It's Halloween, and some teenagers are out trick-or-treating. All in costume, they're hitting a couple of neighbourhoods, driving in between in a borrowed car. As they're heading down the highway, they pass by a lonely-looking farm. Strung up from the sign at the intersection leading to the farmhouse there's something that looks like a scarecrow. It's some kind of Halloween decoration: a hanged man. The teenagers stop in the road to take a few pictures with their mobile phones, then speed on towards their next target neighbourhood.
But a few weeks later, as they happen to be passing the junction again on a night out, they notice that the hangman decoration is still there. There're even a couple of crows perched on its shoulders, picking away. They stop and climb out of the car. One of the boys goes to take a closer look. He doesn't have to get too close to see that it's no decoration, but instead a real, rotting corpse, stung up from the sign like the victim of a lynch mob. The stench is terrible.
It turns out that the man had killed himself on the week of Halloween. He'd lived alone in the farmhouse, and so nobody had missed him when he went. Just like the kids in their car, everybody who passed him by thought that he was a Halloween decoration, and so he hung there, quietly decomposing for weeks and weeks and weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment