[Please read the instructions before jumping in!]

“You knew Aunt Grace?” Jay asked, surprised. This time it was his turn to grimace when the stranger gave him a surprised once-over. “She was my great-aunt on my mother’s side.”

The young man’s expression cleared, a fondness crossing it that gentled his features. “I, uh, I knew Miss Grace,” he agreed, hands folded in front of himself, fingers squeezing together. His dismal tone was somewhat at odds with the crisp way he enunciated his words—at least, those he managed to get out between his stammering. “I’d say. Er, well. Everyone… everyone knew Miss Grace. S-she was one of a kind.”

Jay thought back to her gregarious way of including him in the conversation always, when all the other older relatives just wanted to talk about adult things, and nodded. “She was,” he said quietly. “I take it you know about her disappearance?”

Ducking his head, the young man made a face again. “I, uh, think all her neighbors did,” he said. “Everyone here… everyone here’s got someone watching out for them, but, uh, it’s a bit. Uh. Cliquey? Families here go back a long way,” he added. “Lots of old grudges and, uh, disagreements. Miss Grace, she, uh, she floated over that. J-just about everyone kept an eye on her. Shame it, uh. It didn’t help.”

Jay swallowed around the old grief at those words. “I’m glad she had a place in the community here,” he said. “That must have made her happy. She’d have been really delighted to know one of her neighbors came by. I don’t know that I’ll be much of a replacement, but she willed this place to me, so, um, if you can pass the word on to others, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up if they see the lights on, like you.”

“Willed it, huh.” The visitor dwelled on the implications of that for a moment, then shook his head, offering a hand. “I’m Camden Douglas.”

Jay took it, shaking that soft, broad-fingered hand. It was chilly to the touch, and Jay momentarily thought of the cold fall air outside and pondered inviting Camden in, but—well, he’d just met the man, and the place was a mess anyway. “Jay,” he said. “Jay Park.”

“Jay,” Camden repeated. He let his hand drop, then tucked it back into his other one, rubbing them together as if sharing the warmth of Jay’s hand between them. “Sorry I, uh, didn’t bring a proper housewarming gift.”

“Oh, jeez,” Jay blurted. He gave Camden an awkward smile. “There’s no need to, honestly. Aunt Grace was a bit of a hoarder; I don’t know where I’d put something if you did.”

Camden frowned. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’ll, uh, think of something, I’m sure.” Then he smiled, the expression lightening his face again. “I’ll, I. Uh. I’ll try to pass the news on, but, uh. Like I said, lots of people here don’t talk to certain other folks. And even so, it’ll, uh, take time. You’ll probably get, uh, other gawkers. B-but, uh, it won’t last too long, I’m sure.”

“It’s fine,” Jay hastened to assure Camden. “If everyone’s as nice about it as you, it won’t be a problem.”

Camden blinked at him, then flushed, going red from his ears down to his neck. “H-Have a good night, Jay,” he stammered, and turned to leave.

Jay watched him go, gaze shifting from those broad, soft shoulders to the driveway that he was slouching down. Although the house was somewhat set back in a wooded area, Jay could see several of the surrounding houses between the spindly trees. It was a bit of a surprise that someone had been able to see the lights on in the afternoon, but if they’d noticed his car first, it would have been easy enough to see.

And then the pizza delivery truck pulled up and he pushed those uneasy thoughts from his mind.

When he was finished eating, he slid the box into the newly-cleaned refrigerator and pondered what to do next. He’d barely gotten started on the bedroom, he knew, but he couldn’t stop thinking about that office.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look on his way back to the bedroom, he decided. It’d probably be a good idea to at least assess what was there—if she’d wanted to keep an 8-year-old from messing around in there, some things might be old or valuable, and it’d be worth knowing for when he talked to the antique store tomorrow. Besides, if anywhere in this house was likely to have any paperwork of hers that he should get filed away properly, it was there.

Thus decided, he headed back up and took the door into the office immediately.

