“Remind me to kick myself for choosing a costume that requires so much work,” Alicia said as their group walked past the security check point into Gravewood. Unlike on Halloween, she had forgone her cheerleading uniform in favor of more casual clothes. Since it was already getting late after Jesse had his encounter with the creature, they decided to wait until the next day after school, where they met up on Misty Pine Street in their respective monster disguises.

  “At least you can put yours on yourself,” Noah grumbled. Siobhan and Alicia had once again used their expertise in makeup to transform him into a ghoul, though he also took the opportunity to wear regular clothes instead of his slasher costume.

  Jesse was suddenly very thankful his own disguise only needed fake fangs.

  Once they had arrived at Bella’s house, he rang the bell. He’d expected a speedy answer like the last time they were there, but a few minutes passed and nobody opened the door.

  Noah impatiently knocked hard on the front door, but there was still no response.

  “I’m getting déjà vu,” Jesse remarked.

  “Maybe she’s doing another magic ritual?” Alicia said.

  “Hey, ya’ll.” A friendly voice called from behind them, and they turned to find Hank waving at them from the other side of the street.

  “Thought I saw some familiar faces over here,” he said as he crossed over to them, stopping just short of the steps leading up to Bella’s porch. “And look at that, the gang’s back together.”

  “Hey, Hank,” Jesse greeted, relieved. Out of all the residents of the neighborhood, he was glad it was Hank they happened to run into. “We just needed to talk to Bella about something.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you’re going to be waiting there for a long time. She left town a little earlier this week.”

  “She what?”

  Hank shook his head. “Yeah, had some sort of family emergency and had to leave in a hurry. Said she wouldn’t be back ‘til after Thanksgiving.”

  Alicia put a hand over her heart. “Oh, that’s terrible. We had no idea.”

  “I don’t mean to pry into y'all's business, but if you needed her help with something, maybe I could substitute for her?” He held his hands up. “Now, I know I’m no witch, but I could at least lend an ear.”

  The four of them exchanged glances with each other. It wasn’t like they had many options.

  “Well, you see, there’s this thing...”

  Jesse began to describe their predicament, being extra careful with his wording; about how an unknown monster seemed to have made its home at the local middle school, how it was currently wreaking havoc, and how they were interested in taking care of the situation.

  “To help keep Gravewood a secret of course,” Siobhan jumped in when he finished. “If people notice something weird going on at the school, they might start looking all around town.”

  “That’s mighty proactive of you kids.” Hank stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, that’s a little outside of my wheelhouse. But I think I know who can help.”

  The house they stood before was ominous, and that was saying something for Gravewood. At a casual glance, the large Victorian house looked just the same as all the others in the neighborhood, but a curious shape sticking out the top drew the eye back for a closer look.

  What appeared to be the lens of an oversized telescope stuck out from a hole carved in the roof, similar to what one would see at an observatory. But the strangeness didn’t stop there, as running all along the outer walls of the house were electrical wires and metal piping, getting power from a generator almost as tall as the first floor tacked onto the side where one would expect the chimney to be.

  This was the house of Dr. Rotbart, Hank had told them when he pointed them over to the last house on Lurker Lane, one of the four main roads that made up the neighborhood. He explained that the doctor had just returned from vacation and was always willing to lend a helping hand to anyone in need.

  Despite this, Jesse and his friends found themselves hesitating just outside his door.

  “So... who wants to go first?” he asked.

  “It’s just a house,” Noah said. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

  “Then why don’t you knock?”

  “Because.” He crossed his arms. “Shut up.”

  “Hey, do you guys hear that?” Alicia suddenly said, cocking her head to the side to listen intently.

  Now that she had pointed it out, Jesse could hear something; the faint sound of metal scraping against metal.

  She went around the side of the house, not waiting to see if the others would follow. Unlike Bella’s house, Dr. Rotbart’s had no fence surrounding it, almost as if it welcomed trespassers. She stopped and knelt in front of a small rectangular window that was situated close to the ground, connected to the basement of the house.

  “It’s coming from here.” She motioned for them to join her.

  They all crowded around the tiny window, trying to get a peek inside the basement.

  “Okay, now I’m seriously getting déjà vu,” Jesse muttered.

  “I think I see someone moving around in there.” Alicia squinted. “Is that Dr. Rotbart?”

  He had just barely caught a glimpse of the figure she mentioned before he felt something firm close around the back of his neck and he was suddenly being lifted off of the ground.

