Daily Scares

Haunted Hosue Week: Feverish Tenants

2007-11-02T16:23:00.000-04:00

This has nothing to do with Halloween. Just thought I'd say that. This is actually a leftover from Haunted House week, which I nixed because Jeff already had a story set in a skyscraper (we've both been inspired by Poltergeist III).

Like with The Shoppes at Marblehead, Feverish Tenants dips into my years of real estate. Jeff's spent a lot of time skirting the medical field, so his stories have their share of on-the-job know-how gleaned from various medical publications. I was never so hungry for material as to go back into my pulverbatch of college jobs, which were largely making photocopies and shelving the one book a week someone would take out of an office building's internal library. But since I was writing most of these while immersed in real estate, more stories than you'd think hinged on - in this case - the occupancy rates of office buildings. - Sean

P.S. Hours of fun if you look up "pulverbatch".

Halloween Week: What Day Is This?

2007-10-31T11:53:00.000-04:00

My costume this year consists of a stovepipe hat, fake beard, an assemble of jackets, vets and pants that I imagine resembes 19th century formal wear, and a big black porthole hanging over my stomach.

What am I? The Lincoln Tunnel. My girlfriend, in a blonde wig, holding tulips, and wearing a matching porthole, is the Holland Tunnel. Why are we dressing up? Well, What Day Is This?

I'll get three wears out of this costume (a costume party at a bar last Friday, a local kids' thing tonight Jen and I are volunteering at, and my school's party tomorrow). I normally consider it luck yot get two wears out of something. If anyone needs a cheap stovepipe hat after tomorrow, email me. - Sean

Halloween Week: Devil's Night in Bloomfield Hills

2007-10-30T23:18:00.000-04:00

Raking at night.

I've never raked at night before. For years the idea seemed as ridiculous as reading at night: you can't see what you're doing. But this night, the night before Halloween, I had to rake. Had to make the place look nice for trick-or-treaters. There is appropriate spookiness -- novelty tombstones, plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons, ghost colorforms to adhere to the window. Then there's the unraked lawn, dirty stoop, and Miller Lite empties sort of lawn. Who's inside: recently divorced dad? latchkey kids whose parents have left for a month? the sort of person who makes Saturday Night audience of the Fox network wonder why they don't put a shirt on before being arrested, or at least for pity's sake don't sign the form and get their face blurred?

My lawn is not that sort of lawn anymore, thanks to raking at night. It's more of a legal blindness: I can still see the leaves against the grass, but not the damage the rake might do, not the acorn caps and helicoptered seedpods I might miss, not the dead spot which makes raking or cutting or anything short of sod look good. At the end my lawn, in the dim moonlight, looked as good as the ones done by a service twice a week. Cue that Bette Midler song about from a distance, since there's no suitable song about the wonders of glaucoma.

Devil's Night in Bloomfield Hills taking place on October 30, appropriate for posting today. I didn't try to work in any supernatural horror of violence. It's sad more than frightening. --Jeff

Halloween Week: Thoughtless Neighbors

2007-10-29T22:33:00.000-04:00

Thoughtless Neighbors is based on my actual neighbor across the street, who has fake tombstones and fake spider webs on display 12 months of the year. The lawn is atrocious enough so it took me a while to notice the lawn being the final resting place for Frank N. Stein and Your Name Here. - Sean

Halloween Week: Trick, Not Treat

2007-10-28T17:59:00.000-04:00

Halloween certainly is a lot of people's favorite holiday -- I just saw a Mass Transit demonstration in San Francisco, thousands of people in costumes riding through the hills dusk-lit streets, gleefully stopping traffic as definitely as pyroclastic flow from a volcano. I saw devils, I saw angels, I saw women as men and men as women. I said hi to a banana, who said hi back. I saw tandem bikes, Victorian velicopedes, devices that seated four, five, and six people that were to bicycles what a catapult is to throwing a stone by hand. Everyone crossed under the Stockton Street tunnel, in a scene out of Fellini, out of Kaufman, out of dreams. There is a portion of everyone's heaven reserved for a stream of gaudy happy bicycle riders, encouraging you to come join and ride for a while.

