Work Text:
Dear Michella,
Isn’t this cool? I found a place here in Hellsalem’s Lot that will let you turn your photographs into postcards! I thought that you’d like it, especially since Halloween just came and went! Of course it means that I’m going to be sending you a few of these, and hopefully they’ll all arrive at the same time. I put numbers at the top left, so you can keep them in order!
Anyway - here’s what we wore for Halloween. (Gilbert took this picture!) Zapp insisted that Zed and I go out with him for what he called the best night ever, and that meant costumes too. He made a pretty convincing werewolf by gluing all this fake fur to his face, and it was pretty easy to look like a wizard (just without the bushy beard). Zed didn’t quite know what Halloween was until Zapp explained everything, and so Zapp decided that a sheet with eyeholes was probably more than enough. I think Zapp was doing it just to be Zapp too, but Zed didn’t seem to mind this one time.
Mr. Klaus, Chain, and Mr. Steven are in the background there, although I think you only can see a little bit of them. Chain declined to get involved with any of this, but Mr. Klaus and Mr. Steven said that they’d potentially meet up with us later. Mr. Klaus said in that way that suggested he expected Zapp to get into some kind of trouble, which--
--Okay, that happened.
(cont’d!)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
But early on it was actually a really nice Thursday afternoon! You’d think that the alterworld kids wouldn’t actually be into Halloween at all since the holiday isn’t something they have, but I saw just as many of them out in costumes as I did regular people. There was a really big costume party in the park near Libra HQ, which is what this postcard is a photo of. A lot of kids were superheroes this year, but there were a lot of really scary and convincing masks too, making people look like they had five heads or faces completely covered in fur. Some of the alterworld kids were skeletons of their own species, which was actually super cool, and kind of weird to look at. (There’s one of them in the left foreground.) The apple cider was available to everyone (that’s the tent in the middle) and a lot of pumpkins were available for kids to paint. The pumpkins ended up lining the entire park when they were done (the photo I took didn’t come out great), and the last of the leaves above the park kept falling.
Zapp found me around this point and yelled at me to get into a costume myself. He scared a few kids with his sudden entrance, so I had to drag him a few feet from the park before his werewolf costume caused any more problems. I immediately got a barrage of questions including “where were you at HQ?” and “why don’t you have a costume on already!?” among others. I asked why and got told that obviously we were going to go trick or treating soon, and I wasn’t going to get any candy if I looked like my usual self.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
It was pretty insulting, but I had a feeling that Zapp was going to try and go out no matter what. If I went with him, at least someone would be keeping an eye on him. At this point, Zed was still out/hadn’t gotten pulled into this, so it was just me and Zapp and the city.
We actually did grab two pillowcases for candy, but we managed to knock at the door of two buildings that looked like they were even bothering to give out candy before Zapp started flirting with women who were clearly on their way to parties. Or else coming home from work, it was about 5 o’clock when I took this picture. What really surprised me was that people didn’t seem put off by Zapp all dressed up. If anything, they seemed really into it.
Anyway, while Zapp did that I snuck into an apartment building and got stuff from all five floors, which put me ahead of Zapp quite a bit. Actually, I don’t think he noticed I was gone, come to think of it.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
Halloween here in general is strange, come to think of it. Hellsalem’s Lot is where the alterworld and our world meet, it’s protected by magic, you see all kinds of creatures that seem like they could have stepped out of a horror movie, and yet we’re still celebrating Halloween like nothing has changed at all. I mean, just looking at the front of this postcard feels like it could be a movie still. The kid in the middle sitting on the bench is every depiction of a trick or treater dressed up as a witch, and the two alterworld beings beside her are happy being a three-headed walking hamburger and a pumpkin with eight blue arms. They could have just gone door to door as themselves, if they really wanted to.
When I said something about that to Mr. Klaus this morning, he said he thinks it is because the holiday is just so normal for everyone that to not celebrate it would be even weirder. I think he’s right, but it is still so weird at first glance.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
Ponderings aside - after I did my trick or treating in the apartment building, I found Zapp again. He had brought Zed along, finally, and seemed pretty proud of the on-the-fly ghost costume he had made up. Zed, to my surprise, was okay with all of this, and we followed along with Zapp for a while as we hopped the subway to a residential area uptown. Zapp seemed convinced the area would have “better pickings” as well. Zed and I didn’t know if he meant candy or women, and we decided that we didn’t want to know.
We managed all of five minutes uptown, which is when this picture of Zapp getting kicked out of a really fancy apartment building happened. He managed to bypass the doorman (we refused to go in with him because it seemed risky) by going in with a gaggle of kids dressed in costumes (lots of pink, mostly fairies and ballerinas. I think some girl was having a party with her friends). The doorman saw him split away from the group, chased him up two flights of stairs, and then dragged him into the lobby.
I’ve never actually seen someone get punted out of a door before, like what you’d see in a cartoon, until that very moment. Zapp even landed right on his rear in the middle of the sidewalk, swearing very loudly as the doorman revealed that he had about six extra arms that he could have used to hold onto Zapp instead. Zed seemed unimpressed with the whole thing, and that was the exact moment Zapp said, “Screw this. There’s a haunted house over in Central Park. We’re going.”
