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Fear, Itself

Prologue

Buffy, Willow and Oz are all in Xander’s basement, carving pumpkins for Halloween. Xander isn’t too pleased with his efforts, he was going for scary, but his pumpkin just seems to be mocking him.

Buffy isn’t really into pumpkin carving. She just fingers the bowl of pumpkin innards, and reflects on the life of a pumpkin. “Grow up in the sun, happily intwined with others. And then someone comes along, cuts you open and rips your guts out.”

Xander tries to cheer Buffy up. He has picked up a movie for their second annual Halloween video screening. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a tape. “People, prepare to have your spines tingled, your gooses bumped by the terrifying…” He looks at the label. “…Fantasia. Fantasia?”

“Maybe it’s because of all the horrific things we’ve seen, but hippos wearing tutus just don’t unnerve me the way they used to,” says Oz.

“Phantasm.” says Xander. “It was supposed to be Phantasm.”

Willow thought that they were planning to go to the Alpha Delta fraternity’s Halloween party. They’re doing the whole Halloween House of Horrors bit. It sounds kinda lame to Buffy, but Oz assures her that they have a good track record, and the party after getting through the horrors is usually pretty cool. This is the first Xander has heard of this party, and he is feeling a little left out. Willow tells him that he can come too.

Buffy decides that it’s time for her to go. She just wants to go home and go to sleep. She starts back to the dorm on her own.

Xander shakes his head. “Sad Buffy.”

“She didn’t even touch her pumpkin,” says Willow. “It’s a freak with no face.”

“She’s still suffering a little post-Parker depression.” says Oz.

“Bailing on the Buff. Does anyone else want to smack that guy?” asks Xander. Willow and Oz raise their hands.

Buffy walks through the town alone. The streets of Sunnydale are pretty much empty. Suddenly a demon jumps out of the shadows in front of her and growls menacingly. Buffy decks it with one punch.

“Jeez! That hurt!” The kid takes off his Halloween mask, and climbs back to his feet. “What the hell’s wrong with you lady?” He runs off.

Buffy watches him go. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

Act I

Buffy and Willow pick up their lunch in the cafeteria. Willow is getting a little discouraged with her progress in magic. She seems to have plateaued. Buffy urges her to be cautious in her experimentation. That isn’t what Willow wants to hear. She wants encouragement.

“This is an ‘encouragement’ talk?” asks Buffy. “I thought it was ‘share my pain.’”

“What is college for if not experimenting?” asks Willow. “You know, maybe I can handle it. I’ll know when I’ve reached my limit.”

Oz comes over to them. “Wine coolers?”

“Magic,” says Buffy.

“Ooh, you didn’t encourage her, did you?”

“Where is supportive boyfriend guy?” asks Willow.

“He’s picking up your dry cleaning,” says Oz, “but he told me to tell you that he’s afraid you’re going to get hurt.”

“Okay, Brutus,” says Willow. Oz just looks blank. “Brutus? Caesar? Betrayal? Trusted friend?” Willow makes a stabbing gesture with her banana. “Back stabby?”

Oz got the reference, but he can’t help but worry about Willow’s forays into magic. “I know what it’s like to have power you can’t control. I mean, every time I start to wolf out, I touch something deep…dark. It’s not fun. But just know that what ever you decide, I back your play.”

Willow smiles. She likes that Oz worries about her.

Buffy spots Parker at a cafeteria table, laughing with his friends. She suddenly loses her appetite, and starts to go. Willow stops her. Buffy can’t let Parker ruin her life.

Buffy tells Willow that she just isn’t ready to deal with him yet. She is also having second thoughts about going to the party tonight. She thinks Giles will want her patrolling. He doesn’t care about Halloween.

Giles opens his door. “Happy Hal—” He stops when he sees the expression on Buffy’s face. He’s dressed in a poncho, and a huge sombrero fringed in tassels. He’s carrying a huge bowl of candy. His apartment is fully decorated in a Halloween motif.

Buffy is somewhat shocked by all this. Giles has never exhibited any interest in Halloween before. He explains that his Watcher’s duties had prevented him from embracing its charms in the past. He turns to a toy Frankenstein’s monster he has hanging from a noose from his ceiling, and turns it on. The toy starts to vibrate. “Look, look! It’s alive!” He laughs.

Buffy just stares at Giles as he laughs. He points to the toy. “See: how he shakes?” Buffy keeps staring. Giles stops laughing. “Is there something you wanted?”

