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awmperryJust entered this story in a writing competition at www.nycmidnight.com - you get a genre, a story prompt, and a week to write a story of no more than 2500 words. And now the judging's started, so I can show it to people, see what folks think.
For the record, the genre was fantasy, and the prompt was a child's birthday party.
And he huffed, and he puffed, and...
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The puffer is a boy of almost exactly twelve, labouring under the tragic name of Algernon Jerzy Winterbottom Jr III. His parents felt that the full name should be used on formal events, like birthdays; this was one of the many reasons he hated birthdays.
Another reason was Suzie Peggins. His parents insisted on referring to his classmates as “your little friends from school,” and so thought it would be a nice idea to invite them all to every bloody birthday party, every bloody time. Oh, they weren’t all bad, and some of them could even be classified as friends.
But then there was Suzie Peggins, of course, and she made up for all the almost-friends by sheer weight of juvenile malice.
It was the prettiness that did it, Algie reckoned. Suzie was very pretty, and could affect the most convincing expression of angelic innocence ever seen outside a King Charles spaniel. It was guaranteed to work on anyone over the age of... well, anyone who wasn’t one of her victims, really.
There had always been something slightly off about her, in Algie’s opinion. She had a habit of staring at you as though you weren’t there, or worse, as though you were there but didn’t matter. And she always seemed able to pinpoint, with remarkable accuracy, exactly what to say to inflict maximum damage.
But he was probably just imagining the times she’d appeared behind him out of thin air. He just hadn’t heard the door open, that was it. Had to be.
That said, tearing the head off her own doll, grinning at him, bawling her eyes out to the teacher and blaming him had been just mean.
And still she got invited to every sodding birthday party.
...he blew out the candles.
The room went dark. This was expected. The fact that the lights didn’t come on again was not.
Algie looked around in the absolute silence. It wasn’t complete blackness, he realised as his eyes adjusted; shades of black, dark blues, dark browns, blackish purples hinted at high vaulted ceilings and rows of columns stretching away, but then the blackness crashed down again.
The candles flared up once more, actinic blue flames blazing eighteen inches up in the air. They stabbed up...
...and died down, leaving a dull glare from the cake, and flickering green afterimages on Algie’s retinas. The blurry splotches faded...
...and Suzie, bloody Suzie, was there, staring at him from across the cake, dull blue light illuminating her face from below.
“Hello.” She smirked, and her teeth glinted blue. He must have been imagining it, but he could have sworn there was an unearthly glow from somewhere deep inside her eyes.
His jaw sagged open, and he absently felt himself leaning forward, drawn toward that demonic, angelic face with its glowing blue eyes.
“Happy birthday, Algie,” she purred, the words clanging into his head like iron doors slamming shut, and still her eyes bored into him.
“I...”
He tore his gaze from her eyes, looked around... and there stood Stuart, one of his classmates. Or something that looked like him, at least.
“I brought your friends along,” Suzie’s voice crooned from behind him. “It wouldn’t be much of a party otherwise, would it?”
Algie tapped the rigid figure. Glassy, frozen eyes stared back at him, then the figure yielded to Algie’s nudge and keeled over backwards. It shattered, gleaming crystalline shards of Stuart spilling over the stone floor.
Algie gaped, shocked. Then he jumped as a dainty hand landed on his shoulder.
“Come here,” Suzie said from behind him.
He turned. A shaft of light from somewhere up in the gloom shone down, dimly illuminating the circular table where the cake stood. A dozen chairs had appeared around it, all but two occupied.
They were all there, sort of. Paul, Jenny, Chris, Martin, Gillian, Sayid, James, Kate, Penny, Tom... But none of them were right. They looked like the contents of a toy chest, or as though someone had made toys of them.
Jenny had long blonde curls visibly glued to her porcelain head; Tom looked like a teddy bear, with one button eye hanging raggedly loose; Sayid appeared to have a Kung-Fu Grip And Eight Super-Cool Accessories. None of them moved.
But Suzie gave no sign of noticing. She drifted round the table, pouring tea into little dainty teacups, cutting little dainty slices of cake – a plump blue thing covered in pretty dark blue curlicues, which seemed to have twisted into new and somehow unnerving shapes now - and serving them onto little dainty plates.
She poured tea for Algie, and sat down beside him.
“Go on,” she said, a curiously eager look in her eyes. “Drink your tea.”
He did. It tasted of orange juice.
He turned to her, but she had sprung to her feet and set off around the table, as though distracted.
“Drink your tea, teddy,” she said, raising Tom’s cup to his embroidered lips and dribbling a portion of it down his front. “Oh, silly teddy, you’ve got all messy...”
