Scary, p.1
Scary, page 1
SCARY
A Spine-Splintering Slide
into What Lies Inside
the Psychotic Mind
Barbara Eck Tosi
Copyright © 2021 Barbara Eck Tosi.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by
any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,
organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Archway Publishing
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in
this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views
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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,
and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5632-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5634-9 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5633-2 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017919588
Archway Publishing rev. date: 06/08/2021
For David,
My Beloved Husband and Friend
I found you even though I wasn’t looking.
You searched for me when I couldn’t yet be found.
The Fates somehow sensed the emptiness we shared
and placed us together on solid ground.
You pierce my black darkness with your brightest light.
My bitterness you sweeten with your soft smile.
You know not to tame my wild and free spirit
as well as the quirkiness that is my style.
Your kindness permeates my hesitant heart,
and my restless soul thus finds a placid place.
Your confident shyness is one of many charms
radiantly reflected in your fair face.
You wear compassion like a well-tailored suit
as you render relief to those who know pain.
Your presence you freely with humankind share.
The sun from your spirit leaves no room for rain.
Your armor provides me peaceful pause from hurt
so that I, with new voice, may sing to the birds.
Your loving nature has given me reason
to, with childlike joy, unwrap my gift of words.
Contents
Mort
Handpicked Lover
The Blizzard and the Can Opener
Wednesday Afternoons
Archway of Ice
She, MD
Hide-and-Freak
Disenchanted Diners
Eyes on the Candy
The Proctor
Shepherd’s Pie
A Hand and a Leg
Above and Beyond
Sinfully Spectacular Sensations
The Fat Cat Door
Amazing Glaze
Piece of Mind
The Next-Door Neighbor
Family Tree
Insane Pain
Gnome Gnightmare
Criminally Corporate
Clever Concealment
Slumber Party
High Tea
Thoughtless
Mr. Bartoni’s Bakery
Imagine That
Death Rhyme
Bully
Not There
Six Steps to Somewhere
Rained Out
The Search
Mangled Vines
Chapter and Verse
Victorian Heat
A Life in Pieces
Serenity
Personality Plus
The Purple Door
Chemistry 101
Seriously Serial
Last-Chance Bridge
Delicious Dismemberment
Sleep Deprived
Word Kill
Darkness and Light
Earreversible
A Scary Story
OCD
Forest Fairies
Hell to the Chiefs
Secret Service
The Mildewed Man
Nothingness
Ode to a Mattress
Time Out
Malevolent Mansion
Spaced Out
Perfect Party Planner
Dream House
The Long Drive Home
Pink Peace
I, Writer
About the Book
About the Author
Mort
The embalming fluid floated in a fluted flask on top of the freezing table
next to the stiff and chill-filled corpse, which was understandably unable
to dissect the details regarding its righteously ripe, rigor mortised remains
over which the methodical mortician held high his rigorously rigid reins.
The nervous night was ludicrously late but not too late to have to abort
the perfectly precise postmortem plans of the meticulous mortician, Mort,
who contemplated the cold carcass under the full moon’s high-beam light,
which so iridescently illuminated the corpse’s considerably creepy plight.
The mortician inserted tubes into the cadaver to drain its lifeless blood,
executing extreme efficacy to circumnavigate a bloody, behemoth flood.
Beneath each thick and tensile tube, he securely situated a sturdy pail
for the exceedingly rare but egregious event, the trustworthy tubes did flail.
After the corpse’s blood had been delicately drained and duly collected,
he then the precious pails with poised, painstaking precision inspected.
With the blood’s pomegranate patina, Mort appeared adequately pleased,
so he next, the remaining blood from the tubes systematically squeezed.
Not one delicious, decadent drop of this exquisite elixir could be wasted,
as this ripe, rich rendering would deliver divine drinks after being tasted
by the voracious vampires, whose lusty thirst was quickly quenched
when their throbbing throats with fertile blood were decadently drenched.
The vampires’ hidden home existed far beneath the wooden floor,
whose smooth and seamless surface concealed a secret trapdoor.
