Dark Screams, Volume 4 by Brian James Freeman

Author:Brian James Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Creature Feature

Heather Graham

The Jack the Ripper mannequin glared at Emma Cowell with eyes that were purely evil. Emma stared back for a bit before breaking the glance to look around.

Setup was almost complete; tomorrow, fans, nerds, and old—with some new—stars of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror would pour in to sell their photos and autographs. Producers would come and look for the Rick Bakers of tomorrow.

Everything had to be perfect.

And this…this fabrication was perfect. Nothing truly defined the face, while the stance and the eyes excellently told of evil. Everything about it seemed to leap to life; everything about it looked real, down to the knife held high in its hand, dripping blood…like the blood that dripped around the corpse it stood over and the blood that spattered on the false wall behind it. It was amazing; it was so real, she couldn’t stop staring at it.

Oh, some of the other displays were excellent. Truly excellent. But there was nothing as terrifyingly real as this tableau of Jack the Ripper standing over his assumed last victim, Mary Jane Kelly.

One problem with the creation—it wasn’t hers.

“Emma, heading out!” Rory Welsh called to her. Rory worked with her at Aspirations. Their last assignment together had been a muskrat for what she had considered to be a horrible commercial. Rory didn’t mind; she did. She wanted the big assignments; she wanted movies or a television series with big stars—real work.

“Emma!”

“Yep, I’m done!” she said.

“Well, I’m leaving, and you’d better come. There’s supposedly a curse on the convention. If anyone messes with any of the characters, the whole place comes to life. Werewolves tear into people and chew them all up. Zombies will come for your brains—and vampires will suck the blood right out of you.”

“Yeah, yeah, right. Go on—I’m coming. I’m done.”

But she wasn’t.

“Be right there,” she added.

“Lights going out for now—you need anything else, just be in here bright and early in the morning,” Lloyd Harrison, the producer of the show, called to her. “All right, I’m leaving. Make sure you go out the main door and that it clicks locked behind you when you leave! Lights out!”

Lloyd was impatient—the ass. He had learned how to make the big bucks on other people’s work. And people did pay the big money, while the big shops and well-known fabricators came in to show off their wares and await the next big movie-slash-television-slash-commercial producer to see their work and hire them for their next piece of film magic.

Emma didn’t move; the lights went out. The floor—with its monsters, vampires, werewolves, aliens, and more—seemed exceptionally eerie, lit only by thin strips of emergency lighting along the pathways.

After a moment, she hurried toward the exit to assure herself that both Rory and Lloyd were really gone. Certain that they were, she headed back to the tableau.

“I’m not a bad person—it just can’t be that perfect!” she told herself aloud.

She moved closer to the fabricator’s image of the Ripper; it was magnificent. The eyes actually seemed to glow red—like demon eyes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.