Halloween Horror Special
I wrote my first horror stories in the late 1970s after my grandmother gave me my first typewriter, an old Royal manual she found at a flea market. Had she realized what vile, despicable and lurid stories I would produce on it in my pre-adolescent Stephen King-inspired mania, she probably would have bought me another Bible instead.
While those early stories were mercifully never published, they never truly left the darkest little corners of my heart. So in 1999, for Metro Weekly’s annual Halloween issue, I reached back to my past and combined it with my present for a nasty little number about tricks and treats — or, more accurately, a trick that turns out to be anything but a treat.
In the spirit of Halloween 2009, I’m offering a newly formatted PDF version of “The Medicine Cabinet” for download through Nov. 1. Download it now to read on your laptop by yourself in a dark room. Or on your iPhone while you’re waiting for your date to come back from that suspiciously long trip to the bathroom....
“Steve found the finger in the bathroom medicine cabinet, wrapped in tissue and hidden behind a bottle of mouthwash. He didn’t gasp or yelp or make any of the other noises he would have expected himself to make. He just stood there thinking, That’s a real finger. There’s a finger in the medicine cabinet.”
