The gate creaked as a man forced it to open, shredding off layers of rust as he did so. He walked nervously up what had once been a stone path but was now broken rocks and tangles of ivy, as he tried to look at anything except where he was going. All too soon, he was standing in front of a large, formidable door. No less imposing, the thin, surrounding windows were broken and the stoop had weathered into nothingness. A sign was hanging off the door that read “Madam Goose’s Home for Children.”
He didn’t even consider using the ancient doorbell that somehow was still attached to the side of the mansion, but lifted the big iron knocker and let it pound against the door, the sound reverberating in the eerily calm atmosphere. The door groaned mournfully and swung open, allowing the man to see into the dark hall which was lit only by the pale moonlight. His chin quivered slightly as he walked inside. As soon as he was in, the door slammed shut, causing some bats to take flight.
As the man beat off the bats, he could see a flicker of light coming toward him. He straightened as he saw that it was an old woman carrying a candle. She was tall and thin, wearing an old, faded dress that was as depressing as the house she inhabited. She looked worn and tired, yet there was a stateliness about her features and her hair, which was pulled up under a small hat with a goose feather perched on top.
“I’m glad you came, sir,” she said kindly to the man.
“Yes, Madam Goose. You said you wanted to see me?”
Madam Goose smiled. “The children are so hungry. We have not had good food in so long, and I was wondering if you could assist them.”
The man bit his lip nervously. “What do you want me to do?”
Madam Goose looked surprised. “Why, make muffins of course! You are the legendary Muffin Man, are you not? The children haven’t had a treat in so long; I was hoping you could make them something extra nice, as it is Halloween and all.”
Muffin Man laughed, relieved. “Oh, of course. Well, that will be easy enough. How many muffins were you thinking? I can go back tonight and have them for you by tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Madam Goose disappointedly. “I was rather hoping you could make them here. We have the supplies and we so rarely have guests here. It’s quite nice to see a new face about the house.”
“Right,” Muffin Man gulped. He glanced around the wretched mansion with its torn drapes, cracked mirrors, and dust that made white objects look black. “Where are the children then? I didn’t even realize there was anybody left…”
“Oh, there are always children here,” Madam Goose said mysteriously. She led the way down the hall to a sitting room with a piano and a couple high-backed chairs, lighting a few lamps as she went.
“Children, come out,” she called. “Muffin Man has kindly agreed to help us.”
A young boy’s face peered out from behind the piano. He was pudgy and dull looking and he eyed Muffin Man suspiciously.
“Whatever were you doing behind the piano?” Madam Goose asked him.
“Peter wanted to play so I was hiding from him,” they boy said sourly.
“Muffin Man, this is Georgie. He’s a shy fellow, all right. Oh, and look now, here come the rest.”
Muffin Man turned around to see four more children, one boy and three girls, enter the room. Madam Goose introduced them one by one. “This is Bo,” she said of a small, sniveling girl in a gray frock with bloodshot eyes and dripping nose. “She lost her sheep,” she whispered to him, clucking sadly.
A nice girl with pretty blue eyes and curly blond hair gave Muffin Man a curtsy. “How do you do?” she asked, flashing a winning smile. “This is Muffet,” Madam Goose told him. Then an older boy with a sneaky look about him sneered as he passed Muffin Man.
“Peter,” Muffin Man guessed. Madam Goose nodded. Finally, the last child walked forward, a wisp of a girl whose eyes were pure white, her blond hair straggly and thin. She had a halting, zigzagging, sort of walk and didn’t even seem to know where she was going.
“That is Mary,” Madam Goose said sadly. “She’s a strange child, but she won’t harm you any.”
Muffin Man didn’t like this motley assortment of children, especially Mary. He just wanted to make the muffins and be done with it. “Where are the supplies?” he started to ask, but he was cut off by Mary.
“Missing. MISSING!” she screeched.
“What is?” Madam Goose asked wearily.
“She knows,” Mary said, pointing to Bo. “She always knows. Always, always, she loses them. Now she takes mine.” Her finger shook as she stared directly at Bo, malice covering her face.
“If you’re talking about your lamb,” Bo cried angrily, “I don’t know a thing about it. I wouldn’t take it!”
“Lies,” Mary breathed. “Always lying. I know what you did. And you must give her back now. Otherwise, this place and everyone in it will be cursed.” She sank down onto the dirty floor and wept as she raised her hands above her head and started swaying to some music, unknown to any but herself.
Madam Goose led Muffin Man away. “The lamb has been missing for years,” she informed him. “Mary is usually very quiet, but sometimes she has one of these spells…Anyway, follow me. I will lead you to the kitchen.”
Muffin Man took out a handkerchief and wiped his sweaty brow before stowing it safely away. He wondered if Mary’s pronouncement was a fairly common thing in this house; they had all taken their cursing fairly well. Madam Goose led him to a room that was somewhat better kept than the rest and lit two lamps. She showed him the cupboards with their few paltry supplies and left him to do his work. Once she was gone, Muffin Man breathed easier. This place was just wrong, and he didn’t want to have to stay a moment longer than necessary.
He tried to hum to himself a little as he measured the flour and poured the sugar. Soon, he found he had almost forgotten where he was as he concentrated only on making his world-famous lemon muffins. Then he felt somebody enter the room. He hadn’t heard anyone, nor seen, nor smelled, but he knew somebody was there. He turned around and jumped to see Mary right in front of him.
“What do you want, little one? The muffins shan’t be done for an hour yet.”
Mary looked at him, her eyes rolling in their sockets. “The curse has begun,” she said, before stalking out of the kitchen. Muffin Man stared at her retreating back for a few seconds before following her. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to get out of the house, but she seemed to know where she was going. Sure enough, she led him back to the sitting room. Madam Goose and the other children were sitting there, unmoving, not making a sound. When he entered, Madam Goose looked up.
“Are the muffins done already?” she asked.
“No…Mary said the curse had begun and I was concerned and I just thought…I mean…there isn’t any chance she’s right, is there?” he pleaded. He watched nervously as Mary sat in a corner and started a low chant.
“Nothing has ever happened before,” Madam Goose assured him. Muffin Man still wasn’t very convinced, and he looked down at his shoes as he tried to think of an excuse for leaving right then and there. Then, all the lamps suddenly went out. Mary screamed.
“I told you!” she shrieked. The other children came over and huddled next to Madam Goose, somehow finding their way in the dark. As Muffin Man’s heart beat faster and faster, the lamps suddenly all flickered back on. He looked around to make sure everyone was okay, and nearly fainted. A giant spider was advancing toward them, its pincers clicking menacingly.
“No!” Muffet screamed, burying her face in Madam Goose. “Go away. You’re only a dream!”
“No,” Mary intoned. “It’s a nightmare. Your worst nightmare.” She wailed and then chanted, “Nightmares, come to life. Dig deeper your knife. Dreams of horror and death, take away their breath!”
“Mary, stop!” Madam Goose cried, but Mary kept chanting. The spider came nearer and seemed to be eyeing its potential victims. Muffin Man ran for it. He sped down the hall and pulled on the doorknob, only to find the door was locked, though he could see no place to unlock it. He ran back to the sitting room to find everyone running, but Mary. She was still chanting and wailing, starting out low but getting higher and higher. He considered trying to forcibly stop her, but the spider almost seemed to be guarding her. He looked for any sign of Muffet and then saw a little heap curled up on the floor, completely still.