A napkin appeared in her hand, and she swabbed the tea off Tom’s waistcoat.
“I think I’d like to go home now,” he said timidly, carefully putting the cup back on its saucer. It clattered, betraying a slight tremor in his hand. Suzie glanced up, latching her gaze onto his.
“But we’re not finished.” She stood, resting her hand on teddy-Tom’s shoulder. She cocked her head to the side and stared at him quizzically. “Why would you want to leave?”
With her eyes still locked on him, her hand started absently picking at a seam on the teddy’s arm.
“I... want to go home. I want to go back to my mum.”
Suzie stood still, the only movement her fingernail picking at the seam. Algie watched in horror as the stuffing started to protrude from the hole.
“But you are home.”
She started pulling at the stuffing, pulling out bits of fluffy white stuff and dropping them to the floor. She didn’t seem to be pulling out much, but still Tom the teddy was starting to sag.
“No.”
She looked at him again with that curious gaze, head cocked like an inquisitive bird. Tom fell face-first into his cake.
“Don’t you like me?”
Algie looked at her nervously, then- “No.”
Suzie cocked her head the other way, as if trying to figure out an awkward algebra problem. Then she stuffed the rapidly sagging Tom under the table, where he faded out of existence.
“Don’t worry, you will.” She straightened up, a bright smile now on her face. “Let’s play musical chairs!”
A jaunty, cartoony tune appeared out of nowhere, and she pulled Algie to his feet. He tried to resist, but his feet didn’t seem to want to obey, dragging him round the table with its macabre tableau of inanimate simulacra. And when the music suddenly stopped, Suzie pulled him down onto one of the two empty chairs, throwing herself down on the chair beside him.
“Wasn’t that fun?” she asked, smiling almost hungrily at him. He glanced over his shoulder at the full complement arrayed around the table.
“What about...?”
She looked up, seeming to notice the other ‘guests’ for the first time.
“Oh, them.” She threw a bored glance at a shiny plastic doll, and in a matter of moments Gillian had melted into a greasy, congealing film on the floor. “Go again?”
“Suzie, you just...”
But Suzie had already pulled him to his feet, her eyes flashing blue at his refusal. The music started again, and this time he acquiesced; it was easier than resisting.
They got once round the table, and were back at their chairs when the music stopped again. Suzie pushed him into one of them, and glared at the other. It flared up, and disappeared, leaving only a cloud of smoke.
“Oh dear,” she said innocently, “my chair’s gone.”
She perched herself on Algie’s lap, and glared at the collection of giant toys around the table.
“Bored now,” she said, and they all erupted in a flash of flame and smoke. The flare died down, leaving only piles of ash and a haze of smoke where the chairs and their occupants had been.
She got to her feet again, spun his chair round and hopped up on the table, facing him. She blinked, and the tablecloth and crockery disappeared, leaving only the cake in the centre.
The table itself was granite, an intricate design inlaid into its surface in white marble and gold. It centred on a sigil of a boar’s head, encircled by beads, and on the boar’s forehead stood the cake, its dark blue markings now inescapably demonic.
“Do you like me now?” Suzie asked, leaning in close, bracing her hands against the table’s edge. “Now that I gave you all this stuff, do you like me?”
Algie stared at her in disbelief. This elaborate torture had been her attempt at making friends?
“You... made them into toys! You killed them!”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Only here. And anyway, you have me! What do you need them for?”
Algie stood abruptly. He had to get home, had to get away... He turned, looking for an exit, but there wasn’t one, just rows of vast pillars stretching away into the murk.
He looked around frantically, but-
“Silly boy,” Suzie’s mocking voice said behind him. “You didn’t get here through a door. I’ll send you back when we’re ready. Now...” A surprisingly strong arm grabbed him. “...come back here.”
She yanked him back, sending him sprawling onto the table. The back of his head hit the stone, sending a flickering pain through his skull. He turned his head to one side, where the layers of meringue inside the cake grinned at him.
Something touched his leg, and he raised his head to look. Suzie was there, creeping across the table towards him. She straddled his chest, and leaned down to within inches of his face.
“I like you,” she breathed. “Just over six and a half years from now, I shall need a consort. You’ll be mine. You’ll have everything you want. You’ll never die. And I’ll be yours. Do you understand?”
“What, don’t I have a choice?”
She grinned at him.
“Of course you do,” she said. “You can accept, or you can stay here when I go back to the world. There’s always a choice.”
“Won’t I starve here?”
“Accept or die... is still a choice, Algie dear.”
