To whom it may concern

Get your Eerie #2 pencil ready, because tonight we're rewatching Who's Who.

Sara Sue remembered the girl, all in black, carrying the filmy outline of another person over her own face like a mask sketched in chalk. She felt sick.

The Mayor noticed her change in expression, and laughed.

"Ah," he said. "This one gets it. A shame you never loved your father or brothers; their clinging ghosts would have made you much stupider, and far less of a nuisance."

Sara Sue ground her teeth, fingers aching for a pencil to drive deep into the reality of this man, shutting him up forever.

"And Simon Holmes loved his friends so very much..."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

( Read more... )

"Oh, I know all about the Holmes boy," the Mayor said airly. "He's loyal as a dog." He grinned, his teeth white and even and blinding. "And when he realises I've taken his little friends, he'll come running like a dog. And then, as usually happens to boys who are loyal and good and true, he'll die like a dog."

Behind a tumble-down veil of hair that she'd thought she was long past wearing, Sara Sue glared hatred. At her side, Dash laughed.

"You're thinking of the wrong brother," he said. "Simon was loyal. Harley? He's just very, very angry."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

The robe was thick and soft, the sheer bulk of it packed so tightly into the glitzy gift-wrap prison that it started to ooze out the moment she tore away that first strip of tape. She pulled, and as the tidal wave of the fabric spilled out and down and pooled about her feet in a glorious tide of pinks and blues, Sara Sue squealed in delight.

"It has pockets!"

She lifted it, feeling the velvety plush against her paint-stained fingertips, noticing the slight strain required to lift all that wonderful, snuggly weight, and slipped it on.

"Pockets, you guys!"


Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Sara Sue pulled herself up and onto the ledge and sat there, wheezing. On the other side of Wolf Mountain the sun was rising, but here on the northern face the pre-dawn chill remained and her breath formed icy plumes in the cold air.

She unwrapped one of the World o' Stuff's patent-pending energy bars, inhaling the salty-sweet smells of peanut butter and banana, and devoured it in three bites.

Far below her dangling feet, the town was beginning to stir. She watched the lights come on at the Eerie Dairy, just as lights winked out all over the cemetery.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Marshall hurried down the grimy corridor, two minutes late for his next class and letting his feet handle the familiar route while his brain scrambled for a hopefully not-so-familiar excuse. That was probably why he didn't notice one of the Michaels loitering by the display case until he was almost on top of him.

"Ow!" Marshall exclaimed, jerking his hand back and shaking it to dispel the sudden sting of static electricity.

"Sorry," said the Michael, his voice as quiet as soft pencil on rough paper. He turned, and Marshall could see what had fascinated him.

"Ah," he said. "Sara-Sue."

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Sara Sue wielded the bottle of Squeezy Syrup with the same level of concentration she used for a paintbrush. Her canvas this time was the colour of palest gold, spotted here and there with patches of darker tan, and slightly bubbled.

Dash glanced over at her plate and grimaced.

"You're not planning to bring the smiley face pancake to life or anything, right?" he said.

Sara Sue snorted.

"Take another look," she said, making her fourth pass with the chocolate sauce. "There's not going to be enough space on this bad boy to fit my initials, much less a signature."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

As if on cue, it began to rain. Lightly at first, then heavier, quickly becoming a deluge that poured from a blue and cloudless sky.

Melanie glanced up, feeling the blessedly cool water on her face and bare arms.

"Looks like the boss lady managed to convince Wally," she said.

Sara Sue nodded, using her free hand to push her long hair back even as the hand holding the pencil never stopped moving. Her clothes were quickly becoming soaked, but the sketchpad open on rapidly-dampening knees remained bone-dry.

Melanie reached into her utility belt, checking for the extra pair of socks.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Weather

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

( Read more... )

"Whatever those crystals are doing to the people trapped in there, it's messing up the passage of time," Sara Sue explained. "It's been hours for us, but it might have been weeks or even months for them."

Melanie watched the shadowed hand on the sundial spin across the numbers etched around it. She sucked in a breath.