It was tidier than he’d expected from the other areas of the house—though that only by comparison. Her shelves were stacked full of books, some on their side and some double-shelved, and while plenty of them were the popular paperbacks and mystery novels Jay remembered her reading, many more were clearly antiques, leather-bound and more. One that caught his eye even appeared to be bound in some sort of novelty gold snakeskin. He brushed fingers over that in bemusement, just to feel the texture.

Pulling away from that, he turned toward her enormous desk that dominated the center of the room. Grace used to be a journalist, he recalled, and the heavy old desktop computer that sat on top of the section containing her old roll-out typewriter attested to that. This too was a mess, covered in scraps of notes in Grace’s handwriting that he couldn’t make heads or tails of, just words and phrases clearly meant to jog her memory that meant nothing to him, beyond the word ‘Dream’ repeating throughout there. Sea dream. Library dream. Sand dream. Perhaps she’d been writing down the stories she used to tell, he thought. The scraps were weighed down by that old sword in the stone paperweight-and-letter-opener he’d remembered, and he indulged himself by drawing it out once before putting it back in.

Whatever documentation she had was likely in the desk instead. He pulled at a drawer, then frowned as it wouldn’t move. Neither did the next one, nor either of the ones beneath them. All locked, he realized, and glared down at them for a moment.

Grace’s drawer keys were nowhere in sight.

He gave them another few hopeful jiggles, then sighed, getting up to do another brief circuit of the room in the hopes he’d spot them. Well, he reassured himself, they had to be somewhere; if not here, perhaps she kept them in her bedroom. If she’d bothered to lock things away, it wouldn’t make sense to keep the keys with the lock.

As Jay made his circuit, he glanced out the window in passing—then froze, doing a double take. Down below, not right by the house or even on the property, but a small ways back among the trees, was a person, visible even in the darkening shadows, their pallid face staring up at the window he was looking out of, unmoving.

For a moment, they stared at each other, and Jay felt his skin crawl at how the person out there didn’t change expression. It was like they were wearing a plain white mask—and once he thought it, Jay began to convince himself that it was the truth. That whoever was out there was wearing a mask.

And then they turned to go, beginning to walk briskly back into the woods, and Jay let himself breathe again, heart pounding.

[Please suggest an action in the Comments.
As a reminder, it can be thoughts, words, or deeds!]

[Previous part: Day 2. Next part: Day 4.]

[Remember to read the instructions before jumping in!]

It was early enough in the day, he decided, to start with the worst place—the kitchen. There was a good chance the fridge would be full of old-ass food well in need of disposal, and better to get it over with than have it hanging over his head. Besides, even though he planned to order food in tonight, he’d need somewhere relatively uncontaminated to put his leftovers.

After that, he could check out both the living room and bedroom, decide which seemed like a more viable immediate sleeping option, and go from there.

With that plan in mind, he grabbed his bag of cleaning supplies from the car, and started up the steps to his new house.

The lock fought him for a moment, resisting turning; he assumed due to how long it had been since the mechanism had been used regularly. But it turned, so oiling it was a problem for later. He pushed the door open, fighting down the rather sad desire to call out for Aunt Grace, and stepped inside.

The air smelled heavy with dust, but the lights worked when he flipped them on, illuminating the familiar hallway. The front hallway opened to the left into the living room, and to the right immediately into stairs up to the second floor, a faded red runner still neatly in place over the old hardwood. Grace’s shoes were still in the hallway, along with her umbrella in its stand, and he sighed at the old grief that stirred on seeing them.

It seemed, for a moment, as if the house sighed back, the wind outside picking up and the house settling around him. But, he decided, that wasn’t so bad; at least they were in agreement.

