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02/24/2019 03:42 PM
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NUMBER PROMPTS 2
IGNACIO #6 “I just like proving you wrong.”
The treasure chest made a loud scraping sound as Andy dragged it across the concrete parking lot toward the loading garage where she was meant to meet her contact. Well, meant might be too strong a phrase. No one expected Andy to pull this off. She was almost certain that Ignacio and his people sent her on this wild goose chase to get rid of her, but getting rid of Andy Barclay was easier said than done. Just ask a particular killer doll.
So despite the task being impossible, Andy was there in that parking lot anyway. All of her clothes were wet, like soaking wet, she left little wet footprints behind her, and there was a fair amount of seaweed dangling off of her shoulders and pockets, but she was there, and that was what mattered. The treasure chest—something lugged up from the bottom of the sea off a boat called ‘the Wench’s Knob’—was heavier than Andy could carry, hence the dragging, and it too was still wet, which probably made it even harder to drag around, but inside was more gold coins than any non-pirate had ever seen… probably. And it was Andy’s ticket into the good graces of some criminals, which now that that was said… maybe that wasn’t such a great thing.
“Nacho!!” Andy banged a clenched fist on the side of the metal warehouse door when she reached it. She was out of breath a little bit, bent over and panting, but she made it. She let the treasure chest drop behind her. She carried it far enough. Ignacio probably had people who could handle it the rest of the way. “Nachoooo! Yo!”
The big metal door rolled upward and opened with a clatter. Andy straightened up when she saw all the good looking men with guns on the other side of the garage. She did her best to not say anything stupid and instead she focused in on Ignacio.
“There you are,” she was all smiles now when she went behind the treasure chest and kicked it over. Countless gold coins spilled out along with a bunch of sea water. “Don’t worry, you don’t need to crew me up. I just like proving you wrong.”
THE DRUID #10 “We’re not playing strip poker. I don’t care what I said before.”
In the spirit of being honest, Andy was most certainly expecting some sort of reaction from Dru when she walked in the room. She wasn’t really good at predicting things, especially when it came to people, but she knew there would be something—a gasp, or laugh, or maybe she would throw a shoe—something. They had been talking about having a poker night for weeks and now it was finally here. Most of the people they invited bailed, or weren’t there yet, but that was okay because a nice quiet night between friends seemed to be exactly what Andy needed. She only hoped that her little prank wasn’t enough to piss in the punch and ruin the whole thing.
When the door flew open and Dru came in she sort of flinched, like something was being thrown at her, and she covered her face with her arms, calling out, “Andy! We’re not playing strip poker. I don’t care what I said before.”
Andy was already sat at the poker table, all the cards, and chips, and even beer spread out in front of her. She had the world’s biggest smile on her face and basically nothing else. She really wasn’t sure how Dru would react to walking in on her sitting there totally naked, but as reactions go that one was pretty good. She wished she filmed it.
“I got the veto loud and clear, Nancy Dru, this isn’t strip poker. This is naked poker.” Andy threw her hands up and gestured at her nakedness. “Big difference, mostly in the dress code. Speaking of which, you’re overdressed so… come on over and show me some flesh so I can take your money.”
Andy shuffled the cards. “I’m dealing.”
CLAIRVOYANT PROTECTOR #15 “Well, you’re coming home with me whether you like it or not.”
1989
Of all the doctors, and teachers, and adults, and people that came to visit Andy in the children’s home, Miss Lorraine was Andy’s favorite. She didn’t come by often, but when she did it usually meant something pretty special. She talked to Andy like he was an adult. She listened to him. She took him seriously. For all that and more, Lorraine was the closest thing Andy could find to a mother until the state actually let him see his mother again. Normally, when Lorraine showed up she did so with a smile and a warm look in her eye, and kindness melting off of her, but one time was different, and Andy noticed.
That one different time Lorraine came in with a red nose and pale, colorless cheeks. She was bundled up and sniffing a lot and she looked exactly like how a kid would want to look like if they were trying to stay home from school. She came and sat with Andy anyway, taking him away from the others to ask how his week has been, how he has been feeling—the usual sorts of questions—but it didn’t take Andy long to figure out why she looked so different.
“Miss Lorraine,” Andy drew out every word of her name and took her big, cold hands in his small warm ones. “You don’t look very good.” He put the back of one of his hands up against her forehead, which felt hot, and starting aping all the things his mother used to say to him when he got sick. “Look at you, you’re burning up. You need blankets and soup. Rest, you need rest.” Andy got up, more or less cancelling his own session. He guided Miss Lorraine away by the hand, basically dragging her, and continued Karen Barclay’s greatest hits, even if they didn’t make a lot of sense. “Well, you’re coming home with me whether you like it or not. Tons of rest and no TV. That’s the big one, no TV.”
Andy was too young to process or acknowledge the light smile all this brought to Lorraine’s face or the comfort a little bit of TLC from a kind seven year old could bring to an adult, but he wasn’t doing it for any of that. He was doing it because that was what someone did when someone was sick, and even if most of the mean grownups wouldn’t let Andy see his mother, his mother was always present in him. Always. Lorraine played along and thanked Andy for his concern, and promised him that she would get plenty of rest and be good and healthy by the time they saw each other next, and that was that. Andy missed out on having his chat with Miss Lorraine, but at least now she could get better.
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02/01/2019 02:55 PM
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TAROT PROMPTS
***THE DRUID*** Judgement resurrection, music, grey, refusal, graves
There was something innately strange yet somehow comfortable about slipping into a coffin while you were still alive. It was late, well past midnight, and it was pretty f***ing cold in that cemetery, so climbing into a padded box in a six-foot deep hole where the wind couldn’t find ya, it wasn’t the worst thing. The coffin had a comfortable little pillow and even though the stiffness and claustrophobic nature of it all was sure to cause a backache in the future, it wasn’t all that bad. Besides, with any luck—assuming that all of this went as planned—Andy wouldn’t have to deal with the backache alone. She would be sharing her new body with its old owner. She had never shared a body before… maybe that made backaches easier.
Andy clung to the old voodoo charm that Dru handed to her before the spell was meant to start and she held it close to her chest. She looked up as he leaned back, and Dru was standing above her outside of the hole. She was looking down and leaning on her shovel. The two women exchanged a long drawn out look that said everything that needed to be said, and Andy gave Dru a thumbs up. She pulled the lid of the casket down over top of her and everything went dark. A few seconds later, she could hear the soft thwud-thwud-thwud of dirt being tossed on top of her box and she could hear Dru chanting the spell.
It was decided, somewhere along the way on Andy and Dru’s journey into supernatural friendship, that Andy owed a favor to the woman who owned her new body first. The more Andy learned about Mia Allen the more she realized just how much of an influence she had on Andy without it being super obvious. The idea of her melting away in Hell or some Limbo… it wasn’t right, so Andy and Dru conceived a way to do right by the lost soul. They found the spell, they found the right night to do it, and now all Andy had to do was slip through to the other side and bring Mia back.
Everything was peaceful at first. It was kind of relaxing. The dark, the closed space, the sound of dirt weighing down on her; Andy breathed in and out nice and slow as she kept the panic away. But then something felt different. She couldn’t hear the dirt anymore, but she could feel it on the box, she felt like she was the box. The weight became too much, and Andy had a hard time keeping her breathing under control. Music started playing from somewhere in the darkness that surrounded her, music that she couldn’t place—some distant hell hymn sung by damned souls—and it caused a panic to rush around her.
“Dru!” she called out, banging on the top of her box. “Dru, I want to get out!” But there was no answer.
The box felt wet after that and dark grey water rushed up around Andy. She had no idea where it came from, but it was coming fast and soon it swallowed her up like a river and she couldn’t hear the music anymore. She thrashed around in that box for a short time until the air left her lungs. Her hand crashed through the top of her coffin and pushed it open, and the grey water went rushing away as she sat up, coughing up her spew to keep from drowning.
Everything was quiet.
Everything was different.
Andy was still in the ditch in the graveyard, but when she looked up Dru was gone. She took a second to catch her breath and then stood up. She went wobbly and felt like she was going to topple over but she caught herself on the wall of the hole. When she managed to climb out of the hole she started to notice that things weren’t as normal as she initially thought. Everything was grey, like a black and white movie, and even though it looked like she was still in the cemetery that she went to with Dru to start all this stuff, she wasn’t. Everything was upside down, and that’s how she knew she was in the in-between.
“You’re wasting your time,” a voice, her voice, called out from behind her. Andy spun around on her heel and saw Mia sitting on a gravestone. She wore a dress that Andy could tell was red despite everything being in black and white, and her dark hair was wet and sticking to her rotting face. It was Mia, the same face Andy wore now, but her skin was rotting away to nothing, and bone was starting to poke through in the cheeks and jaw. Her eyes were empty—black sockets—and when she spoke she only seemed half interested.
“Mia?”
“You’re wasting your time,” Mia repeated. “Go back. Tell your witchy friend that you tried, but that I don’t want to live again.” She looked down at one of her hands and that’s when Andy noticed that it was missing.
“You have to come,” Andy said, “I can do this, I can bring you back. It’s not fair that I get to live and use your body and you have to stay dead and rot. It doesn’t have to be like this, it—”
“We couldn’t share the body,” Mia shook her head and an ear fell off. “It’s already too much of you. Look at yourself. Where we are… only souls can travel. You didn’t bring the body with you, yet look how your soul appears.”
Andy looked down and got the point. Despite technically having an out of body experience, she still looked like her new self. Her core self was more Mia than old Andy at this point, or maybe the two identities were just becoming one. Whatever the case, bringing Mia into the mix now might be more trouble than good.
“I… I can’t leave you like this…”
“The destiny of that flesh is tied to you now, Andy Barclay,” Mia replied. “My destiny has a different part to play.”
A moment later, everything was grey again. Andy was in the box, it was dark, but things were normal. She sighed, knowing that in some ways she failed and that she couldn’t bring Mia back. She banged on the lid of the coffin and called out for Dru to dig her up.
***CLAIRVOYANT PROTECTOR*** The Sun crimson, children, success, festivity
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1989
Things weren’t the same. Everyone liked to pretend like they could be the same, but Andy Barclay wasn’t fooled. He was seven years old now, he wasn’t a baby anymore, and he wished that everyone would stop treating him like a baby. The Midtown Children’s Crisis Center tried to pretend like it was home, it tried to pretend like it was school, but really it was neither. Orphanages were for orphans, but Andy wasn’t an orphan. His mom was still out there, still alive, and they were keeping him from her. The Crisis Center was a prison, and it didn’t matter how hard the adults pretended, it wasn’t the same.
He sat in the rec-room making little paper hearts. They told him to make valentines for someone special, but Andy couldn't really see the point in all that. The only person he wanted to give a valentine to was his mother, but he wasn’t confident that any of his gifts would reach her, so he cut little hearts out of red construction paper but left them blank. What was the point anyway?
Every now and then he would look over his shoulder to try and get a glimpse of the adults talking about him in the other room. He would hold the paper hearts and the safety scissors but peek over his shoulder to spy on the adults talking on the other side of the window, and he would stare until they caught him, at which point he would go back to cutting out his hearts as if he had been doing that all along. Usually, when Andy was sent into the rec-room to do something useless, it was so that Ms. Poole could speak to one of the countless doctors or psychologists they sent to talk to him. He hated almost all of them, none of them believed him about Chucky, and any time he tried to talk about his mom they always redirected the conversation back to his thoughts, or feelings, or blah, blah, blah. He only had one thought and one feeling, and that was anger, anger for what they were doing to him and his mother, anger for stealing him away from her, anger for not being believed. He couldn’t tell which of the shrinks was out there now talking to Ms. Poole—he didn’t get a good enough look when he peeked over his shoulder—but more than likely it was someone who wouldn’t be able to do much for him.
Of all the specialists that they made Andy talk to after the incident with Chucky—after they took his mother away—there was only one that Andy thought was nice. She wasn’t like the other doctors. Maybe she wasn’t even a doctor. Ms. Poole introduced her as Mrs. Warren, but she insisted that Andy call her Lorraine. Lorraine let Andy talk about Chucky all he wanted, and when she looked at him it was like she believed him. He only spoke to her the one time and then she was gone. He thought about Lorraine whenever he was forced to sit down with another one of these dumbys, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.