He stared up at the gloom that presumably hid a ceiling somewhere up there, then finally nodded reluctantly.
“All right. You win.”
“Good!” She grinned again, nimbly bouncing to her feet and dropping off the table. “Then I’m sure we shall be friends.”
The question that had been nagging at the back of his mind snuck out.
“Suzie... what are you?”
“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” She caught his right hand with hers, and pulled him to his feet.
“You’re mine now,” she said, clasping his hand firmly. The palm of his hand felt like it was on fire, but he couldn’t draw his gaze from hers. Something was going on with her eyes, swirling vortices of blue and black.
The burning pain increased, but he barely noticed, locked into the whirling depths of her eyes, that seemed to expand and take over his entire world...
The pain crested, flared.
“Look into my eyes,” Suzie crooned, the twin spinning pools melding into one giant maelstrom of blue, black and irresistible evil.
Then everything went black, and Algie fell in.
The world wobbled back. He was moving, that much was certain. He tried to move his arm, but something held him down. A strap, or something... he tried to sit up, but whatever held his arm went all the way across his chest, tying him down.
He opened his eyes. There was a ceiling, and cupboards, and a lamp...
“Algie,” his mother’s voice drifted in, and her face swam into his field of view. “Algie, you fainted. Can you hear me?”
Algie nodded, or something, and muttered something in the general direction of ‘yes’.
“You’ve been out for an hour and a half, Algie. We’re in an ambulance, going to hospital, OK? When we get there they said they’ll turn on the siren for you if you’re awake, all right?”
Algie mumbled something again. His hand was itching.
“One of your little friends wanted to come along to keep you company,” his mother said, drifting away into the periphery once more.
A hand took his, there was the quiet snik of a clasp unclipping, and someone lifted his itching right hand up where he could see it. He stared.
It was faint, but there was no doubt about it. Etched under his skin were thin, faintly glowing blue lines, forming a sigil he had last seen in a very different world. As he watched, the lines blurred, spread and faded away, like ink in the rain.
He looked at the hand holding his; now that he was looking for it, there it was, that same sigil glowing dully under the skin.
“Happy birthday,” a voice purred from beside him. He followed the hand, which turned out to be attached to an arm, which one way or another led to a face.
“Did you enjoy your trip?” asked Suzie. She smirked, and her teeth glinted blue.
For the record, the genre was fantasy, and the prompt was a child's birthday party.
Fairytales and Inkwells
There are worse things than birthday parties.
When Suzie Peggins attends his twelfth,
Algie finds out just how much worse.
FAIRYTAILS AND INKWELLS
And he huffed, and he puffed, and...
* * *
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The puffer is a boy of almost exactly twelve, labouring under the tragic name of Algernon Jerzy Winterbottom Jr III. His parents felt that the full name should be used on formal events, like birthdays; this was one of the many reasons he hated birthdays.
Another reason was Suzie Peggins. His parents insisted on referring to his classmates as “your little friends from school,” and so thought it would be a nice idea to invite them all to every bloody birthday party, every bloody time. Oh, they weren’t all bad, and some of them could even be classified as friends.
But then there was Suzie Peggins, of course, and she made up for all the almost-friends by sheer weight of juvenile malice.
It was the prettiness that did it, Algie reckoned. Suzie was very pretty, and could affect the most convincing expression of angelic innocence ever seen outside a King Charles spaniel. It was guaranteed to work on anyone over the age of... well, anyone who wasn’t one of her victims, really.
There had always been something slightly off about her, in Algie’s opinion. She had a habit of staring at you as though you weren’t there, or worse, as though you were there but didn’t matter. And she always seemed able to pinpoint, with remarkable accuracy, exactly what to say to inflict maximum damage.
But he was probably just imagining the times she’d appeared behind him out of thin air. He just hadn’t heard the door open, that was it. Had to be.
That said, tearing the head off her own doll, grinning at him, bawling her eyes out to the teacher and blaming him had been just mean.
And still she got invited to every sodding birthday party.
* * *
...he blew out the candles.
The room went dark. This was expected. The fact that the lights didn’t come on again was not.
Algie looked around in the absolute silence. It wasn’t complete blackness, he realised as his eyes adjusted; shades of black, dark blues, dark browns, blackish purples hinted at high vaulted ceilings and rows of columns stretching away, but then the blackness crashed down again.
The candles flared up once more, actinic blue flames blazing eighteen inches up in the air. They stabbed up...
...and died down, leaving a dull glare from the cake, and flickering green afterimages on Algie’s retinas. The blurry splotches faded...
...and Suzie, bloody Suzie, was there, staring at him from across the cake, dull blue light illuminating her face from below.
