Page 12 (1/2)
Terry shook his red head sadly "You are a sick little man, Malcolm Crow"
"Hey, just call me ‘Mr Halloween’"
"Other names occur to me What does Valerie think of all this…" He waved his hand around, at a loss for an adjective that precisely described the Crow’s Nest "…stuff?"
Crow shrugged "She thinks I’m a fruit ball"
"Why aer, "a lovable fruit ball and dead sexy"
"Oh, I’m quite sure" Terry snorted "You’re way too far into this stuff, et mail from the real world?"
"Not often"
Most of the year, the Crow’s Nest Craft Shoppe was a respectable, upscale arts and crafts store that sold everything from make-your-own birdhouse kits to Elmer’s School Glue, but with the advent of cooler weather a darkness crept over the store, or at least so it seemed to Terry The basic craft supplies were exiled to the racks in the back rooe main showroom of the shop became a place where monsters ruled Row upon row of rubber horror masks lined the walls, and Terry was always amazed at the horrific detail of these houls, but these were overshadowed by grinning freaks with bulging eyes and insanely s sores; sadoray matter; serial killers with thin, loveless host faces fro eyes and whiplike antennae; huge dragon heads with horns and saurian scales and plates; leprous fiends with leering faces; undead zoes slipped to reveal monstrously deformed verminous eyes; and many more, each more horrific than the last
Then there were the monster model kits, stacks and stacks of them, and apple barrels filled with nasty little trinkets: eyeball key chains and human thumb erasers, plastic vampire teeth and stick-on bullet holes, and scores of assorted insects and ver roo-Boards For a few dollars the local kids could walk aith plastic butcher knives, loves, Jason hockey masks, pitchforks, witches’ brooms, ball-and-chains, pirate hooks, headbands that h their skull, and a variety of uaranteed to transform any ten-year-old into a demon from the outer darkness or a newly risen corpse Crow loved it The kids in town loved it Terry Wolfe, however, hated all of it
One sruously stocked with rows of beepers and cell phones Being the local Cingular distributor paid the bills the rest of the year, Crow insisted The business had its frustrations, though, because the cellular relay toas on the blink as often as it orking, and no one could understand why; plus more than half the places around toere cell phone dead zones
"Hey, that reers on a case of colorful cell phone covers, "while I’e?" He pulled his cell fro all day and it’s dead as a doornail" Crow took it and plugged it into a charger behind the counter and then went back to stocking the shelves, glancing covertly at Terry as he did so He didn’t like the way Terry looked and wondered if he was having troubles with Sarah That, on top of the town’s crop and financial proble of Halloween Terry never liked Halloween, as Cro all too well It had always scared him dry-mouthed and spitless ever since he was ten Back in the autumn of the Black Harvest when Terry had been so cruelly injured That had been the worst time for all of them Cron brother, Billy, had been murdered by the same man who had killed Terry’s sister, Mandy, and had nearly killed Terry
Terry and Croere the only ones in toho had seen the face of the killer and survived--and both of therant worker, Oren Morse The one they’d nicknamed the Bone Man The blues the murders, and had killed