  “Woah!” he yelped in surprise, desperately grasping behind himself at whatever had picked him up, only to realize that it was a hand, its calloused fingers holding tight despite his attempts to claw at it.

  “Hey!” Noah shouted, and he looked over to see him flailing as he was similarly manhandled. It was then that he got his first look at the body attached to the hand.

  The man- or something that looked almost like a man- was gigantic, maybe around eight feet tall, broad shoulders covered in a parka jacket. Despite the rest of his body seeming to be made of pure muscle, his face was gaunt, shadowed by unkempt hair that framed his sunken green eyes. A long, stitched scar cut straight through the top of his head, starting at his hair part and running all the way down to his upper lip, almost perfectly bisecting his face. Another one encircled his neck, as if his head had been reattached there after being chopped off.

  “H-Hey there, big guy,” Jesse said cautiously, giving up his struggling as soon as the man’s piercing gaze fixed on him.

  “Why are you spying on Dr. Rotbart?” His voice was low and deep, and surprisingly calm; his tone giving no indication as to what he was thinking.

  “We weren’t trying to spy, honest! Right, guys?”

  Siobhan and Alicia, who were left wide-eyed on the ground quickly nodded in support.

  “Then what were you doing?”

  “Can we please continue this conversation after you put us down?” Noah demanded. He looked like a cat being held by the scruff of its neck and Jesse would have laughed, except he was certain he looked the same.

  The man abruptly released his hold on the boys, and Jesse was able to just barely catch himself before face-planting into the grass. As they got to their feet, he looked over each one of them in turn, sizing them up. Now that he wasn’t being dangled in the air, he could see that the man’s hands also had stitches running along them. He had a feeling that hidden underneath his heavy clothing were even more stitches.

  “I’ve never seen you before.” In that statement was an accusation.

  Honesty is the best policy, Jesse thought. Well, not too honest.

  “We’re sort of new to the neighborhood. We first came here on Halloween. Hank told us Dr. Rotbart was out of town at the time.” He hoped that name dropping Hank would make them seem more trustworthy.

  “We had a problem we were hoping to get his advice on,” Siobhan spoke up.

  The man took a step back, gesturing for them to follow him. “The doctor’s door is always open to those seeking knowledge.”

  Too late to back out now, they followed the strange man into the house.

  Jesse hadn’t gotten to see much of the basement from the window, and even if he had, he’s not sure it would have prepared him for the whole thing. He couldn’t help but remember the laboratory setting from the haunted house that Ronnie and Donnie had set up, and realized that that had been a cheap imitation of the lab he now stood in.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  It was clear that the room had once been decorated in a way that matched the antique design of the exterior and upper floors, but most of the furniture had since been shoved against the walls and/or buried under various gadgets, tools, and other odds and ends from mechanical projects. In contrast, dozens of shiny inventions (that Jesse could only describe as doodads and thingamajigs) lined the shelves and tables throughout the room, clearly well taken care of.

  As the strange man led them into the lab, Jesse was careful not to step on one of the books or papers that were haphazardly strewn around. It was too dimly lit to properly read them, but many looked like half-finished schematics for even more inventions.

  “Adam,” a voice came from the other end of the room, whoever it was obscured by a row of bookshelves. “I need you to get me another pen from upstairs, I broke the one I was using again. Adam? Where did you go?”

  “Here, Doctor,” the man, Adam, called back. “We have visitors.”

  “Wha- oh!”

  Doctor Rotbart looked to be around forty, with unkempt blond hair, and skin so pale it almost matched his white lab coat. What struck Jesse the most, though, was how human he looked, in a neighborhood full of monsters. The only odd thing about him was his right arm, which was replaced with a mechanical one that looked clunkier than any he had ever seen before. It looked more like a prop from an old sci-fi movie rather than a real prosthetic someone would use today.

  “Guests!” He pulled up the pair of goggles he was wearing, revealing a pair of green eyes that looked more youthful than the crow's feet around them would suggest. “Can I get you anything to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

  The stark difference in hospitality between him and Adam nearly gave Jesse whiplash. “Uh, that’s okay. We’re good.”

  “Pity.” The doctor spoke with a thick accent that took him a while to place as German. “Now that I’ve said it, I’ve made myself thirsty.”

  He started fiddling with one of the weird looking contraptions nearby that turned out to be an espresso machine. It shuddered and let out a ding as he poured himself a cup of coffee into a spare mug.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you four around the neighborhood,” he remarked, taking a sip. “Are you new here?”

  “Not exactly,” Jesse admitted. “We just visit from time to time. My name’s Jesse.”

