as trim as her. But still, it wouldn’t be as much fun as aerobics. She simply loved making folks happy and being on the go.
Inga rolled down her window—the brisk autumn air felt good on her skin, and it dried her tears, too. A bright-red leaf blew into the car and landed right in her lap. It matched her hair exactly. When she was little, the other kids used to make fun of her hair, but she loved the color anyway. She picked up the leaf and tucked it over her ear. She took one more quick glance in the mirror. Now she looked like some kind of savage tree spirit, with her shadowed eyes and that bold leaf nestled in her flaming locks.
Suddenly she realized—she couldn’t show up at the Graves house with her make-up all smeared. It would be obvious she’d been crying, and she didn’t want to upset or worry Trent and Claire. Plus, the raccoon eyes would only remind Claire of how bad her eyes looked... She always had dark circles around her eyes from lack of sleep.
Inga couldn’t fix her make-up in the car—she’d need to wash off the old stuff first. Where could she go...? She didn’t want to drive all the way back to town. The Graves’ only neighbors were a bestselling author and her husband—but nobody ever saw them. The writer, Rose Tremble, had churned out some fancy self-help book called What Color Is Your Karma’s Air-Bag? Inga had looked at it in a bookstore once—pretty drippy stuff. It compared life to a car trip, and people had to decide if their life’s car had a white air-bag or a black one. Apparently it all depended on how they reacted to stress.
Inga saw the lane to the Tremble house coming up on her left. Well, she couldn’t stop there—or could she? A cardboard sign, duct-taped to a tree, declared BOOK SEMINAR in bold red letters. The lane was lined with orange balloons attached to slender black stakes.
Perfect! She’d go in, sneak into the bathroom and fix her make-up. If anybody saw her, she’d just laugh and say she’d heard a sad song on the radio. A dumb excuse, but believable. And then she’d finally get to meet the reclusive author. Heck, she’d even buy a book. Claire would love a nice perky self-help book.
She headed up the lane. The house was huge—about three times bigger than the Graves place. She noticed that all the vehicles parked around the place were luxury cars. Most were red or black and all had tinted windows. There were several hearses, too. Maybe they were part of some Halloween-oriented publicity stunt for whatever book Rose Tremble was promoting these days.
She parked, got out of the car and half-hid her face behind a handkerchief as she walked inside. She was no more than a few feet into the house when a tall, middle-aged woman stepped up to her.
“Welcome! Thank you for coming!” The woman was a vision of pink, yellow and lots of gold. Pink foundation and rose-pink lipstick, yellow hair, dark golden eyes, gold jewelry, a gold silk dress with thin yellow and pink stripes. She had a square-jawed face, a too-wide mouth, and practically reeked of rose-scented perfume.
She stared at Inga, her thick lips stretched into an enormous smile. “My word, look who we have here! Outstanding!”
Inga didn’t know how to respond to that, so she said, “Oh, thanks. I try! I’m Inga. I stay with the Graves.”
The golden woman laughed. “Of course you do! I’m Rose Tremble. You’re just in time! Right this way.”
Inga followed the golden woman down a hallway, past gilt-framed oil paintings and little statues on cherrywood tables. They were walking too fast for her to get a good look at any of the artwork, but she did notice that most seemed to depict creatures out of various mythologies. Nymphs, griffins, satyrs, centaurs, mermaids—and zombies. Were zombies part of some mythology? Maybe Haitian lore.
She wasn’t sure what to do about her face. It was a complete mess. She’d only wanted to use the bathroom, buy a book, chat for a minute and leave. Now it seemed she was going to have to sit through a whole seminar. She followed Rose into a large room, took a quick glance at all the seated people and—
People?
Oh, no. These weren’t people.
People were flesh-colored.
People were made of living tissue.
People were more or less symmetrical...
Inga wanted to run screaming, but the sight before her was so bizarre—so hideously compelling—that she simply couldn’t move. She had to just stand there and absorb this grotesque vision.
The things seated in the chairs had humanoid bodies, shapewise—but their tissue, which could hardly be considered living, came in a variety of inhuman colors. Navy blue. Lime green. Magenta. Purple.
Most of them were clearly rotten. Bugs and all. The room stank like a combination of a busy outhouse and the dumpster behind a butcher shop. But even so, the audience members were moving, jostling in their seats, whispering gurgly little phrases to each other. As for symmetry... Based on what she was seeing, it was clear that decay was a terribly uneven process.
Rose walked up to a lectern at the front of the room and cleared her throat. The grotesque horde immediately fell silent. She then looked toward Inga, who was still standing.
Inga found an empty seat next to a noseless blue creature with a gaptoothed grin.
“First, I’d like to thank all of you for showing up,” Rose said. “I know that for most of you, travel is something of an ordeal.”
Amused murmurs and warbles sounded throughout the room. Strangely enough, the more Inga looked at the creatures around her, the less they frightened her. At least they were behaving. And for some reason, they seemed to accept her presence completely.
“I thought I was on top of the world after the publication of my first book,” the golden woman stated. “It made me a ton of money. I got to be on a lot of talk-shows. I became an overnight celebrity. But you know what?” She leaned forward and cocked her head to one side. “I wasn’t happy. I had my problems, but I was sugar-coating them. And worse of all, I was ignoring my inner monster.”
Most of the audience members nodded what roughly corresponded to heads.
“Then,” Rose said, “I found out that my husband, who was also my literary agent, had been having an affair—spending my money on a waitress whose bust-size was higher than her I.Q. That was about the time I started workshopping my rage ... addressing my own deep-down needs. My first book, with all its happy-crappy philosophy—what a waste of paper! I finally realized I’d been in complete denial when I’d written that. Eventually, my husband hired his sweetie’s drug-addict brother to run me down with a rusted-out Camaro.”
Low moans of pity echoed through the room.
The hideous blue creature next to Inga turned toward her. “My husband tossed the hair-dryer in my bath water,” it whispered.
Before Inga could respond, Rose Tremble continued with her story. “Oh, sure, I could have just thrown in the towel after that Camaro hit me. But you know what? I’ve never been a quitter.” The golden woman pounded the lectern with her fist. “I wasn’t about to let some low-life just run over me and get away with it. He stopped the car to steal the jewelry off my corpse, and that’s when I got back on my own two feet—and ripped out his throat with my teeth!”
The audience greeted this statement with wild clapping and bubbly cheers of approval. The clapping raised a small cloud of dust. One especially desiccated cadaver clapped so eagerly that a couple of its fingers flew off.
