It’s almost Halloween.
Time to get spoopy.
During the last stream, we spun the Wheel of Scary Internet Places and then had to write a story based on Halloween for whatever it landed on.
Check out the stream here or scroll down for what we wrote.
For the first spin, the wheel landed on DeviantArt, home of art by angsty teens. After picking a few pictures at random, chat voted on these:
Here’s what we came up with:
Mike and Jessica were hanging out in her family’s basement, all dressed up with nowhere to go on Halloween. Thanks to the coronavirus, trick or treating had been cancelled, but they figured they could at least have some fun getting sick eating too much candy while dressed up as “baked Jesus” and “not-so-virgin Mary.”
But by the time Mike had finished a bag of Reese’s Cups and Jessica was on her third package of King Size Skittles, they were bored.
“Let’s do something scary,” Jessica said, her teeth stained all colors of the rainbow.
Mike burped out peanut butter gas and shrugged. “Like what?
“I dunno. A scary movie or something?”
“Seen ‘em all,” Mike groaned. “Like a billion times. Plus nothing is scarier than Frozen.”
“Oh yeah?” Jessica said with a multicolored grin. “How about Teens Locked In A Cabin In The Woods With A Killer Who Might Be Supernatural 3?”
Mike laughed. “Nowhere near as good as Saw 2020: You Didn’t Fore-saw That!”
Jessica snorted, adjusted her wide-open “virgin v-neck,” then turned her attention to her phone. As she scrolled through all her open tabs, something made her eyes pop open.
“Oh now this is scary,” she said. “Have you ever seen this before?”
She held out her phone for Mike to see. He squinted to read it, but with his wide-open plastic eyes, it looked like he was already in shock.
“I have no idea what I’m looking at here,” he said. “It looks like some sort of comic a kindergartener drew?”
“It’s not,” Mary said. “It’s this weird thing called ‘vore.’ Apparently people have this kink where they like to be eaten by others, and draw it happening too.”
Mike popped out his plastic eyes to see more clearly, his face scrunched up in confusion as he read the comic.
“So this fat man on the beach is… enjoying getting eaten by the sexy shark lady?”
“Oh you bet,” Jessica said, snatching the phone back to scroll herself. “And the hundreds of comments means he’s not alone either.”
Mike brushed his fingers through his luscious Jesus locks and offered his head up to Mary.
“Here,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve got most of the hairs out of your way. Chomp down if you want.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. She knew what he was up to. He always had some new way of initiating things, and this time was head-biting. First it was her mouth on his head, then it’d be on his lips, then… well, Mike was a pretty predictable boy.
“All right,” she said, setting down her phone. “Just don’t scream.”
She leaned over Mike’s head and gnashed her teeth against his scalp, playfully biting away.
“You know,” Jessica said, somehow perfectly audible speaking while her mouth was wide open. “It’s kind of fitting, isn’t it? Jesus came out of Mary, and now he’s going back in.”
“Heh, yeah, I guess,” Mike said. “Anyway, if you want—”
A bone-crack came from Mary’s mouth, her voice deeper and scratchier than before.
“When Jesus came out of Mary, this world was created. This awful, sinful world.”
“Jess,” Mike said, reaching up to her. He let out a gasp when his fingers touched her mouth on either side much more quickly than they should have. “What the hell are—”
“Maybe if we… put him back in,” Jessica hissed as she drooled all over Mike’s head. “Then that will solve our problems.”
Mike screamed and gripped the sides of Jessica’s face, pulling at her as hard as he could. For some reason her mouth had grown to the size of his entire scalp, sucking away like a giant hungry leech. He pulled and pulled, but all that came was a wet snap, like the sound of a pumpkin top being pulled off the gourd.
He didn’t get to see that it looked like a pumpkin too, all the dangly little tendrils still connecting the severed top of his head with the mushy soup inside his skull. With a pitiful, gasping whine, he collapsed onto the carpet.
Jessica’s mouth, open to the size of a toilet bowl and lined with hundreds and hundreds of rainbow-stained teeth, curled into a grin. She preferred starting from the feet anyway.
The second time we spun the wheel, it landed on YouTube. After chat recommended some videos and we got some random ones too, this one was the winner.
