#Halloween in #Miniature 2015: Spooky Miniatures 4

Today is Day 4 of Halloween in Miniature 2015

* Go to Day 1 - Next: Day 5 * 

Miniatures and Fiction a Little Bit Spooky

 Here's an excerpt from my story, "Puppy Love and Zombies"  coming in Young Adventurers: Heroes, Explorers and Swashbucklers. Pre-order Nov. 1!  See website. 

(The story features my part-zombie girl Becca from my book, GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie facing one of her biggest fears and solving a mystery - who's taking all the dogs?)

 "Puppy Love and Zombies" 

By C.A. Verstraete

    Most of us had been too busy surviving, and trying to avoid the roaming hordes of ravenous undead, to notice something else was going on.

    Yeah, like the rest wasn't bad enough? It was, but this new thing nearly did what the mutated Z virus didn't already do—kill me.

    The morning started great when my Uncle Franco brought this beautiful, year-old white German Shepherd puppy over for us to meet. Unlike my first dog experience (more on that later), the puppy bounced around, played, barked, and most important, didn't make me afraid.

    Call it love at first lick.

    For once, I forgot all the zombie stuff that had plagued me for the past year. I threw a ball and laughed at how she ran and brought it right back. “Ooh, she’s so cute and smart! I’m going to call her Fluffy! Is she mine? Can I keep her, can I?”

    I begged and begged, though I knew my Tia (Spanish for Auntie) Imelda already loved her as much as I did. Then we heard the yells outside. My uncle's cries of “look out!” came too late. My cousin Carm opened the door and jumped back at sight of the chaos in front of our house. Our neighbor Mr. Thompson screamed, “go back in, shut the door!” as two of the zombies came at him.

    In the last few months, most of the full Zs had been rounded up and exterminated, but a few wanderers like these kept us on our toes—at least they should’ve. My uncle grabbed his gun and fired at the monsters. The excitement was too much—the puppy panicked and pulled out of her collar. I screamed as she darted out the door and ran off in the opposite direction.

    “NO-NO!” I yelled and tried to catch her, but she was gone. I would've followed if not for the strong arms of my cousin and aunt holding me back.

    “No, Becca honey, let her go,” Tia implored. “She'll come back or someone will find her.”

    “No, she won't,” I cried. “She won't!”

    And she didn't....

** Get the book to find out where Fluffy went and what's happening to all the dogs! Is it zombies... or something worse? 

-------------------

Today's Spooky Miniaturist! 

Today I wanted to introduce you to some  talented artisans who enjoy putting a "little" scare in their miniature work and who contributed to this year's Halloween in Miniature 2015!

First up is UK artist Linda Cummings. I've admired her work on Facebook and invited her to share some of her amazingly realistic (and sometimes creepy) miniature food. And no drooling! (Okay, I know you can't help it!) 

Linda is a Fellow with the International Guild of Miniature Artisans (IGMA) who sells her minis under the name Linsminis (and Linsminiartform.) Check her Etsy shop (http://www.etsy.com/shop/linsminis /) or see her website, www.linsminis.com.  You can see more of her work on her Pinterest page.

She has been making miniatures for 12 years and says she is “never bored by it, there is always an absorbing fascination in seeing a piece come to life. Often the finished piece is nothing like the way I imagined when I start it, but somehow “evolves” as I work!”

While she was home watching the kids and her husband was working nights at the nightclub they owned and ran for over 20 years, Linda eventually began looking for something else to do once the children were in bed.

“With nothing on the telly to keep me entertained, I turned to counted cross stitch & watercolours,” she says. “Sadly, there are only so many walls in a house to display art so it was a timely birthday present from my mother that began the miniature obsession. She had given me a kit for a two-story house & one miserable, rainy day I decided to actually build it. (It had been sitting unmade in a cupboard for a few years!!)”

That house became a Victorian cake shop filled with her first attempts at making miniature food. “At that time, before the real impact of the Internet, the only miniatures I could find to fill my shop were hugely out of scale and poor quality plastic imports,” she recalls. “So, I decided to make my own. I still have some of those original pieces and now when I look at them I laugh and can’t believe just how much my work has improved over the years!”

