hwango

Once up on a time there was a very spooky story. The story contained all sorts of scary things, like skeletons and existential dread and ghouls and dead goats puppeteered from the inside by enormous colonies of spiders. It was terrifying. In fact, it was so terrifying that most people who tried to read it never made it to the end. Usually this was because they gave up reading long before the story was finished, and not because they fell victim to a soul-eating windmill. It was hardly ever the windmill.

Many people gave up at the part with the Ferris wheel made of bones. Some people made it to the bit with the well filled with snakes. Almost no one made it to the eldritch windmill. That horrible, horrible windmill. The shrieking of its grinding gears, and the ceaseless babbling of its sails made from - well, I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.

Anyway, the point is that the story was scary enough to drive most people away before they reached the end. However, the story was not thwarted so easily.

Elements of the story would creep out and chase after the reader, trying to re-acquire their attention. As you might imagine, this strategy rarely met with success. If, for example, you abandoned reading a story because you were so unsettled by the idea of a well full of snakes whose constant slithering and hissing mingled into a nightmarish chorus endlessly whispering the names of the dead, and then you discovered that your own well was filled with such snakes, I doubt your first impulse would be to go back to read about even more snakes. But this didn't stop the story from trying. Really, nothing could stop the story. The story was relentless. Implacable. Inescapable.

But don't worry, the story that you are reading is about Terrance the Dancing Llama.

Terrance woke up early one morning to sunshine and singing birds. The birds were singing a legally distinct song about it being Terrance's birthday that would not require them to pay anyone any royalties, because it was Terrance's birthday! Terrance danced merrily into his kitchen, where he discovered that someone had snuck in while he was asleep and put up decorations and balloons and a giant banner that read "Happy Birthday Terrance!!!!" You or I would doubtless be terrified that someone who would string together four consecutive exclamation marks had broken into our home while we were asleep, but Terrance's life was one of such carefree bliss that this didn't concern him at all.

Terrance visited all of his friends while running his morning errands. There was Winifred the Kudu, Thorvald the Alpaca, Astrid the Oryx, and even Lancaster the Goat! Everyone said a cheerful "hello!" and wished Terrance a happy birthday! Winifred said that they should have tea later. Thorvald said they should get together later and make cookies. Astrid said they should play games later that afternoon. Lancaster said that later that evening they should visit the traveling carnival that had set up just outside of town! The carnival was spooky! Lancaster said the Ferris wheel was really weird!

Terrance had tea with Winifred the Kudu, made cookies with Thorvald the Alpaca, and played games with Astrid the Oryx! He had a delightful birthday! Then he went to see the carnival with Lancaster the Goat!

The carnival was spooky! The Ferris wheel was indeed really weird! It kind of looked like it was made of...bones?

Terrance wasn't sure he really wanted to ride a Ferris wheel made of bones, but Lancaster assured him that it would be fun. In fact, he was strangely insistent about it. Terrance thought Lancaster was acting a little oddly. Terrance thought Lancaster sounded funny. Terrance thought Lancaster looked a little off. What was that stuff stuck to his horns? Were those...cobwebs?

Oh no.

The lesson to be learned here is that birds have a more extensive knowledge of copyright laws than you might expect. That, and at least one of your friends is probably full of spiders.

Current Mood: spooky
Current Location: A well full of snakes
Current Music: The dreadful whispers of a well full of snakes

For the annual Spooky Story Contest at my library, which I can't actually enter because I'm too old, but that's never stopped me before.

Spooooky Story 2022

Timmy was dismayed to learn that his parents were idiots. He still loved them, and he was reasonably sure that they loved him, but that didn't change the fact that they were idiots.

The new house was clearly evil and probably haunted, and it was definitely brimming with monsters. Timmy's parents tried to convince him that it was just that moving to a new town and a new school and a new house were all scary, but Timmy didn't see anything scary about the new town, the new school seemed nicer than the old school, and it was clearly just the house that was the problem.

The house was not haunted, they said. It was just that it was a smart house, and there was a fancy computer that was doing things like controlling the temperature and managing air circulation and ordering them paper towels when they started to run out. That's why Timmy heard strange noises and why windows and doors and such moved on their own sometimes. Timmy was unable to convince his parents that the strange noises were the whispering voices and scrabbling claws of the monsters that lurked under his bed, in his closet, in the basement, in the attic, and even in one of the drawers in the kitchen.

Timmy's parents were willing to concede that Alexa from their previous house was slightly less sinister than their new house assistant, Alastor, but they still felt that Timmy was overreacting.