Here’s what we came up with to Halloween-ify it:
My dad never taught me how to cook fish, he only taught me how to be disappointed in someone for leaving them. Ten years ago on Halloween, he just up and disappeared on me and Mom. Kind of put seven-year-old me in a bit of a depressed funk, and couldn’t really go trick or treating afterward. Not then, not any Halloween.
And not this year either. Mom was gone, working the late shift at Dewdrop Hotel, and I was of course home alone. My friends were all out at parties and whatnot, and even though I’d been invited, I had to say no. I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t risk breaking down in tears surrounded by them.
But what I definitely could do was finally learn how to cook a goddamn fish. I could have it ready for Mom when she came home, give her a break for once. I’d procured some salmon from the supermarket just for the occasion, clicked on a Gordon Ramsey tutorial video on my phone, and now stood before my stove, ready to do the most un-Halloween thing possible: fry a fish.
I had my knife, flour, oil, even a squeeze of lemon ready to go, so I clicked the play button, ready to learn from the Great Gordon himself.“When I cook fish,” the beautiful Gordon said, “I only want the freshest and the best. But for you. “ He pretended to peer over the screen and scrunched his face in disappointment. “I guess this’ll do.”
I chuckled. This must be what it’s like to have your real dad teach you life things, not just up and walking out on you. Gordon picked up a salmon, head and all, holding it up to the camera.
“You can tell a fish is fresh by looking at its eyes,” he said. “When it’s fresh, its eyes are as bright as yours.”
Gordon hung on that last word a little long, past when my chuckle was over. The camera stayed on him too, just watching him silently smile. For a moment I thought the video had frozen, but when I tapped the screen it was still going forward.
“Anyway,” he said, putting down the fish. “Let’s get cooking.”
Anxious to get started, I picked up the knife and prepared to watch the master. But the camera zoomed back to show his kitchen, and I felt like I’d stuck the knife in an electric outlet.
His kitchen looked exactly like mine. The same slightly rusted gas stove, the same cloud-pattern tile wall, even the same counter with the open boxes of cereal along the sides. Where Gordon was standing was exactly where I was, in front of the whale-shaped cutting board.
“You want to hold the knife tightly,” Gordon said. “Feel how sharp it is. How dangerous it is. You are the knife. You can almost taste the fish as you slide the edge through its ribs.”
He pressed the knife against the edge of the fish on the board… but that was the only thing that was different between his kitchen and mine. The fish he was cutting was not fish. It was some sort of unidentifiable meat, glistening with sinewy pinks. But as I tried to look closer, my phone screen sizzled with light static, like I was pressing a magnet toward it.
“I love fish,” Gordon said as his blade bit into the meat. The cut he’d opened in its side was bleeding, dribbling down onto the cutting board. But he just kept staring straight ahead.
Something was wrong with his face. I hadn’t noticed it up until then, but his eyes were blinking wrong and his lips didn’t move enough. It was as if he was wearing a Gordon Ramsey mask.
“You know?” he said, setting down the blade. “They say good cooking is the fastest way to a person’s heart. But I say it’s between the third and fourth costal ribs.”
He walked backward, keeping his masked-face on me the entire time, scuttling like a crab and reaching up with his arm that was far too long for his body. He grasped one of the cloud-pattern tiles behind him with his fingers, digging his nails into the caulk around it and peeling it away, revealing a dark abyss behind it.
Gordon spoke, this time just above a whisper. “The taste of it on your tongue is on a whole other level.”
I screamed. Couldn’t help it. I grabbed my phone and threw it out of the kitchen, right onto the living room couch. Standing there, breathing heavy, I hated what I saw out of the corner of my eye.
One of the tiles on the wall, the same one Gordon had peeled away in the video, was missing. The same dark gap was there, breathing out stale air into the kitchen and waiting for me to come look.
Trembling, shaking, I shuffled over to it, coldness growing stronger the closer I got. Finally standing before the hole, I was surprised how clearly I could see inside it. As if the blackness itself was the darkness around a candle’s flame.
I saw it inside. The one thing that had been different between mine and Gordon’s kitchens.The meat. Only mine wasn’t fresh and pink and bleeding. Mine was rotten and covered in swamp spots, reeking as if it had been festering away for ten long years.
Two eyes pierced the darkness, iridescent like oil spills in the open ocean.
“We’re not done yet,” came Gordon’s voice. Not from my phone; from the eyes. “Next, I’ll teach you how to prepare leftovers.”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso