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All Hallows' Eve had finally reached Salem and was Penelope Sanders ready for it!
The second hand on the aging, mahogany grandfather clock in her living room had barely been able to tick twice between her arrival home from school - accompanied by Max Dennison - and her rush to decorate her house with as many supernatural decorations as she could find. If she had been permitted, Penny would have covered her house in cobwebs and skeletons throughout the entirety of October, but her mother, Kate - avid despiser of all things haunted - had forbidden any trace of Halloween until the night itself. Penny's grandmother, Agatha, had fervently tried to persuade her daughter into adorning the house earlier and upon these denials, had even tried to surreptitiously festoon the Sanders residence, but to no success.
Now that the evening had arrived, despite her mother's pleas, Penny was more than eager to trim her house with Halloween decorations. Mummies fashioned out of used mannequins wrapped in withering bandages were propped against the house's brick walls and motion-activated skeletons littered the driveway. Artificial cobwebs of torn cotton graced the eaves and were strewn across the hedges and seeming hundreds jack-o'-lanterns in glowing, golden hues dotted themselves over the dew-covered grass.
As she waited for the steady flow of costumed children to arrive at her front door, Penny lay on her bed, sorting through an array of Halloween movies as she pondered which one to choose. Slashers, thrillers, final girls. It was what defined her favourite day of the year.
She stopped flicking through the films when she landed on Scream. Of course, horror made her heart race, but the sight of Billy Loomis seductively licking blood from his fingertips, made her heartbeat jump for a completely different reason. Penny was ready to place the VHS into the player, when her mother called from downstairs. Unable to hear coherently, she trudged down the steps and into the living room.
"Is everything alright, Mum?"
The red-headed woman had been occupied arranging a bowl of what Penny hoped to be sweets for trick-or-treaters but turned out to be potpourri. She looked up at her daughter.
"Everything is fine, sweetie. I just wanted to let you know that I'm going out tonight, so you'll have the house to yourself."
It wasn't like Kate Sanders to leave the house at night - never mind Halloween night.
"Where are you going?" Penny asked curiously.
"There's a party at the Town Hall." Anticipating her daughter's sceptic reply, she answered, "Before you get excited, I'm not going to celebrate Halloween. Tom's band are going to be playing and I promised him that I'd go."
Penny fought the urge to roll her eyes. Tom was the most recent man that her mother had been dating, who she was very much not a fan of. He was boring, obnoxious and just downright annoying. His only possible redeeming grace would have been a love of Halloween, but after a brief interrogation by Penny, she found this was not the case. He was truly a non-believer. Perhaps not as bad as her mother - it was difficult to attain this level of scepticism - but he was a non-believer, nevertheless.