When he snuck another look over his shoulder, he saw that it was a man this time around; a tall man with a bald head, and thick mustache, and big glasses, who was talking to Ms. Poole. Andy sighed and finished up with the hearts. He only had two, but they were big and more or less cut even and clean. He took a crayon and scribbled in names for who they belonged to, and with a little bit of tape, he went over to the window and stuck his valentines on the glass, hoping that maybe the people they were meant for would see them.
One was for mom… who was out there somewhere.
The other was for Lorraine, spelled ‘Lurane’, and Andy hoped that maybe it would be enough to bring her back. With any luck, the sun would catch it just right and Lorraine would see it, and she would come back for Andy and tell everyone that he was not crazy and not making things up. With any luck… she would come back and get him out of there, and then he could spend Valentine’s Day with his mother.
***CHERRY BOMB*** The Hanged Man punishment, knowledge, nature, halo, sacrifice
Maintaining a partnership, or even—dare it be said—a friendship with someone like Jennifer Check was a challenge worthy of a Homer-esque epic tome. Deep down, like very, very deep down, Jennifer was a good person/monster, and in a lot of ways Andy really enjoyed hanging around her. But it should be noted that Jennifer was still very much a handful. Hell, Jennifer was like two handfuls; two handfuls of like something really heavy that should really be lifted by at least three or four more hands, but for the most part it was all worth it. Jennifer was a good partner and it helped to have a monster fighting the good fight out there. Andy and Jennifer stopped a good amount of evil together, but when Jennifer went into one of her moods… that’s when Andy started to wonder if it was all worth it.
“Jennifer, come out of there,” Andy banged on the big metal door that Jennifer locked herself behind in the basement of the house they had been squatting in. “You can’t stay locked in there forever. That sub-basement doesn’t even have any windows! You can’t see in the dark, at least I don’t think you can, and you’re going to get hungry eventually.”
Jennifer was punishing Andy, that much was clear, though Andy had a hard time comprehending why exactly. She remembered them getting into a little bit of a disagreement about the Spice Girls and the next thing she knew, Jennifer was storming down into the basement and locked herself away like some sort of supernatural pre-teen who was quick to anger. Banging on the door wasn’t doing much good though. Andy banged and banged and yelled and yelled, but Jennifer wasn’t giving her the time of day. But it was all good; Andy knew the nature of Jennifer’s… condition. It would take a little work, but she would get her to open that door eventually.
Andy left, and when she came back an hour later she wasn’t alone. It took a little doing, but she used the back ramp to wheel someone down into the basement. This particular someone was bound by the legs and wrists to the wheelchair that they came in on, and they had a bag over their head. Andy gave Jennifer’s door another knock.
“Come out, I brought you a sacrifice, er, I mean, dinner…” Andy pulled the hood off the guy’s head and he snapped with panic, shaking against his bindings and looking around to see where he was. He tried to yell but he was gagged so it all came out as muffled nonsense. “I was saving this one for a rainy day, but I guess this counts as much as anything. He’s a real scumbag, Jenny… He’s the weirdo in town, likes to show his ding-dong to little kids, but there’s never been enough to convict him. I’m sure he tastes delicious… by your standards.”
But again, Jennifer didn’t answer. Andy waited a bit longer, tried again, but nothing. She sighed, “F***, fine… I’ll be right back.”
This time Andy was gone for about ten minutes and when she came back she was wearing a ridiculous Halloween costume. Wearing a short white skirt and a shoulderless tube top, her sexy angel costume came complete with plastic wings she wore on her back and a halo headband that bounced above her head from the clear pipe cleaners that held it in place.
“Come on out, Jennifer,” she called again. “You might be angry at me for some really stupid reasons but it doesn’t mean you’re still not you. I know you, better than most, I think, at this point.”
Andy started rubbing up on the creepo-perv she had tied to a wheelchair, running her hand over his chest as she straddled his lap. “I’m doing some weird, kinky sex sh*t to your dinner!” she called out again. “I know you’re getting hungry and I know you’re too weird to not be into this! Come on! You know you’re sick of being in that room!”
Andy made over-dramatic moaning sounds as she unceremoniously rubbed herself up against the confused pervert. There were a handful of scenarios in the past where Andy could honestly say that she was incredibly embarrassed with herself, but this didn’t really rank. Sure, it was not her proudest moments, but she made a commitment to Jennifer that went beyond one stupid fight about the Spice Girls. Despite everything, they were sort of friends, and sort-of-friends did embarrassing things for one another. That’s how it worked. So Andy rubbed, and poked, and licked the weirdos cheek, and made goofy grunting noises, and she did it all for a monster, her monster.
It was one of the worst five minutes of Andy’s new life… but eventually, Jennifer opened that door.
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01/11/2019 05:14 PM
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MIA ALLEN
The road to death was not straight and narrow, but winding, downhill, jagged, and unpaved. Death came thrice for Mia Allen. It took awhile for it to settle in. The first came from inward evils—a drug overdose leaving Mia dead for minutes—but the second came from outward evils. It was meant to be a place where she could get away, a quiet, secluded cabin in the middle of nowhere where Mia could go cold turkey while surrounded by family and friends. She had the hopes of kicking her heroin addiction once and for all that trip, but for one to cast away an evil, one had to make themselves vulnerable to new evils. A book of the dead, a few whispered words, it didn’t matter how it happened, but evil came for Mia and her friends that night. Her heart stopped again, this time an attempt by her brother to wash away the evil that clung to her, but when she came back there wasn’t much left to come back to. She defeated that evil, the creature in the blood rain, but Mia was the only one that walked away from that cabin—scarred and missing a hand. She escaped death for the second time… but that was all the past. This is the story of the third and final time, how death caught up to Mia Allen.
SUMMER, 2018
Furniture flung across the room, smashing into bits against the walls as the doors ripped free from their hinges. Mia stood in the center of the studio apartment—shotgun in her one good hand and chainsaw attached to her one good stump—while Dottie, the current final girl she was tasked with protecting, clung to her leg and kept her head down. Dottie screamed as the creature with the pale white face and dark top hat skittered across the ceiling, its long black trench coat trailing behind it like a tail.
