feel like it was tearing. Around it was a loose circle of candles, black as pitch, along with a platter of graveyard dirt and a knife. We carefully studied the instructions we’d scraped together from old tombs before beginning in earnest.
Together, we stitched together the effigy with those exuvia. Precise placement, precise choice. No broken legs, no bent antennae. Many molts were set aside, unsuited for the task ahead. We couldn’t afford a mistake. Each exoskeleton looked on, awaiting our future.
More precisely, Hiro’s.
This had been his idea. We both agreed that he should be the experiment’s pioneer. If he had insisted, I’d have taken the plunge. To be honest, I was happy to be second. I was scared.
If we shed our today, maybe we can emerge into a better tomorrow. That was the thought that drove us.
If we failed, though . . .
I shook my head. No, none of that. This would work. Hiro was going first, and he’d prove our method.
For that, I was grateful.
“You scared?”
Hiro’s words barely rose above his breath. His eyes remained low, intent on his placement. The next shell was set with difficulty.
“I should be asking you that.”
His good hand was shaking. The other hung limply at his side. Useless, he called it. He sure couldn’t afford any treatment that might fix it, not with the state of healthcare. Nothing could fix the rest of what the accident had taken from him. Aside from me, he was alone. He had nothing to lose in trying this.
I, at least, had a working body, even if it was the wrong one. I’d fought it all my life, tried to change through clothing and attitude. I was a man, dammit, one with the same financial restraints as Hiro. This was my last resort.
I was the one to place the last exuvia. Smack-dab in the middle of the chalk outline’s head, it was perhaps the most important. It’s placement had to be perfect.
It was, I promised myself.
Hiro told me he was fine. He was taking deep breaths as he stood at the foot of that silhouette, though, his hand trembling. I pretended not to notice as I did my part, stepping from the ring and carefully tracing the sigil in the dirt gatherings.
This was it. No going back.
Hiro took up the knife, recited those words. He pledged his sacrifice, uttered the oath. With a final glance to me, he plunged the knife deep into his own useless arm, dragging it along to eke out his purpose.
Blood splattered across our display, an arterial spray that disturbed not a single phantom. The candles encircling us flickered as Hiro offered himself to the army, his gaze steeled. For a moment, nothing happened. I felt my stomach twist. Had we failed?
Another second, another gush of blood. The first candle extinguished itself, then the second. One after another, the flames surrounding Hiro went out, until only one remained in the darkness. My eyes strained in the gloom, my ears roaring with the echoes of my own heartbeat. I could barely register Hiro’s ragged breathing, but I very much heard it begin.
That swell. The sound of many legs clicking against concrete. The cracking of Hiro’s bones. His voice. And, impossibly in our underground fortress, the whine of cicadas.
I wanted to cover my ears, to slam my eyes shut and pretend nothing was happening. Perhaps I should have fled that basement and braved the madness outside. Then I wouldn’t have witnessed what became of Hiro.
He had gotten his wish, all right: his arm was useless no more. Its chitinous coating shone angular and perfect in the low candlelight as he tore frantically at the forms now stitched to him. The countless cicada shells writhed, the splits in their backs birthing forth countless roots that clung tight. Even as I looked on, those threads continued to dig and spread that virus. I could do nothing as Hiro’s metamorphosis progressed. His voice was nearly indistinguishable from the never-ending scream we had summoned into the pit of our hell.
I wanted to believe in the process. Transformation doesn’t come without pain in some form, after all. But this . . . no, this wasn’t what Hiro wanted, what I wanted. I couldn’t allow it to go on.
By the time I destroyed that sigil, my hands were already stained with Hiro’s blood. He bled not when I carved those bodies from him, not when I trimmed away the roots of that invasion or hacked away at his hardened skin. I couldn’t leave it attached to him, no way. By that point, he was gone, lost to whatever forsaken god we had called upon in that underground. I was left alone to deal with our failure, to explain Hiro’s infestation to whoever next came into that basement.
Hiro had chosen to go first. Even as my ears rung with the cries of cicadas, I was thankful for that.
***
N. V. Morris is a queer author (he/they) working in the horror and fantasy genres. Creepy-crawlies are their friends. You can find their work in Polymorphic, The Colored Lens, and narrated on Creepy Podcast.