By a rustic red rug, the trickster trapdoor had been cleverly covered,
ensuring that the blood imbibers were not at risk of being discovered.
Inside craftily customized coffins, they silently slept away their days,
dipped in dreamy, delicious darkness that detested the sun’s bright rays.
But as soon as daylight ducked beneath a new night that flawlessly fell,
the coffin lids erupted, and vampire mouths soon began to swell.
After the trapdoor was lustily lifted, the vampires eagerly emerged
and wildly walked across the floor as their tenacious thirst swiftly surged
from their tantalizing thoughts of the rapturously ripe, ruby-red libations
that would serve to sweetly satisfy their beastly and bloody expectations.
Mort poured and poetically presented this crimson-colored concoction
in a prized punch bowl he had purchased at a For Morticians Only auction.
Poised punch cups perched on hooks hanging from the red-stained rim
of the antique bowl arranged on a table in the tasting room, deathly dim.
The perfectly positioned punch cups coaxed the greedy, gruesome grip
of the vampires, whose large, loose, and lurid lips would satisfyingly sip
and gulp, guzzle, and guiltlessly gorge on this necessary necrotic nectar,
made so smooth and sumptuous by passing through a particle detector.
After the vampires lewdly licked the punch bowl and punch cups clean,
they formed a long line that led directly to Mort’s indoor latrine.
Each of them wearily waited for the opportunity to expeditiously expel
the luscious liquid that quickly caused their bladders to severely swell.
After unleashing ubiquitous urine, blatantly bloody and royally rich,
they dripped their drool as they dipped their cups into a designated niche
of the latrine and drank the urine, which was again later excreted
after barbaric binge-drinking bouts that were with regularity repeated.
The blood they initially imbibed temporarily satisfied their twisted thirst,
until which time, Mort magically managed some additional arteries to burst
inside the hushed, blue-blushed, caustically cold and creepy cadaver,
whose bountiful blood unfailingly filled each vampire’s mouth and bladder.
Out of Mort’s open office door, the revamped vampires willingly went,
anxiously anticipating the deeply dark hours that would shortly be spent
inside grisly, growling graveyards and on the horrifyingly haunted trail,
where scary, sanguinary spirits were known to moan and woefully wail.
Before morning captured its clandestine chance to light their dismal path
and disastrously deliver its blindingly bright and wickedly white wrath
to Mort’s office, the vivacious, voracious vampires reluctantly returned,
and Mort suddenly something unusually unsettling about them discerned.
As they began to nerve-numbingly notice the needlessly neglected shelves,
they alarmingly appeared not in the least to be their bubbly, bloody selves.
They believed that Mort had been disrespectfully derelict in his restocking
of bottles of blood that bolstered their bite and nefarious nighttime walking.
The vindictive vampires failed to fathom that, in the adjoining room,
boxes brimming with bottled blood were boldly waiting to assume
their proper places on sacred shelves that now sat brazenly bare
because Mort’s nap had lasted longer than any of them were aware.
With transparent tenseness, they thanked Mort in their vampiric way
for faithfully feeding their fabled fetish for fresh blood from dead prey.
They falsely flattered him on his fixation to furnish them sweet peace
by endlessly ensuring that their dark desires dramatically found release.
They then insolently indicated to him that he’d grown forgetful and old
and appeared troubled and tired and lamentably lacked the beastly bold
grip that he over this bountiful bed-and-bloodfest had hypnotically held
and explained that the time had arrived for his useless life to be quelled.
After they mercilessly mocked Mort for running out the reservoir of blood,
their thorny teeth pierced his neck, and he fell to the floor with a thud.
He was very dead, so they opened the trapdoor and descended the stairs
and promptly proceeded to the protected privacy of their loathsome lairs.
Into their macabrely menacing coffins, the vampires predictably climbed,
and with their herculean hands that were bloodied and seriously slimed,
they easily enabled the cob-webbed covers to readily release and drop.