He headed to the kitchen, dreading what he might see, but was relieved that no smell was at least immediately apparent. Then, Aunt Grace always liked to be clean, if not tidy. “Because I put everything everywhere,” she’d said cheerfully, “if I get lazy about chores, I’ll get bugs in no time.” The garbage had been taken out, it seemed, and while the counters were heavily laden, it wasn’t with dirty dishes but with all sorts of appliances that he doubted Aunt Grace had ever used. It wasn’t just the standard microwave and toaster oven, but blenders, a breadmaker, an ancient standmixer, and several things he couldn’t identify—things like a crank press that was either a pasta-maker or a meat grinder, and a bucket with some sort of crank which he absolutely couldn’t identify. It was meant to churn something, he suspected—Cheese? Ice cream?

The fridge was in worse condition, but, thankfully, not unsalvageable. Still, the level of mold in some of the bottles and tupperware containers made him gag. Fuck recycling, he decided, grabbing the first with rubber gloves and tossing it into a garbage bag.

He let his mind wander as he worked, trying both to ignore the grossness of what he was doing and the strange feeling that he was intruding in someone else’s space. She’d willed it to him, he reminded himself—and she’d always seemed fond of him and how he’d responded to her stories. “You’ve got a good balance of common sense and appreciation for the fantastic, Jay,” he remembered her telling him as he’d chatted with her about one of her stories. “That’s what we really need. Too many people have too much of one or the other.”

Which story was it? Probably the door in the basement, he decided. She’d said it was how she got to the dream world—she’d go downstairs, and through the door in the basement, and find herself in the dream world, where she’d go on her strange, inexplicable journeys to strange, inexplicable places full of strange, inexplicable people. When she’d wake up, she’d find herself in her bed.

“Why the basement,” he’d asked, not mocking her even as a teenager, but trying to figure out why that was part of her story. “Wouldn’t it make more sense in your closet? Or is that too, you know, cliche?”

She’d laughed. “I don’t know why the door’s there,” she’d said. “I guess it’s because it’s underground. Dreams are buried, you know. They’re buried in the human mind.”

He sighed, pushing the memory away. A few lysol wipes and an empty fridge was enough for now, he decided; the food he ordered would at least stay cold in there and not pick up too many smells. The rest of the kitchen, he could attack piecemeal.

It wasn’t like he could do it all right now anyway—not with all those old appliances all over the counters. He’d already called ahead to an antique store in town about taking his aunt’s old goods, and that it would take numerous trips. That was something he could get started tomorrow; now, by four, it was too late.

A good time to order in, though. There weren’t a lot of options—it was a far cry from Seattle, where he’d moved from, for sure. A small sleepy town like Kingsport relied on tourism, and so although there were a reasonable number of restaurants, they were ones that expected people in their chairs. But still, there were some of the usual chains, if he needed pizza or bad chinese food.

He decided on the former, giving a call, then did a quick glance into the living room before immediately deciding that the bedroom, unless it was in a terrible state, would be a better option. There was only a chair and a loveseat in the living room, and he didn’t really fancy fitting his lanky body into either to sleep. Besides which, although Grace had left herself something of a path, it was filled with furniture—little end tables piled high with knicknacks of all sorts of materials, a coffee table he couldn’t see for books, lamps all over the place, a spinning wheel, knee-high statuettes, and more.

On top of all that? No curtains covered the windows. He tried to imagine sleeping in a strange place where his great-aunt had gone missing and staring out at the darkness and just shook his head. Nope. Not at all.

Instead, he headed upstairs, the runner almost muffling the creak of the wooden stairs. On the second floor, the main stairway lead to a narrow hallway, with several rooms off of it—one door he recalled headed to the stairs to the attic, another to some kind of closet, and a third to Grace’s office. Toward the end, the last two doors lead to Grace’s room and the bathroom.

Jay hesitated outside the office door. She’d forbidden him from going in there ever since he was old enough to read, he remembered. He’d always resented it a little, because she kept some fascinating things in there—a miniature model of the sword in the stone he’d been obsessed with pulling out, a brass dial that he had never figured out the use of, and more. “These books aren’t for you, baby,” she’d said to him, which hadn’t made sense to him at the time, eight years old and obsessed with reading everything he could get his hands on. “They’re dangerous, so stay out.”

