Thursday, Oct. 30, 1997 | 9:38 a.m.
Our readers fancied themselves quite the cross between Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe, unfurling their fiendish imaginations to finish up "A Night in Purgatory," our Halloween tale of murder, mystery and mayhem.
While not everyone could be chosen the spookiest scribe, we couldn't resist paying homage to some of the most clever alternatives.
At midnight, the doors snap shut, as the fireworks display ignites inside the ballroom, killing everyone -- except for Chuck, who awakens in Sunrise Hospital. Reiter ends the story: "On the news later that evening: Sources of the Purgatory fire are still unknown, and investigators are waiting to question the lone survivor of this eerie Halloween mystery."
In a nightmarish sequence, Buck finds himself dodging the ball of a giant roulette wheel, being chased by a buzzsaw and finally being drowned in a flood of water. Spendlove ends her tale with Buck coming back to the ballroom, a moment before he is about to give his speech, the whole thing apparently a dream -- except for the fact that he is still dripping wet.
As she ends her parable on the evil of hubris, Buck steps up to the microphone, his lesson learned: "Nothing seemed to have changed from earlier in the evening. Nothing except himself. 'Welcome friends,' Buck humbly said."
As the guests of the imploded hotel surface in the tunnel and begin "shedding their flesh" and turning into skeletons, the horrified Chuck escapes, diving off the dam into the water. He eventually awakens to find himself without an alibi for his whereabouts and being blamed by police for the explosion of the hotel, set up as a scapegoat by the Flowingly trio.
Remember: Keep your evil musings limited to the pages of fiction ... and have a Happy Halloween.
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