“Deep breaths, lady.” Mia’s eyes tried to track the creature as it crawled circles above them. “Mama needs her focus.”
The screaming and the floating furniture and the supernatural whositwhatsit on the ceiling were all major distractions, but Mia didn’t let it bother her. Her focus was steadfast. She had been in this evil hunting, survivor saving, business for five years now. It was all old hat by this point. She yanked the puller and revved the chainsaw before aiming her boomstick up at the ceiling, and she counted to three. The countdown didn’t really mean much, but it added to the dramatics of it all, which was something Mia had learned to get behind over the years.
“Three…”
BOOM!
The shotgun coughed up hell and struck the critter creature in the back. The thing dropped down from the ceiling and landed at Mia’s feet. There wasn’t a second of hesitation. Mia swung her other arm around and brought the roaring chainsaw down on the creature’s head, splitting it in twane. The monster shook and twisted and fought, but it was stuck in the chainsaw’s teeth now, and Mia let her weapon feed. It chewed the thing up until it was nothing but shreds and bugs that crawled away out of the husk, and just like that… the furniture fell to the ground and the room went quiet. Evil was gone… for now.
“What the hell was that?” Dottie cried, still clinging to Mia.
“You had yourself a Babadook,” Mia holstered her shotgun and wiped Babadook grease off of her face. “Don’t worry, you’re safe. For now. They always come back, though. If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook. I suggest therapy. That seems to be the best way to deal with these things.”
“I don’t understand,” Dottie said. Mia was already moving toward the door. “Who are you? What is this?”
Mia let her silence answer her back. There wasn’t a good answer anyway, and like that she was gone.
That night in the cabin changed Mia for the better. She lost everything, her brother, her friends, her hand, but some things were better off lost. She lost her addiction as well—never touched the brown sugar again—but when something’s lost, something else can be found. Mia had a purpose in life now, something to keep her going, and that purpose was kicking evil in its useless ass. So that’s what she did, it’s what she dedicated her life to. City after city, evil after evil, Mia hit the road cutting down nastiness where ever she found it. It was a rough life, a lonely life, sure, but it was hers, and she was free. She missed most of what she lost in that cabin, but she wasn’t sure if she would change her new life for anything in the world.
This sentiment would be tested later that night.
After the whole ordeal with the Babadook, Mia went to a local bar to unwind for the night. She wasn’t a drinker, she didn’t touch the stuff, but a bar was a nice, loud place where she could go where she didn’t have to be alone and where few would notice the odd bloodstain here and there that usually coated her clothes or skin. It was a small, hole-in-the-wall sort of place just south of the Canadian border. There were about a dozen or so people inside, but no one paid Mia much attention. One local asked what happened to her left hand, and the bartender seemed curious as to why she was only drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper, but once she made it clear through her grim looks and silence that she wasn’t in the answering mood, they left her alone. It was a perfect night.
Mia was on her third Dr. Pepper when someone took a seat on the stool beside her. She didn’t pay the new face much mind, but when the bartender came by and asked the new woman what she was having to drink, and the new woman waved her off and said she wasn’t thirsty, Mia looked over and saw that this new woman was staring right at her, waiting for and expecting her attention. She had a pale face and long, flat hair. It looked like she had been through some sh*t back in the day. It was the same look Mia couldn’t get rid of.
“Can I help you?”
“You’re her, aren’t you?” the woman asked, her voice small and nervous “They call you the King?”
“No,” Mia said, “That’s the other guy. Similar story, wrong hand,” Mia held up her stump to sort of wave her off. It didn’t work. “You got trouble that needs fixing?”
“My troubles been over for a long time,” the woman said, “Same as you, Mia Allen. Our stories wrapped up a long time ago, but I think we can fix that.”
Mia turned on her stool. “What are you getting at? Who are you?”
“My name’s Brigitte,” she said, “Brigitte Fitzgerald. Like you, I went through some sh*t a while back. Like you, I lost someone close to me.”
“Condolences,” Mia turned back to her Dr. Pepper.
“What’s lost can be found again,” Brigitte said, “My sister… your brother.”
Mia stopped herself mid-sip.
“You might want to watch yourself, Ms. Fitzgerald,” Mia warned. “You keep David’s name in your mouth and you’re liable to choke. I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what happened to your sister, but where my brother is there’s no getting him back. He’s locked away real safe, hurting forever but out of my reach.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Brigitte went on, “Everyone thinks Hell’s this untouchable place, that like Orpheus, it’s impossible to travel to some place so dark to rescue someone we love without it consuming us. But it’s not impossible, Mia. I found a backdoor.” Mia’s eyebrow raised at this. “There’s a shortcut, through the Nef dimension, it’s a doorway to hell, one that opens both ways. I can pay you… I can pay you a lot, actually. It’s what you do, you save people from evil, right? So why should the ones we failed already be beyond saving? Why should you save other people’s family but not your own?”
Mia reached up with her good hand and touched the circular buckthorn necklace she wore around her neck—the last gift she ever got from her brother. She thought about his suffering every day since she lost him, but she moved on a long time ago, she did something good with what she lost. Could she double back on that now?
“Please,” Brigitte continued, “My sister Ginger, she doesn’t belong down there. Neither does your brother David. You’re my last hope, Mia. I’ve talked to everyone in our situation, everyone who I thought could do it… Tommy Jarvis, Cassie Hack—they all turned me down, but you’re different. You’re like me. They didn’t have someone stuck on the other side, too. This isn’t just about Ginger or David… it’s about everyone, everyone stuck in hell who doesn’t belong there. You want to play hero… so be a hero.”
Mia finished her Dr. Pepper and looked at Brigitte Fitzgerald. “Where’s this door?”
THREE DAYS LATER
A hand exploded out of the quiet dirt. There was no grave there, no body recently buried, just an open patch of field in a clearing somewhere that had remained simple and undisturbed for decades if not centuries, but a hand clawed out from under the grass and mud, and it reached toward the storm clouds that gathered in the night sky above. The hand took root of whatever it could grab and it yanked itself free, pulling up the body it was connected to. Mia Allen gasped for air as she rose out of the undugged grave—naked as the day she was born, her hair its natural shade of red, and the hand she had lost on that horrible night at the cabin attached to her wrist again. She coughed up worms and dirt and rolled over to her side where she began to shiver as the first drops of rain fell from the storm above. Her mind was paralyzed with the fear she just escaped, scenes of Hell playing over and over again under her eyelids whenever she had the nerve to blink. She couldn’t shake it, she couldn’t move, and the only thing she wanted was death.
By all definitions of the word, the journey down to Hell was a grand failure for Mia Allen. She found a way back, sure, but she was not whole, not in the ways that mattered. When she returned to the earthly realm, she whole physically. The scars she had from before were gone, the handprint burned into her leg was gone, and the hand she lost was hers once again; but the cost of all this was far too great. David was left behind. Everyone else she went to save was left behind. Mia escaped because she thought it was her only option, but after experiencing torment as grand and as bold as Hell, she found that the real world was too foreign now, and she wasn’t sure she’d survive the shock.
Time worked differently down there. Although only a few days passed on Earth, it was months in Hell. A day in Hell would be enough to break someone, but months… it left Mia shattered. She wasn’t able to pull herself away from the hole in the ground she crawled out of until well after the storm passed and she was wrinkled from the rain and caked in mud. When she got up, she didn’t have plans on how to fix what she had broken, she didn’t have the drive to go out and help someone else in need. She was empty of all that. All she had was pain, and a desire to make it all go away.
The first taste of heroin she retreated to after that only teased the idea of making the pain go away. It wasn’t enough. Maybe there weren’t enough drugs in the world to make the pain Mia felt now go away, but it didn’t stop Mia from trying. The fact that she lasted until the fall was a minor miracle, and came down to the fact that Mia was too incapacitated from her experiences in the underworld to fetch enough drugs. When she overdosed for the second time, there were no friends to help her, no doctors to bring her back. She died a nobody, and this time she died forever. When her body was eventually found, she was taken to a morgue as a Jane Doe, and thrown in a cold box on a snowy night.
It was impossible to say whether Mia escaped her torment or merely returned to it, but if she did return to Hell maybe it was a blessing. There she could be with her brother, and friends, and everyone else who didn’t belong. At least there she knew what to expect, and she wasn’t cursed to live a life of normality with the knowledge of the true horrors that were out there. She did have a regret, however, a regret that all the good work she had done since the cabin was over now. She was dead but it didn’t mean that evil stopped. Her last hope, as her shriveled mind ate itself during the course of her overdose, was that someone else would pick up where she left off, that someone would continue to do her work.
She of course had no way of knowing that her hope would be answered, and that the very night that her body was brought into the morgue, another survivor from another set of horrors would come stumbling in with a body full of knife marks and a desire for a second chance to do some good...
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12/06/2018 03:40 PM
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'Twas the Pine Before Christmas
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, only one creature was stirring; cause she’s single, no spouse…
A fire crackled and snapped over a yule log burning in the hearth. It made things warm and pretty with a soft orange glow that flickered and danced on the walls, but it also made Andy’s eyes ache just above the brow of her nose. She was on the floor reading at the foot of her fully decorated Christmas tree --an ancient voodoo text in one hand and a glass of eggnog in the other-- and the dim, dancing light put a strain on her vision, a strain that the eggnog could only help with a little. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop her from reading, and sipping, and sipping, and reading. Maybe there were better ways to spread a Christmas Eve, but it was Andy’s first Christmas in the new body. Life was still… unstable, to say the least, and a quiet night in studying ancient evils… that was sort of the best she could hope for.
“How the hell does this stuff even get on the Internet?” Andy sighed and set the book down. She downed the rest of her eggnog before bothering to pick it back up again. Her eyes needed the rest anyway.
Trying to understand Chucky’s cult spell had been her little pet project since Thanksgiving. All of this voodoo-magic-mumbojumbo was still very new to her, but if an idiot like Charles Lee Ray could wrap his dim head around it she was sure she could figure it out, too. Moving souls from one vessel to another was one thing but the cult spell, splitting the soul up into equal parts and making a small army of one’s self, that was a whole new level of magic, and Chucky had a good 30 odd years of practice on her. By default, Andy was already behind the 8-Ball.
When Andy set her empty glass down on the floor she had every intention to pick her book back up, to get back at it, but a distraction found her first. A simple hand mirror sat under the tree, or at least it looked like a simple hand mirror. It was a recent find that Andy had picked up at a pawn shop not far from where she was crashing. The mirror, in fact, was enchanted and when someone looked into it they saw their true self. Andy picked up the mirror --as she had almost every day since she got it-- and she turned it over to see the reflection of a man staring back at her. It was her face, her old face; the one with the tired eyes and thirty-six hours of growth on his cheeks. She smiled and he smiled, and Andy took a moment to acknowledge her new normal. It was important for her to do that every now and then and remind herself of how far she had come, and beyond that, how far she still needed to go.
Andy set the mirror back down under the tree and took a moment to admire her decorating job. It was a tall, real pine tree that she had bought two days earlier and decorated herself. She couldn't remember the last time she bothered to decorate for Christmas but this year she had a new lease on life. If she didn’t do something different, what was the point? She decorated the tree just as her mother used to when she was small. The branches were long and bushy and sturdy and they could handle loads of lights and ornaments and a big, bright star at the very top. Tinsley dangled from it and a hand quilted skirt sat around the bottom, bringing the whole thing together. It was a fine tree, it would do the trick, but it was her tree, and that meant something in a way that never meant anything before.
“Focus, Andy,” she said to herself as she opened the book again. “Focus.”
The tree twinkled as Andy studied the spells.
“Ade… due… damballa… All of these damn spells are the same. Give me the power I beg of you.” Andy waited for the sound of thunder or anything ominous but when she listened carefully all she could hear was the crackling fire and the distant sound of a cold wind blowing outside. In the quiet that followed, Andy found herself yawning. Suddenly, she realized how tired she really was. “I think I had too much eggnog. I’ll try again in the morning.”
So Andy turned in. She snuffed out the fire, put her empty glass in the sink, and set the book down on the mantel before turning in to bed for the night. Moments later, the house was dark, Andy was in bed, and all was quiet. But quiet never lasted long for a Barclay.
In the dead of night, the house settled, popping and creaking in the dark. Then the Christmas tree jingled, as if the tree itself shivered, and the wood moaned, eeping out a soft, “Ekk-ekk-ekk”.
It was sometime around three AM when Andy woke in the middle of the night with the sudden urge to use the restroom. She half way through her mid-night wee when she heard a thumping coming from downstairs. Her hackles were raised, she was immediately on edge. Someone was in the house? She listened some more, careful not to make a sound. For a moment only the quiet answered her back and then she heard it again, a steady THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. Not one to mess around when her life was at risk, Andy shot to her feet (gave a quick wipe) and pulled up her pants on the way back to her room. She retrieved a fire axe that she kept by her bedside, and, armed with the heavy weapon, she ventured down into the dark.
Careful footsteps led her back toward the living room, axe held firm and high. At first, everything seemed quite normal, calm almost. Her stocking dangled off the mantle, useless mistletoe hung above the threshold that led into the kitchen, and the hand mirror sat below the… wait, where was the tree?
A soft “Eek-eek-eek,” came from behind Andy and the hairs on the back of her neck stood upright. There was a soft jingling sound, the sound of ornaments tinking against plastic lights, and when Andy slowly turned to face the intruder in her home, she saw her grand, decorated tree standing there, branches extended like pine needle arms, looming over her; a shadowed and wooded monstrosity.
Andy screamed and the tree screamed back.
WHACK!
A hefty swing of the axe struck the tree halfway up and the grand thing tumbled down, falling over an ottoman and smashing old ornaments against the carpet below. She had no idea how her tree came to life, but she didn’t really care either. That was a mystery to be solved after she killed it. She raised the axe high above her head and readied another blow, this one straight down into the trunk of the thing, but before she could let the axe swing the tree reached out with its anthropomorphic hand and grabbed her by the ankle. With the weight of the axe above her, it only took a simple tug to send Andy tumbling down to the ground, falling in the spot where the tree should’ve been.
“Eek-eeeek--eeek” the tree seemed to be talking as it got itself up to its feet. Wait, it had feet? Andy winced through the pain of the fall and looked up to see the tree lumbering toward her, crying out in its strange tree language all the way over, “Eeeek-ta-ta-eeek.”
Andy turned over as the tree stood above her. She reached for the axe, but before she good get a good grip, a distraction gave her pause. The enchanted hand mirror was turned over and facing up. In it, she caught a glimpse of the tree’s reflection and it wasn’t the big, bushy branches she saw in the glass, but the scared and puffy eyes of her old face, with thirty-six hours of growth on cheeks slick with tears. She froze with confusion, unsure of what this all meant, and then it hit her. She turned over and looked up to the tree. The cult spell, it worked?
“You’re… you’re me?”
The tree nodded as best a tree could nod. “Eeek-ta-eek-taa”
“I don’t understand. I… you’re trapped in that object? I’m trapped… we’re trapped? How does this work?”
“Ta-eek-eek-eeek-ta-eeeek,” The tree used one of its fingers to point down to the axe.
Andy picked it up. “I don’t speak tree. How… how do I get you out? We need to find you a new body.”
“Eeeek-ta-ta-ta-eeeek,” the tree said. Suddenly, Andy wasn’t as confused. She didn’t know how, maybe some sort of psychic link or side effect of the spell, but she was starting to understand tree-speak.
“You’re… you’re trapped.”
“Eeeeek-eek-ta,”
“Suffering?”
The tree nodded and again pointed to the axe. “Eeek-ta-eeeeek,”
Andy got to her feet and looked down at the axe. “You need me to kill you?”
The tree nodded and cried sap onto the floor. Andy reached out with her other hand and placed it where she thought a tree might have a shoulder and she stood there with her tree-self in a moment of respectful silence.
“Maybe you should… maybe you should lie down for this?” she suggested. The tree agreed, took off the skirt, folded it, and then sat back, lying horizontal on the floor. Andy readied herself for the weirdest thing anyone had ever done on Christmas. She raised the axe above her head and said a parting word in the tree’s native tongue, hoping that this version of herself would go on in peace, somehow.
“Eeek-ta-ta-ta-eeek,” Andy said, and with that out of the way, she brought the axe down with a heavy chop to the midsection. Bark split and blood spurted from the tree, splashing Andy in the face. The tree screamed and cried out, but Andy didn’t slow down. She had to keep going, she had to make this as quick as possible. Chop-chop-chop. She didn’t stop until the crying stopped and there was just a pile of broken branches, torn pine needles, and blood pooling around her feet.
“Merry Christmas, tree-me.” she said, blowing hair out of her face. “Merry Christmas.”
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09/20/2018 07:10 PM
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PROMPTS #1
LORRAINE WARREN: “I don’t know how they know, but I feel like they’re waiting for me.”
Maybe it was wrong, it was probably wrong, but it made her feel better. Andy knew that the little old woman sitting across from her --tiny teacup clicking against a saucer in a shaky hand-- was not a psychologist and had no real way to help her at all. Andy understood that she traveled all this way to get a glimpse of a side of things that she was still learning about and that dumping all of her problems on this 91 year old woman was not going to solve anything. Still, once she started opening up she found it hard to stop. Maybe it was just the quiet and reverent vibes that Lorraine Warren was putting out. She made it easy, made talking feel therapeutic even if it wasn’t solving anything at all. The conversation had started about evil dolls, a topic they both had a long and troubled past with, but an hour later and Andy had told Lorraine everything, every little detail about Chucky and the horrors that spirit had brought onto Andy’s life. By the time she had no more story left to tell, she felt spent, relieved, like the feeling you get after you throw up when you’ve been sick for a really long time. Her eyes were watering up and she was having a hard time categorizing all of her feelings but most of it was… positive. It was all positive, and she didn’t want it to stop.
“It’s only a matter of time before they come back,” Andy shrugged. “This trick, this new body,” she gestured up and down to herself, “It’s only going to buy me so much time. I don’t know how they know, but I feel like they’re waiting for me. Chucky. Tiffany. Their whole diseased cult. I’ve been running my whole life, since I was six, always running. I’ve already run into one grave and sometimes I wonder how many more it’ll take before he catches me, really catches me. I’m bound to get tired eventually. It’s… it’s only a matter of time.”
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THE DRUID GIRL: “I could kill him. Probably will kill him.”
There was a soft jingling when Andy ran her fingers over the dangling charms and amulets and pendants that hung from a display hook on the wall. She wondered how many of them were real and had any significant connection to voodoo or charms, and how many of them were tchotchke crap that could easily be passed off to tourist who didn’t know any better? Still, Andy liked the jingle, it made her feel like the wind. She often wished she was the wind, invisible but strong, important one day and then gone the next. She almost let the distraction pull her away forever, getting lost in her fantasy of being a breeze running through a sunny clearing somewhere far away, but she stopped herself, refocused, and turned back to Durantia to finish her story about the doll that changed her life forever.
“Sorry, it’s… it’s hard sometimes. I usually feel crazy when I tell people this stuff so… I’m not used to talking to people who get it.”
Andy cleared her throat, sat down on a small stool in the corner, and folded her hands in her lap before continuing. “It’s this back and forth, this dance we’ve been doing for years. I can’t remember a time where Chucky wasn’t a part of my life. He’s always there, he’s always coming. I could kill him. I probably will kill him. I have killed him. It doesn’t matter. Now things are even more complicated. His soul’s split up in twelve different ways… now I’m slipping down that path, too, and already onto body number two. I… I just have a hard time seeing how any of this can end. How many times can a thing die before it stays dead forever? You got the answer to that in any of your books?”
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09/17/2018 03:09 PM
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GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU
Blood pooled in the plateau of torn flesh and slipped through cupped fingers. It didn’t matter how much pressure Andy Barclay put on the gash in his gut, there was no stopping the bleeding. He was going to die. The world went foggy as he shouldered his way in through the door and out of the cold, and he nearly slipped down the stairwell that he didn’t realize was there, catching himself on a railing before he could fall all the way. He left smears of red on the wall and all the stairs. It followed him like a comet’s tail, burning in bright crimson behind him. But like a comet, Andy couldn’t stop. If he stopped he’d die, and he couldn’t die yet. There was still some good he could do.
When Andy got out of Harrogate Psychiatric Hospital six months earlier, he thought he was the one on the hunt. He thought that he, she, they; the cult, Chucky’s cult, had forgotten about him, moved on. He was wrong. Chucky, in his new Nica suit, was waiting for him, anticipating that Andy wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Maybe they had more in common than either would admit. It amounted to an ambush, a would be slaughter. Andy was split open, but managed to escape with his flickering life and then some. Or maybe Chucky was getting cocky… maybe he wanted a hunt. Whatever the case, Andy ran and didn’t look back. He couldn’t look back, not until he was ready.
There was a moment at the bottom of those stairs where Andy thought he wasn’t going to make it. He took a sharp breath and could feel his lungs quiver from the stress of it. He winced, forced himself to stand straight, and pushed forward. He was so close. He couldn’t stop now. Andy threw his weight at the door at the bottom of the stairs and spilled into the brightly lit, sterile room on the other side. The cold was brisk and artificial, but it woke him up, giving him a little extra buzz. Maybe it was the extra buzz that he needed. He made it to the morgue… the rest should be easy.
The morgue was a small room with white stone walls. Whatever town they were in, it was small, didn’t have need for a big fancy mortuary. There was a metal slab in the center of the room for autopsies, a tiny desk crammed in the opposite corner by a second door that probably led out to the rest of the hospital, and one wall lined with cold storage; six metal hatches, three rows of two stacked on one another. According to the labels, only two of them had occupants. Small town meant limited choice when it came to corpses. It didn’t matter. Whatever was in stock would do. Andy knew there was no going back now. It was find a new body and live on to fight another day, or bleed to death and die on the morgue’s cheap linoleum floor. No brainer.
Andy went for the nearest occupied slab, first. In the reflection of the polished metal he could see his pale and blotchy face staring back to him. He was losing a lot of blood, spilling most of it on the floor at his feet. He had to hurry. The name on the outside of the hatch was listed as Jane Doe. He went over to the other one, his breathing slow and labored now, and read the name outloud, “Michael…” but just speaking made everything hurt and he couldn’t even finish the name. Andy grunted, pushing through the pain of dying, and then threw open the hatch and gave the slab a pull, letting it roll out for him.
“Oh, f***.”
Andy almost fell over. Michael’s corpse wasn’t even much of a corpse. It was a pair of legs in bloody old blue jeans, severed at the waist with a few extra entrails hanging out. It looked like the body went through a woodchipper, but whatever happened to it… it wasn’t a viable option. Andy caught himself on the autopsy table to keep from falling over, and once it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to be able to save himself using the blank vessel of the Michael corpse, his head turned toward the slab labeled ‘Jane Doe’.
There was no time to brace himself for this one. He opened the hatch and pulled out the slab, praying that this corpse was at least in one piece. Relief washed over him when he saw that it was. Jane Doe was pale and stiff, at least twenty four hours dead. She was almost a decade younger than Andy, with red hair and chapped lips. There were track marks running up the length of both arms. Andy guessed that all that had something to do with what did her in, but he didn't know for sure. Other than that, the body was in one piece. It was something, better than death, an escape. Feeling left Andy’s legs and he leaned against the storage wall to keep himself upright. He had to act quickly. He was running out of time.
Andy was six years old the first time Chucky tried to steal his body. All those years, all those near possessions, it never occured to Andy to take a move from the devil’s playbook. Chucky put his soul in the body of Nica Pierce back at Harrogate. He walked right out of there in the stolen body of a paraplegic woman. If he could make a paraplegic walk again, Andy could surely do more with a corpse. At least in this case, no one was using Jane Doe’s body anymore. Andy’s flesh was cursed anyway, he never had any luck with it. This would be a new beginning, a chance to start over, to hide, or figure out how to kill the soul of Charles Lee Ray once and for wall. It was a new life, and he’d figure out what to do with that new life once he got it.
Reaching a bloody, shaking hand into his coat, he pulled out a palm sized golden amulet, the Heart of Damballa, and clinging to it was a plastic, severed doll hand that held onto the chain with a death grip. The doll hand was bleeding, too, leaking from the joint it had been torn from. Andy pried the doll hand away and tossed it across the room toward a trash can, and then reached into his other pocket where he pulled out a piece of folded up notebook paper. He opened it up, saw the spell he needed, and read through the bloody fingerprints he left on the page, while clutching the amulet close to his chest and hovering over the body of Jane Doe.
