Freaky Freebies

Happy Halloween! To celebrate my favorite holiday of the year, why not enjoy some free treats while snacking on sweets! Here’s long list of ebooks – some mine and some from my friends at WPaD – that will be free Kindle downloads from October 30-November 3:

~ A scientist develops body-swapping technology, but she must keep it out of the wrong hands…
~ The extinction of the honeybee brings an unexpected result…
~ A zombie virus only affects women…
~ A homeless hacker destroys the world’s supply of digital currency…
~ Teenagers navigate dating in a post-pandemic future…
~ A fugitive finds his benefactor and only friend has met with an unfortunate end…
~ A rich spoiled brat who dreams of being a reality TV star finds herself in a real-life apocalypse…

par·Ab·nor·mal /per.əbˈnɔːr.məl/
adjective
Atypical paranormal fiction produced by Writers, Poets and Deviants.

A mysterious face beneath an icy lake is eerily familiar…
A chilling tour of a cemetery, guided by restless spirits…
A painting participates in a game of chess…
A witch embarks on a quest to retrieve a client’s missing heart…
A bloody knife appears everywhere a woman goes…
A beloved cat turns out to be much more than just a pet…

Enjoy these stories and more in WPaD’s tribute to the parAbnormal!

– A fugitive finds himself in a deadly predicament
– Reality show producers push the envelope to please their superiors
– A group of test subjects take an unexpected journey
– A rogue scientist takes genetic modification to the next level
– People who eat Tide Pods turn into detergent-craving zombies
– Something terrifying lurks in the Canadian wilderness
– Evacuees from a doomed Earth colonize a distant planet.
– A malfunctioning android threatens humanity

Pets!
They come in all shapes and sizes, and we love each and every one.
The writers of WPaD have compiled a collection of pet-themed stories and poetry that ranges from heartwarming to fantastical to thrilling and chilling.
Get cozy, cuddle your furbabies, and enjoy a riveting read!

– A henpecked husband makes a stand against his surly wife.
– Is a mysterious stain on the ceiling of a prison cell a product of the inmate’s imagination or something more sinister?
– A woman trapped in a loveless marriage finds magic in a gift from a friend.
– Something is alive in the outhouse…
– A young boy longs to venture beyond the walls of his post-apocalyptic city, until he learns the terrifying truth about what’s out there.
– A terminally ill teen’s forbidden love affair turns tragic.
– A young witch and her talking dog are tasked with ridding their home of unwanted guests. Magic is their only recourse.

How many ways could we end the world?
The writers of WPaD came up with plenty of possibilities:
A global pandemic? (No way, that would never happen!)
How about aliens, evil politicians, zombies in one form or another,
or even… rogue sex robots? (wait-what?)
A collection of apocalyptic tales guaranteed to shock, entertain, and tug at your heart strings.

A prisoner in her own home; afraid to leave, but too terrified to stay…
Driven to a reclusive lifestyle by her many phobias, Dana’s only sanctuary is her home.
When the objects of her fears begin to invade her safe haven, the only place to escape is outside, where unspeakable horrors lie in wait.

Through the Internet – her only link to the outside world – Dana meets Colin. She finds herself attracted to her online friend, whose soothing presence helps her cling to sanity. She dreams of meeting him in person, but must first find the courage to venture beyond her front door.

They say that if you die alone, your pets will eventually begin to eat you. But what if you aren’t dead yet?
Arnold is a loner who one day wakes to find he is paralyzed. Confined to his bed helpless and alone, he has no family or friends to miss him… nobody to suspect he might be in trouble. All he has are his seven cats, and they are getting hungrier by the day…

Brutal vigilante justice…
A killer stalks the streets of Los Angeles. Victims of the butcher known as ‘The Feeder’ are mutilated while still alive, with parts severed and inserted in their mouths.

When Camille places a drunken birthday phone call to her twin, Sammie becomes worried about her safety and flies to Los Angeles to bring her home. After finding the aspiring actress-turned-prostitute slaughtered in a hotel room, grief-stricken Sammie steps into the role of copycat killer. Suspecting that the killer is Camille’s abusive boyfriend, Sammie embarks on a bloody quest for revenge, copying the modus operandi of a brutal serial killer known as The Feeder. Walking the streets disguised as Camille, Sammie resolves to lure the real Feeder out of hiding. Sammie seeks out drug dealers, pimps, rapists – all men who caused harm to Camille. The men are found disemboweled, force-fed their own body parts and carved up like human Picassos. The bloodbath will not end until Camille’s murder has been avenged.

Can Sammie return to a ‘normal’ life after committing such unspeakable acts?

Warning:
If you are offended by obscene language, graphic violence and scenes of mutilation, then this is NOT the book for you!
Read at your own discretion.

Humans evacuate a dying Earth to start over on a distant planet. When familiar social patterns emerge, it becomes clear that they have learned nothing.

