(Re)adjust {Halloween Style} - Part 1: Dracula Greets You at the Door

I have been waiting for this day for a long time. Months, actually. I sat in the summer heat, typing about love, and waiting for mystery. It's finally here. It's October. It is Autumn chill, and dead leaves, and dressing in costumes to run wild down dark streets. It's Halloween, baby. Bring on the fear.


In honour of my favorite month, I will be doing a four part Halloween special. Firstly, you may have noticed the re-vamped blog design. Think of it as a haunted house, the peeling wallpaper and the cobwebs can hide whatever you want. Just open up your mind. What's possible? What's terror? What's the thrill that comes with? 


There will be four scary stories this month, one a week, but don't worry, we'll ease into it. Count Dracula will pull you in before you run off, too scared to continue. But viewer discretion advised as we proceed. There may be more blood-thirsty creatures to come. Bwa ha ha ha!

Counting

I caught Count Dracula and I’m keeping him in my bedroom closet right now. I draped a rosary on the door knob and duct taped cloves of garlic around the cracks. I have to sleep on the living room couch because the smell is awful, and he keeps scratching at the door with his nails and making my spine tingle. I’ve had four nights on the couch now, and I can’t turn my head without my neck muscles clenching up like an underwater foot cramp. I don’t know what else to do, though. If I let him go he might come back and creep into my bathroom when I’m showering or hide underneath my bed and grab my ankles when I have to go pee in the middle of the night. 

I thought about trying to kill him. I bought a wooden stake but I haven’t taken it out of the Ace Hardware sack yet. I wanted to do some research first, but I’m three seasons into Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even more daunted. On a scale of Wesley to Buffy, I’m about even with Wesley’s glasses. Practice makes perfect, sure, but I don’t really have anything stake-able lying around the house. And what if I’m wrong? I just feel rude stabbing someone in the heart, especially when I don’t know why they were loitering outside my bedroom window in the first place. What if he wasn’t planning to seduce me and drink my blood? The media gives plenty of wholesome people a bad rep. I have no idea what he’s really like outside all the hype, and I have to be sure. I can’t half-ass mortal combat with the undead.

And if he really is bad through and through, it’s not like I’d be dealing with some off-brand vamp. I would be fighting Count Dracula. The real deal. And we all know that no matter what the off-brand claims the real stuff is always better. Or I guess in this case, worse. The vamps Buffy knocks around are pretty clueless, but Count D, well, he’s been playing mind

games for centuries. He’s been in the good guys’ and good gals’ heads. He knows how we think. He knows.

Good God, I shouldn’t have stolen his cape when I found it draped over a lawn chair on the patio. I assumed he took it off because he realized I had noticed he was stalking me, and the loudness of the cape flapping in the wind kept giving away his position. I thought I was being clever when I picked up the black silk and tucked it in the back of my closet to lure him out from behind my neighbor’s swing-set. When he snuck into my room to get it back, I slammed the closet door shut and trapped him inside. I was so relieved I would know where he was at all times, but his silence—

The only sound is the occasional tickling of fingernails on wood like a bored child in a church pew. He didn’t even make a peep when I slammed the door shut on him. No hissing, no growling, no Transylvanian swearing. It was like he wanted me to shut the door, expected it like the laugh track on a rerun.

This is ridiculous. How could he have known? But as I sit here on the carpet, feeling the solidness of the door cool behind my back, there’s an unwanted answer echoing in my brain. It coils my lungs in a rubber-band embrace, and when I press my face into my knees I see it etched into the red of my eyelids. 

How could he have not?