Trick, Not Treat is not about one of the people who love Halloween. It's about a vicious little snot, one of those people who jumps from stealing candy bars to robbing liquor stores. This is before the jump, about coincidence -- or maybe fate -- trying to set him straight.

Halloween Week: Resensitized

2007-10-27T12:21:00.000-04:00

After watching about eight zillion horror movies, you start to wonder if anything will shock you. Someone getting their head chopped off? Been done. Killed by monsters? Done. Stabbed with a corn cob? Done, somehow. (Stephen King's Sleepwalkers will always be known as Death By Corn Cob in the Daily Scares world.)

Of course, a lot of this comes from knowing the overlarge cast of horror movies exists solely to get a lot of neat deaths. (In the Final Destination movies, they get economical and everyone gets two neat death.) But sometimes a movie will have compelling characters, people you actually find yourself caring about. Hint; if you're not fast forwarding through the talking scenes, then the movie is doing its job to make the characters compelling. And you'll hurt a wee bit when that fatal corn cob comes thrusting at them.

Resensitized takes a whole different approach to this. I don't know why Harry has his change of viewpoint, but I know he shouldn't be in his apartment when he does. I'm glad it had a cutout of Michael Myers in his apartment, to officially give this one a Halloween hook. - Sean

Halloween Week: Playing Grown-Up

2007-10-26T00:05:00.000-04:00

I'm very disturbed by Playing Grown-Up: I wish I hadn't written it. I have a pet peeve against hyphenated titles, that is.

See, In titles only the first letter of a word is capped, and even though hyphenated words read and are pronounced like multiple words, they're linked and thus one word. it's a classically phyrric grammatical rule: either leave the subsequent caps off and make it look but (but be right), or add caps to it and make it officially wrong (by seem okay to the hoi polloi).

I've chosen to side with the hoi polloi in this case -- and THERE'S another tiger trap there, since hoi means the and I've said "the the people." Same with Al Queda -- Al is The. Whoever is responsible for only the nouns and not the articles of other languages carrying over into English is doing a crap job.

Oh yeah, the story. It's about a costume shop. Clerks there often have to dress up in costume, so every day is Halloween to them. For others, though, dressing up isn't a job requirement but an honest attempt to pass as normal. --Jeff

Halloween Week: Horror Marathon

2007-10-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

My school showed Hostel II in a common room yesterday. I hadn't seen it yet, just like the 99.9% of the country that didn't bother either. This movie was widely blamed as the one that began the decline of "torture porn" movement, where whole movies are built around murdering someone in the most painful way possible. I personally put more blame with the Saw movies. Hostel and Hostel II both give you plenty of time to get to know the victims before they head off to that dank basement full of power tools. The Saw movies started with big plot holes, which got exponentially bigger as the series went on. Saw IV could just be an Itchy and Scratchy episode at this point.

The fellow higher education students in Horror Marathon are attempting to watch even more movies than me (just for reference's sake, after watching Hostel II I went home and watched The Hoax, two Sopranos episodes, and a Treehouse of Horror). They should be so lucky as to get to watch all the Saw movies. - Sean

Halloween Week: Nutritional Information

2007-10-24T23:51:00.000-04:00

I could be due to check myself into the Department of Redundancies Department for say this for what may only be the second or third time, but a lot of these stories (mine at least) are a few years old. 2004-era, which isn't really Roman times. But the idea behind this particular type of Halloween candy was purely speculative when I wrote it, and it's fact now.

Well, it's "fact" in that a clearly bogus study for Enviga iced tea says if you drink three a day it'll cut 100 calories. A study of 30 people -- not 3,000, not 30,000, but 30 -- that did not study any other behavior like activity or sedentary behavior. If that's how little it takes to build a scientific ad campaign around, I may have a lemonade powder that'll make you almost seven feet tall yet, miraculously, totally unable to play basketball. My test subjects will be the New York Knicks.

Oh yeah, the story. It's called the stunningly beige-y Nutritional Information.