One afternoon, Timmy was left alone in the evil house. His mother had to work late that day, and his father had to make a quick trip to the store to buy paper towels, because Alastor had mistakenly ordered them four boxes of live crickets from a pet store instead of paper towels. Timmy's father assured him that he was certainly old enough and responsible enough to be on his own for a few minutes, and in the event of a crisis the house would call emergency services and both parents. None of this was reassuring to Timmy, since it seemed obvious to him that in the event of a crisis the house would probably just order more crickets, and he was certain that he would be devoured as soon as his father left the house. Timmy considered begging his father not to go, but he didn't think that doing so would change his father's mind, and the conversation would only make their last moments together awkward and embarrassing for both of them.

However, Timmy was pleasantly surprised to find that he was not immediately eaten by ravenous monsters once he was alone in the house, and he wondered if perhaps he might be okay after all. Maybe the monsters would only eat him if he were alone in the house at night or something.

The doorbell rang. Timmy thought about ignoring it - certainly he wasn't going to open the door for some stranger - but there was always a chance that his father or mother had come back earlier than expected and had misplaced their keys.

"Who is it?" Timmy shouted through the door in what he hoped was a mature and confident voice.

"I'm here about the attic," said a voice from the other side of the door. Definitely not one of Timmy's parents. Timmy was about to reply that this person would need to come back another time when, to his horror, the door opened on its own.

"Welcome, authorized entity," said Alastor's creepy voice.

"Wait!" shouted Timmy, but it was too late, and the stranger had already stepped inside. Timmy knew it was wrong to judge people based on their appearances, but it was hard not to recoil in horror from the man's dead eyes and waxy skin. The intruder fixed his lifeless gaze on Timmy and his face shifted oddly. After a moment of this, Timmy realized that the man was attempting a friendly smile, but he obviously didn't have a lot of practice with the expression, and the results were less than favorable.

"Shouldn't Mom and Dad be here for whatever this is?" Timmy objected. Immediately, Timmy realized his mistake in revealing that those individuals were absent.

"Do not worry, Timothy, your parents have authorized this individual," Alastor said.

"They have?" Timmy asked, filled with skepticism.

"Yes, this situation is clearly permitted under the terms of the End User License Agreement that they signed," said Alastor.

This seemed plausible. The same people who bought and moved into a house without checking first to make sure it wasn’t evil probably also signed off on terms and conditions without actually reading them.

The stranger walked past Timmy and headed up the stairs. Feeling that it would be irresponsible and also rude to just leave a guest wandering unattended through the house, Timmy followed him. Timmy noticed that the man was consulting a piece of paper covered with hand-written directions both to the house and then to the attic inside.

“There’s a scary monster up there,” Timmy said, half in warning and half to try to get the man to leave.

“I doubt that very much, young man,” said the intruder without any evident concern. Oh, well.

The man pulled the stairs to attic down and climbed up. Timmy's desire to be a responsible host was not sufficient to induce him to follow the man into the attic, and he waited nervously at the bottom of the stairs.

"These cobwebs are shameful!" the man's voice echoed down the steps. "And this floor!" The floor did creak a bit, but Timmy didn't think it was as bad as all that. "Oh, and here's the monster you mentioned." Timmy froze in terror, but the man didn't sound particularly alarmed.

Then there was a great deal of crashing and banging, and also snarling and squishing and any number of other distressing noises. Eventually, the noises stopped, and then a mangled corpse tumbled down the stairs out of the attic. It had huge claws and lots of sharp teeth and more limbs than seemed strictly necessary. It was clearly some kind of monster.

The visitor strode calmly down the attic stairs dusting off his hands theatrically. He was covered in monster blood.

"See?" he said, "Not really so scary after all."

Timmy felt extremely conflicted. On the one hand, surely a dead monster was preferable to a live one, and so the overall situation should have improved. And yet, staring at the broken corpse was somehow not reassuring.

"Right, don't you worry," said the man. "I'll have those cobwebs up to snuff and get that floor squeaking properly before you know it!" Then he peeled off his human disguise and skittered up the stairs into the attic. He pulled the stairs up after him and immediately started creeping around noisily. Timmy had to admit that the new thing in the attic was true to his word, and the creaking was already louder and more terrifying than that of the previous monster.

"System upgrade complete," said Alastor's voice. "Begin cleanup phase."

Timmy heard the door to his closet bang open, and then the approach of heavy footsteps. Timmy hid in the bathroom and covered his ears to try to block out the sounds of all of the crunching and tearing and chewing. After a little while the noises stopped, and he heard the same heavy footsteps walking back down the hall and into his room, and then the door to his closet closing. When Timmy finally worked up the nerve to leave his hiding place, he discovered all evidence of the previous attic monster was gone.

Well, on the bright side, at least the thing that lived in his closet probably wouldn't be hungry tonight.

The lesson to be learned here is to always read the entire End User License Agreement before you agree to use any service. Also, due to the inexorable march of progress, monsters are no longer confined to large spaces like basements and closets, but can also be found in drawers, cabinets, and maybe even the space under the chair you're sitting in right now.

Current Mood: spooky
Current Location: spooooky
Current Music: spoooooky

Once again, the library is having a Spooky Story Contest...for children. Oh, well. Here is my just-for-fun-I-guess-I'm-too-old-for-you entry.

--

Once upon a time, there lived three siblings who were all young and ambitious necromancers. What’s a necromancer, you ask? Well, you know how most graveyards, mausoleums, government offices, closets, and basements are filled with shambling zombies, murderous skeletons, or various other abominations wrought from the discarded dead? All of those monsters were made by necromancers.

Anyway, the three little necromancers set out into the big, wide world to seek their fortunes and whatnot.

The first little necromancer raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build her a house made of bones. Not only bones, of course, because that would be both structurally unsound and would require an impractical number of bones. Nevertheless, the general motif and the materials used were predominantly osteological. Osteological? It means that the place was spooky.

The locals in the necromancer’s neighborhood did not approve of the necromancer or of her house. Partly it was that her house didn’t fit in with the guidelines of the local homeowners association, partly it was that her army of zombies was noisy and smelled bad and was an affront against nature and decency, but mostly it was that to raise her army and build her house the necromancer had scavenged a lot of her raw materials by desecrating the local cemeteries. Funerals are expensive and time-consuming, and nobody wants all of that effort and expense undone by someone digging up their relatives and turning them into wainscoting.

And so the locals formed an angry mob to tear down the house and dispose of the necromancer. The necromancer tried to point out that the building was made almost entirely of all-natural recycled materials, but the mob was far too angry to listen to this entirely reasonable argument for sustainable building practices, and so they set the house on fire and hacked apart the revenants with axes and chainsaws and such. The angry mob would certainly have done the same to the necromancer (either the setting on fire or hacking apart, they were not picky), but the little necromancer escaped and ran all the way to her brother’s house. Well, metaphorically ran – he lived several towns away. The little necromancers couldn’t live too close together or they’d be competing with each other for resources.

The second little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and commanded them to build him a house made of glitter and rainbows. He didn’t feel shackled by societal expectations of what sort of décor he or any necromancer should favor any more than he felt shackled by societal rules or natural laws against raising an army of the dead in the first place.

Now, it’s not easy to kill a rainbow, and even harder to preserve the corpse so you can harvest it for parts to build your necromantic lair, but the second little necromancer was very talented and industrious. He even made his own glitter, grinding up the bones of unicorns in his diabolical windmill. Yes of course that’s where real glitter comes from.

Sure enough, soon an angry mob formed outside the second little necromancer’s home as well. The mob felt threatened by the necromancer’s refusal to conform to gender stereotypes and his decision to use renewable energy in the form of his windmill rather than continue to feed money to the local energy conglomerates. I mean, they also shouted a lot about his zombies, but I think we all know what was really going on.

As the angry mob burned down the necromancer’s house and hacked apart his zombies with chainsaws and axes, he shouted at them that they were narrow-minded fools, and that they would rue the day. Then he and his sister fled before they were either caught by the mob or overcome by the toxic fumes from the burning glitter. Together they made their way to the home of their elder sister.

The third little necromancer had raised an army of revenants and then rented them out to factories and megastores and other large businesses, allowing those businesses to circumvent laws pertaining to fair compensation and employee rights, since the revenants weren’t actual living people. This was immensely profitable for the businesses, and also fairly lucrative for the necromancer, and she used the money to buy herself a modest, nondescript home out of the edge of town where she could work unnoticed and uninterrupted by angry mobs. At least, that had been the plan.

Alas, even though the necromancer scrupulously avoided social media and worked very hard to keep her personal information as secure as possible, the ceaseless surveillance of our dystopian nightmare world ultimately revealed her location to an angry mob of people driven out of their jobs by the necromancer’s zombies. Yes, I’ll grant you that the elder sister was clearly the most evil of her siblings, but I don’t know why the mob chose to direct their anger at the necromancer instead of the corporations. For some reason, angry mobs just really don’t seem to like necromancers.

Regardless, the necromancer’s corporate connections meant that all it took was a single phone call, and dozens of people with guns and riot armor and tear gas and helicopters showed up to disperse the angry mob, and the three little necromancers were safe to continue practicing their unspeakable arts and laughing in the face of death itself, and even now they continue to fill the world with monsters.

The lesson to be learned here is to always have your spare room ready for guests in case someone dear to you is suddenly menaced by an angry mob. That, and the reason the world is so full of monsters is because making them is so profitable.

Now ignore those noises coming from your closet and go to sleep.