He supposed it was probably porn, actually.

Making a face at the thought, he carried on, opening the door into her bedroom. It still smelled, faintly, of the perfumes that she’d spray around, that still littered her dresser. Clothing covered the four-poster bed and the floor, along with makeup compacts, tubes, and similar things, jewelry scattered around as if she’d been looking for the perfect piece to disappear in.

His heart clenched and he sighed again, heading over and pressing down on the mattress with a hand. The sheets gave off a smell of dust, but the bed felt soft and usable. He’d sleep there tonight, he decided. He could haul his sheets in from the car so it wouldn’t be too weird, then replace the mattress later.

The sound of the doorbell made him jump, heart pounding. It seemed too soon for food, though he supposed that the pizza place must not get too much business. It rang again, urgent, and he pulled away from his memories, thumping down the stairs to the front door. “Coming!”

But the person on the other side of the door, when he opened it, wasn’t wearing a uniform or carrying anything. Jay glanced up at the man’s face, confused, then froze.

The stranger’s unkempt appearance took Jay aback—hair that was clearly once thick hung down stringily, swollen eyes twitched past Jay into the house before focusing on his face again. He had sallow, pale skin and a too-wide mouth with doughy lips.

And then the man grimaced, clearly in response to Jay’s response, and he felt absolutely shitty for his first reaction to the guy’s appearance. “H-hi,” the man said.

“Hi,” Jay said. He drew a deep breath, and focused on the bigger picture. The man was around his own age, and cleanly-dressed, in jeans and a nice polo. “Sorry, you surprised me—I was waiting for pizza and, uh, wasn’t expecting… anyone?”

The man grimaced again, but turned it into a smile. “Y-yeah,” he said. “I, uh, I. Miss Grace has, uh, been gone so long, and I. I saw her lights on? S-so, I uh.”

[Please suggest an action in the Comments.
As a reminder, it can be thoughts, words, or deeds!]

[Previous part: Day 1. Next Part: Day 3.]

[Please read the instructions before jumping in!]

Jay stared out the car window for a long moment before finally getting out of the car, still gazing up at the imposing, run-down house with its intimidating gambrel roof and odd, jutting bay windows. “Mine,” he said aloud, just to hear it, and it sounded absurd even to him.

When the lawyer, reading out the will, had said Jae-Hyun Park aloud as the recipient of Grace Evans’ estate, he hadn’t even been there to hear it. Why would he have been? Grace had been his great-aunt on his mother’s side, and they had barely seen each other except at Christmas for years. Most of his memories of her were the stories she’d tell, hugging him on the couch, the heavy patchouli smell of her perfume hanging around him in waves. Those tales were wild things, full of fantastical and mysterious adventures. All real, according to her—at least insofar as dreams were real.

It was reasonable enough, his mother Susan had justified to him (and everyone else, several times). Grandma had passed away already, and Grace didn’t have any children of her own to spoil. Since Susan and Do-Hun had their own home already, Grace must have wanted to give Jay a leg up on the usual difficulties Millennials were facing with home ownership these days.

“You know, you can sell it, if you find yourself too far from home out in Massachusetts,” Susan had prompted. “Make it an investment on getting a place closer to home?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jay had said, at the time too overwhelmed to make any commitments. “But I might as well take the time to get away for a bit and resettle, you know? Besides, it’ll take a while to get the place cleaned up and all of Aunt Grace’s stuff dealt with, and I have to do that first regardless.”

“Fair enough,” she’d said. They both knew he could use a bit of a break—after all, he’d just been laid off after six years at his company. It hadn’t seemed to matter how many hours of unpaid overtime he’d done, scouring through code until as late as 2am some nights—the bottom line was the bottom line, apparently. And what did he have to show for it? His entire life had fit into the four over-sized Tupperware bins that he’d crammed into the back of his car.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the darker thoughts that had started to possess him, then fished out the keys he’d been given. “Better see what everything’s like before I move anything in.” He’d got all the utilities set up already, minus internet, which would happen tomorrow, so the place was theoretically move-in ready—if any home that had been abandoned for eight years could be considered that.  

