Chapter Forty-Nine: Witches’ Feast:

-Downtown-

The lights flickered in the motel room. Katsumi stood in the dim bathroom, panting. He too had bad memories about Halloween. His vision began spinning.

“Baby?” Miki asked as she pounded on the bathroom door. “Baby, what’s the matter?” He couldn’t hear her voice. His mind ran back to childhood.

His path to darkness began on Halloween ten years ago. Katsumi’s parents fought all of the time. Both always drew blood. Tonight, Katsumi gripped the sides of the sink.

“Shut up!” he yelled.

“Baby?” Miki asked. Each pound on the door reminded him of his dad’s fists pounding into his mom’s ribcage.

“Just shut up!” Katsumi yelled.

“What’s wrong?” Miki asked.

“I said shut up!” He threw a glass at the bathroom door. His father threw his plate that night too. His mom clutched her fork at the table. Little Katsumi kept his head down. Gut instinct told him tonight would be a nasty storm. It began when his mom muttered something under her breath.

Ten years later, Katsumi couldn’t escape Halloween’s turmoil. He gritted his teeth in the mirror. Tonight, he saw his father’s reflection staring back at him.

“You!” Katsumi barked. “I am nothing like you!” Laughing filled his ears. His dad laughed at his wife huddled on the floor, bleeding. Katsumi hid under the kitchen table. He couldn’t remember what they shouted at each other. His memories blocked that part out. But the images remained, blurry and cut to pieces, but vivid. He remembered his dad kicking and punching his mom. His mom never gave the monster the satisfaction. She fought back, no matter how bad her injuries.

Why did she stay? Even his mom asked the same question on the night before Halloween. She used to know, but at that point it didn’t make sense. As she lay bleeding on the kitchen floor, Katsumi’s mom decided to take one more chance to attack.

Katsumi in present day buckled as he remembered the bloody results on that Halloween night. He sank into a ball on the floor. A sea of blood clouded his vision. Whose was it? Ma? Pa? Miki-chan’s? Katsumi’s head began to throb as the Halloween episode conclude in his head.

By November first in 2000, the little boy crawled out from under the table. The silence in the apartment scared him.

“Mama?” he asked. Against his better judgement, little Katsumi wandered into the kitchen. He took the first step into a pool of blood. The boy jumped back at the sensation. He looked down with big eyes. Blood was common in the apartment but this nearly covered the whole kitchen floor. Little Katsumi shook his head. No. No…

He lifted his head, trembling.

His mom’s lifeless body lay splayed on the kitchen floor. She had been stabbed many times. The old angry expression remained on her face even in death. Katsumi covered his mouth, backing away. The boy ran into the living room into another horror. When backed into a pair of legs, he turned and found his dad’s body hanging from the ceiling fan. The twisted smile on his face was enough to send the newly orphaned boy running out of the apartment.

Back in 2010, Katsumi broke down screaming in that dim motel bathroom.

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Outside, Miki sat by the door. Her heart ached to hear her boyfriend in agony Katsumi locked himself in the bathroom hours earlier and refused to come out. She pulled her knees to her chest and buried her head. Katsumi-kun…

She happened to lift her head, sneering.

“What are you looking at?” Miki snarled. She snorted at the skeleton of their victim from last night laying across the room. Miki covered her ears when Katsumi screamed.