Snyder Halloween Season

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 979-8-89008-514-6
Verlag: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

Halloween is the most wonderful part of the year for many of us. For dedicated fans, the season begins when the leaves start turning autumn colors and doesn't finish until Hallowtide ends in November. With it comes a whole lot of fun: scary movies and stories, haunted houses, seasonal sweets, spooky decorations, costume parties, and of course trick or treat. But Halloween is also a deeply spiritual time for some; it's an opportunity to remember and honor loved ones who have passed on.

Master storyteller Lucy A. Snyder has filled her cauldron with everything that Halloween means to her and distilled it into a spell-binding volume of stories. Within these pages you'll find thrills and chills, hilarity and horrors, the sweet and the naughty.

One of the best things about Halloween is you don't have to be yourself. So go ahead and try on a new mask or two ... you may discover hidden talents as a witch, a pirate, a space voyager, a zombie fighter, or even an elf. This is the perfect collection to celebrate the season of the dead or to summon those heady autumn vibes whenever you like. You may even find a couple of tales that evoke a certain winter holiday that keeps trying to crowd in on the fun.

In the worlds within this book, every day is Halloween!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Snyder, Lucy A.

Leseproben

Hazelnuts and Yummy Mummies

I was at the edge of the SowenCon Author Alley in the main vendor hall when the drugs began to take hold. A guy in a black Batman tee shirt was frowning down at my books, clearly not liking what he saw. I’d nailed a smile to my face as I chatted about the plot of my first novel, but I knew I wasn’t connecting because his scowl deepened and deepened but he wasn’t walking away so I started babbling about the plot of the rest of the series while thinking, Oh god, why did I agree to do this?

You agreed to this because they offered you a free hotel room and you have to stay busy this weekend, my Inner Responsible Adult replied. On Halloween, you have to stay busy. You have to, or you will think too many thoughts and end up in the bin again.

Keeping busy was good. But I wasn’t any kind of plausible saleswoman. Nobody was going to hire me to pitch jewelry or juicers. I became a writer in the first pea-picking place because I could only seem to gather my thoughts on paper; I constantly found myself tongue-tied whenever I had to meet new people. So why in the name of sweet candy corn was I working a table trying to talk up books I’d written precisely because I could never reliably form complete sentences except with a keyboard? Couldn’t I have chosen to stay busy doing something less painful, like competing in ghost pepper eating contests? Nude sandpaper surfing? Milking angry sharks?

In my mind, I heard my dead mother’s voice: “Life is a grand comedy, dear; just do your best.”

I suddenly felt too hot despite the chilly diesel-stinky October draft from the loading dock in back and my head felt floaty and puffy like a party balloon. And I wasn’t even sure what words were coming out of my mouth. Something something action something adventure something award-winning something. Batfan’s face scrunched up more and more, getting impossibly wrinkled, and his nose squinched and flattened and inverted, his eyes shrunk tiny, black and beady and suddenly I was looking up at the head of an actual bat. A brown bat like the ones that roosted under the overpass near my mom’s house back in Missouri. Except fifty times as huge, because brown bats are itty-bitty and the Batfan had a noggin the size of a cantaloupe.

I trailed off, gaping at him. What. The. Actual. Fuck.

And then wondered: Did I say that out loud?

The bat gave me a weird, suspicious look and walked away without a screech.

Elaine, the SowenCon author liaison, came hurrying up, her tall pointy witch hat askew, her glittery blue satin dress swirling and glowing like galaxies. Her whole outfit seemed to have turned into a portal to another dimension. I felt as though I might fall right into it.

“Miss Bowen?” she said. By her expression, it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get my attention. A halo of stardust seemed to float around her face.

“Yes?” I replied. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. It seemed huge as a tuna, and it might wriggle free and go swimming across the sea-green carpet. I’d have to chase it down in the gaming room, tackle it near the Munchkin tournament. The idea of that made me laugh out loud.

“Did you eat one of the black raspberry cookies?” Elaine was frowning, looking worried. Her face was getting wrinkled up. I wondered if she was going to turn into a bat, too.

She’d been by a half-hour before with a big basket of homemade Halloween cookies for all the guest authors and artists. A whole spread of tiny frosted tombstones, snickerdoodle ghosts, gingerbread cats. And black cookies, each decorated with a single blue candy eye. I have blue eyes, and after three hours of sitting at my table, the thought of devouring my own flesh had started to appeal to me. So I took two, and gave one to my friend Heather, who’d come with me to the convention to help schlep books and maintain my sanity.

“Did you eat one of the black cookies?” Elaine repeated.

I nodded slowly. “It was tasty. But the frosting was a little bitter.”