Muffin Man realized he would have to go through one of the windows to escape, and then realize that he could never with a good conscience leave Madam Goose and the rest of the children in the mansion with that spider. He decided to look upstairs and see if any of the children had hidden there. He crept up the once grand staircase, wishing it didn’t creak so much, and found himself in another hall with multiple rooms.

“Children,” he called softly. “Is anyone up here?” He heard a squeal emit from a nearby room and opened the door. “Hello?” There was no reply, but he walked in anyway, just to make sure. What he saw startled him. Georgie was surrounded by many little girls, all the little girls he had ever made cry, but they were vicious with long fangs and fire in their eyes. They were beating him and taunting him, calling him fat and ugly.

“Please! I’m sorry! I’ll never tease you again or- or force you to kiss me!” Georgie cried as another girl slapped him across the face. Muffin Man shoved through the demon children and lifted Georgie.

“I’ve got you,” he said. He took Georgie outside the room and shut the door, but the little girls quickly followed. Muffin Man tried to run down to the first floor, but found the spider was trying to figure out how to get up the stairs, so instead he ran to another room, one with a window.

“Look, I’m going to make a rope and then you can go down the rope and get out of here. Go into the town and wait in the park. I have to help everyone else get out.”

Georgie stared as if he hadn’t understood a word, and then looked back at the door. Muffin Man quickly made a rope out of old socks he had found and tried to lower Georgie down with it, but Georgie refused to move.

“Fine. Just, stay here then, okay? I’ll be back with the others. Push the bed in front of the door when I leave and don’t let anybody in until you hear my voice.” Muffin Man then left the room in search of the others. He hoped they were all in their bedrooms, as Georgie had apparently been.

His hope was seemingly fulfilled when he heard the sounds of a scuffle from a bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. Praying it wasn’t anything as dangerous as the spider, Muffin Man opened the door to find Peter cornered by a strange man and a large canning jar. The man looked like a typical farmer, not anything particularly dangerous, and though Muffin Man had never seen a human sized canning jar before, he couldn’t see anything scary about the situation.

