I had plans for my Halloween story this year, but as the saying goes, there's many a slip t'wixt cup and lip. The new plan is that you'll get that next year.

Instead of the planned story, I have a little snapshot of the boys from last year's Halloween story, Micky and Rhys, on their one year anniversary, fresh of the keyboard, unedited, and so on. I hope it makes you smile.

Tradition

Rhys was half watching the muted black-and-white film on the tv, and half watching Micky. Micky was sitting sideways in the big battered armchair, tv remote resting in the space under his knees where his feet were tucked up against the arm, talking on the phone, and picking at the chipped black polish on his nails.

From Micky's half of the conversation, and the way his accent was just that bit stronger, Rhys had deduced that it was a member of Micky's family on the other end. Either his mam, his nan, or one of his aunties, most likely.

He ought to go back upstairs, where the problems for next week's seminars were waiting for him, but what was the point of Saturday afternoons if you couldn't slack in the living room for a while?

( snipped for length )

If you'd like to read about how Micky and Rhys got together, you'll need to pick up Favor. As I said last year, when it came out, Favor's sweet like candy, and it has laser-quest, fake fangs, and boys making out in graveyards. It's also on sale right now, and available for a mere $1.03.

Free Halloween stories from the past four years can be found linked in this post, or under 'seasonal : autumn' in the tags list.

Happy reading!

And to celebrate, I have an e-book out! Favour is one of Torquere's Halloween Sips. It's sweet like candy, and it has laser-quest, fake fangs, and boys making out in graveyards. If that sounds like your kind of thing, it's also a mere $1.29, so an affordable treat.

( have a little (work safe) taster )

Written for buhfly's Halloween Challenge.

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It's never been the sort of event that advertises. There were no flyers, no posters, not even a few discrete lines in a specialist magazine. The only reason I found out about it is because I have a good memory even when I'm drunk. Drunk and exceedingly well fucked, in this case, and apparently my companions of the evening – old friends but not a couple, on the lookout for new blood to play with, both well hung, and sure of what they wanted – had assumed I was too far gone to be listening. It's never been the sort of event that advertises, but apparently knowing the right name and the right shop, and being willing to drop a significant amount of cash – no credit card records please – is enough to secure an invitation. Or it was, four years ago. I doubt it's that simple any more.

( Read more... )

cicirossi has been posting some wonderful little ghost snippets [1], and tsuki_no_bara has also added to the store, and I thought I'd jump on their bandwagon, basically. Hope you don't mind.

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Everyone agreed that the theatre was haunted. No one admitted to believing it, and in some stories it was a stage tech who'd gotten crushed by sliding flats back in the 50's and in some stories it was one of the boxes that was haunted, not back stage at all. Mostly the box stories were variations on a theme of the young heiress her lover and her fiancé. Taki told Trent that the fiancé had stabbed the lover and then had to flee Eden, leaving the heiress broken and lonely. The way Vo told it, it was a story of unrequited love, the heiress leaping from her fiancé’s arms to worship her dancer-lover with her dying breaths. Cameron had laughed then and nudged Vo in the ribs, teasing her about waiting for a rich young man to launch himself at her and they'd all smiled and reached for another handful of plain popcorn and went back to watching the movie.

When the theatre was dark and the stage full of music and rehearsal then Trent was pretty sure they were just stupid stories. When the stage was tight with excitement, waiting for curtains up, and the theatre was full of that buzz of a few hundred hushed voices then he knew they were. But when he'd crept back in after hours, sliding across the courtyard between theatre and school buildings hugging the shadows like he was tailing a snitch, when he'd been sneaking around in the mostly dark looking for places for Ru to hide out and watch them practise, there had been something. Ropes caught swinging in his torch beam backstage, odd sounds like footsteps, and an inexplicable draft in the velvet-wrapped boxes. Not that he believed the stories, which were just stories and nothing to make his heart race and his skin tingle. But there was definitely something

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[1] For example : here, here, here and here