A Box Of Sugar Cereal & A Very Bad Plan

𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧•𝗟𝗜𝗘𝗦•𝗜𝗡•𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗘𝗧 ⬇️⁠

Fans of Agatha Christie’s 𝘾𝙧𝙤𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙙 𝙃𝙤𝙪𝙨𝙚 (or the film 𝙆𝙣𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙊𝙪𝙩), Donna Tartt’s 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙩 𝙃𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙮, and Edgar Cantero’s 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙪𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙀𝙣𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 are likely to enjoy the vibe of this one! Keep an eye out on Instagram { @a.j.quill }on Mondays for updates, snippets, character profiles, and more.⁠

Terrific character goes to Johnny Depp’s charmingly frazzled Ichabod Crane!

@all-writers-eve​

Prompt: the beast within

Cinnamon

The bell on the door gave a halfhearted tinkle, rousing Willow from the book she’d been reading.

“Something hot, or something iced?” she called, only half-looking up.

The poor kid was clearly confused, like the rest of the aimless hipsters that wandered into her coffee shop. “Don’t you have a menu, here?”

“Nope,” she said, assuming he would leave. People tended to do that if you didn’t let them have a hand in picking their poison.

A pause. “Hot,” said the kid, to his credit.

Willow slid off her barstool, slipping a tarot card between the pages to mark her place. It was The Empress.

“Tell me what you like,” she said, passing him to move behind the bar. She could smell cedar and sawdust, gasoline and rain. These weren’t the scents of cologne, but of life.

The kid shrugged. “Coffee, tea. Doesn’t matter.”

Interesting, she thought, because it mattered a very great deal. Her fingers hovered over the dry rack full of colorful mugs, itching with anticipation.

“In a word, describe yourself,” she commanded, expecting a longer pause than she got.

“That’s a bit reductive, isn’t it?”

The Four of Cups? Her left hand twitched toward the blue mug, and with her right she slapped it away. Patience. Push him first.

“Indulge me,” she said.

He thought for a moment. “Curious.”

Ah. The Page of Swords. She snatched the burnt orange mug without pause this time, upending it and sliding it down the bar toward the espresso machine.

“So,” said Willow, adjusting the port-a-filter in the machine and smacking the handle home. “What do you do for work?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking me what I want in my drink?”

She raised her eyebrow. “Is that what you want me to be asking?”

He stared for a moment, then burst into a slow grin. Willow’s fingers tingled again, and she gripped the edge of the bar counter to keep herself from reaching out and snatching at him. Control yourself. Soon enough.

“You can ask me whatever you like,” he told her. He ran his tongue over his upper lip. “But if you’re interested, I like cinnamon.”

Willow’s hand shook against the milk pitcher as steam bubbled out into the dark espresso. From a secret drawer beneath the machine, she pulled a vial full of liquid, black as blood. It shimmered unnaturally in the fluorescent light.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Not long,” answered Willow, tipping just enough of the viscous liquid into the latte. She stirred the mixture with a cinnamon stick, then held out the mug. “Try this, and let me know what you think.”

The boy reached out and took it, his warm fingers brushing hers. She pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth to stop them from giving her away.

She watched him take a sip from the mug. The second he swallowed, she saw his eyelids flutter.

“Cinnamon,” he muttered, suddenly drowsy. “And something else...”

Willow let her jaw unhinge, and crawled across the bar toward her prey.

Much later, Willow returned to her book, sucking on a cinnamon stick. She pulled The Empress out from between the pages, discarding it, and replaced it with The Page of Swords.

☕️ ☠️✨

Favorite horror author with a penchant for excellent sci-fi? Cadwell Turnbull! Check out his short fiction and his novel The Lesson!

Prompt: a terrifying twist.

@all-writers-eve 🍂❄️✨

Being afraid of the water was only a weakness in summertime. Still—it felt especially mortifying to a girl of thirteen. Such creatures are expected to show every weakness, or no weakness at all, and that left Sanity stuck somewhere in between being the tough girl and the scaredy-cat.

Sanity St. James. What a world of a name for one small girl from Antigonish, who couldn’t believe her luck: It had snowed early this year.

She wore her orange parka, the one she was never without once the weather turned cold. Her boots were old, but the left one still kept the snow out. As for the right, Sanity had taken to mummifying her sock with a plastic grocery bag. She’d told her aunt a thousand times to bring her own reusables to the market—but one stray Sobey’s bag was probably not going to murder any turtles from the depths of Sanity’s boot. Not if she had anything to say about it.

Her colleagues trailed along behind her. Sanity’s mother had told her long ago, possibly in a dream, that people you saw regularly but didn’t particularly like were not to be wasted on the word “friends.” Her mother’s people at the paper factory had been colleagues—tiresome, vapid, khaki-wearing losers—and that was just about how Sanity felt about her schoolmates. But being a kid is a thankless job, sometimes, and besides: you’ve got to have someone who will follow you into the woods.