  “Siobhan,” she introduced next.

  “Alicia.”

  There was a pause. After Alicia elbowed him in the side, Noah begrudgingly said, “Noah.”

  “Well met. I’m Doctor Friedrich Rotbart, and of course you’ve already met my assistant, Adam.” He gestured to the giant man who Jesse had almost forgotten was still in the room with them, he had grown so silent. “Now what brings you all to my lab?”

  “We have a bit of a problem,” Jesse started when nobody else spoke up. Since when did he become the leader of their group? “We originally wanted to ask Bella-”

  “Bella!” Dr. Rotbart’s eyes lit up. “Wonderful girl, that one. Very clever. If only she would devote herself to a real science like engineering or chemistry instead of that hokey-pokey witchcraft nonsense. She could do great things. Sorry, what were we talking about?”

  “Doctor,” Adam said in a tone that made it sound like he was used to having to keep Rotbart on track.

  “Right, sorry. I know I have a tendency to ramble. Feel free to tell me off if I interrupt again.”

  “We were hoping that you might be able to help us,” Jesse continued. “There’s this... thing that made itself a home in the local middle school. Can you tell us what it is? And how to get rid of it?” He showed him the video on his phone.

  The doctor adjusted the goggles on his head, a wicked glint in his eyes. “Aha, looks like you have an impfestation on your hands.”

  Noah scowled. “A what?”

  “An imp,” he emphasized, setting his coffee down. “Impfestation, imp. I thought it was pretty good. Never mind. That creature there is an imp. They’re nasty little buggers, causing mischief and property damage everywhere they go. You’re right to come to me; left to their own devices, even a single imp can wreck catastrophic mayhem. Now where to start? They have a- Actually, it might be easier to just show you. Adam, the screen please?”

  Adam reached up to pull down a rolled up screen over one of the walls, like the ones used in classrooms, while Dr. Rotbart fiddled with a projector and a set of slides.

  “If I could just-” he hit the projector with his metal fist and it whirred to life. “There we go.”

  A hand drawn illustration of a bat-like creature identical to the one Jesse encountered filled the screen. A date in the corner marked the drawing as originating from the twelfth century and showed the creature attacking a medieval peasant.

  “Parvus malemonstrum,” Dr. Rotbart announced in a professorly voice. “More commonly known as imps, are small flying creatures who tend to make their nests in dark, out of the way places. They resemble many ordinary bat species but exhibit a level of intelligence that places them in a family all their own. And by intelligence, I mean like that of a toddler; high enough for basic reasoning, but low enough to only use that reasoning for pulling pranks and making a general nuisance of themselves. They are highly territorial and love shiny objects, much like crows. From your video, it looks like the specimen you are dealing with is a queen.”

  With a click, he changed the slide to one that showed two anatomical diagrams next to each other, labelled worker and queen. While they looked almost identical, the queen was bigger and had horns where the worker did not.

  “Queen imps, similar to bees, are unique individuals that possess the ability to control the workers of their species through a special frequency they can emit from their horns. That frequency also has a side effect of interfering with other animals that use echolocation, namely bats, giving the queen the same control over them as she would have over her own kind. And since bats are far more common than imps out in the wild, many queens will choose to form their colonies with them instead.”

  “So, the bats we saw,” Alicia started slowly. “They were being mind-controlled by the queen?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  Jesse’s heart began to race as all of the implications dawned on him. “Hypothetically speaking, if we were to separate a bat from the queen’s colony, would she still have control over it?”

  “That depends on how far the queen is. If you took the bat more than about a kilometer away, then her power would have no effect and the bat would return to normal.”

  “And in American, that is...?” Noah prompted.

  “Less than a mile,” Adam translated.

  Doing some quick mental calculations on how far away his mother’s clinic was from the school and determining that it was safely out of range, Jesse tried not to let the relief show on his face. “Okay, that’s good to know.”

  “There’s a couple of other things about imps that make them such a pain to deal with,” Dr. Rotbart went on. “For starters, they’re incredibly quick and agile, making most traditional methods of capture useless. But the real challenge is their ability to turn invisible when threatened.”

  He switched the slide again, this time showing a black and white photograph of an imp half visible as it flew through the air.

  “They possess a special power to manipulate the veil, the one that separates the natural and supernatural worlds, mainly to hide themselves away. When in this state, they are shrouded so thoroughly, that they cannot be seen by anyone; supernatural being or no. Even a werewolf wouldn’t be able to locate them with their keen senses.”