"Can you-"

"I don't know if I can draw back the time they've lost," Sara Sue told her. "To be honest, I'm not even sure I can sketch them free."

"Syndi thinks you can," said Melanie. "And she's usually right on the money."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

( Read more... )


Ongoing Verse: Milkman

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

( Read more... )

Sara Sue's hand was cramping, and her eyes stung and blurred with the sweat that trickled from her hairline and down her face.

Melanie opened the cooler, reaching inside with a decidedly liquid slosh that indicated most of their ice had melted, and passed her a blessedly semi-cool bottle of water.

"Maybe you should take a break," she suggested. Her ever-present black jacket was slung over the stump of a dead tree in the shape of a human being contorted in agony, and her skin was already reddening in the glare coming off the crystals.

Sara Sue shook her head.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

( Read more... )

Lightning flashed overhead, and for a moment the sky was all aflame, the land beneath it lit bright as day though midnight had come and gone long since.

Thunder rumbled, shaking the single-pane glass in the soft and rotting wood of window frames up and down that long-abandoned street.

Dash X stood in the middle of the weed-cracked road, borrowed clothes plastered to him by the driving rain. This was his least-favourite outfit, the colours too bright and the whole thing several sizes too big, but it was still clothing he could ill-afford to lose.

His feet were bare, and in the light of the storm the scars on them were red, livid and shining. Beneath him, a thick rubber mat of the kind used in offices to lessen the chance of static discharge glistened like living oil.

Lightning cracked again, closer now. At the edge of town, something was burning. The new Weatherman didn't yet have Wally's level of control, and property damage happened more often these days.

The door to one of the houses banged open, caught by the rushing wind. In hand-me-down oil-slickers and heavy-soled rubber boots, Sara Sue and Harley said nothing as they joined him.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Weather

( Read more... )

The sun was up and it was possible that the birds were singing, although Sara Bob Haversock wouldn't know since she couldn't hear much over the sound of her brothers yelling.

She turned over on her thin mattress, inhaling the familiar smells of washing powder and cinderblock, and squeezed her eyes shut.

A moment later she opened them again. No good. The dream was gone, her family's voices wiping it away like an eraser on pencil marks. Too bad; it had felt like a good one.

She sat up, running her fingers through her hair. Upstairs, someone screamed her name.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

It's not quite a Viking funeral - for all his muscle and mass, he's still a triple-folded sheet of A4 in the end and that means his body would burn up too quickly to suit the solemnity of the occasion - but it's not a bad approximation, either.

Sara Sue sketches a shallow-bottomed row boat, the benches missing, and after she's signed it into reality the three of them line it with moss gathered from the scrubland that surrounds the lake. She unfolds the rumpled sketch of the Nanny and smoothes the brittle paper over the soft, damp green.

Dash hadn't known Harley before the disappearances at the lake and his own long, dark years trapped in the cell beneath City Hall, and the quiet, slightly lost shadow left behind in Simon's absence doesn't bear much resemblance to the stories he'd heard back then. Still, he thinks he sees a glimmer of it when Harley shows up twenty minutes before Arnold's send-off with a crate of illegal fireworks and an honour guard courtesy of the Unkind Ones.

They slide the paper-light boat out onto the dark blue water, and when the gentle swell has carried it a little distance from the shore, the three of them shoot rockets at it until it catches fire, orange-white flames curling up to mingle with multi-coloured explosions that light up the night sky and reflect in the waves below.

The Unkind Ones stand with heads bowed and hands clasped, and Billy Millions doesn't answer when Dash presses him on exactly how Eerie's most notorious biker gang came to know the Haversock's mail-order nanny. Harley shrieks with laughter at some of the bigger explosions, and again Dash wonders about that six year old who could bite through reality, and how hard reality must have bitten back once Simon was gone.

Sara Sue selects a roman candle that's thicker around than she is, lining it up with the drifting, half-melted boat with the same carefully calculated precision that he's seen her apply to everything, from drawings designed to leave municipal buildings in screaming heaps of meat and rubble to the exact amount of whipped cream required to make a perfect sundae.