The day her brother tore his own head off and didn’t die was the day Johanna first suspected that all was not right with the world.
A teenage waitress and her sister find their world turned upside down when men start behaving strangely, trying to woo every woman they see, spouting lines from old romantic movies. But it isn’t all love and romance; the men have been infected by an alien virus that makes them tear off their own heads and implant alien eggs into women. All it takes is a single kiss…

Free Ebooks!

Remember these dates, and grab a free download to pass those chilly winter nights.

The Feeder: FREE until Dec 18

Brutal vigilante justice… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BTJYY4Y

Phobia: FREE Dec 16-20

An agoraphobic, terrorized inside her only sanctuary, trapped by her own fears… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PR98CLI

A Feast Not So Fancy: FREE Dec 17-21

A grisly cat-astrophe…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0099RQTGY

Dysfictional 2: Shreds of Sanity: FREE Dec 17-21

A collection of twisted tales…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MT6P1S4

Dysfictional 3: Down the Psycho Path: FREE Dec 20-24

More twisted tales… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KK85SQ7

Goin’ Extinct Too By WPaD: FREE Dec 28-Jan 1

A collection of apocalyptic tales by
Writers, Poets and Deviants…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08B5NYDV2

Droopy the Clown

What is your greatest fear?

What is your greatest fear?

We all have at least one. Some of us have more than one. Others, like yours truly, have an ever-growing list of fears, anxieties and outright phobias. Some of them, ok, most of them, are completely irrational. Where do these fears come from? We aren’t born with them. At what point do we acquire them? I have plenty of phobias: there’s social anxiety, which is essentially a fear of people, fear of answering telephones, FOBPOTS (Fear Of Being Put On The Spot), there are snakes of course, and old people on Rascal scooters… (Ok, I made that last one up.) And then there is coulrophobia.

That’s right.

Clowns.

Hate them. I just hate them.

Clowns are terrifying, plain and simple. Whoever got the idea that they are funny is one sick puppy, in my opinion. There is nothing funny about those white-faced, big-mouthed, floppy-shoe-wearing demon spawn. Nothing whatsoever. What the hell is funny about concealing one’s face in white grease and painting on a freaky looking over-exaggerated phony facial expression? Happy… sad… soulful and doleful, my ass. Pure evil has no soul.

I think clowns are psychopaths from the FBI’s Most Wanted list or maybe vicious Mafia hitmen who cooperated with police to save their own asses and now they’re in the Witness Protection Program. Whoever they are, they’re hiding their faces behind makeup so people won’t recognize them and masquerading as carnival folk or street performers. They even conceal their fingerprints with gloves and foot size with those ridiculous shoes. They have every detail covered to make sure nobody recognizes them.

Clowns.

Greasy, creepy ghouls passing themselves off as entertainers.

I’ve been asked why I have such a phobia but I’m not alone. I know of plenty of people who don’t like clowns. Little children routinely shriek in terror at the sight of them, and yet they continue to terrorize birthday parties and circus rings as if nobody has noticed that they are freaking the shit out of a lot of people.

It’s been suggested that perhaps I was frightened by a clown as a child and that memory developed into a full-blown phobia.

Yeah, maybe.

Frightened.

Excuse me while I scoff.

More like traumatized.

My earliest memory of being scared shitless by a clown dates back to when I was about five or six years old. It wasn’t at a birthday party or circus or any of the typical scenarios.

It was in my own home. In my bedroom.

I didn’t like the dark when I was little. What kid does?

I used to insist that my mother keep my bedroom door open and the hall light on when I went to bed. Who the hell can sleep when it’s dark? It’s scary as hell.

Once the lights are out, everything changes. That pile of clothes on top of the dresser becomes a severed rhinoceros head. The book bag hanging on the closet door becomes a dripping mass of flesh, torn from a screaming victim by a ravenous zombie. The cherubic faces of the dolls become ghoulish death masks with vacant black holes for eyes. The large teddy bear in the corner becomes a troll, crouched and grinning, waiting for me to close my eyes so it can sneak up to my bedside and do unspeakable things to me. The sock on the floor beside the bed becomes a grey bony hand, reaching out from beneath the bed, seeking a bare ankle to grab.

But nothing was worse than the night I saw the clown.

Over the years, I’ve convinced myself that it was just a dream, albeit an extremely vivid one.

I had closed my eyes, just for a few seconds, or perhaps I had actually dozed off, I’ll never know for sure.

When I opened my eyes, there it was.

It was sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed.

A clown.

It was horrible.

In the partial illumination from the hallway light, I could see its face clearly. It was one of those sad-faced clowns; the worst kind.

It sat quietly at the foot of my bed, staring at me from beneath a wild red afro.

Its eyes were the worst part. I’ve never forgotten those eyes; they haunt me still.

