Halloween Interview & Flash Fiction
Challenge
1. You're born on Halloween and have the ghostly evil super powers
of one of the following: The Ghost from Poltergeist, The Frankenstein Monster,
The Mummy, The most Evil of Witches, The Devil himself, Freddy Kruger, Pumpkin
Head, Michael from Halloween, or Jason from Friday the 13th.
Alternatively, if you prefer, pick one of your own. Otherwise, tell us which
one you would choose and why? No friendly ghosts allowed! You're to wreak havoc
in this scenario!
I have inherited the power of...The Most Evil of All Witches!
I've always been fascinated by them. On the one hand, they were slaughtered for
hundreds or even thousands of years...but on the other hand, I've always
wondered why. Why witches--why not, say, midwives or prostitutes? I
realize that a lot of the time, the women who were killed were women who had a)
property worth taking, and b) few or no male relatives to protect them. But
now that we've legalized pot in Colorado, I've also been pondering: what
if one of the reasons that "witches" were targeted was that they
distributed not just medicines like arbortifacients, but recreational
drugs? As well as the knowledge to find, harvest, preserve, and use
them? It's just supposition on my part, but it would explain why you hear
about them acting weird and having orgies with the devils. You hear stuff
that's almost as bad about pot, let alone other types of illegal drugs. Witch
burnings as a covert Mafia war between church-sanctioned and independent drug
dealers. Why not? It might be fun...
2. The Zombie Apocalypse is going to occur this Halloween and for
48 hours, the world is thrown into chaos. Live through it and consider yourself
lucky, you've been warned. What is your first step, especially as no one else
knows or believes you? Do you leave family behind and seek shelter to ride it
out, or do you try to save your family? How and why?
Oh, my family would believe me. We've had an agreement for
years that if one of us gets bitten by a zombie, the others will take them down
as quickly and painlessly as possible. We don't have bug-out bags and
kits set up, but it's on our to-do lists. I'm thinking about making them
for Christmas presents at some point [she said, hoping her family isn't reading
this]. At our old house, we were planning to go up to a certain reservoir
stocked with fish; now that we're in the middle of moving, I'm not sure where
we'd go. I'll have to ask.
3. Because of the time of your birth, (see the 1st question)
the angels have decided to forgive your sins and are offering to remedy one
evil that now exists in the world, but only one! Which would you choose and
why?
I'd like to tweak human nature just a leeeetle bit so that
humanity can process the interconnection of more than five things at a time.
See Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God. In essence, humans may
think we're smart, but we can't actually process the interconnections of more
than five things at a time (which is 125 interconnections). The universe
is far more complex than that, which leads to humanity failing
to even understand how little it knows (and, I might add, how hypocritical we
usually are). A planet with just a little less hypocrisy and a little more willingness
to admit we're wrong? Super.
4. Why is Halloween a favorite holiday, or not a favorite, and if
it isn't why did you participate in this query? Come on; tell us your biggest
most secret Halloween fantasy!
FAVORITE. I've always liked it (I was one of those kids who
always wanted to play dress up), but the reason it's a favorite is because of
my daughter, who was born in October. Halloween has become a second birthday in
which we set up a mini-haunted-house in the garage and pass out treats to
anyone brave enough to run in and make a snatch-and-grab. We've done
Frankenstein, hillbilly zombies, pirates, and other things. It's a ton of fun. This
year, because we're in the middle of moving, we're going to do a normal
trick-or-treat pass. Siiiiigh. Next year.
Now the fun part: Finish the story. I've given you the first 100
words. Provide us with the rest, but please hold the number to 750 words or
less. The winner will receive a $10 Amazon gift card. The contest will be
judged by another lover of the horror genre, the person to be announced later.
The winner will be posted no later than a week after Halloween!
DESPERATION HOLLER
Jerry sauntered along Desperation Holler Road
that earlier echoed with the excited shouts of ghosts and ghouls as the
children scrambled from house to house in colorful and frightening costumes.
Dusk dissolved into the blackest of nights as
the little monsters disappeared into the shelter of the brightly lit houses
with their chocolate goodies.
Jerry smiled, even suppressed laughter,
because he knew there was no refuge, not in Desperation Holler on this most
evil of Halloweens.
Concealed by the dark limbs of deformed trees
and invasive ivy, the innocuous little cabin looked abandoned, but Jerry knew
better.
All he had to do was get
inside, find the trap door to the cellar (it was supposed to be in one of the
bedrooms, although that homeless slut he’d caught had claimed not to know which
room it was in), and climb down an old wooden ladder.
The chest would be the only
thing left in the cellar: the glass jars full of dead babies and demons' blood
had already been taken out by the group of teenagers who had found the trap
door last week, and Jerry had already found their hiding spot after
he had caught Mary digging through his trash three days ago. He had been so
elated that he had put a quick end to the girl and her other little homeless
friends. There was fun and then there was what he'd been sent here to
do, and now he was all out of time for fun.
He must have gone past that
place a hundred times and not even suspected.
He whistled as he swung his
keyring around the tip of his finger.
He did a little jig as he
jumped onto the front stoop and selected the key with the grinning skull at the
end. The key slid into the door lock and opened it smoothly. He danced inside
and closed the door, closing the rotting curtains with a flourish.
He laughed when he saw the
cross-stitched embroidery on the wall: BLESSINGS ON THIS HOUSE and a
cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney, flower pots on the stoop, and an
embroidery spiderweb stretched between chimney and roof. The cabin was a little
old ladies' home, all armchairs and doilies and delicate end tables simply begging
for a cup and saucer. Spiderwebs covered the furniture like drop cloths, torn
in places where the teenagers had stopped to playact a tea party in the
witches' chairs, pinkies sticking out as they spoke in clumsy accents.
He skipped into the back
hallway, jiggling door handles as he went. Broken windows, leaves, sticks, and
animal nests. Footprints on bare floors, rotting quilts on beds, the old gray
tinsel of fat cobs long dead. The place was so old it had no indoor bathrooms.
There'd be an outhouse somewhere in the back, so long unused that it would
smell almost sweet. Maybe it would still have an almanac or catalog by the
door.
The last room, then. He
flung open the door. The bed had been tossed to the wall and the trap door
flung open. A narrow old ladder peeked out from under the floorboards.
Jerry picked another key
from the ring, this one marked with a candle held by a severed hand. He knelt
at the edge of the trap door and turned the key in the darkness.
A faint green glow appeared
in the cellar: all clear. Yet who knew better than he to trust witches! He
ignored the ladder and jumped down, landing as cleverly and quietly as a cat
hunting a mouse.
The shelves were bare of all
but circles in the dust. The cellar ran the length of the house; if the dust
spots on the shelves were any indication, the homeless shits had another cache
of jars somewhere. When he was done tonight he’d have to go looking for them.
And use them all up, before
they went bad. He grinned.
An old, iron-bound chest
waited coquettishly for him at the other end of the cellar. Splashes of old mud
covered the bottom of the chest; it was heavy, sinking down into the floor.
Around it lay scraps of old carpet and straw mats, marked with small, muddy
footprints.
He sang a little ditty about
something something pretty, something something pity and didn’t even mind that
he’d forgotten most of the words, and couldn’t remember whether the singer had
used a fish knife or a surgeon’s scalpel on the women as he’d killed them.
The skeleton key flashed in
his hand as he pushed it into the lock and turned it.
The top of the chest popped
open like a jack in the box. Jerry hopped backward, and the small claws missed
him.
He cooed, he tickled, he
scooped it up with a tattered old piece of rag rug from the floor so it
wouldn’t scratch him, he closed the lid.
And then he turned around
just as the eerie green thieves' light went out.
He tucked the bundle under
his arm and pulled out a third key, this one marked with the handle of a knife,
and held it before him.
The trap door at the other
end of the cellar slammed shut. The squirming, sacred bundle fell apart in his
arms, scattering into fragments of old mud onto the floor.
Jerry cursed, an old curse
that was supposed to be good against witches. He’d suddenly remembered
something bad, very bad.
There hadn’t been any
spiderwebs in the cellar.
Behind him, the chest lid
creaked.
****
Thanks so much DeAnna, That was thrilling!
DeAnna says she would happily give away an ebook to one lucky commenter! Your choice of A MURDER OF CROWS
(short horror stories), ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN UNDERLAND (zombies), and TALES
TOLD UNDER THE COVERS (middle-grade genre stories).
Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts
by DeAnna Knippling
Once upon a time, there was a
girl named Alice Pleasance Liddell whose father ran Christ Church College at
Oxford University. One of Dean Liddell’s friends was a man named Charles
Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics and amateur photographer who would eventually
become known as Lewis Carroll.
Once upon a time, an outbreak of
a virulent disease known as zombieism spread across Great Britain. What made it
so deadly was that it had two phases—the earlier phase infected the victim’s
bloodstream, making them infectious but not necessarily mad; the latter phase
occurred upon death, when the victim was prevented from joining the souls in
the afterlife and condemned to remain upon the Earth—which had the
understandable effect of enraging them to the point of infecting every human in
sight.
At first, the undead were
considered to be lost to both Heaven and Earth, and regularly burnt to cinders
in large pits throughout the countryside; then, the Italian Filippo Pacini
developed a serum that, if ingested early enough and regularly thereafter,
allowed the undead to fight off the worst effects of the infection. The
Infected and the undead were treated with serum on a regular basis, and society
returned to normal—except for a few curious customs regarding the undead, including
the requirement to be shackled at all times, for the safety of the living.
A curious fact of the times was
that zombies, being dead, were seen to have few legal rights. They were unable
to enter into legal contracts or own property—even themselves. A zombie without
a de facto owner was a dead zombie—collected by the Government and humanely
destroyed.
Protected zombies were often
employed as servants. They were certainly not slaves.
Once upon a time, Mrs. Liddell
wanted a picture taken of her three daughters by the most fashionable
photographer in Oxford…even if he was a zombie.
*****
DeAnna Knippling lives in Colorado with her family and probably
spends too much time thinking about ways to hypothetically scare her friends
with horror stories.
Everyone, no matter how jaded, has something
that gets under their skin, is her theory. Her latest book is Alice's
Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, a zombie tale about
the real Alice from Alice in Wonderland. You can find out more about her
at www.WonderlandPress.com.
Her new collection of short
horror stories, A MURDER OF CROWS, is out now! You can get a copy here.
*****
It's only the 16th - plenty of time to enter the
Youthful Frights vs. Adult Fears
Come on, I dare you!
