Four friends, Daniel, Joseph, Kian and Ethan, decided that for Halloween they would go to the forest near their houses. They had been through it a thousand times during the day, and knew the way around it off by heart, so they couldn't get lost.

They sat round a campfire in their costumes. Joseph was wearing a clown costume, fake blood dripping from his eyes. Ethan was the Grim Reaper, axe sharp like a sword. Daniel was a zombie, and Kian was an alien.

It was a strange sight.

They started telling ghost stories, each one loving the fear. They had to come up with one to do with who they were dressed up as, and the person who got people the most scared, who got the most screams, would be the one to lead them all through the forest.

They decided to do this in teams, Ethan and Kian, Daniel and Joseph. Ethan started it off, but didn't get very many screams. Joseph didn't either. Kian didn't get them screaming, but you could tell they were all biting them back. While Ethan was congratulating him, Daniel started to talk to Joseph.

"I've got a great idea. When I say, 'to this day, people still run screaming from the undead every day...', you jump behind them from the forest and scream. Got it?"

"OK. What are you going to tell them I'm doing?"

Daniel shoed him away. "Don't worry about it, Joe!" Daniel watched his friend go, brown eyes wide with thought, then turned to the other two. "He's going to get something from the forest to make it scarier. It won't work, so I'll just say I forgot and get on with it."

Daniel began to tell them a tale of one man who got buried alive by his own brother. He screamed and screamed but no one would let him out. By the next full moon, he was dead, but still rose up from his grave and stalked the town at night.

"They say he roamed the streets, smashing through the windows of every house, trying to find the brothers of every child in the city, destroying them, feasting on them until only the bones were left, and then throwing them to the dogs. You couldn't hear yourself think over the screams."

You could tell by the faces that they were scared, mainly because they were brothers.

"To this day-"

Daniel was cut short, because screams were coming from the forest, but deep inside it, and it was too early for Joseph to become part of the story. The boy thought only one thing. "We've got to see if that's Joe!" Daniel marched into the forest.

"Are you kidding me?" Kian, selfish as always, asked. Person-Who-Likes-To-Complain was his middle name.

"We could die in there!" Ethan tagged on after him like always.

Daniel sighed. "If you were in there fighting against, I don't know, a wolf or something, would you want help? If not, remind me to introduce you to the wolves' enclosure at the zoo sometime."

He disappeared into the trees, the darkness, where anything can hide. The other two had no choice but to follow him, because he had forgotten the torch.

***

The forest was mostly silent, but the occasional twig snapping made them jump out of their skin. They didn't know what they were looking for, or indeed where they were in this childhood adventure turned into a world of tricks and traps. Wherever Joe was, they would be very glad to see him, because he had taken the other torch.

They found the torch. It lay on the floor, dripping blood from the glass, clearly broken, but clearly theirs. Daniel gulped. He got them into it, and there wasn't much he could do to get them out of this nightmare.

They only wished it really was a nightmare.

The more they ventured deep into the trees, the more lost they became. They had no idea where they were, but for years they had explored the whole forest every day for years. It seemed to become darker than when they entered. They were all sure it was past midnight.

The new moon seemed to glow like a silver diamond ring. More like a creepy eye watching us, Daniel thought. The stars looked down on them, dancing to music Daniel was hearing in his head from a horror film. The sky was black like the eyes of the creature that haunts your nights and stalks your dreams. The trees' shadows loomed over them, taking shape of different beasts from your nightmares that had a habit of jumping out to ATTACK!

Suddenly, Daniel heard rustling above them. They looked up to see something dark, shaped like a person, coming towards them in a kind of semi circle. Is it... Daniel couldn't believe his eyes. A clown was hanging from the lowest branch, eyes wide as his smile, real blood pouring from them, arms dangling down, almost reaching to the floor.

Joe!

The rustling started again, above them once more, though they couldn't see where. Without warning, another shape began to come down on them. It was definitely another person, but it was disformed, and had something gleaming in its hand.

Before they knew it, the knife was at their throats.

Oh, so that's what it-

******

Jason looked over the fence of his garden, looking out over the forest where his brother had gone missing two years ago. He was as old as Daniel had been when he disappeared into thin air that night, and it was Halloween tomorrow. It just brought back memories good and bad: his brother playing with him when he was younger, helping him with his homework, his brother breaking his leg, and his dad coming back and telling them that they were all gone.

He looked at the war zone one last time, then went back into the house, slamming the door behind him. He went into his bedroom, shut the door, then burst into tears. His brother was gone forever.

Jason turned the picture of him and Daniel together to face the wall. That seemed to wipe his memory. In time, somehow, he would forget everything that happened with his brother. He wouldn't even remember that Daniel had ever existed.

******

Jason sat with his friends in his house. There were so many of them he could barely remember their names sometimes. By this time, he was two years older than Daniel had been when he disappeared, which was 12, but Jason had forgotten already.

It was Halloween. All ten of them sat in a circle round the coffee table on the floor, the lights darkened, torch in Jason's hand, telling ghost stories. Some made them scream, well the girls anyway, but it didn't matter. Jason's parents were 'out'.

Then they, I mean Jason, decided to play truth or dare. "But I don't want to play that. My mother says it's bad to play it and I'm not allowed," Alex said.

Jason sat up, cold green eyes flashing. "Oh, wouldn't that be a shame, if dear little mother found out. But, if you knew how to hold your tongue like any normal teenager, then she wouldn't would she?"

"You shouldn't be so mean all the time." Alex wanted to bite back the words as soon as he said them. Jason had only invited Alex because his mum made him, and Alex needed to learn how to live in this messed up world. He wasn't that good at it at the moment.

Jason began to walk over to Alex, standing tall like a giant over the midget. "I'm mean? Is that what Mother would think?" Jason said this in a mock posh accent, like Alex's. "Mummy isn't here darling. Now, it's getting very late for someone who acts like a four year old. Go home to bed, or keep having fun with your... Friends."

Alex nodded. "I'll do it, but can I stay out of daring people?"

Jason looked even angrier. "No. In fact, we're daring all of you to find us in the forest. We'll hide, then you find us when one of us screams and lets you know we're done. We'll be around the same place. Come on, Alex."

He forced Alex up by his collar and dragged him out of the room, almost suffocating him in the process. Their friends watched them off, stunned, confused, and it wasn't long before they heard screams coming from the forest. It was time.

***

Eight people looked through the whole of the forest, but not one of them could find James or Alex. One of them at the back, Lauren, tripped over something on the ground, but she couldn't see it. Someone flashed a torch in her direction, and she screamed.

Alex's head was lying on the ground.

Something came up behind Lauren and placed a hand over her mouth. A green hand. It grabbed her throat and cut off her windpipe. She couldn't breathe. Lauren fell limp in its arms. The green thing carried her, dragging her along the floor as it made its way up the side of the messed up line of people, revealing itself to everyone.

A person in an alien costume.

One of the people in the line tore off the alien costume's head, but that was a huge mistake. Underneath was a head beyond description, so terrible it made people faint. It was sickly green and rotting, skin flaking off, eyes nowhere to be seen. Alien was the perfect way to describe it, because he couldn't really be in this world.

In return, he/it 'glared' at them and disappeared into the darkness.

***

All seven people were running like lightning through the forest, trying their hardest to find a way out. But before long, they had returned to the same clearing where the alien arrived, where Alex's head lay, where Lauren lost her life.

This time, no aliens snuck up on them and suffocated them from behind. No heads lay on the floor, staring up at the sky as if something else was there.

Something was coming out of the shadows, however. It was walking as if it had a broken leg, limping over sticks and logs like they were ten times bigger. It stumbled into the clearing, abs someone flashed a torch in its direction.

Everyone's jaw dropped.

It was a person dressed in the zombie costume from ASDA, but he looked dead as well. His skin was a rotting yellow, his eyes white, the pupil rolled back into his head, his arms covered in grotesque scars and bruises that you couldn't draw in lipstick.

When his arm fell from his shoulders and onto the ground, you couldn't hear yourself think over the screams.

He grabbed one of the boys, brother of many, and bit his neck, a chunk oozing blood in its mouth. The boy slumped to the ground, lifeless. But after barely anytime watching him lie on the ground, red spilling from the wound, he got up and started walking again, still limping.

The boy grabbed his friends, with the help of his new one, and dragged them to somewhere new.

After what seemed like days of struggling and being pulled into trees on purpose, they finally made it to their unwanted destination: ...the same clearing...that they had...walked away from...in a straight line.

But a new evil haunted this part of the forest. A circle of Halloween costumes ringed them. Some were centuries old, it seemed, some decades, some years. The thing that caught their eyes the most though, were the people without them, battered and bruised, familiar to their hearts.

Lauren stood beside her attacker, pale and lifeless, stumbling around like she was drunk. The alien at her side was rotting as always, no surprise. The two zombies joined the circle, alike in many ways now, almost the same outfits, to be fairly honest. Then, hauntingly, Alex stood, beside a Grim Reaper and a shadow. The Grim Reaper had taken Alex's head as his own. The shadow remained a mystery.

One boy went up to the Grim Reaper and shook him, yelling to him again and again: "What did you do to my friend?" It turned out, nothing. The head fell into the empty costume. The boy was lost for words.

The shadow laughed. Then ran. They ran after him. The creatures followed.

They ran into unknown trees, and were about to run further when another shadow came flying towards them. It seemed to come in sort of a semi circle, round the branch of a nearby tree.

It reached out two hands towards them, but never touched them. A clown hung from that branch, swinging, brushing the ground with his gloved hands. His face was stretched in to a painfully wide tragic frown, like a cartoon mime. His eyes were closed, blood pouring from beneath the lids. Those who looked close enough could see that they had dried up over years.

But what shocked them the most, is that when the looked back to the creatures, then closer at the clown, they realised that they were only 12.

Another shadow came racing towards them. The first shadow. This time, it was coming down from high up in the trees above their heads. One of them, a girl, tried to run, but the oldest looking costume threw her back to where she was. Something gleamed in the shadows hand. As it came closer, its green eyes flashed and they knew it was too late to ask him to stop.

Jason would not have listened to them even if they had.