Halloween Week: Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha

2007-10-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

The worst Halloween party I went to was at a gym in high school. 1% of the people were in costumes. Want to take a guess if my friends and I were that 1%? We ended up shrugging our vampire capes off and sticking them in a broom closet, so we could stand around awkwardly and have a better chance of not being noticed.

The best Halloween party I went to was at some college friends' rented house. Three theater girls and one gay guy shared the house. The threat was that if you didn't come in costume, the gay guy would make you a costume - and he was Peter Pan, so he'd just be stripping you to your underwear and calling you a Lost Boy. EVERYONE wore a costume. Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha is in that vein, but with Dr. Evan doing more than just pantsing his uncostumed guests. - Sean

Halloween Week: Candy Coating

2007-10-22T21:59:00.001-04:00

This was one of the first teensy stories I ever wrote, before the idea of having the title be a sort of meta-commentary on the acts of the story really made their way prevalent in many of the pieces. So that's why the woman in Candy Coating is in fact not named Candy. She's Wanda. And she's the sort of person who the world might be better if if she talked more, and acted less.

Oh, and speaking of acting less, this one's short. Less of me, better for you.

Halloween Week: The Prophet Norbert

2007-10-21T21:58:00.000-04:00

This may be a bit of a stretch for us here, but we want to go two week for Halloween, not just one. It's such a rich vein to write about -- the costumes, the history, the inherent scariness aspect of it. It may be we tap out in the middle of next week -- Halloween is on a Wednesday, so the Thursday to Saturday stories might be stale. But hey, maybe like the drug store we can start posting Thanksgiving stories then! And the Christmas stories right up through until February, where there's a week of reenactments of the St. Valentine Day Massacre.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start off the almost-fortnight of Halloween with The Prophet Norbert. Thanks to Big Love and the horrendous Jeffs trial --thanks for ruining an otherwise fine name, pal --the idea of these towns of religious fundamentalists is more out there than when i wrote this. I may have goofed on then celebrating Halloween, though. Seems like one of the first things they'd ban in their new community. But with so many splinter factions, surely one of them must approve of dressing up?

Haunted House Week: Toys in the Attic

2007-10-20T23:45:00.000-04:00

Of the hundreds of teensy horror stories I've written, Toys in the Attic has got to be in my top ten. Hopefully you'll like it as well.

Haunted House Week: Puttyface

2007-10-19T16:04:00.000-04:00

Puttyface is based on a photo passed around my former office. It was of two girls that had previously worked there. No one wanted the picture, but no one wanted to throw it out. So this photo was snuck into the photo collection someone with family pictures on their desk, and the time taken to notice the new photo wagered upon. There was no one to give it back to when it was eventually noticed, so the prankee became the pranker, and stuck it in someone else's photo collection. It's on my replacement's desk now, for all I know.

The completely incidental side note that sparked my idea for this story: I didn't recognize either of these girls, but my time there overlapped with both of them. I knew what they looked like, but that particular photo had them both in puttyface, so they didn't look like themselves. Occasionally it becomes permanent: Mark Hamill syndrome.

I should probably apologize for the attempted Michael Caine accent. This is one of the earliest stories I've written. I don't think there's any noticable difference between the older stories and the ones I wrote toward the end of my daily writing - either rock-solid consistency, or a stubborn refusal to get better from practice. I try to alter the voice of these stories, and so for this one added Cockney rhyming slang. Toward the end of these, when Jeff was hatching the podcasting idea, I stayed away from typing any voice I didn't think feasible coming from my mouth. And Puttyface is why. Don't ask me what robin or Mae West means: look it up. It'll be valuable learning in case you actually run into Michael Caine and wish to converse. - Sean

Haunted House Week: The Haunted Radiator

2007-10-18T00:40:00.000-04:00

Announcement: Don't look at the tags of The Haunted Radiator if you want the surprise ending intact.

Addendum to announcement: Alfred Hitchcock would have announced that announcement a lot better. So would William Castle, or really anyone with more of a sense of showmanship. I just throw the steak on a garbage plate and douse a Dixie Cup in A1 Sauce.