“Hello.” She smirked, and her teeth glinted blue. He must have been imagining it, but he could have sworn there was an unearthly glow from somewhere deep inside her eyes.
His jaw sagged open, and he absently felt himself leaning forward, drawn toward that demonic, angelic face with its glowing blue eyes.
“Happy birthday, Algie,” she purred, the words clanging into his head like iron doors slamming shut, and still her eyes bored into him.
“I...”
He tore his gaze from her eyes, looked around... and there stood Stuart, one of his classmates. Or something that looked like him, at least.
“I brought your friends along,” Suzie’s voice crooned from behind him. “It wouldn’t be much of a party otherwise, would it?”
Algie tapped the rigid figure. Glassy, frozen eyes stared back at him, then the figure yielded to Algie’s nudge and keeled over backwards. It shattered, gleaming crystalline shards of Stuart spilling over the stone floor.
Algie gaped, shocked. Then he jumped as a dainty hand landed on his shoulder.
“Come here,” Suzie said from behind him.
He turned. A shaft of light from somewhere up in the gloom shone down, dimly illuminating the circular table where the cake stood. A dozen chairs had appeared around it, all but two occupied.
They were all there, sort of. Paul, Jenny, Chris, Martin, Gillian, Sayid, James, Kate, Penny, Tom... But none of them were right. They looked like the contents of a toy chest, or as though someone had made toys of them.
Jenny had long blonde curls visibly glued to her porcelain head; Tom looked like a teddy bear, with one button eye hanging raggedly loose; Sayid appeared to have a Kung-Fu Grip And Eight Super-Cool Accessories. None of them moved.
But Suzie gave no sign of noticing. She drifted round the table, pouring tea into little dainty teacups, cutting little dainty slices of cake – a plump blue thing covered in pretty dark blue curlicues, which seemed to have twisted into new and somehow unnerving shapes now - and serving them onto little dainty plates.
She poured tea for Algie, and sat down beside him.
“Go on,” she said, a curiously eager look in her eyes. “Drink your tea.”
He did. It tasted of orange juice.
He turned to her, but she had sprung to her feet and set off around the table, as though distracted.
“Drink your tea, teddy,” she said, raising Tom’s cup to his embroidered lips and dribbling a portion of it down his front. “Oh, silly teddy, you’ve got all messy...”
A napkin appeared in her hand, and she swabbed the tea off Tom’s waistcoat.
“I think I’d like to go home now,” he said timidly, carefully putting the cup back on its saucer. It clattered, betraying a slight tremor in his hand. Suzie glanced up, latching her gaze onto his.
“But we’re not finished.” She stood, resting her hand on teddy-Tom’s shoulder. She cocked her head to the side and stared at him quizzically. “Why would you want to leave?”
With her eyes still locked on him, her hand started absently picking at a seam on the teddy’s arm.
“I... want to go home. I want to go back to my mum.”
Suzie stood still, the only movement her fingernail picking at the seam. Algie watched in horror as the stuffing started to protrude from the hole.
“But you are home.”
She started pulling at the stuffing, pulling out bits of fluffy white stuff and dropping them to the floor. She didn’t seem to be pulling out much, but still Tom the teddy was starting to sag.
“No.”
She looked at him again with that curious gaze, head cocked like an inquisitive bird. Tom fell face-first into his cake.
“Don’t you like me?”
Algie looked at her nervously, then- “No.”
Suzie cocked her head the other way, as if trying to figure out an awkward algebra problem. Then she stuffed the rapidly sagging Tom under the table, where he faded out of existence.
“Don’t worry, you will.” She straightened up, a bright smile now on her face. “Let’s play musical chairs!”
A jaunty, cartoony tune appeared out of nowhere, and she pulled Algie to his feet. He tried to resist, but his feet didn’t seem to want to obey, dragging him round the table with its macabre tableau of inanimate simulacra. And when the music suddenly stopped, Suzie pulled him down onto one of the two empty chairs, throwing herself down on the chair beside him.
“Wasn’t that fun?” she asked, smiling almost hungrily at him. He glanced over his shoulder at the full complement arrayed around the table.
“What about...?”
She looked up, seeming to notice the other ‘guests’ for the first time.
“Oh, them.” She threw a bored glance at a shiny plastic doll, and in a matter of moments Gillian had melted into a greasy, congealing film on the floor. “Go again?”
“Suzie, you just...”
But Suzie had already pulled him to his feet, her eyes flashing blue at his refusal. The music started again, and this time he acquiesced; it was easier than resisting.
