For the 13 days leading up to Halloween, I am trying an experiment by rewriting the same story in 13 different styles, reflecting the various horror subgenres as part of my Thirteen For Halloween series. You can find the original version HERE. So, feel free to come back and weigh in with your opinion of which style worked the best!

Anaïs Castillo seemed a sweet and quiet girl, but she harbored morbid passions that her religious parents condemned as sinful perversions. After being severely punished for her secret horror artwork, Anaïs fled to the streets.

Taken in by occultists, she immersed herself in their bloody rituals, soon exhibiting a talent for manipulating dark forces. During one profane ceremony, a vile entity tore out her soul as easily as gutting a fish and swallowed it whole.

Anaïs’s corpse lay sprawled on the filthy couch, inert and drained of life, every muscle slack in eternal rest. The stagnant air smelled of rot, tinged with the metallic scent of dried blood. Shadows moved restlessly, feeding off the horror of her lifeless form.

In the dank pit of the abandoned warehouse, Anaïs’s body was an appalling centerpiece. Walls, stained with symbols drawn in a mixture of paint and blood, seemed to close in on her like hungry wolves.

But in that oppressive dark, a flicker. Her eyes sprang open, irises filled with a lunatic glee. Her smile, wide and savage, revealed teeth that had mutated into razor-sharp points.

With a nauseating sound of cracking bones and tearing sinew, Anaïs rose. A palpable wave of dread oozed from her, congealing the very air into a soup of despair. The restraints of human mortality were shredded, left behind like molted skin.

Taking her first grotesque steps, her body morphed with each movement, bones jutting unnaturally through her flesh. The dark energy culminating around her spelled doom, a foul wind carrying the stench of impending chaos.

The door of her macabre den swung open, broken from its hinges. Anaïs set her sights on an unsuspecting world, teeming with souls ripe for torment. A feral hunger animated her; she was now a goddess of ruin, intoxicated by her own abhorrent power.

She paid her former occultist companions a friendly visit and ripped through them in a whirlwind of fangs and claws, splattering the walls with viscera. Crazed and ravenous, the ghoul woman Anaïs had become careened into the night, no longer bound by mortal constraints.

Detective Vince Contreras was investigating a string of grisly murders, obsessed with stopping the monster responsible. He studied the elaborate crime scenes with revulsion and awe – human remains arranged in macabre tableaus of suffering.

Anaïs sculpted new masterpieces each night, experimenting with how much agony various cuts, punctures and amputations inflicted before her victims succumbed. She relished the symphony of screams as she tore through sinew and crushed bones between jagged teeth.

Detective Contreras arrived at the latest gruesome murder scene, bile rising in his throat. Anaïs had outdone herself with this ritualistic display of depravity. The teen victim’s body was contorted in an impossible pose, spine bent backward, mouth frozen open in a silent scream.

Vince had studied every mutilated corpse left behind by the monstrous Ghoul Woman, searching in vain for some pattern or meaning in the carnage. But it was clear now her butchery was an altar to chaos, each atrocity a tribute to humankind’s suppressed potential for boundless cruelty.

The detective’s breaking point came when Anaïs left a grisly package at his doorstep—his daughter’s severed hand. She was taunting Vince, demonstrating the fragility of the one thing he had left to protect in this world.

An unhinged fury ignited within Vince, overriding his sense of justice and morality. He would descend into the very depths of madness and evil to hunt Anaïs down, no matter the cost. She had become his Moby Dick, his obsession given flesh.

Their final showdown occurred in the dilapidated warehouse where Anaïs first transformed. Amid the occult symbols and dried blood, the two faced each other—one corrupted by darkness, the other warped in its pursuit. Anaïs grinned with sadistic glee, eager to eclipse whatever light remained in her opponent.

What transpired between them on that night was more profane communion than combat. Vince came to understand that within himself lurked the same capacity for boundless cruelty, kept in check only by tenuous bonds of compassion and conscience. Anaïs had the power to sever those bonds and baptize Vince in the same psychotic freedom she enjoyed.

Yet some core of humanity persisted, even when all seemed lost. As Anaïs reveled in her victory, Vince summoned one last burst of defiance, rejecting her twisted baptism. But the horrors he witnessed would leave deep scars. Long after Anaïs was gone, her magnum opus would live on in Vince’s shattered psyche—a lingering resonance of our infinite potential for depravity.