Still, he remembered this house—remembered what it was like. Two main floors, both big and creaky with narrow walls and hallways between rooms that made the place seem overcrowded. On top of that, there was an attic and basement, both used for storage. And Aunt Grace’s things all over the place. She had a bit of a tendency towards hoarding, and, on all available surfaces, collected what had (to young Jay) been mysterious artifacts: leather-bound books, old clocks, strange furniture, weird old paintings, old globes and barometers and all the rest. Susan used to roll her eyes about the whole place. “No wonder she has weird dreams, when she looks at that mess all day.”

Jay needed a plan of action on what to tackle first, he decided. The main floor, with the probably horrific-kitchen, living room, and dining room? The second floor, with Aunt Grace’s—no, his—bedroom, office, and bathroom? Or should he start from the top or the bottom, and work his way through methodically?

[Please suggest an action in the Comments.
As a reminder, it can be thoughts, words, or deeds!]

[Previous part: Introduction. Next part: Day 2.]

It’s time to choose your own adventure again–my yearly Halloween Interactive Fiction begins tomorrow. It’s gonna be spooky, gonna be queer, and gonna be driven by you!

Here’s how it works:
Tomorrow (Oct 1) I’ll put up the introduction to a story, describing the situation the character finds himself in. Then, you leave a comment to the post with a suggestion for what the character should do next! You’re an invisible audience shouting things at the screen–but the things you’re yelling will help influence the character’s actions. Examples of what suggestions might look like: “Examine the mirror” or “break the vase” or “Don’t give up!! Think about your family!” Get your comments in by no later than 4pm PST the next day. Then, between approximately 5pm-9pm PST, I will put up the next part of the story. A new post will go up every day until Halloween!

(If contradictory actions are suggested by different people (“Break the vase” and “take the vase with you”, for example), I’ll make my decision based on which is suggested more and/or which is more in line with the protagonist’s established personality. In general, you can suggest whatever you want, even if it isn’t relevant. For example, “what do you look like, though?” could be a suggestion just as much as anything else—you are more than welcome to use your comment to learn more about the character(s) as well as advance the story.)

Anyone’s welcome to jump in on the most recent post–don’t feel like you have to be there from the start to play (though do read previous parts, just so you’re caught up on what’s happened so far).

(The small text: I reserve all rights to this work. If I eventually get this published in any form that requires me to take this version down, I will send copies of this online version, with comments left intact, to everyone who contributed suggestions, if I am reasonably able to get in contact with them.)

Everyone is welcome to play and I hope you consider joining in! If you want to dip your toes in and read a little about how this works first, feel free to check out the previous Halloween I.F. games I’ve run.

Let’s Get Started:
Comment to this post with a suggestion for our protagonist’s name! He is American, bisexual, in his twenties, a computer programmer who is between jobs after layoffs at his company, and has, to his own confusion, recently inherited an old countryside manor home left to him by his eccentric great-aunt.

[Completed Parts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 | Day 11 | Day 12 | Day 13 | Day 14 | Day 15 | Day 16 | Day 17 | Day 18 | Day 19 | Day 20 | Day 21 | Day 22 | Day 23 | Day 24 | Day 25 | Day 26 | Day 27 | Day 28 | Day 29 | Day 30 | Day 31 | Conclusion | Author’s Notes/Story Q&A]

Looking for other spooky stories I’ve written? Check out Empty Vessels, a m/m novel about a literally-haunted young man who, after getting to know some of the monsters he can see, decides to help save them from a greater threat. And please consider ordering Only Human, a m/m zombie novella about a guy seeing a doctor about a curse, who gets to know his doctor’s super hot–and super dead–receptionist (previously published in the Less Than Dead anthology).