They’d been walking for miles now. Only Sanity’s aunt knew which trail they’d taken, and she was the opposite of a helicopter parent. “Back before dark” was their only restriction, and there was a good hour left before that became an issue.

“Look!” One of her colleagues, Tim, pointed a mittened hand off to the left of the group, somewhere through the trees. “C’mon, follow me!”

“We shouldn’t leave the path,” said Raina, who was really perfectly nice and rather clever. But, because of comments like this one, she’d been labeled something worse than a scaredy-cat. A rule-follower.

“It’s not really leaving the path. It’s right there!”

“What’s there?” asked Sanity, cautiously. The map in her head was...well. She didn’t really have one. They could be anywhere.

“The lake!”

The giggle that ripped through the group make the hair on Sanity’s neck stand up. Her cheeks burned.

“Come on then,” she commanded, setting off after Tim. The giggles stopped, and gave way to crunching twigs and the sounds of descending a shallow hill.

The lake was frozen. It had only been this cold for a week or so, but the crust of white where the water had been looked thick. Too thick.

“Betcha won’t walk on it,” said Tim, ever the instigator. He elbowed her in the ribs.

“Don’t,” warned Raina, in stereo with the sensible voice in Sanity’s head. The sane voice. The one that didn’t sound a thing like her mother’s.

She looked at the place where her leaky boot met the edge of the shore, kicked away the frothy snow there. Beneath was ice so dark it looked black. Wasn’t that supposed to mean it was thicker? Safer? That helpful fact was one too many Wikipedia articles in the past to tell for certain.

She didn’t care about proving anything to stupid Tim. Not a jot. But she was tired of being afraid.

Try it, said a different inner voice. Now: this one sounded a good deal more like her mother’s. That was a bad sign.

The first step onto the lake was anticlimactic. So were the second, the third, and the fourth. But there was one peculiar thing about Sanity that pushed at the back of her brain in moments like this—right below where a lobotomy scar would be, if she ever decided to get one. It ran in the family. Once she began things, she had trouble stopping.

“Come back!” Tim’s voice was calling behind her, too far away to feel real. He sounded frantic. Was she at thirty steps now, or forty? The ice felt thick as a sidewalk. Where would she end up, if she kept going? It felt like something was out here. Keep going, keep going, keep going....

The ice beneath her feet shook, throwing her to her knees. Sanity frowned—this wasn’t how it felt when ice cracked. She’d stepped in frozen puddles before, testing her luck, pushing herself. This felt like a truck was driving across the ice, but not from above.

From beneath.

I’m a bit late for Monday’s prompt, but I couldn’t resist writing something for the ghost in the machine! @all-writers-eve

👻

You know what silence sounds like? Real, power-outage grade silence, not even a buzz of electricity to be heard?

It’s awful. It filled the garage around us, closing in like a big ol’ cloud of nothing. You could have heard a pin drop. Then again, I doubt any of us had pins on us—we were doing a summoning, not voodoo.

The ouija board lay discarded on the garage floor, mocking us. Come and wake the dead, it teased silently. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to see?

We all stood in a circle, our backs to the infernal thing, holding whatever blunt objects we were able to scrounge up. A baseball bat my kid brother used for little league. An ancient fire extinguisher. A tire iron. It was pitch dark save for the thin slice of moon peeking in through the garage door window, but we didn't dare try the overhead light. Not after last time..

“Did you hear that?” Marybeth whispered, the sound too harsh in the eerie silence. I saw Rhys jump out of the corner of my eye.

“Quiet,” I hissed.

“We’ve been quiet! It isn’t helping. What if it comes back?”

"It can't as long as everything's turned off. Remember that flash last time, when Rhys cut the light? It's stuck in the electrical current."

"How can you be sure?" Marybeth pressed.

I adjusted my grip on the baseball bat. "As long as nothing's turned on, or plugged in, it doesn't have any way out of the current. Okay? And we unplugged everything in the damn garage."

The silence, already maddening, took on a charged quality. Something rattled--the chain on the overhead bulb? The box of carpentry nails on the thawing minifridge?

You're the eldest, Will. Keep your head. I schooled the panic out of my voice. "We unplugged everything, right?"

Rhys gave a strangled whimper.

"Right?"

I could hear Marybeth's heart hammering, the swell of panicked breathing from the others. Rhys stammered out the words: "My phone charger. I think I forgot--"

And then an angry tangle of energy ripped out of the wall, sending bits of shredded lightning cable soaring like shrapnel.

