Hair-Raising Halloween – Interracial Love

Authors note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

This story is my submission to the ‘Halloween Story Contest 2024’. It’s set within my Rutwell College Chronicles universe.

Hair-Raising Halloween

Chapter One: Rutwell College Campus, Founder’s Wood, 8pm, October 31 st .

She ran like her life depended on it. Her lungs bursting, legs burning, slipping every few paces on wet leaves that lay thick on sodden, muddy grass. A slip might lead to a misstep, a fresh graze on a hand outstretched to grasp one of the trees beside her, knuckles skimming over rough bark. Some slips made her fall and her gait now bore testament to a number of bruising tumbles and an ankle that had turned awkwardly. The difficulty of her path was writ clear on the clothes she wore, blue jeans and dark jacket streaked with mud and dirt.

Her auburn hair, shoulder length and flowing, had managed to pick up some twigs snarled in its locks as she burst through undergrowth and ducked beneath low branches. The trees in this wooded area had been planted over a century before by the college’s founder and had grown dense over the intervening years.

Hazel eyes, frightened eyes, darted about as she ran, looking for a path to follow. Her ears strained to catch signs of any pursuit but the hollow drum, her heart beating in her chest, seemed to drown out all but the snapping of twigs beneath her own clumsy feet. The silvered disc of the moon hung low in the sky. The tree’s, denuded of their leaves by Autum’s onset threw confusing shadows in her path as the branches rose like skeletal fingers into the night sky. The moon’s glow made her white skin seem paler than normal, though shock and fear had much to do with her pallor. Only a streak of grime on her right cheekbone offered any relief to the bone white landscape of her gorgeous face.

The young woman, still clinging to her status as a teenager but only barely, paused for a moment. An arm wrapped around the trunk of a tree for support as she gasped for air. Her chest, small but well formed, heaved as she sucked in deep breathes to ease her lungs and settle her fear. She needed to find safety. Intelligent, a college student after all, she took a moment to run through her mind the path she had followed when she’d begun to flee. Making a rough guess to her location, she turned ninety degrees from the direction she had been travelling, lurching into a shambling jog towards what she hoped was safety.

The ground beneath her began to grow steeper, the incline of a hill she couldn’t really see in the dark. Encouraged now, her deduction regarding where she was apparently right, she began scrambling up the hill, using her hands to seize tufts of grass as leverage, slipping twice more as she climbed the slope, keeping her feet beneath her though.

With a gasp of relief, the young college student reached the summit of the low hill. Before her she could see the sports fields of the college, a few hundred of her fellow undergraduates gathered there, celebrating Halloween in true collegiate fashion… with a party. Only a couple of hundred yards separated her from safety and she allowed herself a smile before starting down the hill.

As she put her bad foot, the one with the injured ankle, tentatively forward to begin navigating the downward slope of the hill, a sound like a twig snapping came from behind her. She half turned, even as she prepared to hurl herself forward down the hill, positive that a tumbling fall down its gradient was preferable to meeting her pursuer.

The young woman was a hair too slow, or her attacker was just super naturally fast. An arm, matted with dark hair so dense it seemed like fur, curled about her waist dragging her back up and over the brow of the hill, lifting her feet off the ground as it did so. A terrified scream tore through the night, cut off by a large hand clamping across the frightened woman’s mouth.

Down below, the entire gathering of students slowed to stillness, anxious faces turned to the direction the scream had come from. The music was switched off as everyone strained their eyes towards the hill and the wood behind it. Some low mutters began to snake their way through the crowd, other young women nervously gripping the red plastic cups filled with beer to their chests, drifting towards friends for the comfort of numbers.

Another scream, this one echoing out from the center of the crowd. A young man from one of the ‘wilder’ fraternities on campus, naked except for a rubber Michael Myers mask, bounded through the crowd, the young woman he had startled into a scream now laughing at his antics. Within seconds the music and the revelry resumed, the original scream now forgotten.

Chapter Two: Rutwell College Campus, Chemical Research Wing, 4pm, October 31 st . (Four hours before the attack).