It bursts with a thousand cascading explosions of green and pink and blue, and the shrill whistle as it goes off is magnified tenfold by the empty space around them. As the last traces of Nanny Arnold are obliterated in alternating flashes of light and dark, Sara Sue's eyes are wide and wet, and she drinks in the final death of her oldest creation.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

( Read more... )

So after friendof_dorothy and deifire respectively made me remember fanmixes and Five Things fic in the space of a single day, I decided it would be fun to have a Fandom Tropes challenge once a month, to remind us of all the stuff that used to be super common in fandom that maybe we don't see as much as we'd like to these days.

Your prompt for this month is: Saving the World with Art

The second hand was the hardest. Finger-painting something that thin and fine, in oily prison crud, on bare skin, might have been manageable for Sara Sue, or even Syndi, but it was definitely beyond Marshall.

He picked up the sharp-edged rock, dragged it along the greasy build-up on the wall, and gritted his teeth as he pressed the jagged makeshift nib along his arm. It left a trail of black ooze and a thin white line that quickly welled with droplets of red.

Marshall pocketed the stone, stared at the crude drawing of a wristwatch.

The second hand moved, slightly.


Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

( Read more... )

Perhaps it was his frantically-racing mind playing tricks on him, perhaps it was just his eyes adjusting to the windowless gloom of the tiny cell, but Marshall could almost swear that next to the calendar was the outline of a door.

Painfully, he raised himself up to a crouch and, one wary eye on the darkened room beyond the bars of his cage, he shuffled over to examine the faint chalk smudges that formed a tall rectangle on the bare breezeblock walls.

The room's previous occupant had signed her work, and despite his situation, Marshall laughed when he saw it.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

( Read more... )

"I like it," said Harley. "When we inevitably sell out to the toy companies, I'm having Motheus packaged so you can't see his butt and if anyone asks me if we released another weird buns-of-steel character, I'll be like, 'maaayyybe' and it'll all be a clever marketing ploy."

"How meta," said Sara Sue dryly. "Shall I make sure I only ever draw him from the front so you can make butt jokes with our IP?"

Harley gasped in delight. Sara Sue groaned.

"No!" she said. "That was sarcasm! I'm starting to think the manufacturers didn't mess up the doll's design..."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

"The kids would love it," said Harley, spinning the Professor like a fuzzy red-eyed top and making the untidy piles of paper around him flutter with the motion. "Butts are inherently funny when you're a kid."

"You'd get great reviews from the Wilson Twins," Sara Sue said, reaching out to steady a stack of pages that looked ready to topple from the centrifugal force of Prof. Moth's breakdancing. "They called your last story collection 'intellectually inaccessible' because you had a character that was a cross between a bat and a bowl of pudding."

Harley nodded.

"Poor Puddious Baby," he agreed.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

"That sounds like we're admitting that he looks like Mothman," she said.

"No," said Harley, waggling Prof. Moth in front of his mouth and affecting what he thought of as a professorial drawn. "We are acknowledging that the common cultural perception of this so-called 'Moth Man' shares a passing physical similarity to beloved children's book character Batteus Bat and his child, Batteus Baby."

Sara Sue snorted with laughter.

"Is that what he sounds like?"

Harley shrugged.

"Maybe," he said. "Batteus Bat's based on stories Simon used to tell me, so the truth is he probably was based on the Mothman."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

( Read more... )

Sara Sue glared at him. Then she pulled her hair back off her face and glared at him with both eyes for added effect.

"Batteus Baby does not look like Mothman," she said. "He looks like a baby bat, not some weird six-pack-sporting Kamen Rider statue down in Point Pleasant."

"I meant he looks like the stories," said Harley. "Black shadowy figure with big wings and red eyes? I can see how a toy designer would get "Mothman" from that."

He picked up the doll and examined it critically.

"I like him," he said. "He's weird. We should keep him."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

( Read more... )