“Ade… due… damballa…” the words vibrated in his throat. He could feel a storm flowing around him. Outside, thunder rumbled. “Give me the power, I beg of you!” He continued the spell, pushing the words out of his mouth best he could. He felt sick, vile, he felt like… he felt like Chucky. The thunder was so loud now, it was right on top of him. It made the entire basement morgue shake. The lights flickered. Andy continued the spell. He didn’t slow down, he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He kept going and going and going and then…
Everything went black.
Eyelids shot open and a gasping breath filled otherwise cold and still lungs. Andy sat up with a startle and realized that he wasn’t where he was before. He tried to move but stiff joints were slow to react. When he looked down he found that he was on the slab and his body was floating in a pool of blood on the ground, lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling, and the Heart of Damballa still clutched in his hands. Andy looked down at his fingers and only then just noticed the longer hair that was itching the back of his neck. He looked at the curly orange locks and then took a moment to let everything settle in.
It took a secondto figure out how to make the new body work. After 36 years of one body, adjusting to a new one would take a minute. Andy swung their legs over the edge of the slab, in the opposite direction of the old body, and tried to put weight on the new legs. Andy fell to his knees, but then gave a little burst of strength and forced his way back up again. Each step was slow, like learning how to walk again, but he figured it out, and crossed the room and made it to the small desk in the corner. There was a mirror on that desk. Andy took it and held it up to the new face. He did it, or she did it… they did. Gender was a construct anyway, the pronouns didn’t matter, only survival mattered. Andy had a new lease on life, a new chance, thanks to an old voodoo spell and the body of a Jane Doe in a small town morgue. Unlike Chucky, Andy would respect the body he wore now. Jane Doe might not have had a real name that could ever be known, but it was part of the package now, it was part of Andy Barclay and that would mean something. One way or another, that would mean something.
Sirens coming from somewhere outside yanked Andy from their daydreams. The cops were probably following that trail of blood that led right to the morgue. If everyone was lucky it would be the cops, anyway. Andy didn’t have time to mourn or say goodbye to the old body. Life was funny that way, no time for sentimentality. She ran to the other side of the room and closed the hatch over Jane Doe’s slab. He took the Heart of Damballa back and put it in her new pocket. She closed the eyes of his old body. And then they left, disappearing into the night.
The world would think that Andy Barclay was dead. In a way, he was. But death was just the beginning. The game was only getting started.
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08/25/2018 01:51 PM
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DRABBLES
1) GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU The story of how Andy got a new body... 2) PROMPTS #1 Short drabbles written around quotes chosen by other writers. 3) 'TWAS THE PINE BEFORE CHRISTMAS A weird Christmas drabble where Andy accidentally puts her soul into a tree. 4) MIA ALLEN The story of what happened to Mia Allen between the events of Evil Dead (2013) and when Andy finds her body. 5) TAROT CARD PROMPTS Three short drabbles for people written around prompts chosen by them. 6) QUOTE PROMPTS 2 Prompts for Ignacio, Dru, and Lorraine. 7) EL VERANO DE 1999 It is the summer of 1999 and a 16 year old Andy Barclay travels down to Mexico to kill a monster. 8) MORE PROMPTS Scenario prompts for people: Six short drabbles 9) CAN'T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOUAndy has a drink with Baron Samedi and deals with vampires in the El Royale. 10) MIA STODDARD-BARCLAY OF DIMENSION 1-1-QT Andy's daughter from a parallel universe escapes her apocalypse and ends up in the universe we all know and love. 11) CANDY SHOP Andy uses the Nocul Amulet to get a glimpse of three parallel worlds that help give her perspective on the life she's living. 12) AN EASY ANSWERClaire proposes to Andy 13) COPYAfter getting engaged, Andy is readying herself to hang up her chainsaw for good and retire, but one last adventure with her old friend Ronald Tyler reminds her that retiring might not be as easy as she had hoped. 14) NOT WHO YOU ARE Andy deals with long seeded gender issues. Short drabbles for Aurelia, Zelda, and Claire. 16) A RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE
The story of the death of Andy's father. 17) I MADE DADDY AN ANGEL The death of Andy's father from the perspective of the killer. 18) I GOT SOUL, BUT I'M NOT A SOLDIER A story about Andy's time serving in Afghanistan 19) VOODOO PREGNANCY Andy's wife is pregnant but it's all going too quickly. Andy travels somewhere dangerous to find help... 20) VERB PROMPTS
Micro drabbles written around verbs chosen by other writers. 21) SWEET CHILD O MINETrouble seeps into the Stoddard-Barclay house and if Andy doesn't do something about it, it can change the fate of the family forever. 22) DREAMWEAVER: Prologue The world has ended. What now? An introduction to a future story line with @WuShifu Andy visits a specialist in Necropolis City to help her daughter Mia deal with the aftermath of some supernatural trauma the Stoddard-Barclay family just endured. 24) ALLY Andy tracks down a doctor in the middle of the night in order to learn how to be a better wife. 25) WANNA PLAY? An AU drabble about a version of Andy from a parallel universe. 26) TAKEN Andy gets caught up in growing tensions between her wife's pack and a rival pack of werewolves. 27) TAKEN PART II Andy escapes the clutches of the werewolves that kidnapped her. 28) BIRTHDAY CARD A few days before Claire's birthday, Andy sits down and writes her a card. 29) GIF PROMPTS Short prompts written around gifs chosen by other writers 30) FACE YOUR DEMONS Andy travels to hell in order to find a way to rescue her wife's soul from the afterlife. 31) COME TO MAMA Karen Barclay from the Reboot Universe gets pulled into Andy's world and possessed by Charles Lee Ray. 32) QUESTION PROMPTS Prompts for @ClairvoyantProtector, @Nyctophiliac, @Butcher, @Claire, @CodeRed, @Avery, @BlackWidow, @HarbingerOfDeath, @Morningstar, @SpookyFvker 33) RERUNS Chucky is in hell.
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