She credits her youngest daughter with urging her to sell her handmade creations. ‘One day she said to me, ‘you know Mum, those are fantastic, you should sell them.’ At the time she was at Bath University and there was a wonderful doll’s house shop in Bath run by Caroline Neville. My daughter dragged me there with a piece of my work, a basket filled with veggies, to see if they’d be interested in stocking any. The basket never made it to the owner as a customer in the shop asked to look at it and bought it there and then! I was so embarrassed, not only did I have no idea of what to charge for it, but I was stealing one of the shop’s customers! eBay was in its infancy in those days and in early 2004 I started selling from there….the rest is history!”

  

Linda works with “the usual materials” - polymer clay, air dry clay, artist’s pastels, wood and linen threads for the baskets. She says what she likes best about working in miniature is the detail.

 “I love the challenge of getting as much detail as I possibly can in a miniature which is why I prefer 12th scale, as any smaller and the minutiae is lost,” she says. “I still very occasionally work cross-stitch, but to be honest, between my ever growing family, big garden and game birds, I have very little time left over. I am usually found in my workshop in the wee small hours, desperately trying to catch up! If someone could give me another 24 hours in every day I would be so grateful!”

While some miniaturists often sell their creations and aren’t collectors, Linda does have three houses in her collection:  “I have the original cake shop that started it all, a thatched farmhouse that is a home for my feathered game birds and a Victorian ladies’ outfitters. I collect silver miniatures and have some oh-so-tiny, perfect pieces made by Mike Sparrow. I have a fascination for tiny teapots and just can’t resist the gorgeous work of Loredana Tonetti, who works in cold porcelain.”

And if she had to pick a favorite miniature (or two), what would it be? 

“My favourite piece is an art deco silver ashtray, complete with the tiniest cigarettes in silver holders and lidded cigarette box with a double opening lid, made by Mike Sparrow.”

* Come back tomorrow for more Halloween goodies and miniature artisans!* 

* See Day 5 - Happy Halloween!! *

#Halloween in #Miniature 2015-3: Jean Rabe Fiction

 * Welcome to Day 3 of Halloween in Miniature 2015 
(Go back to Day 1 -  Next: Day 4) 

-------------------

The Ascension of Mary Grace -   2/continued

By Jean Rabe

 (Herbs-potions - joanna campbell slan)

  So Mercy had to find another way into heaven, and she would have to use the very last drop of essence to do it.  But first she’d have to break another commandment or two.  She’d settled on ascending tonight.

   Mercy had started toward town shortly after dawn. It wasn’t a far trip, but she moved so sluggishly that she had to give herself enough time; she couldn’t risk using up the essence to speed her step. She headed toward Highway 7, not to visit the churches, which on this Friday would be empty, but to go to the drive-in theater. For Mercy’s magic to work, the sky would have to be as black as coal . . . and that accursed theater with its big screen was right where the land was the flattest. She needed the flattest parcel on which to make her approach to heaven.

   She’d enjoyed movies here during previous summers, sitting at the back of the lot and cloaking herself in the essence so no one would demand she pay the five dollars to watch. She’d mentally made up her own dialog and music, as the sound from the little tinny speakers didn’t reach that far.

   The theater was the smallest of Kentucky’s remaining drive-ins. At the height of the country’s drive-in theater craze, there’d been roughly one hundred and twenty places like this in the state—one for every county. Now there were only a dozen or so left, and unfortunately one of those happened to be between Mercy and the hereafter.

   There were eighty spaces—she’d counted them a handful of decades past, and they’d never been added to, though the proprietor had managed to squeeze in a hundred cars and pickups the first night they showed “Titanic.” It had never been so busy since.

(chairs - patriciapaulstudio)

   She reached her “sitting spot” shortly before sunset, settling on the ground where the weeds were neither particularly high nor scratchy. Two cars were already here—filled with young people lost in each other’s arms. She had plenty of money in her pocket in case someone from the tiny concession stand spotted her and came to demand she buy a ticket.

  By dusk there were only twenty cars—plus the old motorcycle the theater owner/projectionist drove. There was a bicycle, too, and that belonged to his only employee, a boy too young to have a driver’s license.

   Twenty cars . . . they would not take too much of the essence, and that was a good thing. Fortunate no splashy new release was playing tonight—that would attract more. Mercy knew it wouldn’t be too many more years before this drive-in closed on its own accord, but she didn’t have time to wait for that. She would help it along.

