Oh bitter bite of fabulous fright and my, it’s always better to be up at night! I just went to do some late hour laundry and saw a horrifically bloody scene…

…I went to Super WalMart for some last minute Halloween shopping. Got back, and am using the early AM hours to get some final bits of business done before a grand Hallow’s Eve weekend. Item number #665…do laundry. Got the load and the coinage – four quarters, four coins, the price of clean boxers being twice Charon’s toll. I get into the laundry room and what do mine eyes divine? Blood and balloons…everywhere.

Some campus group or the housing office must have put up decorations, in the laundry room no less, with quite a bit of impressive zeal. Warms the heart. There are paper streamers and balloons (all orange and brown) and other decorations as well as splashed gore all over the white walls and machines and counters. But now…this is the genius part – whether by purposeful artifice or serendipitous accident the decorations seem to be in two layers.

Let me explain. It didn’t seem like someone put up happy decorations and happy blood and weeeeeeeeeeeee…isn’t Halloween fun? No. It looks more like someone put up streamers and balloons and other decor…and then some act of unholy, unspeakable, violence and villainy and degradation happened that would make Hannable Lector shake his head and say, “Oh my…that was a bit strong…wasn’t it?” It looked like this horrible fate befell the decorators in the middle of the decoration (like they hadn’t quite finished)… …balloowns, on the ground, some covered in blood. Bloody hand prints on the ground, on the machines on the walls. Smears of blood on the floor, as if someone crawled through it but couldn’t quite make it. One of the paper streamers, partly torn down from the ceiling, hanging, and tied in a make-shift hangman’s noose.  Bloody messages hastily written by finger…GET OUT NOW! – on the floor; HELP ME  and RUN! – on the washing machine; B L O O D – on the dryer; REDRUM – on one window; and on the other window – OH GOD IT WAS THE CHILDREN

Now, that must have all looked cool when they put it up. But it was perfect when I got to it: the door open, wind blowing in, lazily disturbing the streamers and balloons on the floor, things just a little more out of place and random (like a real crime scene) and it being four in the morning and I the only living, waking human on the whole campus…totally silent (save the wind). Oh man…it was perfectly set up…a bit of ephereal art, specific to that one moment for an audience of one (probably won’t be quite as good by tomorrow). It would have been divinely perfect had someone, at that moment, called me on my cell (and thus, triggering my Halloween themed ring tone)…but that’s ok…I took it out and set it off myself 🙂 

Of course…maybe the scene was too perfect. Maybe the reason that the campus is deathly quiet isn’t because this is UIS and it’s always like that this time of night, but because everyone (but me) is dead… Well…I guess if I don’t show up tomorrow night to Eureka…you all will know why. Pleasant dreams puppets…