“I was thinking that I should patrol tonight. You know, possibly the cemetery or if you had a better su…” Buffy is too distracted by the fringe of Giles’ sombrero. “Could you please take that off?”

Giles sets down his bowl of candy, and takes off the hat. He asks Buffy if there’s some specific threat she’s sensing.

“No. But then you know we were all caught of guard when Ethan turned everyone into their costumes.”

“True, but what happened then was anomalous. Creatures of the night shy away form Halloween. They find it all much too crass.”

Buffy gives Giles another look. “Hard to believe.”

“Well, I promise you, there is little likelihood of any supernatural activity tonight.” Giles picks up the bowl of candy again and holds it out to her. “You sure you don’t want one?”

The Alpha Delta boys prepare their house for the party. All the standard Halloween stuff. Cotton cobwebs, rubber spiders, spring loaded plastic skeletons in the closets. Their sound system needs a little work, so Chaz suggests to Josh that they call Oz over to help them with it. He has also found a really cool mystical symbol in a book for them to paint on the floor in the goat room upstairs.

Xander is preparing to go out when he turns around and sees Anya standing on his stairs. She really needs to learn how to knock.

“Your Uncle Rory let me in,” says Anya. “Does he always smell like peppermint?”

“The man likes his schnapps,” says Xander. “What are you doing here?”

“You haven’t called. Not once.”

“You said you were over me.”

“You just accepted that?” asks Anya. “I only said that because I thought that’s what you wanted to hear.”

“Well, that’s the funny thing about me,” says Xander. “I tend to hear the actual words people say and accept them at face value.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I accept that.”

Xander isn’t exactly displeased to see Anya, which gives her a happy. She asks if he wants to go out with her tonight, for their one week copulation anniversary. Xander tells her that he already has plans with Buffy, Willow and Oz for Halloween.

“I don’t understand,” says Anya. Xander starts to explain Halloween to her. Anya stops him. She knows all about that inane ritual. She doesn’t understand why he is still hanging out with those people that he has so little in common with. They’re in college, he isn’t. They don’t live at home anymore, he does. This hits a bit of a nerve with Xander, but he invites Anya to come along with him to the party anyway.

“You mean like a date?” asks Anya. “Is that what this is? Are we dating?”

Xander admits that there are some date-like qualities to what he is proposing. He also tells Anya that she will need a costume. Something scary.

“Scary? Scary how?” asks Anya.

“Anya. You, ex-demon, terrorized mankind for centuries. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

Buffy arrives at Psych class, after class has let out. She asks Professor Walsh for the day’s assignment. Walsh is not pleased that Buffy skipped the class, and warns her that if she misses any more she will be out.

Professor Walsh leaves. Riley warns Buffy that Walsh is serious as he hands her a copy of the assignment. He has noticed that Buffy’s classwork has taken a bit of a downturn lately. He figures it’s either too much fun or not enough.

“Both actually,” says Buffy. She promises to do the assignment tonight.

“Tonight? It’s Halloween! You aren’t going to get dressed up and go party?” asks Riley. “I may be out of line here, and it’s not really my business, but, you seem like the kind of person that makes things really hard on themselves. Halloween isn’t a night for responsibility. It’s when the ghosts and goblins come out.”

This amuses Buffy, since ghosts and goblins are her responsibility, but she doesn’t tell Riley that. He advises her to have some fun. He on the other hand is going to be grading papers.

Xander helps Oz carry some of the Dingo’s sound equipment into the Alpha Delta house to upgrade their sound system for the party. Xander notes the interesting pentagram that Chaz is painting on the floor, but he’s soon distracted by some food. He thinks that the Alpha Delts have a sweet setup.

Josh suggests that maybe Xander should pledge with them, but Oz points out that Xander is a civilian.

“Ah, a townie huh?” says Josh. “I didn’t know. He looked so normal. You sure we should let him come to the party Oz?” Xander is a little miffed that they are suddenly talking about him like he isn’t there.

Oz finishes hooking up the speakers, turns the sound system on and listens carefully to it. He doesn’t look happy.

“You’re sensing a disturbance in the force, Master?” asks Xander.

Oz pulls out a knife. "The left speaker is crackling a little bit."

“And you feel stabbing it is the proper solution?” asks Xander.

Oz tells Xander that he’s going to trim the wires. He moves around behind the speakers.

Oz's knife slips, and he cuts his thumb. He comes out from behind the speaker, shaking his hand from the pain. A couple of drops of his blood land on the design painted on the floor.

No one sees the design ripple, or a rubber spider come to life, and crawl away.

Act II

Buffy takes Riley’s advice and decides to join her friends for the party. She drops by at home to get her mother to make some alterations to a Little Red Riding Hood costume she had last worn when she was twelve.

Buffy and Joyce start reminiscing about the good old days with her dad taking her out trick-or-treating. The trip down memory lane comes to a screeching halt when Buffy starts feeling guilty about her parents getting divorced.

Joyce tries to tell Buffy that the divorce had nothing to do with her, but Buffy doesn’t really believe it. “I’m starting to feel like there’s a pattern here. Open your heart to someone and he bails on you. Maybe its easier to just not to let anyone in.”

Joyce understands how Buffy feels, but she can’t let it take over her life. It took her a long time to start making new friends after the divorce, and she’s still a little gun shy when it comes to men. “It certainly didn’t help that my last boyfriend turned out to be a homicidal robot.”

Joyce sits beside Buffy and puts her arm around her. “I will always be here for you. And you’ve got Mr. Giles and your friends. Believe me, there is nothing to be afraid of.”

Willow talks with Oz on the phone while she makes some last minute adjustments to her costume. She’s wearing a full set of chain mail and a breastplate. She is going to be meeting up with Oz at his place, and they’ll be connecting with the others at the party.

Willow tells Oz that they have to make sure that Buffy has fun tonight. “And if Parker shows up we’ll just axe murder him. That’s Halloweeny!” She hangs up the phone and makes her way out through the dorm, which seems to be having its own Halloween party.

The party is in full swing at the Alpha Delta house. Josh leads a blindfolded girl in a tropical island costume to the bowl of peeled grape ‘eyeballs.’ The girl lifts her blindfold to look. Her hand is full of real eyeballs. She screams.

Buffy is waiting outside the Alpha Delta house for the others. Xander is the first to show up. He’s dressed in a tux. “Hey Red!” He slips into his Big Bad Wolf impression. “What you got in the basket little girl?”

“Weapons,” says Buffy. “Just in case. I like the tux Xander.”

“Bond. James Bond” says Xander. “Insurance you know, in case we get turned into our costumes again, I’m going for cool secret agent guy.”

“I hate to break it to you, but you’ll probably end up cool head waiter guy.”

“As long as I’m cool and wield some kind of power.”

Willow and Oz show up. Buffy and Xander think that Willow is looking very mediæval.

“I’m Joan of Arc,” says Willow. “I figured we had a lot in common, seeing as how I was almost burned at the stake, and plus she had that close relationship with God.”

Xander looks at Oz, who seems to be wearing his normal everyday clothes. “And you are?”

Oz pulls aside his jacket lapel, revealing his name tag: “GOD.”

“Of course,” says Xander. “I wish I’d thought of that before I put down my deposit. I could have been God.”

“Blasphemer,” says Oz.

They head off toward the Alpha Delta house. A couple of the UCSCS commandos come out of the bushes ahead of them, with their weapons. They don’t need to hide tonight. One of them seems to pause to give Buffy a good look over, before they continue on their way.

“Nice costumes,” says Buffy. “Very stealthy.”

“What are they supposed to be?” asks Willow.

“NATO?” asks Oz.

Xander tells them that he’s invited Anya to join them, but she’s having a little difficulty picking out a scary costume. Buffy isn’t happy to learn that she is the dateless fifth wheel of their group. Willow tells her not to worry about it. “We’re going to have the best time.”

Everyone is running around in genuine terror inside the House of Horrors. There is no sign of this from outside as Buffy and her friends walk up to the front door.

Oz reaches for the doorknob. “Let the horrors begin!” He opens the door.

Josh runs from the goat room. He trips and falls down the stairs, and breaks his neck. A voice booms through the house. “Release me!”

Buffy and her friends enter the front hall of the House of Horrors. It’s deserted. No one else is there. All they hear is some cheesy fake evil laughter coming from some speakers.

Buffy looks around at the decorations. “Terrifying. If I were Abbott and Costello this would be fairly traumatic.” They are all surprised that there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the house.

They make their way through the deserted house. Willow walks into some cobwebs which wigs her a bit. Oz jokes that the frat boys aren’t very obsessive about their cleaning. They might be real. Xander is startled by a plastic skeleton springing out of a closet at him, wielding a plastic knife.

Oz looks back at Willow. He sees that there’s a big hairy real spider crawling on her shoulder. He hurries to brush it off her. Willow is not amused. They decide to hurry to get to the party part of the party.