   She didn’t have the energy to walk farther and find an equally flat piece of ground miles west in the county. It was ascend to heaven right here, on this clear, cloudless night . . . or rot in hell.

   The first feature started while it was still too light to see it well. It looked to be a comedy, actors falling down, the occupants in the cars bobbing in laughter in response. She’d never cared for comedies, mirth was overrated. But she admitted to liking the overlarge picture with its glowing colors and gigantic faces.

  And Mercy liked this place. She breathed deep of it, sucking down the scent of buttered popcorn which she wished she would have purchased. But that would have given her away, and she hadn’t wanted to draw attention. So she called up a memory, of what the hot popcorn had tasted like on a summer night when she’d distracted the boy at the concession counter with her lightning bugs. It had been salty-sweet, butter thick on each puff, and she let that recollection satisfy her. Getting to heaven was more important that filling her grumbling belly.

   There were other odors—of the tall grass that grew at the borders of the lot, mingled with the fragrance of hidden wildflowers. It had rained earlier in the day, and so she also smelled the moistness in the earth. She thrust her fingers into the ground and relished the feel of it. Her mother was buried in the rich Kentucky soil, Mercy had seen to the task a dozen decades past when she first sensed the essence fading and knew what was left couldn’t be shared by two.

   The sky darkened when the second picture started.

   It was dark enough now.

   Behind her, she caught sight of lightning bugs dancing along the tops of the tall grass. She would need their help. 

(Drinks, patriciapaulstudio)   

  Mercy shuffled toward the concession stand, the front part of which served as the projection booth. A thin, middle-aged man was at the counter, getting a refill on his soda; he paid her no mind and returned to his car.
   The boy behind the counter, though, he noticed Mercy immediately, eyes wide like a cat that had been spooked. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She saw him work up some saliva.
   “I’d leave, boy,” Mercy said. Her voice was so soft, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. So she ambled closer, right up to the counter and curled her bony fingers around the edge. She caught a distorted look at her reflection in its shiny surface. Mercy scowled; there were more crevices in her skin than when she’d looked a few days ago, and the color was darker and appeared desiccated. “I’m not a monster, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  

(patriciapaulstudio)

 The boy blinked dumbly.

   “I said, I’d leave.” She mustered a little more power in her voice, which she likened to the sound of dry leaves blowing across pavement. “I’d get on your bicycle and pedal for all your worth.”

   “I-I-I—”

   “Or I will kill you.” She drew herself up and set her shoulders back, fixed him with a menacing gaze for good measure.

   He looked behind him to two doors, one led outside, and the other to the projection room. He started toward the exit.

   “Smart boy. And don’t worry about coming back tomorrow.”

(Detail, door, Joanna Campbell Slan)

  The door slammed behind him and he hopped on the bike, the wheels made a crunching sound over the gravel.

   “There’ll be no more ‘tomorrow’ here . . . for me or this place.” Tomorrow, she would be ensconced in heaven.

   Mercy leaned against the wall and sent her senses into the ground, coaxing up some of its waning essence. There was so little left. Maybe other mountains held magic, the Andes, the Rockies, Himalayas, Cardamoms in Cambodia, Cherskiy in Siberia, Haraz in Yemen, Taurus in Turkey, or Knuckles in Sri Lanka. She had no means to travel to any of them, nor any desire to leave Kentucky and its Appalachians. But she had a desire to get to heaven. The essence would be everlasting there.

   “Come to me,” she whispered, calling out to her lightning bugs and the beetles she sensed scurrying inches below the gravel in the lot. She summoned flies, too, and bees that had been sleeping. “Come all of you.”

   Then she slipped in through the door, pausing to stare at the mound of buttered popcorn in the machine, shaking off the notion to sample some, and making her way into the projection room. The man hadn’t heard her approach, so wrapped up in the film he was watching through his small window, chuckling at the appropriate places.

   Mercy edged closer. She briefly thought about telling him to leave, but decided better of it. He might summon a sheriff’s deputy or foolishly stand his ground.

   “Slay him,” she said, so faint he couldn’t hear.

(Detail, patriciapaulstudio)

   The cockroaches that had been hiding in the walls of the concession area swarmed him, the beetles, too, as well as the bees that had been roused from their slumber. The man writhed and screamed, and she reached forward and turned off the projector, then the lights in this room. Next she turned off the lights in the concession area and unplugged the popcorn machine and the dispenser of sweetened ice.