Haunted House Week: The Family Chiroptera

2007-10-17T23:31:00.000-04:00

Sean is, as you will find out from the eight or nine upcoming Cave Weeks we have here, quite the caver. As he'll explain in the upcoming Karst Week, Lava Tube Week, Stalagmite Week, the totally unrelated Stalactites Week, Flowstone Week, Cavern Week, and Monster in a Cave And in the Last Sentence It Jumps Out Weeks, he's been in dozens of them. He's taken me through two or three. We've hardly ever gotten trapped.

One feature of caves, as everyone knows, are bats. I already knew bats were teeny things, and if you disturbed them they'd flap around and waste their body energy and most likely die, because you disturbed their sleep. We went in one cave with bats, and I tried to avoid touching a bat the way I'd avoid touching a house of cards.

But someone else touched them, and bats flashed in and out of my helmet light. They reflected the light enough, and we so small, that I seriously thought they were moths instead of bats. Quite the duhn-duhn-DUUUHN! moment when I found out the insects (or whatever moths are) were really flying rodents (or whatever bats are).

Wait: I know what bats are. They're in the The Family Chiroptera.

Haunted House Week: Ghosts of Lascaux II

2007-10-16T12:42:00.000-04:00

No, you didn't miss anything. There is no original Ghosts of Lascaux story, just this one, part II. Or deux, as I'll attempt to pronounce. Not that anyone can be blamed for seeing a Roman numeral and wincing at the idea of another horror spinoff. Every good (and sometimes rightfully forgotten) horror movie is clawing its way out of an untended tomb like a persistent zombie. Was anyone calling for a Wicker Man remake? When a Stranger Calls? Black Christmas? Hands up, horror fans, if if you never even knew about some of the source material that these freshly squeezed turds ruin the good names of? And if for some accidental reason the remake doesn't put people to sleep, then there's a sequel to the remake, The Hills Have Eyes II or another Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I haven't seen the new Halloween yet, but I hope the persistent Zombie behind that one is the exception to prove the rule.

See what I did there? Zombie? Rob Zombie? God, I'm hysterical. Anyhoo, here's Ghosts of Lascaux II, for your emjoyment. If you like it, I'll write a III and IV and a Ghosts of Lascaux II vs. Demonic Toys. - Sean

Haunted House Week: Shuttered

2007-10-15T23:30:00.000-04:00

I'm giving myself a bit of a challenge, and hopefully a bit of a guessing game for you folks playing along at home. I'm going to try ot go all week -- me at least, Sean is probably going to be uncreative and actually write about haunted houses -- with twists on the haunted house.

Shuttered, for instance, is a skyscraper. That's one big house. No one's haunted a skyscraper before. (I will clap my hands over my ears and pretend you're not saying "poltergeist 3." Or "The Grudge.") But with Leona Helmsley dying recently, we may have our first case. If you are being haunted by Leona Helmsley, try announcing that your shoes cost less than $50. It'll make her run shrieking ectoplastmic despair for miles.

Haunted House Week: Persistent Reg the Chimney Sweep

2007-10-14T18:43:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Haunted House week. Hopefully these seven stores will make you look at the alarm system wired to every window of your house, your big mean dog, and the gun locked in the dresser ... and trade them all in for a crucifix and a deed that's not on Indian burial ground.

I've personally never seen a ghost, but I've looked for them. I've checked mirrors when I'm alone, investigated creaks, and even crawled under the floorboards of a colonial tavern. So far, nada. Zip. Only thing I found was an old 7-Up bottle. If ghosts exists, maybe they only show up to people who really don't want to see them. Never to the guy with the thermal camcorder, always to the six-year-old who saw his first X-Files episode.

We kick the week off with Persistent Reg the Chimney Sweep. Here in New Jersey, the chimney sweeps are aggressive as all hell. They'll call you up regularly, insisting you need this service or that. I live in an apartment, and I still get the calls. When I say that I don't have a fireplace ... they still try to sell me. That's persistence. I can see them building me a chimney, just so I'm now able to use their services. Good thing none of them sell artificial arms. - Sean

Witch Week: Spell Check

2007-10-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

If you can cast a spell then you're a witch, right? No need to be all goth-y and morbid about it. You could be a bubbly person and be a witch -- perhaps a bit too bubble-headed, as Aly in Spell Check turns out to be.