“Is everything okay in here, Peter?” he asked. Peter looked at the door in surprise.

“Have you come to save me? Please save me! I don’t want to be a pickle!” he bawled.

“He’s going to turn you into a pickle?” Muffin Man asked, confused.

“Yes! I stole and pickled all his peppers and now he’s going to pickle me!”

The farmer turned around and grinned at Muffin Man. His face was ghastly; his lips were stained blood red, his eyes were yellow like a cat’s, and maggots were crawling out of his ears. He held up a knife that he was apparently planning to use to chop up Peter.

“Nice, juicy, human pickles,” he said, salivating.

Muffin Man looked around and spotted a brick that had fallen out of the wall. He picked it up and bashed the farmer over the head with it, but he was too late and the farmer had already cut Peter open.

“It’s done,” Peter whispered, as he held his hand over his bleeding heart. Muffin Man brushed a piece of hair out of Peter’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Then Peter was gone, and with a heavy heart Muffin Man resolved to save Bo and Madam Goose if it was the last thing he did.

After he left Peter’s room, he checked all the other rooms in the hall and found nobody, so he decided to check if the stairway was clear. It was, so he crept down the stairs and walked toward the sitting room. He peeked around the corner and saw the spider was disappearing into thin air as Mary waved her hands over it. Muffin Man felt a powerful wave of hatred toward that little girl; two people had died so far because of her and she had complete control over it. Mary seemed to realize she was being watched because she looked up suddenly at Muffin Man, her blank eyes still swirling.

“Muffin Man,” she said sweetly, “don’t get involved in things you don’t understand. I control all, I see all, and if you come a step closer the spider will come back before you can grab the poker.”

Muffin Man gasped. Grabbing the poker by the fireplace had indeed been his plan, but he hadn’t even moved a muscle yet. Weighing his chances, he decided it was best that he just try to save the other two and hope that Georgie had listened to his instructions rather than to try and take on this devil.

He ran through the mansion and got himself completely lost as he tried to find Bo and Madam Goose, as he had no idea where they might be. It didn’t help that he had no light except for whatever moonlight could get through the windows, and the rooms were often filled with strange items, like bones, chains, and rats. One room was home to a large, taxidermied crocodile. After escaping from one room which seemed to be entirely spider webs, Muffin Man realized he was in a large indoor courtyard. He briefly wondered what kind of children’s home had the money for such a thing, and then he started checking for Bo.

“Bo!” he called in a hoarse whisper. “Are you in here? I can help you!” Nobody answered, but Muffin Man could feel that he wasn’t alone. “It’s Muffin Man. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

Still nobody answered, so Muffin Man picked a direction and then walked the whole courtyard in an orderly fashion. When he got to the last corner, he puked. Bo’s head was on a stake, her mangled body nearby, and a group of sheep with a gun and a knife were leaving the scene. Muffin Man grabbed one of the sheep and pulled it around to face him.

“Why would you kill her like that? Why would you kill her at all, you sick, demented animal?” he shrieked.

“Funny how humans have a problem with us killing a human, but they’re perfectly fine killing us and chopping off our heads. At least we didn’t eat the girl,” the sheep said snootily.

“Yeah, she shouldn’t have left us outside to be found by the farmer she stole us from anyway,” another sheep said.

Muffin Man let go of the sheep in shock; he hadn’t actually expected them to reply to his questions, though compared to everything else he had seen that night it really shouldn’t have seemed shocking. He ran out of the courtyard as quickly as he could and found that he was in front of the stairs to the kitchen.

“Maybe,” he said to himself,” this is all a joke. I bet Madam Goose is downstairs waiting to laugh at how scared I’ve been. I’ll just go down there, grab my coat and be on my way and this will be a fun story to tell the grandkids.”

With these words of comfort, he went down to the kitchen and was pleased to see that Madam Goose was standing there. Then he realized she was looking intensely uncomfortable and that she was somehow becoming shorter and fatter at the same time. She looked sadly at Muffin Man and looked away, ashamed, and Muffin Man realized that she was turning into a goose.

He looked around instinctively, because he had learned by now that everyone’s nightmares were deadly, and turning into a goose did not seem like a cause of death to him. His fears were justified and with a yell he jumped in front of Madam Goose as a butcher stepped out from behind the door, his knife ready to make clean work of Madam Goose.

The butcher made some angry gestures for Muffin Man to get out of the way, but he refused, figuring that he might as well make his last stand against these creatures from the night. The butcher didn’t want to give him a choice though, and with one massive hand launched Muffin Man into the back wall, where he slid down and blacked out.

Muffin Man groaned when he came to and felt tears come to his eyes when he smelled the roast goose that could only be Madam Goose. Painfully standing up, he knew that he was too late, that he had failed everyone. He then remembered Georgie. Maybe he hadn’t failed everyone quite yet.

