Principal Kerwin Calloway smiled broadly as the students were herded into the cafeteria in the crisp, gray school uniforms that ushered in the new look of his school.  Not a muttered word among them.  Perfect posture.  Lock-step formation.
Neatly-combed hair.  Their black neckerchiefs finely tied.  Their faces set and
focused.  He rubbed his large, meaty hands together, his heart swelling with pride. Those fools on the school board had all said he was crazy and that it couldn’t be done.  He’d proved them all wrong.  He’d gotten the job done, all right. He nodded approvingly as the students all formed up in perfectly synchronized rows, seating themselves, one row at a time.  He smiled at his vice principal, Joe Mathers, and winked at him.  Joe smiled back, but there was an odd look hidden under that smile.  Joe still had an uneasy feeling about it all, he could tell.  “How do they know how to form up like that,” he’d once whispered to him in the teachers’ lounge over a cup of coffee, a pale, scared look on his face.  “We never taught them.”
“Why look a gift horse in the mouth, Joe,” Kerwin had asked with a smile, sipping his coffee.  “All I know is, since we instituted the new policy, they’ve been well-behaved and obedient.  And, their grades are through the roof.  Better even than I’d dared hope.”
“Yeah, but...” He’d shook his head in apparent disbelief.  “In class, they just sit there and stare up at me.  They listen.  They memorize.  They’re like little
recording machines in little mannequin bodies.  The other teachers all say the
same.  They don’t act like kids, anymore.  It’s like they’re all in a cult, or
something.”  Kerwin sighed and shook his head.  Joe was a good man.  But, he was young.  Even the most idealistic of his generation had bought the lie.  But, the truth will out.  This kind of order was the true nature of man.  Once the corruption of certain unnatural elements had finally been cleansed from the landscape, the real face of America’s youth emerged.
He thought back with a mixture of anger and satisfaction to the P.T.A. and town council meetings where those closed-minded idiots had all looked at him like he was off his head.  Ban Halloween?  Was the old guy nuts, or what?  Trick or treating?
Witches, ghosts and monsters?  It was part of being a kid.  Not anymore, Kerwin thought with a sigh, flashing back to the Halloween nights of his childhood when his dad had taken him trick-or-treating.  Apples and caramel popcorn.  Bags filled with candy.  Horror stories read under bed covers with a flash-light.  He smiled sadly.
The innocence of a bygone age.  Now...devil worship.  Vampire cults.  Obsession with demons and gothic horror.  A dehumanizing entertainment industry which fed on images of sick, perverted violence and fed it to our kids like incremental bits of poison, rendering them immune.  Insensitive.  Unhesitant to aim a weapon at a human being and laugh as they pulled the trigger.  A game.  Like trick-or-treating.
As the last of the students formed up in the rows at the rear of the caf, he tapped his microphone and adjusted the volume.  “Greetings, all.”  His voice boomed across the great hall.  Five thousand pairs of eyes fixed on him.  Gray clouds passed across a cold, raw October sky, pale sunlight fighting its way through the tall, arching windows at the rear of the room.  “I’ve brought you all here today, partly to congratulate you on your excellent grades...go on, give yourselves a hand,” he said with a smile.  “You’ve earned it.”  They clapped politely for a few seconds, then were quiet.  “But, I also wanted to share my thoughts on our school’s new policy.
As you know, we don’t allow any dark, gothic stuff here.  Nor do we allow
Halloween decorations here, or any mention of Halloween, or ghosts or goblins or any such thing.  Some people might think this is a little strange.  I know you may have heard that kids from other schools have been laughing at us.”
The wind howled outside, the flag whipping noisily on the front lawn as more gray clouds filled the sky.  “But, I guess they stopped laughing when they read the last test scores, huh?”  His laughter echoed weakly through the cafeteria, the stone-hard faces of the students staring coldly down at him.  He coughed and cleared his throat.  “Anyway...our policy has been proven to work.  Our school is the best by far, in terms of grades, in terms of no discipline problems, of any school in this town, maybe even in the whole country.  Think about that.  Our new policy...and, your hard work...have made it all possible.  You should all be proud.”  Dead silence.  The wind howled more loudly, the windows rattling as still more gray clouds blotted out the sun, the room darkening a bit.
“Tonight, as you know, is October 31.  Halloween, as some still call it.  Tonight, many kids your age will be out there in the streets.  Maybe causing trouble.  Maybe getting into trouble.  I know some of you may be feeling a bit left out, maybe a bit odd right now, but don’t worry.  That’s all going to change very soon.  The town council, and all your parents have seen that our way is best.  So, very soon, all the other schools in our town are going to replicate our policy.  Better yet...the town council is going to vote on a bill to ban Halloween altogether from our community.
