Frightmares (Underlined) - Softcover

Gibson, Eva V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593486870 ISBN 13: 9780593486870

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A 2023 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Young Adult Novel!

In a Florida tourist trap, a summer acting job turns into a real-life horror show when a cast member turns up dead—then disappears. This nail-biting story is perfect for fans of Fear Street and the Scream franchise.

Dave is spending his final summer before college working at Frightmares House of Horrors, a struggling haunted house attraction held together by malfunctioning killer clown mannequins, a cheap replica Annabelle doll, and a lot of improvising.

After a particularly disastrous shift ends in an employee walkout, Dave reluctantly takes over a role for his friend, however, he makes a horrifying discovery—a real dead body, hidden on set. But when Dave returns with help, the body is gone.

Though the killer covered their tracks, Dave realizes they must know what he saw. Could he be their next target?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eva V. Gibson is the author of the YA novels Together We Caught Fire, Where Secrets Lie, and Frightmares. A bookworm since early childhood, she has routinely gravitated to the dark and gritty, reading, then writing, stories with grim themes and flawed, complicated characters. She lives in Northern Virginia with her family, and spends most of her time brooding, baking, creating, and parenting, awaiting the day her kids read her books with equal parts excitement and trepidation.

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Chapter 1

This whole night sucks.

The second-to-last working bulb flickered in the cobwebbed chandelier, gave a final flare, and went dark, throwing the room into shadow. I stepped back and peered up at it, sucking air through my teeth as I knocked my hip against the antique dresser.

Josie Manning’s eyes blinked open. She squinted into the gloom, peering through the lock of hair caught in her smeared eye makeup. The wrought-iron bed frame creaked as I leaned over her. She shifted, her breath catching in her bloodstained corset.

“Hold still,” I hissed, tightening the worn leather restraint around her goth-pale wrist. I’d be lucky if it lasted through Sunday. “This piece-of-shit buckle--”

She opened her mouth to answer, then paused, listening. I heard it too--shrieks and clattering. Hurried footsteps, closer than they should be. Her finger tapped my knuckle: one, two, three. Ready or not.

She started screaming right before the curtain swung open.

It was reflex by now. The ax was in my grip, swinging an arc above her tear-streaked face. I brought it down hard on the clean sheet covering her legs, buried it in the mattress just below her knee. Blood welled and blossomed around the blade; the toes on her severed foot twitched, drawing gasps and laughter.

“SEE? SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO? TRY TO RUN AWAY NOW. GO AHEAD, SEE HOW FAR YOU GET WITHOUT YOUR LEG.”

“Dude, that’s messed up.”

The voice--belonging to some douche in a Tapout tank shirt--sent a wave of giggles through the crowd. A bunch of high school kids, most around my age, most of them grinning and taking pictures. We’d be all over the #FRIGHTMARES hashtag by midnight, swimming in well-deserved ridicule and emoji-driven mockery.

Thank God I look nothing like myself.

Josie screamed louder, pleading for help. I left the ax buried in the mattress and reached for the coiled bullwhip hanging on the wall above the bed. Even Tapout flinched at the first downswing. I cracked it again and again against her thighs, striping the sheets bloody. Striping the air with her broken wails.

The whip did most of the work. One more tweaked shoulder would derail my swim training, and I’d have nothing to offer in the fall season but weak form and a shitty backstroke, so a half-assed performance it was. No way was I going to let a terrible summer job mess up my swimming scholarship. It wasn’t an option.

The group eventually shuffled into the corridor, heading for the next scene. About a nanosecond after the door closed behind them, I was moving: smearing fresh F/X blood on the whip; coiling it and hanging it back on the wall; yanking the ax out of the mattress; ripping the stained sheet off Josie’s “legs” and stuffing it in the basket under the bed next to her actual legs. Her torso sprouted from the cutout in the mattress, ramrod straight and prickly as a pissed-off cactus. I snapped a fresh sheet over her, tucking it around her waist to hide the hole, and repositioned the severed leg so it was even with the other prosthetic. The mechanical toes wriggled beneath the sheet like trapped mice.

