by James Comins
What was happening to her?
Sarah went back home and tried to lay in bed. She wound up floating an inch above it. Sleep landed on her like a falling piano, and in the morning she still didn’t have any way to touch the world around her.
Despondent, she floated around the house, wishing she could eat breakfast or look at the Internet or take a shower. Instead she watched her dad get ready for work and drive away.
Alone.
From one familiar room to the next she drifted, wondering what had gone wrong. Was it something she’d done, or . . . no, there weren’t any answers. In the end she curled up, floating above the couch, and waited for something to happen.
As night fell, her dad came home. With him was a lady Sarah didn’t recognize, a lady dressed in black and wearing a very large hat like ladies in old movies wear. It looked like it was made of alligator skin. The woman had a bag over her shoulder. Sitting down at the kitchen table together, the woman unslung her bag and started taking things out.
Was her dad dating this spooky-looking woman? Right after his own daughter had died?
The woman drew a big shape on the kitchen table and said a few magic words.
Thump. Sarah dropped like a bag of logs onto the kitchen floor.
"Great prank, huh?" said her dad.
"What?" Sarah yelled.
"Mom told me that you were planning to play a prank on me, and so I figured I’d get one ready for you, too. Mrs. Strasvinskalofsky here was behind a tree when you played your prank, and she sent you to the spirit world for a day. You shouldn’t scare dads by pretending you’re dead."
"Well you shouldn’t ever prank your daughter!" Sarah shouted.
"Sweetie, if you don’t get scared from time to time, you’ll never get brave and adventurous."
Sarah burst into tears. "You said it was good when I was dead," she sobbed.
Her dad hugged her. "I meant it was good that you remembered to tug the bag as well as play the sound effect. You played a really good prank."
Sarah screamed out everything she had. Her dad was so frustrating! He didn’t understand anything. He was so mean and stupid.
"Thanks, dad," she muttered, after she was done screaming. "Love you."
"Love you, too, sweetie," he said, and gave her another big hug.
Mrs. Strasvinskalofsky rose and packed up her bag. "You know, my daughter Tasha’s having a hard time in school. She hasn’t done geometry since Rumanian boarding school in 1600 anno domini. Do you mind coming over sometime and helping her with her homework? Your dad says you’re great at math."
"Yeah, sure," said Sarah.
Mrs. Strasvinskalofsky left.
"Don’t ever prank me again," Sarah told her dad. She still felt really mad.
"Promise you’ll always be brave?" her dad said.
"Yes, dad," she groaned, rolling her eyes.
"Okay. I promise."
Louis
Louis was the town undertaker’s son. Every day his father came home smelling of strange chemicals, formaldehyde, fancy makeup and dead stuff. Gradually, the smell filled the house, and the garden, and got into all of Louis’ clothes. Mostly he couldn’t smell it, but at school all the other kids called him Corpse Boy, and eventually he stopped getting mad about it and just got used to the nickname.
As the smell got worse, something started happening. Louis started finding that anything he touched would shrivel up just a bit.
His homework worksheets would shrink and curl as he filled them out.
His number two pencils would turn a deeper shade of yellow and would spiral until they wouldn’t fit into the pencil sharpener anymore.
The keys to his computer keyboard would warp and pop out of their sockets.
The final straw--and his drinking straws went funny, too--the final straw was when Whiskers the housecat started losing its fur when he petted it.
There was something wrong with Louis.
When he told his mother that there was something wrong with him, she looked up from her crosswords and told him he had quite the imagination. When he showed her the handfuls of fur from Whiskers, she laughed and said it was just a touch of mange. She’d make a vet appointment, she told him.
He set Whiskers down, and masses of hair came out. Louis looked down at his hands and felt like he had some kind of curse.
That night, when he turned out the light, the lightswitch cracked.
He lay in bed, wondering what was happening to him. His nose itched, and when he scratched at it, he felt his nose burn. Stuffing his hands into his pillowcases, he tried to get some sleep.
In the morning, the entire stripy pillowcase was black like tar.
When he trudged downstairs and showed the pillowcase to his mother, she screamed, but she wasn’t looking at the pillowcase. She pointed a shaking finger at his nose.
In the mirror, he saw that part of his left nostril was a black hole. He couldn’t feel it anymore.
"Don’t touch anything else!" his mother exclaimed.
"Do you believe me now?" he asked irritably.
"We need to get you to a doctor!" she said. "You have that flesh-eating bacteria!"
"Then why did it eat my pillowcase, too?" he asked. "And my pencils, and my homework, and my lightswitch . . ."
"The doctor will know," his mother said, and they drove to the doctor’s.
When they got there, all the nurses covered their noses as politely as they could manage. Louis heard them whispering about "an awful stink! Smells like death!"
The doctor came in to the waiting room and tried to disguise a grossed-out look. "Please come into my office," he said, and Louis rose and followed the doctor.
With his stethoscope the doctor listened to Louis’ breath, which he said was normal. He wrapped a blood pressure sleeve around Louis’ arm and pumped it up. "Normal," he said. Then he put a magnifying glass over his eye and looked at Louis’ nose. "Bacterial," he pronounced, and wrote out a script for medicine.
"But doctor," Louis said. "My homework papers--"
The doctor didn’t reply. He had already left to tend to other patients.
Back home, Louis’ mother dropped two of the pills into his hand, but they immediately puffed into powder. She dropped the next two straight into his mouth, held a glass of water to his lips, and he swallowed.
"Now, don’t touch anything until the medicine does its work," she scolded, and sent him upstairs to his room.
Louis lay in bed, propping his hands up, listening to the radio. Eventually it was time for bed, and that’s when the trouble started.
Maybe it was the pills, or maybe it was all in his head, but suddenly his butt itched.
Then his nose itched.
Then his feet itched.
The itching spread like wild mushrooms, sprouting up all over him. He kept his hands up, gritting his teeth, as a million little itches came to life and began torturing him. There was no way he could get through the night without scratching. Maybe he could get a fork? Swinging his legs over the bed, he went to the door and grabbed the doorknob, but the doorknob twisted and melted under his fingers. He tried using his foot, then the crook of his elbow, but it was too late; the knob was fused shut. He was trapped.
"Mommmm," he called through the door, but she and Dad were out; they always went to late-night horror movies on Friday nights. He was alone in the house. Whiskers the cat mewed on the other side of the door.
He tried the doorknob one last time.
Trapped.
The itching was getting worse fast. He rifled through his stuff, looking for something he could itch himself with. He grabbed the computer keyboard with his elbows and tried scraping it over his back, but that wasn’t happening.
Like a shining itchy flame, his body was alight with itching. His slightly off-color palms twitched as he tried to resist--
Couldn’t resist--
* * *
When his parents came home, they pulled into the driveway, went inside and opened the b
edroom door to check on him. All they found was a perfectly preserved corpse.
Stacey
The murderer was right behind her. He had a knife. His breath was hot, and they were both running in the dark. Closer and closer, right behind her--
Stacey woke up with sweat dripping down her cheeks and pooling behind her ears. Her pillow was soaked. Breathing heavily, she pulled her frog slippers on and shuffled downstairs, away from the nightmare. Sunday. She finished her homework and printed it out.
The day passed. Bedtime.
The cabin was deep in the woods. Rickety. It rattled as the clawed fingers of creatures scratched on the doors and shutters. Sitting alone in the middle of the floor in the dark, she watched the bare wood walls bulge as the creatures battered it. Fingers began to reach through the gaps in the walls, fingers green and decayed but hungry. They were coming. They were coming. They were--
Stacey tumbled out of bed. She took her sopping pillow to the laundry room and threw it into the dryer, set it for an hour. She was still shivering.
In the lunchroom the next day, the new girl, the one who dressed all in black, came over to her and sat down.
"You look like you’ve seen a ghost," the new girl said.
"What’s your name?" Stacey asked.
"Natassiya Krzyzstina Strasvinskalofsky," said the new girl, "but you can call me Tasha. What’s wrong?"
Stacey sighed. "I keep having the same kind of bad dream. There’s always someone who’s trying to get me."
Tasha tipped her head to one side. "Well, why don’t you get them instead?"
This had never occured to Stacey.
"How--what should I--" she stuttered.
Tasha told her to come over after school. It was the big black house on the hill, she said. With the pink castle on the other side of the field.
After school, Stacey called her mom to tell her she was at a friend’s house and then went up the big field to the black house on the hill. It was painted jet black, shiny, with vinyl siding and a crooked chimney. Looking around, she saw Tasha coming up the road behind her, and together they went inside.
The furniture, the wallpaper and the carpet were all painted black. Stacey followed Tasha upstairs to Tasha’s bedroom, which was hung with shroud-like black taffeta and had several species of taxidermy raccoons and marmots.
"Did you . . . make those yourself?" Stacey asked, pointing nervously to a stuffed rat wearing a crown.
"I only stuff evil animals," Tasha replied. "The rat king was the worst, although these black widows were pretty bad, too. Now. You need to confront the monsters in your dreams, right? So you need a way to defend yourself."
Tasha opened a drawer and pulled out a selection of daggers and knives. They seemed to wave in the dim light, as if they were made of black fire.
"Which one do you like?" Tasha asked.
Stacey had never touched a dagger before. She was reluctant to come too close. But Tasha drew her forward, and she selected a short, square-pommelled dagger with a purple blade.
"Interesting," said Tasha. "Don’t touch the blade, you’ll prick your finger. Now. Take this home and keep it under your pillow, and when you’re chased by a monster, turn and reach for it. And fight."
Tasha wrapped the dagger in a piece of black leather and tied it with a black ribbon. She handed it to Stacey and sent her home by herself.
Taking her newly-dry pillow out of the dryer, Stacey stuffed the strange dagger into the pillowcase and tried to go about the rest of her day. The adventure ahead of her seemed very frightening, but also exhilarating. She couldn’t wait to fight her fears.
Acknowlogies and Apoledgements
Let's begin by saying how important Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Read in the Dark books were to these stories. I first read Schwartz's books when I was early grade school, and they scared the dickens out of me. I've always wanted to write stories that made people feel the same way, but I think kids have changed since those books came out, and I think they need something scarier still these days. If you think this book is TOO scary, go read Alvin Schwartz and see if you can handle that. If those are too scary too, maybe you need to get brave.
Goosebumps and the Bruce Coville books were influential, as were the TV shows Are You Afraid of the Dark and The Real Ghostbusters. I haven't read as much Stephen King as I'd like, even though I grew up down the street from him, but there's no doubt that some of the Stephen King movies seeped into the stories. I might also add Shel Silverstein for his influence on the pony story, "Ryan." And the story about the shadow, "Sam," was strongly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, who might be the scariest writer ever.
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