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
This is what the house’s exterior looked like! I was expecting something that was obviously made out of plywood, but somehow the people in charge of this house managed to erect an entire Victorian style house in the middle of the park, and honestly, I don’t think the photo did it justice. The sun was just setting over when we got there, and so this great big black house with all sorts of creepy ornamentation was looming among these trees sporting brilliant yellow and dark red leaves that were catching the last rays of sunlight. All kinds of spooky sounds were pouring out of it too - wolf howls, shrieks, rattling chains - and the dry ice made it feel like it was truly something creepy. Or else it was a kind of bygone creepy that you could let yourself be scared by without having to worry for your life. That was actually maybe the nicest part. After working for Libra, being scared in a controlled environment is pretty relaxing in its own way.
At least, that’s what I figured while we waited in line. Zed spent the whole fifteen minutes of waiting feeling uncomfortable in his sheet, and when Zapp wasn’t looking, I helped him take it off. We didn’t want it to get caught on anything anyway, since Zed’s vision was pretty limited with it on.
Zapp was pretty disappointed when he realized that the sheet was off (he was flirting with the girls in line behind us), but before he could start complaining, we were ushered into the haunted house.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
Okay, maybe Zapp’s terrified face with wide eyes, his nostrils upturned, and mouth opened mid-scream isn’t the most flattering photo of him or the best way to tell you that the house was actually pretty scary, but it was too good a photo not to send! Zapp started freaking out the second we walked into the house’s main entrance and a skeleton reached out to grab him, and he didn’t stop screaming until we reached the third floor.
The house was really cool though. Each room tied into the theme of creepy 19th century things, and so there were a lot of women with makeup to make it look like they were decaying skeletons or ghostly apparitions that came out of nowhere, and men who seemed like they were normal until the right light it them and they came out to scare you with a faceful of grotesque prosthetics. It was weird not seeing any alterworld creatures in the cast, but it seemed like the whole point was that all the terror here was human-based.
The dining room had a morbid feast where some visitors were invited to partake, the living room had a constant seance going on where you could be dragged into participating, and upstairs each room had either a gory death being played out or a ghost that wanted to tell you of the horrors of how they died. I actually listened to one while Zapp and Zed explored the other room, and at the end of the ghost’s story, there was a little push of ice cold air from a hidden vent that sent me screaming from the room. Zed said that every time they opened a door, Zapp was terrified, and I almost felt bad leaving the two alone for a few minutes.
We went up onto the third floor expecting more of the same, but there was a surprise waiting for us.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
The blurry thing against all the brown and white on the front of this postcard is what was on the third floor: a blood breed.
From what we’ve been able to tell, this blood breed got himself hired as a part of the haunted house by saying he’d make a really great vampire to scare people. Those doing the hiring didn’t know the half of it, and so when we got to the attic part of the house, we saw this flash of movement and we all went rigid. There was the thud of something meat like hitting the floor, followed by a high-pitched shriek yelling that this part of the house was closed and that we ought to go back downstairs.
Zed was the first one of us to recognize the smell of blood, and yelled for Zapp to get ready to fight. Zapp managed to shoo me out of the attic so I could go and get Mr. Klaus and everyone else. I hated the idea of leaving them both alone, especially since last time any of Libra encountered a blood breed, there had been a lot of destruction, but between leaving the blood breed alone or having two people try to go up against it and keep it away from other people--
--I did what they asked and ran out of the house so I could call Mr. Klaus. No one else in the haunted house seemed to sense that anything was amiss, and that me running out was just because I was scared.
(cont’d)
-Leo
※※※
Michella (cont’d),
Chain took this photo of myself, Zapp, and Zed after everything was done. It’s on the sofa at Libra, not in the haunted house, and I think all three of us were asleep when she took it. It definitely explains why Zed is letting Zapp use his shoulder as a pillow without telling him off. I can’t tell you why Zapp and I still have our costumes on though. I guess we were that tired.
Back to the haunted house though. Once I was outside I called Mr. Klaus immediately, and he brought absolutely everyone who was in HQ at the time. So really, that meant all of Libra period, because they take blood breeds so seriously. When they got there, I told Mr. Klaus how to get up to the attic room and what little we had seen in the lighting. He nodded, and began to lead everyone inside. I think he cut in line, come to think of it, although I’m sure he apologized to whoever he stepped in front of.
Within moments there was a commotion in the attic. I could hear Zapp yelling, Mr. Klaus unleashing his techniques, and then the roof was blown off of the whole house. Everyone watching clapped, assuming that this was part of the haunted house, and for all the papers have reported, that is still the case. Anyway, with the roof off, the blood breed was thrown onto the ground behind the house, and by the time I had run around the building to see what had happened, it had already been sealed.
We had actually arrived in time to see that the blood breed had only drained two guests of the haunted house, and even then, it hadn’t been all the way. The two women he had attacked were rushed to a hospital, and are still recovering.
Mr. Steven stayed behind to talk over things with the house’s operators, while the rest of us headed back to Libra. Zapp and Zed spent the entire car ride with Gilbert chattering about how well they had been doing without Mr. Klaus’ help, and he pretended not to hear them.
Zapp seemed to be satisfied with this Halloween adventure the next morning though, as he went out of his way to say thank you to me for going trick or treating with him. I don’t think he’s ever said those two words to me before.
Anyway, that was Halloween this year. If you like the postcards, I can try and do them more often! And sorry for all the tiny handwriting, I know it probably got hard on this particular card!
Tell me about what you did this year!
Your brother,
-Leo