Halloween 3 (Patreon)

Eli had put almost no effort into Halloween. A thrift-store shirt, an old green waistcoat, a cheap pendant, and a pair of enormous rubber goblin ears he had ordered online at the last minute. That was the joke. Everyone else at the party had spent weeks planning elaborate costumes, while Eli had simply shoved the ears into his messy black hair and announced that he was a goblin. Somehow it worked. He spent the first hour grinning for photographs, laughing every time someone tugged one of the ears and asked how he had attached them.

Eventually he escaped to the bathroom, mostly because one ear had begun to itch. He leaned toward the mirror and rubbed his cheek.

His finger came away green.

Eli frowned. “Very funny.”

He assumed someone had smeared makeup on him, but there was no makeup on his fingertip. The color was beneath the skin. Worse, it was spreading. A faint olive patch crept from his cheek toward his jaw while the fingers touching it slowly changed to the same shade. He stared at his hand. Green flooded across the back of it, darkening around the knuckles, then continued beneath his sleeve.

“No. Nope. Absolutely not.”

Within seconds his other hand followed. The color climbed both arms and washed across his neck. Eli watched helplessly as his familiar complexion disappeared beneath a uniform dull green. Even his lips took on a muted olive tone. He splashed water over his face. Nothing came off.

Then he noticed the ears.

The rubber points were moving.

He grabbed the left one and pulled.

Pain shot through his skull.

Eli screamed and released it. The ear snapped back into place—not attached to his ear, but actually his ear now. He stared at the mirror, breathing hard, then very carefully pinched the tip again. He could feel his own fingers touching it all the way to the point. While he watched, the ear stretched another inch. The cartilage lengthened. The base widened. Delicate folds formed inside it as the cheap prosthetic shape became living flesh.

The right ear changed with it.

“Oh my God.”

His hair began to fall out.

At first a few strands drifted onto the sink. Then hundreds followed. Eli plunged both hands into his thick black hair and came away holding fistfuls of it. More slid over his shoulders, down his shirt, across the counter. He raked desperately at his scalp and only accelerated the process. Within a minute his hairline had retreated halfway across his head. Another handful came loose. Then another.

Soon he was staring at a completely bald green skull framed by two enormous pointed ears.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

The skin of his forehead tightened, then wrinkled. Deep creases appeared between his brows. His cheeks hollowed dramatically, exposing sharp cheekbones beneath the green flesh. Eli pressed both hands to his face as his nose tingled, stretched, and slowly pushed outward.

“No, no, no—”

His nose lengthened into a hooked point.

His chin followed, becoming narrow and prominent. Fine wrinkles multiplied around his eyes and mouth, then deepened into leathery furrows. The smooth green skin roughened into something pebbled and ancient-looking. He watched his own youthful face vanish piece by piece until the thing in the mirror looked decades older and several species removed from human.

Eli backed away from the sink.

His sleeves suddenly felt too loose.

He looked down and realized his arms were thinning. Not weakening—changing. His forearms became narrow and corded, elbows sharper, wrists almost skeletal. His fingers stretched grotesquely, each joint lengthening until his hands looked enormous compared with his arms. The nails darkened, hardened, and pushed outward into curved black claws.

He held both hands in front of him, trembling.

“Those are not my hands.”

His voice cracked halfway through the sentence.

It emerged higher, raspier, almost nasal.

Eli froze.

“Those are not my—”

The second attempt was worse. The words came out in a scratchy little croak.

His transformation raced downward. His chest narrowed. His shoulders drew in. His stomach flattened unnaturally, giving him the lean, almost starved proportions of a storybook creature. The old white shirt and green waistcoat, chosen because they looked vaguely medieval, suddenly fitted him perfectly. Even the pendant seemed different now—not costume jewelry, but something old and tarnished hanging against leathery green skin.

He gripped the counter and stared at the mirror.

There was almost nothing of Eli left.

The creature staring back had a bald, elongated head, immense pointed ears, sunken eyes, a hooked nose and deeply wrinkled olive-green skin. His arms were too long. His fingers were longer still, tipped with claws. He opened his mouth in disbelief and discovered that his teeth had changed too: uneven, yellowed, sharper than before.

For several seconds he could only stare.

Then something strange happened.

His terror began to fade.

Not because the transformation was stopping. It had clearly finished.

Because the reflection suddenly struck him as funny.

Eli’s mouth twitched.

He fought it.

The twitch became a smile.

“No,” he whispered.

The goblin in the mirror smiled wider.

Eli watched his own expression become sly, delighted and thoroughly mischievous. Something inside his head seemed to shift into place along with the body. The panic remained somewhere underneath, but another instinct was rising over it: curiosity, amusement, and an overwhelming desire to cause trouble.

From downstairs came the roar of the Halloween party.

Someone shouted, “Eli! Where are you?”

He looked toward the bathroom door.

Then back at himself.

Slowly, he raised both clawed hands and examined them one final time. His grin widened until it showed every crooked tooth.

“Well,” he rasped, discovering that he rather liked the new voice, “I did say I was going as a goblin.”

He opened the door.

The screaming downstairs began approximately thirty seconds later.