   Cars started honking, people shouted for the movie to resume, headlights came on. Mercy stretched out with the essence and drained all the batteries. She needed it to be wholly dark.

   She stepped outside and embraced the night, glancing up to see the myriad stars, so many and so bright, with no headlights or movie screen or concession stand sign to cut their glory.

   “Come to me,” she repeated, this time signaling only the lightning bugs. “Hurry.”

   Her hold on the essence was feeble at best now, and she was slipping away. Mercy envisioned herself falling down into the bowels of hell to burn for eternity.

   “Hurry!”

   The lightning bugs complied, spreading out and hovering above the ground among the cars and the legs of the movie-goers who had gotten out to see what was amiss. She tried to shut out the chatter of the people as she shuffled toward the edge of the lot.

   The stars sparkling, the lightning bugs twinkling, God’s fireworks, all of it, she thought. Heaven come to ground. She couldn’t see where the stars stopped and her bugs began.

   “Beautiful,” Mercy breathed.

   “It is beautiful,” a woman perched on a car roof behind her gushed.

   Beyond the cars now, and the towering, dark screen, only the flashes of nature’s light filled Mercy’s vision. She pulled up the last of the Appalachian essence and stepped out onto the field, finding the doorway and slowly ascending.

# # # 

   

** Continue to Day 4 tomorrow ** 

 

 * Jean Rabe is author of a variety of books including, The Love-Haight Casefiles: Seeking Supernatural Justice.

One of her latest books, Pockets of Darkness, is about mother, successful businesswoman, antiques expert - and thief - Bridget O’Shea. But when she steals an ancient relic from a Manhattan apartment, she acquires a curse in the form of a Sumerian demon. The demon wants something from Bridget, killing people she cares about to force her cooperation, and it will continue to kill unless she meets its demands.

  * Joanna Campbell Slan is also author of the Kiki Lowenstein mystery series, including The Halloween Close Call (A Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery Series Short Story #10).

** Miniatures by: ** 

* Haunted housewares, skeleton, Patricia Paul - PatriciaPaulStudio.com 

* Haunted House - Joanna Campbell Slan

#Halloween in #Miniature 2015: Jean Rabe Spooky Fiction 2

Welcome to Day 2 of Halloween in Miniature 2015. 

(Go back to Day 1 - Next: Day 3) 

Today's story is a little longer. Author Jean Rabe. She's known best for her work in science fiction including the Dragonlance series and some of the Rogue Angel books, but she's written in a variety of genres, including some creepy, spooky stories.

I tried my best to get the essence of this story in the pictures... A good word since that is what this featured story is all about.  

----------------------------------

The Ascension of Mary Grace

by Jean Rabe

   Mercy Grace Flannery hadn’t done the right things to gain her entrance to heaven. While this hadn’t concerned her during the first two hundred years of her life, it was weighing heavy now. Mercy was dying.

(bed-PatriciaPaulStudio)

   She didn’t have cancer or heart disease or any other particular ailment that doctors at the Letcher County Clinic would be able to slap a diagnosis on. Mercy was simply running out of “essence,” and there wasn’t enough of it left in the land to sustain her.

   When she was born in 1789, outside of Jeremiah, Kentucky, the essence was thick, ribbons of it writhing in the earth and waiting for anyone with the proper skills to harvest it. Mama Flannery had schooled her daughter early on in how to use it, and Mercy had wisely never passed the knowledge along to anyone else; sharing was not something she practiced.

   But she did practice often with the essence.

(PatriciaPaulStudio)

  The magic—the essence—in the great Appalachian Mountains made her strong and kept her looking like a woman of twenty summers for nearly two centuries. But the presence of more people settling in the mountains—coupled with the miners who dug into the earth’s belly and the tourists who came in droves to ogle the scenery—weakened the essence, the pristine nature of the earth, and thereby weakened her.

   Now Mercy Grace thought she looked every one of her two hundred and twenty-two years, skin as gray as ash and deeply wrinkled like the bark of an ancient sweetgum, hair as wispy as a spider web, gait as slow as a slug.

