Halloween Haunts 2013: Coming Home to Horror by Rena Mason

I spent my childhood growing up in Sacramento, California. Halloween for my family meant my dad running out to buy last minute costumes. My youngest sister always got the princess costume and I got whatever they had left in my size—Spider Man, the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, even G.I. Joe one year—and I don’t mean the fancy costumes. I mean the ones with the sharp mask edges, a rubber band stapled to the sides to keep it around your head. Where the seeing and breathing holes were cut wrong, and you spent half the night wiping breath sweat from the inside. Then we’d come home after all that work with a bunch of candy and my dad would eat all the good chocolate bars and say that he was just checking them to make sure they weren’t poisoned. It wasn’t funny, and I hated Halloween.

At eight years old, I gave up on trick-or-treating. I’d stay home instead and hand out candy. In between the knocks on the door, I discovered they played scary movies on TV all Halloween night. I’d turn it on and watch, sometimes avoiding answering the door so I wouldn’t miss the good parts. In the movies, there were always huge trees with fall leaves blowing all around. Creepy old two-story houses, and cemeteries. I’d never seen any place like the ones in the horror movies. That’s where Halloween is fun, I thought, and I wanted to go there.

After the holiday, I missed the thrill of watching the horror movies, but when there are only five channels, you watch whatever’s on. Until the day I found scary books in the library. The Strange but True anthologies were my favorite, full of creepy ghost stories that were real! Then I started ordering them through Scholastic. The only comic I ever bought and read in my whole life was a horror comic I’d ordered. I realized I could have horror all year long, and this made me happy.

At thirteen, my new family moved to Plattsburgh, New York. It’s very upstate, picturesque, around Lake Champlain. In the autumn, the leaves would change into brilliant colors, then fall and line the streets. The old air base side where we lived, had huge trees, a cemetery filled with graves from the Revolutionary War, and even old abandoned historical buildings.

Too old to trick or treat, my new friends and I would sneak into those buildings and run out screaming and scared through the cemetery and tall trees, then jump the fence to get back home. We’d go down to the lake and tell ghost stories. Walk along the old train tracks in the dark. It was everything I’d seen in the movies and more.

By then my scary book tastes had intensified, and I read some of the more popular authors of the time. The new surroundings made the stories I’d read and had been reading come to life. This is the place Stephen King must write about in his stories, I thought, and it felt like I’d finally come home.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Rena is offering one free print copy of The Evolutionist and one free print copy of East End Girls/Only the Thunder Knows.

Giveaway Rules: Enter for the prize by posting in the comments section. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. You may enter once for each giveaway, and all entrants may be considered for other giveaways if they don’t win on the day they post. If you would like to comment without being entered for the giveaway, include “Not a Giveaway Entry” at the end of your post. You may also enter by e-mailing memoutreach@horror.org and putting HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header.

RENA MASON is a retired O.R. nurse and a longtime horror fan who currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, a member of the Horror Writers Association, and an active member of the International Thriller Writers. Her short story, “The Eyes Have It,” is in the 2013 Bram Stoker Award® nominated anthology, Horror For Good: A Charitable Anthology from Cutting Block Press. Her debut novel The Evolutionist was released April 13, 2013 from Nightscape Press. The novella, East End Girls, a part of JournalStone Publishing’s DoubleDown series Book 1 was released June 2013. Her short story “Death Squared” will be in Crystal Lake Publishing’s anthology Fear the Reaper, scheduled for release Halloween 2013. To learn more about Rena and her upcoming projects, visit these sites:

http://www.renamasonwrites.com/

http://www.renamasonwrites.blogspot.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Rena-Mason/e/B00C7YOVDY/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5785510.Rena_Mason?from_search=true

Read an excerpt from “Death Squared” by Rena Mason:

(Forthcoming in Fear the Reaper, an anthology from Crystal Lake Publishing, release date October 25^th:  http://www.crystallakepub.com/upcoming-titles.php)

The boys continued through the house, came to a set of stairs, and started up – Billy in the lead. Every step creaked a little underneath the carpet. Their sneakers made little squeaks on the varnish of the hardwood landing.

“Let’s try and keep it down,” Billy whispered, then walked on.

“Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom, where she did it.”

“How do you–”

“John said it was to the right, at the top of the stairs, down a long hallway.”

“You guys talk about this stuff over family dinner, or what?”

“I overheard him telling my mom, you idiot.”

It was probably a lie. John, Billy’s stepdad, and a cop, had already told the boys over dinner Tonia had slit her wrists, but Trent didn’t want to argue about it in the dead girl’s house.

Billy walked ahead while Trent stood at the landing. Moonlight beamed through a skylight and lit up dozens of picture frames covering the wall on both sides. So many photos of Tonia and her family from when she’d been a baby up until now. Trent’s stomach growled and twisted into knots. In one of the pictures, she looked right into the camera with a dry smile when somebody took the snapshot. Tonia’s eyes pierced his the way they so often did at school. Guilt churned the bottom of his gut and made its way up to his chest where it stopped and burned. Her stare made his skin crawl. Seeing the photos suddenly made Tonia more real, and he wanted to go.

Trent heard Billy moving around halfway down the hall and turned to see his friend open the bathroom door, then step in. The white bathtub glowed eerie blue from Billy’s LED keychain flashlight.

“This is it,” Billy said. “Come on.”

“I’m good right here.”

“Damn, they cleaned up the blood. John said it was all over the place.”

A dull slapping sound came from the other end of the dark hall. Trent froze. Billy poked his head through the bathroom doorway. Out of the darkness came a red rubber ball bouncing knee-high against the hardwood. It passed Billy, then came to a slow roll and stopped in front of Trent. Black scribbles were all over it.