CYOB: Spooktacular

The following post is my contribution to the third — Halloween-themed! — edition of Nancy Pearl Wannabe’s Choose Your Own Blogventure. Start at the beginning and then follow along, choosing as you go. Have fun!

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“Get out of there, Annelise!”

I clapped my hands over my mouth. Who really screams at a movie, anyway? Maybe no one heard. If I just sit very quietly —

“Kate!” Mom’s figure appeared in the stairway, and she peered down at me in the glow of the basement TV. I looked up sheepishly from hugging a throw pillow while the black-and-white scenes from Haunted Happenings gave me away. “Up here, right now. You always get spooked from those movies.”

“Ugh, Mom, I’m fine. People are supposed to watch scary movies on Halloween.” I clomped up to the kitchen and grabbed the duct tape to finish my costume.

“If you’re young enough to trick-or-treat, you’re too young for those movies. Do people even give high-schoolers candy?”

“Mother, please.” I shot her The Look. “Julie’s on her way over right now! Besides, we have such awesome costumes!”

Mom eyed my all-black ensemble with stuffed cats duct-taped to my limbs. “What are you supposed to be, again?”

“A cat burglar!”

“Right.”

Just then, Julie barreled through the front door in her matching burglar get-up, and we grabbed our pillow-case candy sacks and ran off into the night.  I asked her right away if she’d ever seen Haunted Happenings.

“Yes! The trunk, ohmygod. And that creepy old professor! He is totally the scariest part of the movie, the way he always — wait, have you seen it? It is so good! But way scary.”

Rats! I began crafting a scheme to watch the movie somehow when Julie turned to me and whispered, “But maybe you shouldn’t watch it. Every time I see a big old chest now, I get freaked out. There’s one at my grandma’s house, and I can’t sleep in that room any more.”

“Scaredy cat burglar!” I made a twisted face and lunged at her, but I stopped when I saw that she was transfixed by the scene in front of us.

Every neighborhood has it: The Halloween House. There are elaborate decorations, recorded ghost sounds, someone who’s going to jump out of a dark corner, and best of all, killer candy as a reward for surviving the front lawn.

“Look, they did an old library,” Julie said softly. “They even made an outside fireplace and stuff.”

It was pretty impressive. There were two shabby armchairs grouped around the fire and stacks of books piled next to candles and cobwebby vases. They had even set up an old-looking map, a chess set, and a gramophone playing tinny music. Unsurprisingly, there were plenty of hiding spots for whoever was waiting to scare us.

The shortest route to the candy was through the library, but Julie grabbed my arm. “I can’t. Look over there.”

I followed her pointed finger and saw a giant, dark trunk right next to the front door of the house. It was easily large enough to fit a person.

“It’s okay. Let’s just go really fast.”

That’s when I noticed a book propped up straight ahead: Haunted Happenings in New England.

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If you think Kate and Julie should brave the library, click here.

If you think Kate and Julie should devise some other way of scoring the candy, click here.