  That explained how it had disappeared from the kitchen so quickly.

  “Then what do we do?” Siobhan asked.

  “Fear not, for there is a way to combat this. Through my research, I’ve discovered that Halloween’s light can reveal their true form, no matter how much they try to hide themselves.”

  “Halloween’s light?” Jesse frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like; light that possesses the essence of Halloween.” The doctor started ticking off examples. “Moonlight captured from the night of the holiday, a flame taken from a Samhain bonfire, that sort of thing.”

  Jesse didn’t know what a Sow-wen was, but an idea struck him. “What about a jack-o-lantern?”

  He snapped his robotic fingers. “Yes, exactly! All jack-o-lanterns are imbued with the spirit of Halloween, meaning it would work no matter when it was carved.” He crossed the lab and picked up a metal box-like contraption that had just begun to collect dust. “How fortuitous. I just so happened to have invented an imp-catching device not too long ago, but haven’t yet had the opportunity to try it out on the real thing. You four can borrow the trap and bring the queen back to me so I can observe it’s efficiency.”

  Alicia cleared her throat. “Uh, anyone else a little worried about using a potentially dangerous machine on a live animal? Imp or no, that’s kind of messed up.”

  Rotbart looked offended. “Pardon me, fraulein, but I’ll have you know I always test my inventions out on myself before I ever recommend them for use on others, and this device is no exception!”

  “You tested an imp trap on yourself?” Jesse looked down at the trap, which was about the size of a shoebox, trying to imagine how the doctor could possibly get himself trapped in it.

  “That was a fun week,” Adam remembered.

  “Regardless, it will take some time to make the final adjustments to the machine. I’ll have to recalibrate its settings to only target creatures of a certain size, and make sure it has all the power it needs for your mission. In the meantime, I recommend you carve that jack-o-lantern of yours if you want to be able to see the imp queen you’re chasing. Before sundown is the prime time to catch her.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jesse told him. “We already have the perfect lantern in mind.”

  “I knew we would find him back here.”

  Just as Jesse had predicted, Bella had returned Brom to the pumpkin patch before she had left Gravewood, probably so he couldn’t do any damage to her house while she was away. They found the jack-o-lantern in the far corner of the field, where he wouldn’t be able to cause any trouble.

  Brom tutted as they approached. “Well, if it isn’t the three musketeers, back together.”

  “There’s four of us,” Noah pointed out.

  “Don’t they teach you anything at that school of yours?” he huffed. “In the classic French novel by Alexandre Dumas-”

  “We need your help,” Jesse said, effectively cutting off whatever tirade Brom was about to launch into.

  “Of course, you only ever come by when you need something. You never stop just to visit.”

  Siobhan raised an eyebrow. “Do you want us to visit you?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” he mumbled.

  “There’s an imp nesting in our school,” Jesse got them back on track as he explained their situation, keeping it brief as he showed him the video on his phone.

  “That was a nice story,” Brom said, once he had finished laughing at the part where Jesse had fallen on his butt. “But you forgot to include why I should care.”

  “Forget this,” Alicia said impatiently. “Let’s just carve our own jack-o-lantern.”

  Brom snorted. “Sure, if you want terrible light coverage. You think just any old pumpkin can get a glow this good? Not to mention stability. Those other jack-o-lanterns would snuff out with the slightest breeze. Not me, though. You could dunk me under water and I’d still be burning bright.”

  “Care to test that claim?” Noah said.

  “Just try it.”

  “Guys, cool it,” Jesse said, getting in between their glaring match. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Brom was right. A regular flimsy candle flame would never endure the amount of running around and chasing that they were inevitably going to have to face while trying to capture the imp queen. Plus, he knew from experience that Brom was much more durable than the average pumpkin, if his being tossed around and punted was anything to go by. He was, unfortunately, their best option. “What can we do to convince you to help?”

  He could have sworn that the jack-o-lantern's eyes had a wicked glint to them as he hummed. “Hmmm, what can you do for me? How about you all owe me a favor.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I didn't mean right now. I meant a favor that I can cash in whenever I want in the future.”

  “What would you even want that for?” Siobhan asked. “You’re a jack-o-lantern, you barely even leave the pumpkin field.”

  “Probably just something mundane like taking him to see Bella,” Noah said dismissively.

  “If that’s the case, then you don’t have to worry about agreeing to my demand, now do you?”

  Jesse sighed deeply. “You better not make me regret this.”

  “I won’t.” A beat. “Probably.”

  “Alright, fine. You’ve got a deal.”