Isn’t that wonderful?”
Thunder rolled outside, the clouds darkening angrily, a rain storm brewing.  The lights flickered and grew dim, the room growing darker still.  Damn!  Of all the times for a power failure.  He cursed angrily under his breath as lighting bolts cracked across the gray, cloudy sky.  “Everyone...please stay in your seats.  It’s nothing serious.  Joe,” he whispered to Mathers.  “See where that stupid janitor is, will you?”  Joe nodded nervously and reached for the door handle.  But, the door wouldn’t budge.  He tugged and tugged at it, twisting until his face strained, but the door wouldn’t move.
“Seems stuck, Kerwin,” he muttered with visible embarrassment, the lights
sputtering, shadows dancing across the walls like ghosts and witches.
“Here, let me help.”  Kerwin pressed with all his strength, but the door handle
seemed frozen.  The wind was really howling up a storm outside.  He almost didn’t hear the entire student body stand up at once, and start making their way down the steps, towards him.  “Please...go back to your seats.  We’ll have this straightened out in no time.  There’s no problem.  I said...get back to your seats.”  They kept coming.  Perfect formation.  Joe looked at him, growing pale.  Kerwin became angry.  “I said...”  His anger froze as the sky blackened, and in the black murky shadow of the darkened room, the eyes of the approaching kids glowed red like burning coals.  In the illumination of a lightning burst, their cold, neat little porcelain faces cracked like empty masks, bits of their cheeks falling away.  Wriggling little black tentacles snaked their way out from inside the crumbling, hollow children.
“Dear God,” Joe whispered behind him, sinking to his knees.  Joe’s eyes were wide and glassy, fixed on the windows.  Kerwin looked up.  The black, cloudy sky shattered with  a deafening crash of thunder and lightning.  A face formed out of the lightning-wracked clouds, red eyes blazing like twin bloody suns, fangs of lightning glistening through a rain of blood that drenched the windows red.  One final burst of hurricane-force wind, like a shriek from an angry god, and the windows shattered.  Flying glass shards whipped wildly through the room.  Kerwin cried out in pain as one slashed across his cheek.  He touched the wound, his hand coming away drenched in blood, his collar and the lapel of his jacket turning red.
Coiling streams of black mist flooded into the room like monstrous tentacles,
quickly spreading through the student body.  What remained of the extraneous shells of his perfect little students shattered into a million pale shards, revealing writhing masses of slithering black tentacles, gnashing curved claws, clicking mandibles, drooling, fanged maws and thousands of burning red eyes.  It all slithered together and congealed into a single, crawling black mass which merged with the monstrous apparition appearing out of the sky.  Taking solid form, it entered the room, its giant black tentacles crushing the walls like paper.  Its laughter was a petrifying roar.  Its eyes blazed red, its claws crushing tables and chairs like match sticks.  Kerwin’s knees turned to putty.  His mouth dropped, his eyes fixed on the monstrosity. He only dimly heard Joe scream.  It was like a dream as he saw his friend being dragged backwards across the caf, a huge tentacle wrapped around his ankles.  Joe screamed, his face twisted in anguish as he reached out his hands, pleading to Kerwin for help.  Kerwin was still paralyzed as the monster lifted Joe Mathers twenty feet into the air and dangled him upside-down over its huge, drooling mouth, his arms flailing.  Kerwin nearly vomited as the monster lashed out its black, forked tongue and pulled Joe into its mouth, like a frog snaring a fly.  Another tentacle coiled around Kerwin’s waist like a boa constrictor, crushing his ribs.  He winced in
pain, unable to breath as he felt himself being lifted into the air.  He looked up and saw a giant face of writhing tentacles with a thousand eyes, pulling him into the dark cavern of its mouth.  A hundred gory fangs gnashed, grinding human muscle and bone as bloodied mandibles clicked and tore flesh. His vision faded to gray, his head tingling and swimming though shadow and smothering darkness.  How could this be, his mind screamed out in protest with the last of his reason.  He had gotten rid of the evil.  He had banished it.  All of it.  The pagan mythology, the dark symbols, the ancient rituals...everything that had trapped the ancient evil, he suddenly realized with horror.  Everything that had filtered it out of our plane of existence, held it captive in a prison of illusion, kept it contained just outside our reality at this time, through all the millennia.
Now, he’d set it free.