They continue through the house. Oz gets a little confused, the layout seems different from when he was here before.

Buffy spots something on the floor. She bends down to examine the red stain. It’s blood. Real blood. Buffy hears a squeaking noise as she stands up. They look around for its source. It’s coming from above them. They look up and see that the ceiling is covered with bats.

The bats take flight, and swoop down around them. They all duck. Buffy grabs a bat out of the air and throws it to the floor while the rest of the bats fly off.

Oz goes over to look at the bat on the floor. He picks it up. It’s rubber.

“What the hell is going on here?” asks Buffy.

“Look, maybe it’s nothing,” says Xander. “Maybe it’s just a neat trick. You know, something done with wires or—”

A booming voice echoes through the house. “Release me!”

“Or it might be something else,” says Xander.

Anya arrives at the Alpha Delta house in her scary costume. It’s a pink rabbit suit, complete with big floppy ears and feet. She walks up to where it looks like the door should be, but there’s just a blank wall there now with a “HELLCOME” mat in front of it.

Anya knocks on the wall. “Hey! Hello!” No one answers.

Anya starts to walk around the house, looking for a way in. She hears the screams of a girl. She looks and sees her pounding on an upstairs window. As Anya watches the brickwork around the window suddenly grows over top of it, sealing the window closed.

“Xander!” Anya starts to run as fast as her bunny feet will let her.

Buffy and her friends make their way back to the front hallway, but the door is gone. They can’t get out. Oz is getting tired of the spooky noises coming from the speakers, so he disconnects them.

“Thank the Lord!” says Buffy.

“You’re welcome” says Oz.

Willow thinks that they really should be trying to get out of there. They don’t have any idea what it is they are dealing with. Xander hears a noise, but everyone ignores him.

Buffy hears it too. “Do you hear something?”

“Like I said, sounds like a hissing,” says Xander.

“It’s like a ‘SSSS’ noise,” says Buffy

“I thought the word ‘hissing’ kind of covered that nicely,” says Xander, but the others continue to ignore him.

Buffy follows the noise to a closet. She opens it. Chaz is cowering inside. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Oz kneels down beside Chaz, and asks him what’s happening.

Chaz keeps rocking back and forth. “It ah…”

“What is it?” asks Buffy.

“It’s alive!” says Chaz. “It’s alive!”

The plastic skeleton which sprang out of the closet at Xander transforms into a real one, and starts to move.

Act III

Buffy tries to get Chaz to tell her what happened, but he’s too terrified. The skeleton comes up behind her and stabs her with its knife.

Buffy whirls around and crushes the skeleton’s skull with a punch to its head. She kicks it in the chest. The skeleton falls to the floor. It’s plastic again and carrying a plastic knife.

The others move around behind Buffy to check out her wound. It isn’t bad, her cape took most of it. Chaz goes back to hiding in his closet.

“Cowering in a closet is starting to seem like a reasonable plan,” says Oz.

Buffy looks around. “What closet?” Where the door to Chaz’s closet had been there is now a wall with a picture hanging on it.

They hear the sound of a girl screaming. Buffy announces her new plan: the others will look for a way out and go for help. She will search the house for other people. Willow doesn’t like this plan. She doesn’t want to run off and leave Buffy alone.

“We need help.” Buffy pulls a mini-crossbow out of her basket. “We need the only person who can make sense of what’s happening.”

Giles is alone his apartment, sitting in his costume, holding the bowl of candy in his lap. There’s a knock on the door. He jumps up and enthusiastically answers it. “Happy Hal—”

Anya barges in wearing her bunny suit. “Xander’s in trouble! You’ve got to do something right now.”

Giles is taken aback. “Anya!”

“Are you listening? Xander’s trapped!”

“Where’s Buffy and the others?”

“Oh, they’re trapped too. But we’ve got to save Xander!”

Giles asks Anya what’s happened, and she tells him what she saw at the house. Giles has a pretty good notion about what is probably going on. He has to gather some supplies first but he tells her not to worry about Xander. He is among friends.

Buffy and Willow’s argument has escalated. Willow isn’t in any mood to take orders from Buffy. Xander tries to intervene and calm them both down but they just ignore him and keep arguing. Willow wants to try a guiding spell, a simple conjuring to summon a guide which can lead them all out.

“Conjuring?” asks Buffy. “Will, let’s be realistic here, okay? Your basic spells are usually only fifty-fifty.”