The click of glass beakers and vials, the hum of the centrifuge machine, the odor of chemicals, all of these were comfortingly familiar to Professor Alphonse Devlin, stimuli that took him to his happy place. Since he’d been old enough to read, chemistry had been his life. From mixing ingredients in his mother’s cupboards into a secret potion, all the way through to becoming the youngest tenured Professor of Chemistry in Rutwell College’s history. Of course, that had been ten years ago. Since then, he had been striving to become a Distinguished Professor, his life, and his wife’s goal.

He wanted the position because it would mark a significant breakthrough in his profession, a recognition from his peers of his accomplishments. His wife wanted it to happen as the position came with a significant pay bump, tied to endowments at the college. So far though he had been coming up short, something his wife found unacceptable.

Professor Devlin had been leaning on one of the stainless-steel lap tables, idly scanning the latest test results, results he knew so well he could have recited them from memory, when he closed the laptop with an irritated jerking of his hands. Picking it up, he wound his way through the orderly clutter of his personal lab and over to the small area he considered his real office, a simple desk and chair in the corner of the room. As a tenured professor, he had his own office in the campus’s main building, but he never felt he was going to achieve anything there. He needed to be where the action was, in the lab. Not that the word ‘action’ was one people would label him with. A little below average height, a lot above average weight, the black man had begun balding in his early twenties and now at forty-five only a narrow band of hair encircled the outside of his head.

He wasn’t the only one challenged by the shrinking of hair follicles in the lab. Assistant Professors McClean and Desmond, both former PhD students of his, were also in various stages of balding. Both were black men in their early thirties and while McClean still clung on the fantasy of a full head of hair, the reality was a receding hairline that had begun thinning at his crown. Professor Desmond was completely bald, opting to shave his head clean once his hair loss became advanced. The two men worked hand in hand with Professor Devlin as he was disdainful of laboratory assistants, preferring ‘qualified’ hands and minds to be responsible for all stages and elements of the work they were carrying out.

Thinking about his work, his great chance to become internationally recognized as well as feted by the President and faculty of Rutwell College, Professor Devlin began rechecking the latest results. They had only begun the first stages of testing, using a specific type of animal, Rattus norvegicus domestica, otherwise known as the domesticated or laboratory rat. The type Professor Devlin required were specifically bred as hairless rats. The results were positive and, glancing towards McClean and Desmond, the three men shared a smile. It was early days but science could not be rushed, care had to be taken.

His cell phone began to ring, the ‘Imperial March’ from Star Wars was the ring tone he had assigned to one particular person.

“Hello my love,” Professor Devlin said with forced cheer into his phone.

“Hello my ass! What the hell are you playing at?”

“Uh-umm, I’m not sure, wh-what seems to be the problem my sweet?”

“The problem? You want to know what the damned problem is? I’ll tell you what the problem is. You went and embarrassed me. That’s the goddamn problem!”

“H-how? I’m here at the University, what happened?” Professor Devlin twisted awkwardly in his chair so as to turn away from his colleagues. He was well aware the strident tones of his biblically enraged wife could be heard quite clearly by the two men but he wasn’t going to embarrass himself further by scuttling from the room for privacy. Thankfully the two men, more than aware of his marital ‘pressures’, took a few steps away for decency.

“I went to buy some clothes at that new boutique only to find out the credit card was maxed out. Now I know we weren’t close to the limit. So, what did you buy?”

“Nothing, I thought… that is to say, we spoke about keeping the card in control and lowering the limit. So, I contacted the bank and did that.”

“Oh. You thought. Yooouu thought! Did you think about me huh? Did you think about my needs? Did you think about the shame you brought down on me?”

“But, bu-,” the middle-aged professor began to bluster, trying to make his wife see that it had been her decision as well.

“Nu-uh, no, no, nope, not happening. You aint gonna slide out from this with your ‘but dears’ and your ‘but sweetie’, no, no, NO! Not this time. Goddamn it! A man owns his mistakes, so be a man! My momma told me, don’t you marry a bald man, they all weak, self-centered and selfish, mmm-hmmm, that woman was a prophet, no doubt.”

“Yes dear,” Professor sighed miserably into the phone. This was a theme he was all too familiar with.

