Wow, this is late! But recently, in collaboration with some authors I know, I've been published in a .99 cent
box set of original novellas, free on Kindle Unlimited, just in time for Halloween! Which is why I'm posting about it just in time for Thanksgiving!
Because the box set is still there, the stories are just as good as they were a month ago. My contribution is an original Kate and Blake novella, Kate & Blake Vs The Halloween Fair:
Kate & Blake Vs. the Halloween Fair by Dakota Kahn
Kate loves Halloween, but not when one of her clients drops dead right at the beginning of the biggest Halloween party in town. Was it just an old woman having a heart attack... or a nefarious plot to scare the poor woman to death?
Here's an excerpt from my story:
Chapter 1
Transcript From the ScreamCity, a Horror Movie Chat Forum:
HorrorLawyer: I’ve got a list of movies I’m going to be showing my fiancee tonight.
WoodsboroBilly: Wow, finally going to inaugurate him into the fellowship, hey?
HorrorLawyer: Trying. He’s such a tough guy, but show him a little Hollywood blood… He turns white as a sheet!
WoodsboroBilly: Needs to get a stronger stomach. What’s on the bill?
HorrorLawyer: Night of the Demon, Halloween, The Others.
WoodsboroBilly: Weak! Hardly any blood, one of them’s black and white. Start with Zombi. Go full Italian horror on him. If he can’t take that… noob.
HorrorLawyer: This is initiation, not hazing! Ooh.. Appointment in real life.. Gotta go.
I signed off before WoodsboroBilly could say goodbye, and looked up from my computer, hopefully seeming completely professional and lawyerlike. Talking on an on-line forum with some guy I would never meet in the real world about what gooey, gross horror movies we liked best was not the most professional lawyer behavior in the world, but a lady needs to relax, even sometimes at work.
The old lady who came in my door looked like she could have been in any of the movies that we were talking about, probably as the withered and evil hag who lived in the attic (like the creepy woman in House of the Devil.) She looked at me like she knew just what I had been doing, and did not approve one bit.
I had to flush out all of the horror movie maven stuff that was filling my head, and put on my respectable small town lawyer face. Not that, if this woman had problems only a lawyer could fix, she had too many options here in Whispering Pines.
I’m Kate Becker, hometown returnee and while in my professional life I’m a law-talking-gal, at that moment I was fidgeting in my expensive professional skirt like a kid in 6th period home room, staring at the clock.
It was October 31st. Halloween, and I was finally going to get Blake, my hunky cop fiancee and total tough guy to join in on one of my favorite hobbies: scary movies.
And I’m not a fly-by-night-watch-whatever-crap-they-shovel-out-in-October-at-the-multi-plex kind of horror fan. I dig deep, I watch wide. Hellraiser, Halloween, Basket Case, It’s Alive, Nightmare on Elm Street 1, 3 and 7 (New Nightmare) - they’re all deep in my heart.
But Blake… I’m not kidding when I call him a tough guy. He’s got an expression and demeanor like a bad guy’s top henchman in an action movie, except he uses his calmness and strength for good, not evil. He’s got a lot of good qualities… but he eats kiddy food, listens to whatever’s on the radio as long as it’s country, and doesn’t like movies at all. And he especially hates horror movies.
Which made me so excited for tonight’s little film festival. I live too far out in the woods for any trick or treaters, so I have to make my own Halloween fun. My excitement kept me distracted, so even when my client introduced herself (Mrs. Grantham, who did not tell me her first name) and stated her problem, I barely heard it.
Until she got to the part about her whole neighborhood trying to kill her.
“Excuse me,” I said, trying to keep even the hint of surprise out of my voice. “Could you repeat that last part?”
She took a deep breath, making her cheeks puff out and her eyes buggy. “I am unaccustomed to repeating myself,” she said.
“Be that as it may, I need to have a full and complete picture of your situation before I can commit to any sort of relationship,” I said. “If you would. So I can type it down.”
“Surely you should have a secretary dealing with such things,” she sniffed, with the definite air of “I can take my business elsewhere, you know.”
Please do, I thought, but did not say. I was well-between clients, and needed any paying job I could get to keep my office open, my belly full of food and my DVD player full of terror.
“Secretary’s out,” I lied. “With gout. She can barely stand up most days, poor thing.”
“Well, then I suppose I must make do. My neighbors are trying to murder me. Through terror.”
She nodded, as if that said it all.
“I’m sorry…”
“I’m not going to say it again,” she said, folding pipe-cleaner arms across her chest. She looked like she had been made out of bundled sticks. Like a scarecrow that had come to life and was very cross about the whole ordeal.
“Well, no, of course not. But if you could elaborate.”
“I’ve told you the truth. All week, they’ve been plotting. Arranging,” she said, stretching out the word as if that would fill me in on whatever the hell she meant.