Once he was out of the kitchen, Muffin Man found it fairly easy to get back to the sitting room from which he could get to Georgie’s room. He was startled, though, to realize that all was quiet in the sitting room, and that Mary was no longer chanting or wailing. He walked in and found her setting up a noose and a chair.

“What are you doing?” he asked softly.

“It is the end,” she said. “We all face our fears, and we all die. I have lived my fear of being alone all my life, but I will be alone no longer.” With glee on her face, she put the rope around her neck and kicked away the chair. Muffin Man deliberated on the ethics of letting this…thing…die, and then grabbed her. She spit in his face and raked him with her long, extremely sharp nails, causing him to let go. Then she kicked him in the gut, and with her dying breath called up a ring of fire to protect her from him.

Muffin Man left the scene, his mind scarred forever, and went to Georgie’s room. He knocked on the door.

“Georgie, I’m sorry, but it’s just you and me. You can open the door and we’ll escape though. Please.” Muffin Man wasn’t sure just why he had added in that “please,” but it somehow described his current feelings perfectly.

The door didn’t open, so Muffin Man tried to open it himself, and when it swung without even creaking he knew Georgie hadn’t listened to any of the warnings. Preparing himself for the worst, though he wasn’t sure what that was anymore, Muffin Man looked at the small lump that was in the middle of the floor. It appeared Georgie had been beaten to death, and aside from the multiple bruises covering his head, he could almost have been sleeping.

Muffin Man went slowly down the stairs. It was all over now. He knew he wouldn’t be facing any of his own nightmares, as Mary was no longer around to call them first. Everyone else was dead and all that was left was to leave through one of the windows, and there was now no danger in leaving through a first floor window.

He grabbed a hat rack that was by the door and then entered the nearest room with a window in it. Before he could break the window, though, he heard a voice.

“Surely you weren’t planning to leave yet, Muffin Man?” it said. He turned around and saw Muffet.

“Muffet! How are you alive?” he exclaimed.

“Oh, but I’m not. None of us are.”

“Us? I’m alive, thank you.”

“Well,” she regarded him, “you are for now. But I mean Madam Goose, the other children, and I.”

“Yes. You are all dead; I watched a lot of it happen. But how am I seeing you?” He thought about it for a second. “I’m seeing things aren’t I?”

“Technically you’re always seeing things, but no, you are not crazy.” Around Muffet, the other children and Madam Goose sprang up from the floorboards.

“What do you want from me?” Muffin Man cried. “I tried to save you!”

“You did,” Madam Goose said. “It almost makes this whole thing a pity. I would rather you had been a selfish weakling to the little hero you tried to be.”

Muffin Man gaped at the ghosts as they all swarmed around him, cackling.

“I think we ought to give him an explanation,” Bo said, her face appearing out of the sea of ghosts. “He did try to save us, after all.”

“Very well, Bo. Tell him,” Madam Goose instructed.

Bo smiled at Muffin Man. “You never actually saw us alive. We’ve been dead for years and years!”

“We were stuck, though,” Muffet interjected mournfully.

“Yes,” Bo said glaring, “we were doomed to walk upon the earth forever, never going beyond, always hiding. It was our own fault of course; we had never faced our worst fears.”

Mary took up the story. “The dead cannot be truly dead unless in life they confronted their fears. Those who didn’t must remain as imprints of themselves.”

“There was, of course, one way to get out of this place,” Peter said, smiling.

“We had to face ghostly versions of our fears. After all, ghosts can harm other ghosts, so we were truly fearful as we faced a second death. That’s why they didn’t harm you, though, because ghosts usually can’t harm people,” Bo said.

The voices started becoming one and the same and Muffin Man found he had trouble differentiating between the different ghosts. His heart was beating quickly and he still didn’t understand what his point was in this whole affair.

“There was a catch, though. We had missed our chance to face our fears in life, so we had to do extra to deserve true death. We had to kill a man after we faced our second deaths.”

“You didn’t kill anybody else, though,” Muffin Man pointed out. “And you said ghosts can’t harm humans.”

“Usually, they can’t. But for the Passing ritual, it is possible. We have completed almost all the ritual and there is only one step left before we join the ones we love.”

Multiple images sprang into Muffin Man’s mind and he realized he was seeing who the ghosts were looking forward to seeing. Mainly it was parents or other family members, but he also recognized what must have been Mary’s lamb, and for some reason, there was a gander.

“You see, it has to be done,” the ghosts whispered.

Muffin Man tried to run out of the room, but the ghosts forced him down and flew all around him. They flew into his nose and out through his mouth and he could feel them looking through his eyes. As they stole his breath little by little, aged his body years within minutes, he smelled a nasty, potent scent. His last thought was, “The muffins are burning…”