Morgana stood in a moonlit clearing with blood dripping from her fingertips. Her throat was raw from chanting the words, over and over and over again. It should have worked. It should have been done hours ago. And still, the wind stirred the branches, and the quiet of the night seeped deep into her soul. She raised her head, just enough to cast her eyes around the treeline.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And then, the barest glint of stars, hanging far too low to be celestial.

She squinted through her tangled hair, watching the trees like a vigil. Darkness. Nothingness. And then, all at once, there they were again.

A blade-sharp smile split Morgana’s crimson lips. Not fallen stars, but eyes. Eyes in the dark, seeking her.

@all-writers-eve​

Meliot stood with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, watching the knight wander closer. He stood proudly, mingling with the rest of his honored peers, dangling a goblet of wine from his fingertips. Every thread in his cape spoke of splendor, every glint of laughter a flash of gold across his face.

He looked magnificent. He was magnificent.

Meliot dropped his gaze, unwilling to risk their eyes meeting. There would be little recourse then.

The dancing and the chatter swirled around him, indiscernible as Meliot freed a single hand to grasp a goblet of wine from a passing squire’s tray. He busied himself with his cup, watching hemlines drift by in his peripheral vision, and on went the minutes.

Fingers closed around the wrist behind his back, soft and sudden.

“Midnight,” his knight’s voice whispered in his ear. “Do you remember the meeting place?”

Meliot shut his eyes as callused fingers slipped away from the line of his racing pulse. “How could I forget?”

--

From the head of the room, the king smiled. The festivities were well underway, and laughter filled his royal hall. He gazed upon his subjects, one at a time. His queen, dancing with abandon with her long hair adrift. His half-sister, grinning despite herself, her arched spine faced carefully toward the corner of the room. Lancelaut he’d lost track of, but the knight too had been grinning and dancing last he’d seen.

“A fine gathering to mark so grim an occasion,” said the king’s elder brother beside him. Cai’s voice, usually so full of levity, sounded unsettlingly hollow. “When will you make the announcement?”

“Soon.” Arthur lifted his goblet to his lips, ignoring the pang in his chest. “At midnight.”

--

Morgana crept out of the servant’s entrance adjoining the Great Hall, and fled into the night. She had tarried at her brother’s banquet too long.

Twigs snapped beneath her slippered feet as she ran, into the cover of the woods and up the rise of the hill beyond, to the place where the moonlight fell against the standing stones. She had carved runes there, days before; slain a falcon and left its bones to dry; and now, after this night’s festivities, she had the last piece of the puzzle.

The lock of hair in her hand was nothing remarkable to look at, but it burned quicker than any talisman she’d ever seen. She arranged the brittle bones against the face of the rock, circling the dying flame, and spoke words of power into the runes as the moon bore witness.

The stroke of midnight fell, and with it, the end would begin.

--

@flashfictionfridayofficial​, thank you for another delightful prompt!! ✨

“Create something based on the best horror thing of all time,” they said. “It will be spooky,” they said. @all-writers-eve

Get out there and join the challenge, fellow creatives!! 🍁💀

The Haunting of Hill House

Ink on paper

~ A.J. Quill

“That’s the last of the haul, sir. The cargo bay is full nigh to bursting with tea and spices!”

“Thank you, quartermaster,” boomed the commodore, eyes on the gaggle of fellow redcoats standing far too comfortably on her deck. If all went smoothly, her ship would be out of the harbor and above suspicion before the powder-wigged dolts noticed anything amiss.

Pride of the Royal Navy, my ass, thought the commodore, flashing yet another smile to yet another uniformed scumbag she didn’t like. She was sure the group of them were only “seeing her off” in hopes of catching a nitpick they might report back to Ewan.

The very thought painted a smirk on her face. So long as her brother continued to oversee the Navy’s trade routes, her shenanigans were secure. And, so long as her brother kept calling her Elijah instead of Elaine in public, so was her military rank.

She grabbed the quartermaster’s arm, stilling him as he passed.

“And the...other cargo?”

He blinked innocently at her. “In it’s usual place, sir.”

“Good,” muttered Elaine. “See it stays there until we’re on the open see. Can’t have the wigs sniffing out pirate gold and stolen gunpowder.”

“I’ll pass that whisper through the crew, sir, in case anyone fancies getting lightfingered before plunder’s been rightly divided.”

“Good man,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Best not to make them wait too long for their shares once we’ve cast off, though. It’s the shinier things in life that tend to disappear the quickest.”

The quartermaster set off, and Elaine perched at the stern of her ship, one eye on the redcoats and the other on the horizon, where the night was fast decaying in the wake of a golden sunrise.

“The glint of treasure yet to be smuggled,” she muttered, fingers stretching over the smooth-worn helm.