Bloodshot, droopy eyes like those of a bloodhound – a bloodhound that had been pulling downward on its cheeks the way children sometimes do and their mothers tell them their faces will freeze that way. I guess this creature never had a mother because his face was frozen in a permanent sag with lower lids hanging and looking all red and bloodshot. Below the saggy lower lids were those jiggly eyebags like I sometimes saw on old people’s faces and below that, more wrinkles, like the clown’s entire face was melting.

I swore right then that I’d never ever pull my eyes down to make a funny face again.

There was nothing funny about this clown’s face.

It just sat there in silence, fixing me with that doleful bloodhound gaze while I did my best to stay as still as possible. Maybe if it thought I was asleep it would leave me alone. But my eyes were open, saucer-wide in terror, so I knew that it knew I was awake and that I saw it.

The bedroom door was also at the foot of the bed, so in order to escape from my room I would have had to make it past the clown.

It hadn’t moved yet and I wondered how fast it was.

I was pretty fast. Maybe I could make it.

Then again, maybe not.

And so there we sat, the clown and I, locked into some kind of morbid staredown that would only end when one of us moved, after which I was certain that I would emerge the loser.

I prepared myself for the most gruesome and unimaginable death and I waited.

And waited.

The clown never moved.

I began to wonder if the clown was alive after all. Maybe it was some kind of dummy or mannequin that someone had placed in my room as a cruel joke. I couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. My parents? Never!

I realized then that the house was eerily quiet. Maybe there was a murderer in the house who had already killed my parents and had left the clown in my doorway like some grisly calling card or something. The clown murderer… it made sense, and at my age I could believe a story like that easily. Yep, the thing had to be fake. I was almost convinced.

And then it moved.

 The clown moved, ever so slightly. I swear it did. I was positive I’d seen it move and the saggy bags under its eyes had jiggled, even though it seemed to be in exactly the same position as it was before.

Did it move?

I began to doubt my own eyes.

Then I heard a creaking noise.

I knew that sound.

It was the squeaky hinge of my bedroom door.

My heart began to pound.

Oh NO! NONONO! Please, no, anything but that! Please don’t shut the door!

I screamed silently in my head at first, then I tried to scream for real but discovered I was mute. I tried to shake my head NO at it, but found that I also couldn’t move. It had cast some sort of evil freezing spell on me or something.

I tried to move again, to shake my head from side to side to tell it not to do what it was threatening to do. I managed to move my head just a tiny bit, but it was probably not enough for the clown to see.

I tried pleading with the thing with my eyes, mentally begging it to have mercy on me and leave the door open.

I heard the creak again and the wedge of light that spilled into the room from the hallway narrowed.

I gauged the distance between myself and the door and wondered if I could move fast enough to escape before Droopy the Clown closed the door.

There was no way I was going to make it.

I was frozen.

I was a goner.

I thought that maybe if I didn’t look it would go away, but as soon as I closed my eyes I heard the hinge creak again. My eyelids snapped open and I was certain I saw the clown quickly open the door back up and resume its previous position.

Fine.

I would have to keep an eye on it then.

I couldn’t let it shut the door because once that door was shut I would be at the mercy of the droopy-eyed clown, the rhino head, the bony hand, the troll, the zombie and whatever that thing was that moved outside my window.

Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because the next time I opened my eyes it was daylight; the clown was gone, I was still alive and my bedroom door was still open.

Over time I convinced myself that it was just a dream; the product of a child’s overactive imagination. I never quite forgot about Droopy the Clown, as I secretly called him, but in time I accepted that he was imaginary.

That experience, whether real or imagined was the root of my present-day hatred for the grease-painted ghouls.

* * *

I still don’t like the dark much. I prefer to sleep with the bedroom door open and some form of lighting in the room. I find that leaving the TV set on with the volume low is an ideal way to provide dim light and a bit of background noise to muffle the spooky creaks and groans of this old house.

Tonight is different.

The storm outside has knocked the power out. It’s the middle of the night, so there’s no point in lighting candles. The logical thing is to just go to sleep. I close my eyes and am almost asleep when I hear the creak. It isn’t the sound of the storm or the usual house creaks.

I know that sound.

The creak of a hinge

 A bedroom door hinge.

My bedroom door hinge.

 NO! That’s impossible!

Heart pounding, I open my eyes just a crack at first, then all the way but I see nothing in the inky blackness.

Silly. Just getting a little spooked because of the storm.

CRACK! BOOM!

The lightning strike is so close I feel it as much as hear it. The entire house shakes.

The bright flash of lightning that accompanies the sound bathes the room in an electric blue-white glow.

For a brief moment there he is, plain as day.

Droopy the Clown.

Sitting by my bedroom door.

I must have been imagining things. Just freaked out because of the storm.

The lightning flashes again, momentarily blinding me. I close my eyes with the intention of shutting out the storm and all the imaginary visions that come with it.

That’s when I see him.

Imprinted in negative on the insides of my eyes is the last image I saw before the lights went out again.

He is standing beside my bed.

Published in Dysfictional ~ Available worldwide in ebook and paperback