“THE SMALL ASSASSIN” a Terrifying Story by RAY BRADBURY | #MidnightInTheMacabre

Just over a week ago, Terry McKinnon caught up with Harriet Hartman in a motel room and put bullets into her chest, and she barely flinched; she had him by the throat before she tossed him aside and told him to go home. Now he's driving into Eastgate with a gun in his pocket and a wooden stake he made himself, because that seaside town full of boarded-up houses is the only one around where she's never killed anyone.

On Halloween night in Grove City, Ohio, Lucy Buxton's dad drives her and Shawn Dyer to Gantz Park with two flashlights and a thirty-minute limit, so they can look for the Blood Bats, which legend says come out only on this one night of the year and trace back to Archibald Rhysand, a Union soldier who was rumored to eat bats on the battlefield. Two teenage boys got to the park first that night, with a pair of pumpkins and a handful of firecrackers, and their car is still sitting in the lot.

Eric Sherman finally has a farmhouse with no HOA, no neighbors complaining about his Halloween displays, and plenty of room for his props, until a loose floorboard at the foot of the attic stairs gives up a locked black trunk marked in Hebrew, with a grinning jester marionette inside.

In 2014, Ohio killed Dennis McGuire with a drug pair no one in the country had used in an execution, Oklahoma laid a sheet over Clayton Lockett's needle while the drugs went into his tissue, and Arizona gave Joseph Wood fifteen doses as a reporter counted about 640 gasps. Then come 23 more lethal injections from 1985 to 2010, among them Joseph Cannon, whose needle came out of his arm in Texas, and Bennie Demps, who said in Florida, "They butchered me back there."

Mary Mallon insisted she had never had typhoid in her life, and in March 1907, when a health department doctor brought police and an ambulance to the Park Avenue house where she cooked, Mary met them at the door with a long kitchen fork.