(PatriciaPaulStudio)

   Maybe she’d spent too much of the mountains’ essence through the decades clearing patches of ground for her garden—magically coaxing beetles to churn the dirt and grasshoppers to eat only the weeds. She siphoned off more than she should have on her crops to get magnificent yields, calling bees to pollinate everything.

(Bugs - Patricia Paul Studio)

   She’d given her animals longer lives and greater intelligence, her cabin warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer, and she’d used the essence to slay and bury the increasing number of poachers and hikers and lookee loos who’d traipsed onto her property and stuck their noses where they didn’t below—the insects acting as her assassins. No one would find the bodies, as she’d used the essence to bury them so deep that they could never be recovered. It was those murders that worried her the most; they’d tainted her soul pretty dark.

   “Thou shalt not kill,” she said, her voice as soft as a feather. It was a struggle to speak these days.

   She also worried about the “thou shalt not steal” directive, as she’d done that on a regular basis during the first century or so—clothes from the little shops in town, along with a nice assortment of baubles for her neck and hair; she had a fondness for things that sparkled. She’d never been caught, used the essence to see to that, entrancing the clerks to look the other way, momentarily entranced by a pretty butterfly. And she’d used it to sometimes empty their cash boxes so she could buy her a fine dinner at the town’s only restaurant. Up until the past few months she’d been stealing from the convenience store on Highway 7, which stocked a variety of liquors, potato chips, and iced chocolate cupcakes.

(Miniature chocolate cake - Linn's Minis)

  

 She had once coveted things that had belonged to a neighbor, and eventually made said neighbor “disappear” so she could expand her property and acquire his possessions. A large nest of hornets had helped with that.

(house- Joanna Campbell Slan)

   

She’d taken the Lord’s name in vain every day of her life; cursing was something she’d never been able to shake.

(nancy cronin dolls)

   While Mercy had never married, she had enjoyed dalliances with men who were such . . . though none of that had went on since she’d started to turn gray. That didn’t make her adulterous, and so she figured she was safe on that one commandment.

  
 But as far as the Sabbath went? She certainly hadn’t kept that very holy, and so she was morally and religiously in trouble on several levels.

   There was a heaven, Mercy had learned that early on through the essence. And so she was pretty certain there was also a hell. Since she had no desire to go to the latter—and was assured to make the trip if she let nature take its course, she knew she would have to do something soon to find her way to those proverbial Pearly Gates.

   Jeremiah had a Baptist church out on Highway 7, and there was Letcher Independent Baptist Church about a half-mile down the stretch from it, not any other denomination represented that she knew of. The town’s population was a hair over eight hundred, and so religious diversity apparently wasn’t an option. The Baptist pastors at either of those places might forgive her sins . . . but she doubted God would. Maybe a Catholic priest held more sway with the almighty, what with the ornate robes and confession booths, the celibacy and the statues of Mother Mary, and the other accoutrements. But she worried she might die before she found one in some nearby town, and there was no guarantee anyway that a priest could absolve her of all the “thou shalt nots” that she had so often “shalted.” 

(This story first appeared in the anthology, "Mountain Magic.") 

*** Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of the story -  Go to Day 3   *** 

 *   Jean Rabe's latest works include The Love-Haight Casefiles: Seeking Supernatural Justice about lawyers Thomas Brock and Evelyn Love crusading for the rights of OTs—Other-Than-Humans. Their clients include ghosts, gargoyles, vampires, and things that have not yet been given names. The city’s OT element is sometimes malevolent, sometimes misunderstood, and often discriminated against. Brock and Love represent them, whatever the case, whatever the species. 

* Miniatures by: * 

  * Food, furnishings, Patricia Paul - Patricia Paul Studio.com

* Miniature cake - Linda Cummings - Linn's  Minis 

* Nancy Cronin dolls

* Haunted House - Joanna Campbell Slan

  * Joanna Campbell Slan is also author of the Kiki Lowenstein and Cara Mia mystery series. 

She is also contributor and editor of the new anthology - Happy Homicides: Thirteen Cozy Holiday Mysteries; see details. - Oh, and it includes a story about a dollhouse. 

#Halloween in Miniature 2015: Spooky Fiction, Stephen D Sullivan

 * Welcome to Halloween in Miniature 2015.  * 

This year I'm featuring some terrific spooky and eerie short fiction by fellow authors with miniatures from various miniaturists as illustrations. I'll match them as best as I can with the story,  but you may have to use a little imagination...

