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    Love and Other Scary Things
    Love and Other Scary Things
    Love and Other Scary Things
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    Love and Other Scary Things

    By Lydia Westing

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    About this ebook

    When Christine was twelve years old she made a list of her greatest fears. Never did it occur to her that someday it would come back to bite her in the ass. Christine’s aunt is ready to retire and willing to let Christine take over her year-round Halloween store, a small but successful tourist attraction. There’s just one caveat to the deal: Christine must prove that she understands fear by facing every single one on that list. Her aunt gives her a camerawoman to record her quest to face her fears, a former high school mean girl who now works at the store, Kendra Santosi. Will Christine be able to make it through the entire list in the month before Halloween? And will she ever have the guts to tell Kendra that number ten on her list is “telling Kendra Santosi I'm in love with her”?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBryant Street Shorts
    Release dateSep 17, 2020
    ISBN9781094413440
    Author

    Lydia Westing

    Lydia Westing is usually a comedy and pop-culture writer for websites like Reductress, Bunny Ears, Cracked, and The Modern Rogue. She has a small dog and a large husband, and they all live together in Nashville, Tennessee. She played roller derby for several different teams on and off for over five years. She’s much better at writing than she ever was at roller derby.

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      Book preview

      Love and Other Scary Things - Lydia Westing

      Chapter One: I’m Afraid of Werewolves

      God, it’s such a tired way to start a story, but it all really did start on a dark and stormy night. I was exhausted from taking the red-eye into Indiana from San Francisco after my shift ended at work and then driving the hour and forty-five minutes from Indianapolis to Devil’s Creek in the pouring rain.

      I hate flying, so one of my waitresses gave me three Xanax, but I had saved them for the much more traumatic experience I was sure to encounter entering my Auntie’s store at three in the morning. Auntie Elaine loved to spook me. She’d been doing it since I was a little girl, and the novelty had not worn off as I’d grown up.

      She didn’t mean anything by it. Scaring people was how she said I love you, which was probably why she’d chosen to spend her life curating the most popular (and only) tourist attraction in Devil’s Creek, Indiana, Halloween Village. When you enter Devil’s Creek, a faded billboard warns that it’s the last Halloween store for 10,000 miles. This is only true nine months out of the year, but no one has complained to Aunt Elaine about that yet.

      The store was huge, two stories tall, with a pumpkin patch out front, a corn maze in the back, and woods all around that were used for a haunted hayride during the busy season.

      There was a rundown museum of the weird in the back of the store that was mostly old animatronics’ and fetal pigs in jars. Whole rooms were devoted to bins of skeletons and shelves of haunted dolls. Basically, anything spooky you could think of, Halloween Village had four in stock.

      The second level of Halloween Village was mostly storage for the fancier costumes that she rented out. There was also a cute two-bedroom apartment where Auntie Elaine lived, which was why I was at the store so late at night.

      Auntie Elaine had promised to leave the front door unlocked for me. I guess the town’s small enough that she doesn’t worry about getting robbed. So now, I was facing a creepy Halloween store lit only by the occasional flash of lightning.

      I don’t like to think of myself as an anxious person, but, well, it’s an adjective that’s been used to describe me before. I eased the door open and was greeted by a recording of a menacing laugh, followed by a bellow of, Enter if you dare! and a clap of fake thunder that was accentuated by a real one.

      Shit, I muttered involuntarily as the thunder combo made me jump. I quickly rolled in my wet suitcase and closed the door behind me. Making my way through the store, I noted lots of new additions to the shop. I hadn’t visited since I started managing the wine bar three years ago, just hadn’t been able to get the time off.

      There was a giant spider with blood-covered fangs tucked into one corner. The kid’s costume section had been relocated to the front of the store, probably a good idea as things tended to get scarier the further back you moved. For example, the very back wall of the store was lined with metal drums filled with various severed limbs. A sign above it said, All internal organs buy three get one free!

      The last time I visited, the store hadn’t been nearly this organized. There was clear labeling for every section now: medieval costumes, cartoon costumes, bawdy costumes, an entire wall for all the fake teeth.

      I got so distracted looking around at the fantastic new organization that I ran right into a man standing in front of the stairway to my aunt’s apartment. At first, I thought it might be a mannequin, but then he started to move. As I went crashing to the ground, dragging the mysterious invader with me, I screamed.

      As I prepared to fight this mysterious intruder off, I noticed that he kept his hands stiff and on each side of my head, pretty polite for a burglar, not trying to rough me up for anything. Suddenly, he started to scream too, or… no, wait… he was howling? That’s when I realized it wasn’t a man or even a mannequin. It was an animatronic werewolf. He must have been motion activated.

      Christine, is that you? My aunt called from the top of the stairs.

      Yeah, Auntie Elaine. I’m sorry, I think I might have broken your werewolf.

      She laughed, You’re still so jumpy, kid. Don’t worry about it. That thing was already on the fritz. You have to get right up on it to activate the motion.

      Uh-huh, I noticed, I sighed as I tried to disentangle myself from the automaton.

      Auntie Elaine made her way downstairs to help. She slept in boxers and a ratty Nightmare on Elm Street T-shirt. It was strange to see her short, dark hair, which she usually kept carefully slicked back, sticking out in every direction. Her stocky physique made it easy for her to pull the werewolf off of me.

      We had a brief hello hug before she yawned and asked, What time is it?

      Around three, I replied.

      Well, come on, let’s get you to bed. You must be exhausted.

      Auntie, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep until you tell me what you need to tell me, I said. When she called me and insisted that I book a ticket to Indiana as soon as possible so we could have a conversation in person, I was afraid I knew exactly what she was going to say.

      Cancer ran in my family. It took my Grandmother, and then four years ago it took my mother; now it had come for her. I’ve been so worried about you, I said. Suddenly, all of the worry, the tiredness from the trip, and the shock of the werewolf attack got to me.

      Auntie Elaine looked at the tears gathering in my eyes and realized the mistake she had made. Oh, Christine, no, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s nothing bad! It’s all good news!

      Really? You promise?

      Yes, of course,

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