Then they drifted into deep sleep and dreamt about blood nonstop.
On the upstairs wooden floor, Mort lay chillingly cold and motionless,
as he morbidly marinated in his pathetically premature postmortem abyss
outside the adjoining room, where big boxes of beauteous blood waited
for Mort’s attentive action that would forever remain radically belated.
The next day a new mortician would arrive at the site and officially be
designated to drain the blood from incoming cadavers’ every artery.
Mort’s corpse, of course, would be tubed first, so his blood could flow
and
fill
punch
bowls
for
the
vengeful
vampires
that
quietly
waited
below.
Handpicked Lover
Professor Miller was highly esteemed and duly deemed an academic sage
because he solved the perplexing puzzles that permeated each penned page
of the considerably complex novels that his English literature class read—
novels whose secrets were stoked when stroked by lively, literary thread.
The professor collected the ethereal thread during his much younger years.
These specialized spools were the tools he used to allay his innate fears
of misinterpreting the moods and methods of the famous authors he studied
while he was still a college student with a brain undeveloped and muddied.
When the thread touched an author’s text, the text began to eerily unravel
the murky mysteries and tense themes that within the novels did travel.
As the menagerie of meanings became unmasked, the students were prepared
to explore the elliptical eccentricities that the thin thread effectively bared.
The many mixed meanings that the writers may or may not have intended,
were exhaustively examined and evaluated by the students, who pretended
to completely comprehend the curiously complex, confusingly cryptic forms
commonly used by accomplished authors to create legendary literary storms.
Professor Miller entered the room and prepared to begin his lecture
when his electric eyes locked with those of a student whose exquisite texture
of whisper-soft, winter-white skin and luscious locks of long, silken hair
quickly called to mind a Shakespearean maiden, the sweetest and most fair.
Professor Miller’s literature lecture eventually came to an exuberant close,
and his cultured class of creative collegians from their academic chairs rose.
His eyes and those of the stunning student intimately intersected once more
as she shyly, but seductively, leaned against the lecture hall’s open door.
As she waited for him to make a move, he wildly walked toward her,
both magically and momentarily blinded by the lure of love’s lusty blur,
which dramatically did their acute angles of vision undeniably impair,
as they faced each other with eyes eagerly engaged in a sensual stare.
After the crowded classroom of students had dispersed and dissipated,
the two predestined lovers, with excited bodies undeniably unsatiated,
to Professor Miller’s palatial home without a hint of hesitation went,
and there, they, the red-hot remainder of the delirious, delicious day spent.
They playfully pursued their passions upon the same bed that was shared
by the professor and his wife since the day the two had been paired.
Entwined like twisted, climbing vines, the professor and his lover decided
to use to their maximum advantage every possible perk the day provided.
The professor’s wife was out of town and would return in just a few days.
He and the student made lots of love amid the summer sun’s sizzling rays.
Succulent juices sensually signaled their simultaneous orgasmic release,
secured through shared stimulation that brought them both sweet peace.
Over the clandestine course of many months, these randy rendezvous
continued to avidly arouse them both without arousing any clues
that could calamitously cause the sudden eruption of significant suspicion
about this blatant betrayal now in free-falling and full-fledged fruition.
The student lover was acutely aware that Professor Miller was married,
and one day, as they in each other’s bare bodies were very deeply buried,
she told him he must immediately confess their love affair to his wife
and divorce her so the inseparable lovers could commence a new life.
Professor Miller gazed at his young mistress and feigned a loving smile,
assuring her, they would soon walk together down the marital aisle
and that he would, that very night, reveal his transgressions to his wife
and demand her full agreement to terminate their miserable married life.
Upon hearing his promise, the student provocatively professed her love,
but suddenly and shockingly was severely struck from high above.
Her head was heinously hammered with a huge, heavy candlestick,
which categorically and completely killed her in a manner chillingly quick.
Professor Miller had savagely snuffed out her young, inexperienced life,
which ensured he would not be forced to forfeit his unsuspecting wife.