They got once round the table, and were back at their chairs when the music stopped again. Suzie pushed him into one of them, and glared at the other. It flared up, and disappeared, leaving only a cloud of smoke.
“Oh dear,” she said innocently, “my chair’s gone.”
She perched herself on Algie’s lap, and glared at the collection of giant toys around the table.
“Bored now,” she said, and they all erupted in a flash of flame and smoke. The flare died down, leaving only piles of ash and a haze of smoke where the chairs and their occupants had been.
She got to her feet again, spun his chair round and hopped up on the table, facing him. She blinked, and the tablecloth and crockery disappeared, leaving only the cake in the centre.
The table itself was granite, an intricate design inlaid into its surface in white marble and gold. It centred on a sigil of a boar’s head, encircled by beads, and on the boar’s forehead stood the cake, its dark blue markings now inescapably demonic.
“Do you like me now?” Suzie asked, leaning in close, bracing her hands against the table’s edge. “Now that I gave you all this stuff, do you like me?”
Algie stared at her in disbelief. This elaborate torture had been her attempt at making friends?
“You... made them into toys! You killed them!”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Only here. And anyway, you have me! What do you need them for?”
Algie stood abruptly. He had to get home, had to get away... He turned, looking for an exit, but there wasn’t one, just rows of vast pillars stretching away into the murk.
He looked around frantically, but-
“Silly boy,” Suzie’s mocking voice said behind him. “You didn’t get here through a door. I’ll send you back when we’re ready. Now...” A surprisingly strong arm grabbed him. “...come back here.”
She yanked him back, sending him sprawling onto the table. The back of his head hit the stone, sending a flickering pain through his skull. He turned his head to one side, where the layers of meringue inside the cake grinned at him.
Something touched his leg, and he raised his head to look. Suzie was there, creeping across the table towards him. She straddled his chest, and leaned down to within inches of his face.
“I like you,” she breathed. “Just over six and a half years from now, I shall need a consort. You’ll be mine. You’ll have everything you want. You’ll never die. And I’ll be yours. Do you understand?”
“What, don’t I have a choice?”
She grinned at him.
“Of course you do,” she said. “You can accept, or you can stay here when I go back to the world. There’s always a choice.”
“Won’t I starve here?”
“Accept or die... is still a choice, Algie dear.”
He stared up at the gloom that presumably hid a ceiling somewhere up there, then finally nodded reluctantly.
“All right. You win.”
“Good!” She grinned again, nimbly bouncing to her feet and dropping off the table. “Then I’m sure we shall be friends.”
The question that had been nagging at the back of his mind snuck out.
“Suzie... what are you?”
“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” She caught his right hand with hers, and pulled him to his feet.
“You’re mine now,” she said, clasping his hand firmly. The palm of his hand felt like it was on fire, but he couldn’t draw his gaze from hers. Something was going on with her eyes, swirling vortices of blue and black.
The burning pain increased, but he barely noticed, locked into the whirling depths of her eyes, that seemed to expand and take over his entire world...
The pain crested, flared.
“Look into my eyes,” Suzie crooned, the twin spinning pools melding into one giant maelstrom of blue, black and irresistible evil.
Then everything went black, and Algie fell in.
* * *
The world wobbled back. He was moving, that much was certain. He tried to move his arm, but something held him down. A strap, or something... he tried to sit up, but whatever held his arm went all the way across his chest, tying him down.
He opened his eyes. There was a ceiling, and cupboards, and a lamp...
“Algie,” his mother’s voice drifted in, and her face swam into his field of view. “Algie, you fainted. Can you hear me?”
Algie nodded, or something, and muttered something in the general direction of ‘yes’.
“You’ve been out for an hour and a half, Algie. We’re in an ambulance, going to hospital, OK? When we get there they said they’ll turn on the siren for you if you’re awake, all right?”
Algie mumbled something again. His hand was itching.
“One of your little friends wanted to come along to keep you company,” his mother said, drifting away into the periphery once more.
A hand took his, there was the quiet snik of a clasp unclipping, and someone lifted his itching right hand up where he could see it. He stared.
It was faint, but there was no doubt about it. Etched under his skin were thin, faintly glowing blue lines, forming a sigil he had last seen in a very different world. As he watched, the lines blurred, spread and faded away, like ink in the rain.
He looked at the hand holding his; now that he was looking for it, there it was, that same sigil glowing dully under the skin.
“Happy birthday,” a voice purred from beside him. He followed the hand, which turned out to be attached to an arm, which one way or another led to a face.
“Did you enjoy your trip?” asked Suzie. She smirked, and her teeth glinted blue.