“Now you want to fix our credit rating… get the goddamn promotion at work. But don’t you think to cheat me out of what I deserve, cutting back on my credit card… how come you aint got balls on you like that when it comes to lovin’ your wife, eh? Now… get your ass back to work just as soon as you call the bank back and sort this shameful episode out. And you best forget about dinner tonight, I don’t want to see your pudgy ass in my home till I’ve had time to come to terms with your egregious behavior.

“Yes dear, sorry dear,” he said, the conversation already at an end, his wife having hung up on him.

On the other side of the laboratory, Desmond and McClean kept their heads down as they pottered about, trying to look busy. They both respected their boss hugely, to them, he was a giant in his field of study. The fact that other members of the college’s faculty, aware and scornful of his timidity, had pinned the moniker ‘Alpha’ on Professor Alphonse Devlin was not something they ever spoke of, especially since they both knew they were mockingly referred to as ‘Beta One’ and ‘Beta Two’. The glanced over at their boss, their mentor, watching as he leaned heavily against his desk, bald pate bowed in thought.

Professor Devlin’s knuckles pressed hard on the desk top as he tried to find a measure of self-control. He hated and loved his wife in equal measures, as much as he hated and loved his quest for a scientific breakthrough that would make his name. He loved the process of science itself but the pressure he put himself under to succeed, to stand out, was immense. He’d even resorted to plagiarism of a sort to make strides towards his goal. His assistants weren’t aware, but a lot of the progress they had made in the last two years had been based on someone else’s work.

He had come across some notes belonging to Professor Finklestein and her own progress in bio engineering a system of cell regeneration. She and her assistant had disappeared a couple of years ago, the majority of their notes going with them (see story ‘Rutwell College Chronicle: Halloween’) and the faculty rumor mill was that their work had been classified by the military, the two women drafted into the army’s science division. He didn’t know if it was true or not but the fragments of notes he’d found, in combination with his own research had put him on the brink of a revolution for men the world over… a cure for baldness. They were so close as well, he actually felt the process was right, but FDA regulations were so stringent, they had to follow a certain course of tests before ever reaching human trials and finally publishing his work. If he could get the serum approved, the financial rewards and accompanying prestige were unimaginable. Certainly, enough to put an end to his wife’s griping.

What if it wasn’t right yet? What if he was wrong? How many months… years, would be lost to testing before he could set about refining the serum. He could hear the echo of his wife’s bitterness in his head, “… don’t you marry a bald man…”. Decision made he banged his fists on the desktop, the two other men turning at the sudden, uncharacteristic display of temper.

“Gentlemen, who wants to make history tonight?”

Chapter Three: Rutwell College Campus, Founder’s Wood, 6pm, October 31 st . (Two hours before the attack).

The small clearing lay almost dead center in the wooded area that had come to be known as ‘Founder’s Wood’. Ten years before, the President of the university at the time, had commissioned what he called a ‘contemplation grove’ at this spot. The oak trees had been removed to fashion the rough circle of the clearing and the wood from those tree’s was used to build some benches and one picnic table sited in the clearing.

It never became a popular spot for the students and faculty however. The thick woods made reaching it a chore, and those seeking solitude for whatever reason would look towards less inhospitable locations. That said, it had an atmosphere about it, isolated as it was, and it suited the purposes of Professor Lena Shenee very nicely.

She was a thirty-five-year-old lecturer, holding doctorates in a number of fields, History and Comparative Religions being just two of them. The popularity of her courses owed as much to how she looked as her abilities as a teacher. Blonde, beautiful and irrepressibly cheerful, her lightly freckled face and wide smile were the subject of many Freshmen’s fantasies on taking her course. Proud as she was with how she looked and her academic achievements, she tried to remain grounded and accessible as a person. First, she insisted her students call her Lena, claiming ‘Professor’ made her sound ancient. Secondly, she tried to lighten the mood of the subject matter whenever possible, moving away from the dry, dusty tomes of history and engaging the students innovatively when she could.