“Oh no.” She leaned in over by books. “Listen. I meant to give you a treat, but you got a trick by mistake. You’ve just consumed a fairly large dose of a hallucinogen. Those black cookies were for our ritual tonight, but our initiate got the batches mixed up.”

Elaine’s eyes were swirling, glittering, dark as a black pearl ring my mom used to own. It was always her favorite. She lost it in the ocean the same day she got her first diagnosis.

“My mom died five years ago today,” I blurted out. “She had two kinds of cancer and ehrlichiosis and cryptosporidium and it all killed her. It was like watching Boromir get shot with those black arrows. She never did anything halfway, not even dying.”

“I’m…I’m really sorry to hear that. But the hallucinogen—”

“On Halloween we’re supposed to remember the dead,” I said. “But how can I not remember my mom dying? How could I ever not think about that? So she could have died any other day and I’d still remember. Dying on Halloween was just…overkill. But hey, that’s Mom! Never do things halfway.”

“I’m truly sorry about your mother, but listen!” Elaine was speaking very slowly and clearly, as if she were addressing a learning-disabled child. “The hallucinogen is going to give you visions. It might last five or six hours.”

I had a moment of rational clarity: “I take antidepressants. There’s a bunch of stuff I’m not supposed to take with them. Is the cookie going to make me sick?”

“I don’t think so.” She sounded profoundly uncertain, and her voice echoed as if she were in a large cavern. “Many of us in the coven are also on antidepressants and nobody’s had a problem. But you do need to drink a lot of water. I’m going to call someone to take you back to your hotel room and keep an eye on you. I’ll get someone else to watch your table for the rest of the day. Everything will be fine.”

“I have a panel on zombie poetry in an hour,” I said, watching tiny stardust pixies dance around her hat.

“Don’t worry about the panel—”

“But I have to warn them.” I gazed up at her, suddenly realizing it was not merely another convention panel but a very important personal mission. “I have to warn them all that when you write poetry, you are letting the brain eaters into your mind. You are letting them into your mind!”

“Listen, don’t worry about the brain eaters. Just come around the table take my hand and we’ll get you back to your room and get you some blankets and water, and—”

“VICTORIAAAA!”

Heather was zooming down the carpeted aisle full-speed on her electric, candy apple red mobility scooter. Startled con-goers were dodging right and left to get out of her way. She’d had surgery on both feet four weeks earlier and while she’d been okayed to walk short distances, the vastness of the convention center was just too much.

Her eyes were hugely dilated, and she had a sweaty look of determination I seldom saw outside end game rounds of Iron Dragon. In her free arm, she clutched a brand-new skateboard decorated with the colorful unicorn logo of one of the role-playing game companies that was sponsoring the convention. As far as I knew, she didn’t skateboard and certainly wasn’t in any condition to do it now. Had she bought it? Won it? Stolen it? Was this Grand Theft Skateboard?

She plunked it down on the floor beside my table as though she were throwing a gauntlet. “Victoria! The Ghost of Trick-or-Treat needs us!”

“It does?”

“Yes! Come with me if you want to save The Great Pumpkin!” Her words rang with irresistible authority. I was needed. Summoned. Destined.

Nervous purple fairies orbited Elaine’s head. “I don’t think—”

“OK!” I jumped up and stared down at the skateboard, which was undulating slightly, like a cat that was about to hork up a hairball. “What now?”

“Get upon this flatfish steed and grab the back of my Harley!”

I was sure that the skateboard might vomit all over my shoes, but a good soldier in the Halloween army honors the call of duty. I stepped on the wobbly board and grasped the back of the scooter’s seat. The black vinyl bubbled up between my fingers and hissed at me, but I held fast.

“Oh, Miss Bowen, no—”

“To infinity!” Heather punched the scooter into high gear.

We zoomed past the laughing liquid racks of vendors’ books and games, faster and faster, the colors streaking and boiling with sparks as we approached light speed. And then with a blast of outer space cold, we were in the Haunter’s Hall where cartoon ghosts whooshed above the bloated foam animatronic zombies and shrieking funhouse mansion-fronts. Heather’s speeding wheels kicked up a storm of autumn leaves that made me sneeze from the smell of wood smoke and pumpkin spice. The leaves swirled up around us in a rattling vortex of reds and oranges and browns, their brittle serrated edges lashing my face and arms, and I let go of the scooter to shield my eyes—

—the skateboard squirted out from beneath my feet and my arms windmilled as I fell forward through empty darkness—

—and I face-planted onto someone’s frosty lawn, the air whoofing out of my lungs.

“Clumsy,” a man above me said. “A princess shouldn’t be clumsy.”

I...