How Sweet It Is by Dylan Newton

Author:Dylan Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Drake finished typing and put his laptop to sleep, closing it up. “Thanks—it’s nice to have someone who—”

“—gets how crazy it is when your mind moves faster than your fingers can type?” Kate nodded. “You’ve seen my spreadsheets. They contain that level of detail so I can fall asleep at night. If I don’t write everything down that needs to be done—and I mean every little, teensy thing—I will obsess about it and lose sleep. Speaking of which…” Kate paused, lifting up her printed spreadsheet. “I need to move a few things around in here to amplify the creepy factor.”

Drake looked around the attic’s dusty boxes, trunks, and stacks of original moldings and baseboards that had been saved when his grandfather had repapered the walls. The only thing creepy was the broken-down baby carriage with its dingy-haired doll and the cobwebbed figure of the gray squirrel that hung in the corner. Apparently, one of his ancestors had either bought or stuffed the creature himself, decades ago, and the squirrel was perpetually frozen on a branch in the corner of the attic, staring down at the floor below as if he’d just spotted a cobra lying in wait next to the old box containing the entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1970. Unless you had a phobia of stuffed squirrels or outdated information, it didn’t look particularly menacing to him.

“What are you going to do? Looks like an average attic to me. Only the exposed knob and tube wiring gives me the heebie-jeebies. The electrician said they weren’t live, but I make my living off asking questions that begin with ‘What if,’ so I know how the best-laid plans are set aflame.”

“They aren’t live. The wires have long since been disconnected,” Kate said, reaching above her head to grab an exposed wire with a bare hand and shaking it twice for emphasis while she scrolled through her phone. Drake winced, but she didn’t get shocked and seemed oblivious to any sort of danger, never glancing up from her device. “Nothing to worry about there—that one was checked off last week. What I’m hoping you’ll give me permission to do is go through some of those trunks, maybe push them around and set things up in a more…helter-skelter manner?”

Drake rolled his eyes. “What happened to not making me a sideshow freak again?”

“Not like that,” Kate said, holding her phone up to him. She’d screenshot a picture of an old attic with dolls set up on trunks facing the camera, things mysteriously draped in white sheets, and random debris set up in a haphazard, almost demented, manner. “I want it to seem as if you gaze around this space when you’re looking for inspiration. I want your fans to picture you here, writing, and for that picture to align with how they believe a horror writer seeks inspiration. We’ll do it classy and tasteful—just an old attic, which their imagination will transform into something way more sinister than it is in real life.

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