That was what this evening was about. She’d offered an extra lecture to anyone interested, an outdoors discussion which she’d said would run for about ninety minutes. Some turned up out of genuine interest, others because they had no other plans, a few in the hopes that their sexy professor would be wearing a Halloween costume. They weren’t disappointed.

The crowd of about twenty students, all clutching flashlights, were chatting amongst themselves when Lena made her appearance at the edge of the grove. She was wearing a bone white, figure hugging witches robe, complete with a matching hooded cape. A soft sigh of ‘fuck me’ from one male student in the sudden quiet of the clearing carried to everyone’s ears and set off a gale of laughter. Lena laughed along with them, pleased at the turn out.

“No, I don’t think so. But I will put your body to use Mr. Davies. Come over here and help me with these bags. You too Mr. Collins,” Lena said, crooking a finger at the two young men, one of whom was blushing furiously.

The students walked over and saw that their professor had stowed some waterproof duffel bags at the edge of the clearing which they now picked up with a grunt of effort, carrying them over to the small table. Lena unzipped the first one, removing some wooden staves that had been wrapped at one end with rope and smelled slightly of some accelerant. She set her two ‘volunteers’ to pushing the medieval style torches into the soft earth, setting a wide ring of them about the clearing. They remained unlit however, Lena opening the other duffel bag to remove some large candles that she set on and near the benches and table, also unlit. Finally, she pulled out some sheets of paper setting them aside, first securing them with a candle so they wouldn’t blow away. Preparations done, she turned to the intrigued students.

“First, thank you all for coming. I’m sure many of you are no doubt heading off later to score bags of candy,’ there was some scoffing at this. “And I’m sure the other requirement of a good Halloween night, a scary movie, will also be on the cards. So, I won’t keep you all, I’ll dive in to this quickly. Okay, my outfit…” This time there was a wolf whistle from the back of the crowd, Davies immediately shaking his head, making clear it wasn’t him.

“Yes, yes, settle down. Well, I’m not out tonight as ‘slutty witch’ in case that was your thought. I’m wearing an approximation of a priestess’s robe of the Wicca religion. Wicca, or ‘The Craft’, is a form of modern paganism. Next semester we will be looking at the issues Historians have in fully understanding what Paganism is, the contradictions among scholarly works into it, the lack of source material and its revival in the mid twentieth century. Interesting fact, Wicca is the first religion that originated solely from England and by that, I mean it had no roots or links to and Judeo-Christian religions as did say, the Church of England…” Lena launched into her lecture, her crowd hooked by her performance and the subject matter given what night of the year it was.

For an hour she kept her audience enthralled, moving among them as she spoke, her outfit making her pale skin seem almost spectral. Despite only being five feet two in height, her short, slim figure loomed large in the clearing, lit as she was by the flashlights of her students, her shadow bouncing around as she strode about, gesticulating as she spoke. A fair number of the flashlights focused on her trim figure; her 32D-24-36 measurements displayed to their best effect by the tight robe. Eventually, as promised, she brought the talk to an end on time.

“Any questions?” Lena looked about.

“Yeah Prof… I mean, Lena. What’s with the torches and candles?” The voice was female but with all the flashlights pointed at her, Lena couldn’t make out who spoke. She stepped closer, seeing it was Alicia Brainch, one of her more promising students but who tended to have a melodramatic approach to history, looking for the conspiracy or mythological rather than the facts. Lena was sure the young woman would love this next part.

“I almost forgot, thank you Alicia for reminding me. Well, as its Halloween and this night owes its origins to the Celtic festival of Samhain, I thought we might indulge our ancestors’ beliefs for a moment before finishing up.” Lena went back to the table, retrieving the stack of papers which she began handing around.

“About a month ago, Professor O’Suilleabhain at Trinity College in Ireland sent me a translation. That’s what you are holding in your hands. At a dig site on Bull Rock in County Kerry, archaeologists discovered a stone marked with Ogham writing. It appears to have been a prayer to Donn, or Duinn, the Celtic God of the Underworld who is associated with that location. So, many thanks to Professor O’Suilleabhain, you are all holding a phonetic translation of that inscription into Gaelic.” Lena paused to gauge their interest, everyone seemed intrigued, especially Alicia as she’d supposed.

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