“Oh yeah? Well—so is your face!” Willow turns and starts to walk away from her.

“What?” asks Buffy. “What does that mean?”

Willow turns around. “I’m not your sidekick!” She storms off, and Oz follows her.

“Well, that was a bunch of laughs,” says Xander “Look, Buffy, we are all tired and a little edgy. Maybe Willow is over reacting. I’m sure part of it is because of how you’ve been ‘pushing away’ girl lately. But now is not the time to let that stuff tear us apart. What I’m saying is, I’m right with you. I’m right by your side. I’m—”

Buffy looks around. “Xander! Where did you go?”

At first Xander thinks that Buffy is joking, but he quickly realizes that she can’t see, or hear him. His friends haven’t been ignoring him. He has totally disappeared to them. Buffy rushes off to look for him, leaving Xander behind.

Willow and Oz find the stairs leading up to the second floor. Willow is still feeling miffed with Buffy. She sheds her chain mail as she heads up the stairs, with Oz following her.

Oz looks down at his hand on the banister as he climbs the stairs. It has begun to transform into a werewolf paw. He calls out to Willow, and she turns around and sees his face beginning its transformation too. She doesn’t understand how this could be happening to him. It isn’t his time of the month.

Oz wants to get away from Willow, before it’s too late, but Willow doesn’t want to be separated from him. She wants to find some ropes or something to tie him up with.

Willow grabs onto Oz, to keep him from leaving, but he pulls away—scratching his claws across the back of her hand in the process—and he runs away from her.

Xander finds a mirror. He’s happy to see that he isn’t really invisible. It’s just that no one else can see him.

“I can see you,” says a decapitated head with its eyes hanging from their sockets on the table behind him.

Oz sits in a bathtub in his half transformed state. “You’re not going to change! You’re not going to change!” He rocks back and forth, repeating it over and over. “You’re not going to change! You’re not going to change!”

Buffy searches the house for her friends. She can’t find any of them. She’s alone.

Willow sits on a table with her legs crossed.

“Aradia, Goddess of the lost,
The path is murky, the woods are dense, darkness pervades.
I beseech thee, bring the light.”

A green glowing light appears before Willow. She’s pleased with the result. She gets off the table and asks it to lead her to Oz. It starts to go.

“Wait, I should try to find the people trapped upstairs first.” The light divides. “But we still have to find a way out of the house.” The light divides again.

The lights keep dividing, and start flying around Willow’s head like a swarm of fireflies. Willow swats at them, but they continue to multiply and swarm around her, buzzing like a swarm of angry bees. She tries to call out for help, and some of them fly into her mouth, making her choke. She starts to run. The swarm chases her.

Buffy hears Willow screaming and tries to move toward the sound. It seems to be coming from the other side of a locked door. She breaks it open and steps through. There is no floor on the other side of the door, and she falls down into the basement. Buffy is momentarily stunned. She lies for a little while on the floor recovering.

“All alone,” says a raspy voice.

Buffy tries to sit up. “Who said that?”

It’s Josh, his head askew from his broken neck. “They all ran away from you. They always will. Open your heart to someone and…but don’t fret little girl, you’re not alone. Anymore.” Arms start to come up through the ground, grabbing at Buffy.

Act IV

Buffy struggles against the zombies that are digging their way out of the ground and grabbing at her.

Giles examines the wall where the door used to be while reading from one of his books.

Anya is nervously fiddling with the ties for her bunny hat. “Well?”

“We’re going to have to create a door,” says Giles.

“Create a door? You can do that?”

“I can.” Giles goes to his bag of supplies. He tosses aside several stakes and such, and pulls out a chainsaw. He starts it up and cuts into the wall.

Buffy fights to escape from the zombies.

“No matter how hard you fight you just end up in the same place,” says Josh. “I don’t see why you bother.”

Buffy breaks free from the hands clawing at her. She scrambles across the floor to a small door in the basement wall. She opens it and goes through. She quickly closes it behind her.

Buffy looks around, and realizes that she has moved from the basement to the upstairs goat room. There are several people there, all sitting cowering on the floor. She notices that one of them is Oz.

Willow comes running in. “Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!” She’s swatting at an invisible swarm of bugs around her head.

The sound of Willow’s terror makes Oz look up. He sees that his hands are back to normal, and he rushes to Willow, his fears for himself forgotten.

Oz and Buffy calm Willow down and she sees that her swarm of fireflies has vanished. Oz tells her that they’re all okay.

“We are not okay,” says Buffy. “We need to get out of here.”

Xander is sitting huddled on the floor. “I’d offer my opinion, but you jerks aren’t going to hear it anyway. Not that didn’t-go-to-college-boy has anything important to say. I might as well hang out with my new best friend Bleeding Dummy Head, for all you dorks care.”

“What is wrong with you?” asks Buffy.

Xander jumps to his feet. “You…you heard that? You…you can see me?” Buffy nods at him. “Good. Oh god, good!”

“The house separated us,” says Oz. “Like it wanted to scare us.”

“But we got away,” says Willow.

“No,” says Buffy. “We were brought here. We all got so scared that we ended up…here. Why?” She notices the pentagram painted on the floor.

Xander remembers Chaz copying it from the book, which is still there. He gets it and hands it to Willow.

The book is written in Gaelic, and Willow struggles to translate it. It seems to be a summoning spell for the demon Gachnar. The frat boys somehow accidentally began the ritual. Gachnar is trying to manifest itself. As she reads the voice booms out again. “Release me!”

Willow learns that Gachnar feeds on fear. Everyone’s fears have been manifesting, and Gachnar is feeding off them. They have to stop.

“If we close our eyes and say it’s a dream…it’ll stab us to death!” says Xander. “These things are real.”

“Okay, so our fears are feeding it,” says Buffy. “If we get everyone out of here…”

Gachnar continues to call for his release, and there’s a pounding coming from walls all around them. Xander thinks that leaving is a good plan and starts to head for the door. It suddenly bursts open.

“Giles?” asks Xander. “Everyone, it’s Giles!” Giles is standing in the open door. “With a chainsaw!”

Anya pushes past Giles and runs to hug Xander while Giles tells them that they can’t get out the way he came in. The holes he cut closed up behind them.

Willow shows Giles the book. He quickly scans through the text she’d struggled with. He is familiar with Gachnar it seems. They can not allow it to come into being.

“But if it does, I can fight it, right?” asks Buffy.

Giles flips to another page and shows Buffy a picture of a ferocious looking horned demon.

“I don’t want to fight that,” says Buffy. They have to break the spell.

Giles begins to read from the book. “The summoning spell for Gachnar can be shut down in one of two ways. Destroying the mark of Gachnar…”

Buffy rushes over to where the mark is painted on the floor. She puts her fist through the center of it and starts ripping up the floorboards. She looks over at Giles with a very self satisfied expression on her face.

“…is not one of them,” continues Giles with a somewhat peeved expression, “and will in fact immediately bring forth the fear demon itself!”

A brilliant light starts to shine up through the hole Buffy has made in the floor. The house trembles. Gachnar slowly ascends out of the floor with a mighty roar. He looks around, and then he suddenly looks up at the people surrounding him. Gachnar is about four inches tall.

Buffy looks down at the tiny demon. “This is Gachnar?”

“Big overture. Little show,” says Xander.

“I am the Dark Lord of Nightmares.” says Gachnar, in a small squeaky voice. “The Bringer of Terror. Tremble before me! Fear me!”

Willow giggles. “He’s so cute.”

“Tremble!” squeaks Gachnar.

Xander bends over Gachnar. “Who’s the little fear demon? Come on. Who’s the little fear demon?”

“Don’t taunt the fear demon,” warns Giles.

“I bring the terror.” squeaks Gachnar.

Xander gets a little nervous. “Why? Can he hurt me?”

“No,” says Giles. “It’s just tacky.”

“I bring the fear!” says the demon.

“Be that as it may,” says Giles, “Buffy when it comes to slaying…”

“Size doesn’t matter?” asks Buffy.

“They are all going to abandon you, you know.” Gachnar confides to Buffy.

“Yeah, yeah.” Buffy raises up her foot, and stomps on it.

Epilogue

The gang sits around in Giles’ apartment eating his chocolate. Xander is looking at Anya with a puzzled expression on his face. “What?” she asks.

Xander points at Anya’s bunny outfit. “That’s your scary costume?”

“Bunnies frighten me,” says Anya.

Giles has been checking up on Gachnar. He has found something he doesn’t like. “Oh, bloody hell! The inscription!”

“What’s the matter?” asks Buffy.

“I should have translated the Gaelic inscription under the illustration of Gachnar!” He hands Buffy the book open to the picture he had shown her earlier.

“What’s it say?” asks Buffy.

“‘Actual size.’” says a disgusted Giles.

Death Toll