“Arranging…”
“Costumes! Visions, in their windows, on their front lawns, horrible things! Skeletons, witches. One man has filled his tree with hanged bodies. I can barely go out my front door without being… assaulted! And they do it every year, but now it’s worse!”
“Wait a minute,” I said, after typing each word she said, dutifully. I looked back over them, and then leveled a gaze at her, trying to evaluate without looking too evaluatey. “Every year. Are you talking about… Halloween decorations?”
“Blasphemous and horrible things, designed just to make me too frightened to leave the house! And then that’s not enough. They’ve been coming inside my house. I’ve heard them. I have hip trouble, it takes me quite some time to get downstairs, so they crawl around when I’m in my bedroom. By the time I come down, they’ve all gone after scuttling around, making noise, just to terrify me. I have a weak heart!” she said, practically beating against it.
“How do you know people are sneaking into your house?”
“Things! I hear them and I see them. They take my food. And my medications, I have to get new prescriptions all the time because someone’s taking my pills.”
I tried to keep a smile on my face, but I knew it had to be getting strained. This was sounding more like a poor lady’s dementia than some concerted plot of evil-doers. Unfortunately she seemed to be able to see what I was thinking through my expression.
“I know what’s happening to me! I’m under attack! Oh, you’re just like the police.”
“You’ve been to the police?” I said, starting to get the full picture.
“Yes, they told me they couldn’t do anything! I want them added, too. To the list.”
“The list?”
“Of people I shall sue for murdering me! With fright! That’s what you do, you’re a lawyer. Sue them. Sue them so they can’t all gather in the street tonight and make noise and frighten me.”
“The police?”
“No, stupid girl, my neighbors! It’s all going to happen tonight! Tonight!”
I typed my thoughts directly on my computer, “Oh hell this is a nutter. Nutters don’t have good cases and nutters don’t pay their bills. How do I get her out of the office without her doing something nuts to me?” Then I immediately felt terrible, because this was an old woman, probably without much family around. I might have been her only conversation in days, and as annoying as I found her, think of how she saw the world: as deliberately frightening her. Going out of its way to make her miserable. Poor thing.
I rubbed my chin, and tried to look very sympathetic while she stared at me with her fierce, buggy eyes. Her hair was so silver it looked like she dyed it, and in curls around her face looking like a shimmering halo on a barely covered skull. It was an elaborate, if bizarre, style, and looked like it took some time, and energy. Probably because she wanted to impress the people she was leaving her house to see - first the cops, then me. This was an old, frightened woman, and even if she was nuts I couldn’t just dismiss her.
“Well… I will consult with the authorities and see what I can do. But Mrs. Grantham…”
“You’re going to send me away,” she said, those buggy eyes becoming glaring and vindictive.
“Even if I thought we could successfully sue your neighbors into… not scaring you, or even get some kind of injunction against this gathering…” It must have just been a block Halloween party. Wait a minute… “Do you live on San Jose Drive?”
Mrs. Grantham looked left and right, as if doors had opened on either side and my evil minions had poured out to cackle at her. “How did you know that?”
OMG OMG OMG San Jose Drive throws the biggest block Halloween party in the whole town. It’s like a fair, and I’ve never been able to go.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” I said, tempering my smile - I wanted to grin ear to ear. “I will come to your neighborhood tonight and I’ll see what goes on. If there’s anything actionable, and there might not be, I’ll let you know.”
“Ah!” she shrieked, almost busting my ear drums. “You’ll expect me to pay you money just so you can come and terrify me, too!”
She nodded, like she’d just figured out my scheme.
“No, of course not. If I decide there’s nothing I can do, I will not charge you a fee.”
She stared at me awhile, separate emotions criss-crossing over that ancient face like ducks going across a pond, leaving a little ripple in their wake.
“In writing.”
“In writing,” I said, sighing. I spent the next couple of minutes typing up an agreement that stated, essentially, that I’d go and look around and if we couldn’t sue everybody in sight, I wouldn’t charge a fee.
I’m a lawyer, so I worded it just right so that if I did actually see something, there were all kinds of fees I could assess, because the way this woman clung to her money I bet she had plenty. And I believe in sharing.
After she read it a few times, we both signed it. She curled up the piece of computer paper like a treasure map, and clutched it in her hand. “I am now going. You may arrange for my trip home.”
I had no idea what the hell that meant, but she was out my door then standing on the curb before I could say anything. I called for a taxi, heard the dispatcher groan when I told them who they were picking up (”Sorry, Benny,” I said to the old guy who ran the only taxi service in town) and then, happily unobserved, did a little dance.
San Jose Drive’s Halloween Party. Kate Becker. And my man Blake, who I’m sure would learn to love it. This was turning out to be a pretty good Halloween.
***
If you'd like to read more,
get the box set! .99 cents on Kindle, free through Kindle Unlimited, and only available through Amazon!