“You okay?”

“Well, Dave,” she answered, “I’m starving and dehydrated, and my ass has been asleep for the past twenty minutes. Oh, and as I’m sure you’ve noticed, this corset is a size too small, and it’s sapping my will to live. Other than that, I’m great.”

“Shift’s almost done.” I adjusted the pillow behind her back and ran a comb through her bobbed black hair. One thing we’d learned over the past five months on this set was it was way faster for me to do all this bullshit for her, rather than undoing the restraints so she could do it herself. “You still good with the lipstick?”

“It’s drying out. Water first, then another coat. Red, this time.”

I rummaged through the dresser drawer with one hand, squeezed the sport bottle over her open mouth with the other. By the time she swallowed, I was poised and waiting. A quick pat dry with the towel, a swipe of scarlet over the smeared pink, and she was good to go. I checked my reflection in the mirror: my waistcoat was straight; my cravat was dapper. My cape fell over my shoulders like a swoop of night. I adjusted the wig, smoothed the long blond locks, and dusted another layer of powder over my sweaty makeup. I looked stupid as hell. In other words, ready for the next group.

“Soon as we get out of here, I’m kicking Seth’s ass,” Josie breathed. “Every run tonight--every single run--he’s let them in early. There’s no time to reset the scene.”

“Better cover up first,” I muttered, refreshing the saline tear streaks on her cheeks and smearing them through her eyeliner. Seth Tinetti never stopped checking out our female castmates, Josie included, and made zero attempts to hide it--not in front of his girlfriend, Bethany, or Josie’s boyfriend, Ollie, or Loretta, proprietress of Frightmares House of Horrors, our boss, and his actual mother. Not much hope for a guy who has zero chill even when his mom is literally standing there.

“Oh God, you’re right,” Josie said, groaning. “I swear, I do not get paid enough to deal with this. You kick his ass for me, then, and I’ll owe you one.”

“I’ll kick it for myself. He has us in here with a broken strobe and one working light bulb. I can barely see.”

“I doubt the customers can, either. Which is for the best, since half these props are basically garbage. How’s the duct tape?”

“It’s holding fine, but it looks like shit.”

“At least it’s holding. If the ax head comes off again, just start beating me with the handle.”

“I’m not beating you for real, Jo.”

“Dude, I don’t mean actually-- Know what? You might as well. This bullshit--three years of auditions, two agencies, my freaking SAG card--I should at least be basic Disney cast by now, not stuck in a bed at goddamn Frightmares House of Horrors, being fake-tortured by a very tall child. No offense.” The racket started up outside the room. Early. Again. “SETH. WHY.”

The broken restraint fell off her wrist as the next crowd shoved through the curtain. We improvised.

 

The night only got worse. The tours piled up one after the other, until they were practically overlapping. We had no time to reset the scene, and no choice but to go off-script, which meant the entire show was just me cracking the whip, Josie screeching, and the mechanical toes wiggling endlessly beneath the same bloody sheet. Worst of all, right when I’d finally found a rhythm, an actual real wolf spider had dropped from the chandelier onto Josie’s bare shoulder, triggering a scream that would’ve been perfect for the performance had I not echoed it in both volume and pitch.

That spider ended up jumping--actually leaping off her shoulder and scurrying down her corset, over the sheet, and off the far edge of the mattress. I then spent the rest of the scene flailing the bullwhip at tiny, spidery shadows as we cleared the room with our ragged howls. We never did find the little bastard, and we never recovered our act--not that it mattered how badly we sucked once the final light bulb blew out.

By the time the crew gathered in the greenroom for postshift notes, Josie was furious beyond speech--which was just as well, since everyone else was at full volume, shouting over each other as Loretta emerged from her office. She’d been into the eighties Elvira look lately, which was a hard bar to clear...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593486870
• ISBN 13: 9780593486870
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland