The Plotmaster (plotmaster) wrote in horror_story, @ 2013-10-30 20:32:00 |
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“Erica, can you come down here please?” Mrs. Preston called from the kitchen. She adjusted the large, orange pumpkin in front of her, a look of hesitant excitement on her features. She’d spent nearly twenty minutes picking out the perfect pumpkin for them to carve. It wasn’t perfectly round, but then, none of them were. It’s flat spot was near the bottom, however, she thought if they just turned it right, no one would be able to tell. It’s stem was a curl of green the culminated in a thin twist of vine to which a few dry leaves still clung. It was beautiful and she was already brimming with ideas for how to carve it. She’d purchased a book with different designs. It even had carving tools attached to the front. She was torn, at the moment, between the spider web pattern and the adorable cat face.
The pounding of heavy boots on the stairs heralded her daughter’s arrival and Mrs. Preston fixed a pleasant smile on her face. She’d spent ten years perfecting that face, and yet, when Erica rounded the corner, it faltered ever so slightly, as it always did. She was well aware of what her friends said about her. They called her the Booby. A poor mother forced to raise a child that was clearly never meant to be her own, but unwilling to admit it. Erica stood in front of her wearing what looked like the entire contents of a Goodwill donation bin and sporting a new earring that her mother most certainly had not signed off on. She had to wonder what adult was taking her child to get these things. It was her fourth piercing and she was already up to three tattoos. And she was only fifteen.
“What?” Erica said by way of greeting, a sneer on her lips as she reached up to scratch the new piercing. It was most likely infected. Maybe a friend had done it for her instead of a professional. Just as troublesome but easier to accept.
“Look what I got for us, Sweety,” Mrs. Preston said with as much excitement as she could muster. “I thought we could carve it together, maybe put it out tonight. Halloween is only two days away after all.” She came around the counter a few steps, clasping her hands almost nervously. “Have you put any thought into a costume? It’s not too late, you know. We could go shopping.”
“I’m going to a party tonight,” Erica snapped, turning away from her mother slightly and looking at her from the corners of her eyes rather than head on.
“Oh honey, you know how I feel about parties,” her mother chided, switching into Mom mode, though she knew, by now, how useless it usually was. “Who’s having it? Will their parents be there?”
Erica rolled her eyes and didn’t answer, examining her nails and picking at the flaking black nail polish. Her mother sighed.
“I think it would be best if you stayed in tonight. We’ll carve a pumpkin, have some cider, it’ll be nice.” She smiled, attempting to regain that pleasant expression, that excited tone, but it fell short.
Erica threw her head back and sighed loudly. In two quick strides she was at the counter. Wrenching a large butcher knife out of the clean dishes rack she turned and slammed into the top of the pumpkin, burying it almost to the hilt. Her mother let out a shriek of surprise.
“There, it’s ready to go out. Can I go now?” She didn’t wait for a response. Spinning on her heel, she stormed out the back door through the garage and didn’t return.
She’d be dressed as a devil, she’d said, in a red cloak.
Once he arrived at the venue, Rob realized that he should have insisted on more specifics than that. To hell with specifics, he should have demanded a photograph. When she’d expressed her desire for them to get to know each other without the visual references, he’d been charmed. It had occurred to him that her motive was self-consciousness, of course. Her profile did use the word full-figured. But it wasn’t as if he weren’t self-conscious, himself. There were no good pictures of him, where he looked happy. None that made him seem approachable. Since birth, all cameras had conspired to make him seem frightened or miserable. So when she’d said she didn’t need to see a picture, Rob had been more relieved than suspicious.
Which left him here, at a party full of strangers in a club he’d never been to, nervously scanning a human sea of costumes for a red cloak. Oh, let’s be honest. I’m looking for a large woman in a red cloak. He was no fool. A woman like her… just the right blend of funny and provocative, able to tease without making him feel as though she were condescending… that was a rare find by any standards. She must be singularly unattractive by societal norms, to still be single. She was too full of life, too intelligent, too perfect, otherwise.
He refused to let that concern him, however. So what if she were huge? Let her be four hundred pounds and riddled with imperfections. Annie was the most engaging virtual conversationalist he’d ever met, and Rob was determined to make it work between them. He just had to find her, first, and hope that she wasn’t disappointed in him.
Perhaps he should have worn more of a costume. The tuxedo was just inappropriate enough for the venue to help him blend in, but with his glasses on he suspected that he looked like a nerd trying to pass for James Bond. Nobody asked. Nobody approached him at all, but that was normal. When he was concentrating over something, whether it was scanning through a crowd of merrymakers or working out the next quarterly budget, Rob had a tendency to wear a pinched expression that made him look sour. When he found Annie, he’d have to make a concerted effort not to glower by accident. Women responded more positively to smiles, but Rob wasn’t much of a smiler, naturally. He’d have to try. Perhaps he should have practiced in the mirror.
Was it possible that she hadn’t come? That this was a ruse? He’d been stood up before. Ever since high school, there’d always been the occasional girl who was cruel enough to lead him on. Trick him into believing that he might have found someone who’d find him desirable, just to let him fall flat on his face against the hard, cement floor of the truth. Rob York, the unloveable, the unloved. Annie wouldn’t do that to him, though. He was sure of it. She’d had romantic horror stories of her own. They’d bonded over their failures, when she wasn’t poking gentle fun at his utter lack of successes.
No, she’d be there. She’d promised. And with that very thought, there appeared a red cloak in the crowd. His heart initially leapt into his throat, but quickly plummeted. Could that possibly be his Annie? Large was an understatement; the person looked to be seven feet tall! When the cloak turned, Rob saw that this devil was a towering, shirtless man. All tattoos and muscles, smirking beneath his horns.
Oh, God.
There were certain things that couldn’t be overcome by force of will. Couldn’t be expected to. So when Rob saw that devil, he turned and fled, determined to delete his email account. No more dating sites. Ever.
Ms. Donnelly
Thank you for agreeing to house-sit for me this week. There's candy in the kitchen for the trick-or-treaters on Thursday. The birds in the foyer will respond to their names: Theodore, Joseph, and Stephen. The key you were given will open any door in the house, but I'd advise leaving the upstairs office closed.
Much obliged,
Christine York
Tatum stood on the stoop, note in hand, teeth gnawing at her lip nervously. She had agreed to watch Mrs. York's house upon her father's order.. which was, admittedly, how Tatum agreed to do most things she did not ordinarily want to do. Her classes, her college plans, even her friendships. Now community service, apparently. He controlled it all. She did as he said. She wasn't allowed to hang out with anyone that dad didn't approve of; it was probably why she was spending Halloween babysitting birds instead of out making mischief like a normal teenager. Certainly blaming her dad's nature was easier than accepting responsibility for her own lack of social graces.
When she let herself inside, she didn't want to linger in the foyer. She liked all animals, assumed that was why her dad had volunteered her for this job.. but she didn't really like birds much. They weren't fuzzy like cats or dogs, even rodents. What if they pecked at her? It was very Hitchcock. She was polite enough to greet them in their cages, squinting down at the page and reading each name, waiting for them to reply. Which they did. "I-I'm Tatum," she told them. It turned out that they could mimic her name back to her, each bird repeating it back to her in turn, blinking their dark eyes at her. Creepy.
Looking upon the stash of candy waiting on the kitchen counter had her sweet-tooth aching. Old ladies were often the best houses when trick-or-treating, they loved kids and were often most generous, that was a fact. Her father usually handed out the bare minimum fun-sized candy bar, but Mrs. York obviously had enough disposable candy income that Tatum was sure no one would notice if she were to steal a few sweets off the top. It was Halloween night, after all, and she hadn't outgrown treats.
She only went into the office because she'd needed a pair of scissors to bust up the weed, she would swear on that. Snacking and smoke went hand in hand, but she couldn't roll a proper joint without supplies. It stood to reason that an office would have a pair of scissors in it. And really, it was Christine York's fault for leaving the book out on her desk like that, Tatum would swear on that next. Wide open to that chapter, Carnality.
Tatum wasn't even sure what the word meant precisely, but the illustration on the page was enough to make her blush, to get the gist across. It was enough to make her glance nervously over her shoulder, toward the open office door.. before she sat in the chair and ran her fingers over the page. Downstairs, the birds began to cry. Tatum's brow furrowed, flipping a page, skimming words and averting her eyes from certain depictions. For all of the strange illustrations and passages, most written in a language she didn't understand, there were bits of English. Seemingly scrawled in by someone else after the fact. Neat writing. York, maybe. Short phrases, concise explanations of what the passages below represented. Or what they were supposed to accomplish.
She started reading quietly on the third page, without thinking; How to Make Yourself More Attractive to Those You Desire. With only the description in English, she had to sound out all words in the passage slowly, awkward on her tied tongue. When she finished, nothing happened, and she was sure that maybe she had read it all wrong. Or perhaps it was just a good luck chant or something. Spell book, hah. She almost laughed. Was she so gullible?
Then she finally stood up, and she felt it against her leg, unfamiliar and hard. Unnatural. It was not what she wanted, but it was something that might make her more.. attractive to normal girls.
When she finally found the scissors, she was burying them into her groin instead, screaming frantically. Determined to get it off, get it off, get it off...
He kept his head down. Kept his nose clean, as the phrase goes. Kept his ears open. That’s what a good cop did, after all. It was a mantra as ingrained in Archer Avery’s persona just as surely as his
squared-shoulders stance and verbal brevity. Head down. Nose clean. Ears open.
That mindset meant that the full moon didn’t make much of a dent in his personality. Cops, even the sort that weren’t all that superstitious, swore that the full moon made people batcrap crazy. Crime went up. Nights when the moon was luminous, ripe… those were the nights when people showed their true colors.
Archer’s true color was white. Same as his fucking hair. When he shifted, he became a large pale grey wolf with so much white shot through his coat that his absurd partner had nicknamed him White Fang. Archer wasn’t so easily amused. Lycanthropy? Not a barrel of laughs. There were canine cops, sure. Just not lupine ones. None that he knew.
A year into his second skin, Archer thought he finally hit a good balance. The physical change hurt like a bitch; there was no helping that. What he believed he could help was the wolf-brain that competed with his human mind, warred for attention. He wasn’t some blood-thirsty psycho animal like you saw in horror films, but when the moon was full he sure as hell wanted to hunt. On two legs, that sorta shit hadn’t appealed to Archer. On four, it was sustenance and sport rolled into one.
If he had to be a werewolf, Archer figured he’d be the best fucking werewolf he could be. Although he worked hard, learned to supplant the bestial urges with the iron will of his humanity, he indulged the wolf-brain now and again, made trips upstate to run through the woods, setting his sights on deer but just as willing to enjoy windsprints against rabbits, cutting off their escape routes then letting them go just to give chase again. Archer’d never played with his food as a kid. He was making up for it now.
Work was keeping him busy these days, though. Too many unsolved cases, too many superior officers breathing down his neck for progress. One chief literally did that very thing, bent over Captain Avery at
his desk in a pathetic attempt to show his dominance and the menace of his visit. It had taken every ounce of Archer’s will not to turn and snap his jaws at the other cop’s jugular. Even then, he didn’t think that maybe the wolf was weaving himself more firmly into his consciousness, making the line between human and other smudge and blur.
Instead of making the trek upstate, Archer resolved to spend October’s full moon in the city so he could catch up on paperwork in the daytime. The change was always so draining but he’d never let fatigue stop him when he was fully human. Why worry about it now? And there was plenty of park for him to roam at night. Just had to keep the wolf-brain at bay once he shifted.
It was too bad that Archer willfully ignored the fundamental flaw in that plan: you can’t tell a wild animal that you’d give him a bigger and better hunt next month. You also can’t tell him to stop when he spots a squirrel and all you’d given yourself to eat that day was an energy bar. If a starving werewolf spots a squirrel, he’s going to give chase. If he chases it in full view of people, those people are going to scream. When people scream, cops show up. Cops with guns.
Forget the myths about silver bullets; the regular kind work just fucking fine. Archer Avery, werewolf, learned that the hard way. Blood bubbled up from his throat, frothing pink over his snowy muzzle. The last
thing he saw before he died was his panicked partner, service weapon drawn.