Today's eerie story is... 

A TRACE OF VIOLET

By Stephen D. Sullivan

I feel so much better now.  I look better, too.  My dark hair falls in long waves over my smooth shoulders.  My lips are full and red.  My skin seems very pale, but that’s not surprising, given my recent ordeal.

(cverstraete collection)

My gown looks beautiful—just like new—with delicate handmade lace at the collar, sleeves, and hem.  It’s violet, of course, like my eyes … and like my name, Violet Frost.

All Frosts have violet eyes.  Every family member has, stretching all the way to the Middle Ages, which is as far back as reliable ancestral records go.  In those dark times, some people called our eye color a curse, proof that the Frosts consorted with witches and demons.  

(witch- nancy cronin)

For me, though, it’s a trademark—like lavender dresses, lilac perfume, and purple sapphires.

Unfortunately, our family has plenty of actual curses.  My mother’s was catalepsy. She had a lifelong fear of being buried alive, ever since she fell off her horse as a girl and woke to find herself being given Ministration at the Time of Death (what Catholics call “Last Rites”).  Two subsequent incidents—at age twenty-six and thirty-nine—caused her to make plans to avoid any premature burial, strategies agreed to by the rest of the family and, since then, adopted as a Frost tradition.

Frosts are neither embalmed nor buried in the ground.  Rather, when we die, we are placed in a niche in one of the family crypts, the oldest of which lie in the catacombs beneath Frost Hall.  

(British library public domain collection)

Our tombs are not sealed, but, rather, can be opened from within by the slightest touch on the capstone plaque. It’s true that easy infiltration of air into the niche speeds decomposition, but that’s a far less grievous insult to a corpse than not being able to breathe would be for a living cataleptic.

Despite these elaborate precautions, when my mother was finally sent to the tomb—at the too-young age of forty-nine—she never again walked in the light of day. As her only child, I waited and waited—and frequently checked her sepulcher myself, just to be sure—but my mother did not return to the land of the living. When we put her into the crypt, she was well and truly dead.

I never exhibited any signs of my mother’s affliction.  Not until the night of my twenty-sixth birthday, a little more than a year after my mother’s death. The birthday celebration my uncle had prepared for me was one of the most elaborate ever seen at Frost Hall.  He spared no expense.  Partly, I think, as a tribute to my late mother—who had been fond of big parties—but also, I’m sure, because I remained unmarried, and he hoped to attract for me an acceptable suitor.

The fete proved exceptional, with delicious food, marvelous music, and wonderful dancing.

(food, cverstraete collection)

I was enjoying the attentions of Ephraim Corman and Bramwell Winslow, both of whom were charming and well-heeled local gentlemen, and either of whom might have made a suitable mate for a Frost maiden on the verge of spinsterhood.  

(Image detail, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Auguste Renoir, 1881)

Delightfully, I found no easy way to choose between them. Then an idea struck me. Perhaps, I thought, I should play a game of hide-and-seek, and see which one of them can find me.  Given the sprawling nature of my ancestral home, catching this eligible Frost lass would be no mean feat—and perhaps a sign of true love and devotion. And the winner would get, at the least, a kiss. My little scheme brought a smile to my lips.  I always liked hide and seek!

I relayed the notion to my suitors, both of whom readily assented to the test.  Then I ran off into the twisting corridors of the manse. They waited the agreed upon time before following, each in his own direction, each doing his utmost to track me down and capture my affections.

I moved swiftly through the mansion, careful to leave only the barest trace of my passing: a purple flower removed from its vase and left on a table, a spritz of my lilac perfume in the air. I intended to hide in the gardens, amid the lilacs and lavenders.  But as a final jest, I circled ’round behind my beaus—using some of my home’s many hidden passages—and made a visit to the punch bowl in the great ballroom. 

 My appearance at the main revel would, I hoped, both throw my admirers off the true scent and tease their masculine sensibilities. If everyone else at the party had seen me while they were searching, why hadn’t they?

  

(linsminis.com)

I chuckled quietly at the jest as I raised the glass of punch to my lips. But I had taken barely one little sip, when, all of a sudden, a fit of dizziness overcame me. The whole world swam before my eyes, and I heard the partygoers crying out in alarm as my knees buckled and I crumpled to the ballroom floor.  Then everything went black.

