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Halloween Haunts 2013: A Walk in the Mists by Keith Deininger Today I have a guest blog over at the Horror Writers Association website for Halloween Haunts 2013 where I take a walk in the mists of memory and share some creepy, non-fiction Halloween moments from my life. Take a quick look, leave a comment (any time through the end of the month) and you just might win this autographed copy of THE NEW FLESH. Afraid I'm not much of a sketch artist, but sometimes I doodle anyway... He stood in the doorway and tried to control his breathing. The room was empty except for an old man sitting crouched forward on a lone chair. The old man had a knife in one hand and his index finger extended with the other; he was slowly whittling his finger with the knife, taking thin curls of flesh with each swipe. Below him, to catch the shavings and the blood, there was a tin bucket. Blood dripped from the old man’s finger. Plink...plink… “‘Ello, young feller,” the old man said, and continued to whittle. Plink. Zach held the card up so he could read it: 'Is this a dream?' He looked at the old man. The old man did not disappear. Plink. In the story, it is nighttime on every page and the illustrated trees look sickly yet alive. A young boy wanders through those woods alone, when he hears something behind him, a snapping twig. He is scared, and starts to run. On the next page, we see what pursues him. It is a strange pair of green pants; just pants, no legs, but something about the opening about the waist implies much more, forming a mouth of sorts, gibbering. The boy runs and he is pursued. On each page the boy struggles through a different nightmare landscape: a swamp where faces stare up at him from the muck, trees with mossy branches reaching out for him, reptilian animals with grins of triumph. Until eventually, the boy sees his village before him. He runs to it, and waiting by the gates, springing out at him, tackling him to the ground, is the the pair of green pants.
On the next page, the boy walks happily through town, wearing his new green pants, showing them off. And there’s a moral to the story, although it escapes me at the moment. The boy has gained a new friend. Something like that. The problem is, the boy’s face always seemed different to me. I remember looking at it closely. His smile was different than before, than it was at the beginning of the story. His smile looked kind of like the one made by the pants, sloppy and gibbering. And I always thought the pants had somehow swallowed the boy, and now it was those creepy green pants walking around town, morphed to look like the boy, pretending to be kind and friendly, waiting for their next victim. That’s how I remember the story, anyway. But that’s crazy, right? That just goes to show you how a kid’s imagination can twist a perfectly innocent story. All I know for sure is that I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I was too scared. I’d find myself under the covers, the lights out, the door closed, and I couldn’t help but to imagine those green pants stalking around outside, or coming after me in my dreams if I fell asleep. What if there really were things--like those green pants--that could eat you whole, and then walk around in everyday life pretending to be normal? But they weren’t normal. And all they wanted was to play their little game of eating and eating… And Kevin Conners, a second-grader, whose backyard dumped out into a strip of land filled with scraggly trees against the highway, was out looking for bottles for his bottle collection, when he found, with a jolt of excitement, a strange-looking bottle with a cork stopper. When he pulled the stopper free, he discovered the bottle was filled with a dark crimson liquid with a strangely metallic smell. It couldn’t be blood, could it? He hid the bottle and the next day, after school, went looking for more. He found several test tubes and a beaker, with similar stoppers, filled with the same substance. He was thrilled, because mostly his collection consisted of beer and soda bottles and these were a rare find, but they made him uneasy. He dumped the liquid inside them down the drain in the sink in the garage and washed them out the best he could. He tucked them away so his parents wouldn’t see them and start asking questions. A few days later, the crimson fluid began to come up from the pipes, filling all the sinks in the house, the bathtub, and the toilet, then spilling over onto the floor. Then, the sprinkler system came to life and painted the front lawn red.
--from WITHIN US ALL, work in progress All through this great month of October, the Horror Writers Association is hosting a series of blog posts about Halloween and other such things, book giveaways, and excerpts from the works of many fantastic horror writers. And I am, of course, one of them and will be giving away a signed paperback copy of THE NEW FLESH! My post, A Walk in the Mists (about a few choice creepy moments in my life), is coming out on the 28th, very close to Halloween itself. It's definitely worth checking out! Go here: http://www.horror.org/blog/ and click on the Halloween Haunts posts. |
"Unrelenting Horror"- FREE!An award-winning author known for blending elements of fantasy with horror in his surreal, literary style. Author of WITHIN, A GAME FOR GODS and VIOLENT HEARTS.
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