Haunted Houses up next week -- as well as some crazy cross-posting, because Sean and I cant try to sort out the difference between a haunted house and a ghost. I mean, does a ghost story necessarily have to be a ghost out in a field or a yard to NOT be considered a haunted house story? And can you truly have a haunted house story withOUT a ghost? The "ghost" in Jane Eyre was human, yet there's a definitive haunted house right there. We've got some ontological razmatazz to sort out by tomorrow's post. -- Jeff

Witch Week: Cuss Words

2007-10-12T22:38:00.000-04:00

Another little girl is the star of Cuss Words, which means again I've got to pretend I've got pigtails and a room full of Barbies for the reading. In actually, only one of those is true. And honestly, most of the girls buried in my root cellar were names Maria. But I think one of them had the middle name Barbara. - Sean

Witch Week: Butcher Paper

2007-10-11T00:39:00.000-04:00

I am a sucker for a phrase that sounds more malevolent than it really is for these stories. Such a phrase is Butcher Paper. The stuff is used for all sorts of wrapping. It's what people sit on when they go to the doctor. And, of course, the Macaroni Grille and many other cheese-n-pasta establishments use it as a tablecloth.

I know a fair lot of pagans/witches/druids/wiccans, and they all have radically different takes on what it exactly is they're worshipping, if they worship it at all. In a lot of ways it is make-your-own-religion,a nd I don't mean that in at all negatively. There are some people, though, who the sort of people who go to the timeshare weekend just for the trip and skip the sales pitch. They are interested in religion solely for the superpowers. The folks in this story are these kinds of witches, although they're a distinct minority...possibly because a few candles and thinking real hard won't turn you into Willow, not even third-season Willow where it was just a pencil floating around.

Witch Week: Mental Vacations

2007-10-10T16:41:00.000-04:00

My concentration here in business school is going to be pharmaceutical management. Part of this is practical. I'm in New Jersey, home to lots of pharma companies. My school has an excellent pharma program, and the big companies recruit here. A pharma degree from here is worth more than one in another concentration. (And, of course, they pay more than Burger King.)

Part of it is idealistic. I would like to make a big difference to the world. Consumer product companies look fun, banks look impressive, and consulting looks lucrative. But who can say that their work directly benefits people, literally saves people's lives? Sure, you contribute to the economy by efficiently running a company, but you do that in any job. Pharma companies make drugs and vaccines that save lives. They do make money, and plow that into development of future drugs and vaccines. And hopefully I'll be at one of them soon.

With that off my chest, Mental Vacations is about a crazy voodoo lady. She's crazy enough to tie people up and do mind-swapping with sacrificial chicken blood. And she might agree with me on my rant. - Sean

Witch Week: Angry Mob

2007-10-09T23:54:00.000-04:00

The date of this story, Angry Mob, is about five hundred years ago, back when Lithuania was an actual Grand Duchy. Being a big fan of the Simpsons, who ware in turn a big fan of rabid mobs, I feel I must warn you that there are no crowds waving pitchforks and torches. Being from Northern New Jersey, I feel I must also warn you that guys named Vito and Joey and Carmine do not make an appearance either. Not even any Russian mob connections.

I have no right even using the word mob, in other words.

Witch Week: The Shoppes at Marblehead

2007-10-08T08:22:00.000-04:00

Jeff's in a three-day celebration of Columbus' accidental Caribbean cruise, so I'll double up on posts. The Shoppes at Marblehead uses my 2 1/2 years of real estate experience, the job I left to join grad school. Real estate was interesting stuff, the people very happy to talk and the workload more than I've ever had before. It wasn't the job so much as the second and third jobs piled on me when it was realized that I wouldn't quit with more work on me. That worked until I quit. A benefit of that is that 18 credits of brutal financial number-crunching feels like every week's a three-day weekend. (Ignore for the moment that I get Fridays off.)

This story also uses my knowledge of the town of Marblehead, where Jeff and I lived from kindergarten through half of third grade. Check the Massachusetts page of your atlas: the town's where I say it is. - Sean