When I awoke again, at first, I had no clear idea of where I might be. Had I been taken to my chambers?  If so, it was darker than any night I ever remembered—completely black, in fact.  Perhaps the curtains of my bed had been drawn, as well as the drapes covering the windows.

I reached out to throw back the bed curtains.

(bed - patriciapaulstudio.com)

My hand encountered a wall of solid stone.I reached in the other direction and found stone there, as well.A horrific chill ran through my body.  I panicked, wailing and scratching at the walls of my tomb—for I realized now, that was where I must be.  I’d had a cataleptic fit, and my well-meaning relatives had buried me!

I am not sure how long I screamed and clawed at my niche; it seemed like ages.Then I remembered my mother and her elaborate precautions that had, over the years, become a family tradition. Yes, I was in my sepulcher, but I was not trapped.

(detail - haunted bed, #68, gallery, patriciapaulstudio.com)

Forcing myself to calmness, I pressed on the capstone above my head. At first, it did not budge, and the fear built inside me again. Steady pressure, though, soon caused the stone to swing outward, revealing the contours of the tomb beyond.The catacombs beneath Frost Hall are dark, but not lightless.  The tradition started by my mother requires that a series of oil lamps always remain lit within.  These lamps do not shed enough light for a normal person to navigate easily, but they are more than adequate for someone just awakening from the total darkness of the crypt.

Using the dim illumination from the lamps, I made my way back through the deep tunnels to the tomb’s exit. Joy suffused my entire being as I burst through the door and back into my home. I ran through the halls, shouting: “I’m alive!  I’m alive!”

Frost Hall remained dark and silent; it must have been very late at night, and only the faintest glimmer of starlight leaked in through the mansion’s many-paned windows.

The first person I encountered was MacGinnis, the wine steward; he’d always had a penchant for late-night tippling.  Upon occasion, I had even joined his midnight libations. Far from being delighted to see me, though, MacGinnis turned white as a sheet, dropped his purloined bottle of brandy, and ran in the opposite direction, quickly vanishing into the manse’s darkened halls. Peggy, the housemaid, also fled my entreaties, as did Naill, the butler, after her, each raising enough racket to wake the dead.

(butler - Julie Campbell dolls)

I must look a terrible fright, I realized.  How long had I slept in the tomb?

I determined to return to my room and repair my appearance before attempting to contact any more of the household or my family. My fingers, numb from disuse, fumbled with the doorknob to my chambers.  Eventually, though, the knob turned, and the big oak door gave me admittance.

Within, all was as I had left it on the night of my birthday party—save that a thick layer of dust covered my worldly possessions. No matter.  I’d soon have the maids set things right.

I moved to my dressing table mirror and sat down before it. Then I screamed. For staring back at me was a wide-eyed horror—a rotting corpse clad in a moldering purple dress.  Skin sloughed off the thing’s body in long, tattered strips; its grizzled hair fell over its bony gray shoulders; its white teeth shone through its lipless grin.

(Skeleton lady, patriciapaulstudio.com)

For a moment, I could not comprehend how this frightful ghoul had lodged itself in my mirror. Then I understood…

I feel so much better now.  I look better, too—as lovely as I did when I was alive. The rotting remains of what was once Violet Frost lie at the foot of my dressing table, cast aside like old clothing, its bony fingers almost touching the hem of my violet skirts...

(This is  a shortened version of the story. Read the full story and ending here.) 

( ** Go to Day 2 **  )

   * Stephen D. Sullivan is author of a number of books including some original novelized versions and screenplays of of classic horror films.  His latest is an original comedy take on the classic "bad" horror film, MANOS - The Hands of Fate - see details. A straight horror version is coming soon.

** Miniatures by: **

* Doll, food table, Christine Verstraete - cverstraete.com

* Witch, Nancy Cronin dolls  -  * Cauldron - Linda Cummings, Lins Minis

* Butler - Julie Campbell Dolls  - see her Pinterest page.

*  Furnishings, skeleton lady, Patricia Paul - Patricia Paul Studio

* NOTE: Many of the artists have been featured in past Halloween in Miniature blogs. Be sure to check the top page link for more of their work and visit their websites!

candidcanine.blogspot.com

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I have several photos in this issue.