Friday Nightmares Read online

  Friday Nightmares

  Corey Edward

  Copyright © 2021 by Corey Edward

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Cover design by Emily’s World of Design

  Published by Fyresyde Publishing

  ISBN:

  * * *

  Created with Vellum

  For R. Neil Hagan, who always believed.

  Contents

  1. The Case of the Dicey Tomatoes

  2. Where There’s a Will, There’s a Catch

  3. The Last (Worst) Case of James Candle

  4. Big Boy Magic

  5. The Beast And Its Belly

  6. Henry Candle, Star Reporter

  7. Stay With Us

  8. A Covert Operation

  9. Girl In The Mirror

  10. A Bitter Rift

  11. Monsters And Meatloaf

  12. Like An Egyptian

  13. Office Cleaning

  14. The Blair Henry Project

  15. A Grin, Darkly

  16. This Rising Darkness

  17. All Hallow’s Leave

  18. True Magic

  Thank you for reading!

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Check Out Titles by Other FyreSyde Authors

  One

  The Case of the Dicey Tomatoes

  I spent my Saturday night hacking into a dead wizard’s computer.

  This impossible task wasn't made any easier by the fact that said wizard also happened to be my father. But I couldn’t let myself give up. Not when so much was riding on me gaining access to the case files contained on the ancient ruin of a desktop.

  This was, quite literally, a matter of life or death – but mostly the latter.

  It’s been two long weeks since my father’s body was found in the woods outside Boston with a snake carved into his chest. Two weeks since my grandparents woke me up in the dead of night to tell me what happened and changed my life forever. After fourteen days of investigations, interviews, and decoding, the police still weren’t any closer to uncovering a reason for his murder.

  Given the fact that they weren’t aware he was a wizard or that wizards even existed to begin with, they weren’t likely to find one.

  That was up to me, if I could ever get his computer to cooperate.

  I'd already typed in so many different possibilities that it would make a forgetful grandmother look tame. Magic. Spellcraft. Crowley. Merlin. Gracie, which was my late mother’s name, and finally, my own name, Henry. Hell, I even tried JamesCandle1, though I should’ve known my father wouldn’t use his own name as a password.

  He was many things in life, but predictable wasn’t one of them.

  His chaotic disaster of a desk didn’t hold any clues, either. All that remained of James Candle were mountains of bills, piles of spell books, and a half-eaten bag of Doritos. It was so uniquely him that it was practically a memorial.

  The curly-tailed, cream-colored pug on my lap shifted uncomfortably, growing more impatient by the minute. If we didn't get out of there soon, he'd be making for the Doritos, and those bad boys were staler than last year's memes.

  I was just about ready to throw the computer out of the window when a woman came running into the office with tears streaming down her face.

  She didn’t look like what I’d always imagined my father’s “typical” clients to be. The only thing unusual about her was just how ordinary she was, with tidy blonde hair, a pink blouse, and faded blue jeans. She was the kind of person you’d see walking into a bank at half-past noon with her phone up to her ear, not running into a wizard’s office in tears.

  But that’s the thing about the paranormal. It didn’t walk into your life politely. It tumbled into it on rainy Saturday evenings, locked and loaded and ready to wreck your shit. It left your father dead in the woods and you with the unwanted family business you spent your sixteen years of life trying to avoid.

  And there was nothing you could do about it.

  Well, mostly.

  “Hello?” I tried, because what else could I say. I hopped to my feet and hurried over to the woman’s side, Rusty following after. She was crying so much that she almost didn’t seem to hear me, so distracted by whatever it was that had dragged her here today. “How can I help you?”

  “Is this… is this Candle Paranormal Investigations?” she asked between great, heaving sobs.

  “Yes. It is. What’s wrong?”

  “Thank God,” she said, latching onto my shoulders as if she were drowning and I was the side of a boat. “You have to help me. Please. I’m… I’m in trouble. Deep trouble.”

  Yeah, and so was everyone else who came to Candle Paranormal Investigations. Including me.

  Especially me.

  “Why don’t you come take a seat,” I suggested. “I’ll get you some tissues and coffee and we can go work this thing out.”

  I didn’t want to work it out. I wanted to shove his books into boxes, smash his computer, and walk right out of there, never to go back. But how could I say no to this poor woman, teary-eyed and lost? How could I reject her the same way so many others had rejected me?

  She took a seat in front of the desk and I took a seat behind it. Rusty, my pug Familiar, jumped onto my lap and stared at her with a tilted head and big, beady eyes. As a Familiar animal, he could understand human speech and emotions as well as most regular dogs understood "sit" and "shake." He didn’t handle sadness particularly well, but like most dogs, he was at least helpful in alleviating it.

  I handed her a tissue, which she took and emptied her nose into. I made to go get her a cup of coffee, but she waved me down before I could even stand.

  “No thanks, I don't need more caffeine. I just need help. God, this is ridiculous,” she said once she calmed down. “Really, it is. I feel so goddamn stupid. Like I just imagined the whole thing. But I found you on Google and thought it was worth a try. I thought you might be able to help me.”

  “Help you with what?” I asked.

  What I really meant to ask was: exorcism, banishment, or otherwise?

  “Are you really going to believe me?” she asked, as if we were on camera. “I’m telling you. It's crazy."

  “I’ll believe you,” I said. “I promise. What's-”

  “I’m being haunted by a can of tomatoes,” she said, blurting it out in one breath.

  What.

  The.

  Hell?

  I was expecting something wild, but I wasn't expecting that.

  Haunted houses? Sure.

  Haunted hospitals? Okay.

  But haunted canned goods? No way. Unheard of.

  Even wizards had to draw their lines somewhere, and this was exactly where I drew mine.

  I couldn’t, however, say that without violating the motto on the windows outside of the office: “WE BELIEVE WHEN THEY DON’T!”

  I had to stay true to that promise.

  The fate of my client’s kitchen depended on it.

  “Let's start over again from the beginning,” I said, opening a nearby notebook and clicking on my pen. “When did you first suspect the can of tomatoes was haunted?”

  “As soon as I got back from the store and started unpacking the groceries,” said the woman, dabbing at her eyes with the tissue. “I put the can down and it just started moving. Rolling around on the counter all by itself like it was alive. I-I know it sounds totally insane, but —"

  “There’s nothing sane about the super
natural,” I replied. In fact, if she knew even a quarter of the insane things that were locked away in my father’s case files, she would probably be glad that this was all she had to contend with. “I’ve heard much weirder, I promise.”

  “Oh, wait ‘til you hear what happened when it stopped rolling.” Her eyes darted around the office, as if the can of tomatoes might jump out from behind the chair and come after her in search of revenge. “My first instinct was to pick it up, so I did. But then — oh, God.”

  She stopped talking and wailed once again, smashing a tissue up against her nose. I looked down at Rusty and nodded toward the woman.

  Help her, I thought. Please.

  He jumped off my lap and waddled over to her with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. She picked up her head as licked her hand, brushing a strand of hair out of her face.

  “He’s so cute,” she said with a smile. “What’s his name?”

  “Rusty,” I replied. “Are you okay?”

  She sighed. “Sorry. This isn’t easy to talk about.”

  “There’s no need to apologize,” I said. “Take as long as you need. It’s what I’m here for.”

  It wasn’t, in fact, what I was there for. I was there because I had to be, because I didn’t have a true say in the matter. I was a hopeless participant in a deadly family tradition I never wanted to carry on, held hostage by the threat of losing my magic.

  “So here’s what happened next,” she went on, snapping me back into focus. “The can burst open by itself and out popped this… oh, I don’t know, this thing. It was red, like a tomato, and had the same skin as a tomato, but it wasn’t one. I mean, what kind of tomato is as big as someone’s head? What tomato has fangs, for Christ’s sake? And those eyes… those big, black eyes.” She shuddered. “I threw the can to the ground and ran right out of my apartment. That was three days ago. I haven’t been back since.”

  I nodded, writing all the details that would aid in my search for its identity. Corporeal. Fangs. Smaller than a person. After I had everything down, I wheeled away from my father’s desk, reached up into the nearby bookcase, and withdrew a hardbound green tome.

  “What’s that?” she asked. She sounded almost frightened of it, and I couldn’t blame her. Big, ancient books were the most threatening of all, which was exactly why I loved them.

  It gave them character.

  “It’s called the ‘Dictionary Infernal.’ It’s a reference guide to all the supernatural entities who plague this world. Helpful, if you need to know what’s haunting you.” I flipped to a chapter about halfway through the book and scanned through the classifications, based on what she told me. “Ah. Sounds to me like that thing you saw is known as a ‘Vextable.’ It’s a species of Darkon known for inserting itself into canned fruits and vegetables and taking revenge on those who seek to consume them.”

  “Darkon?” She blinked. “What’s a ‘Darkon’?”

  But of course. I should’ve known she’d be confused. Most people were, when it came to creatures of the night.

  “A ‘Darkon’ is a creature from another dimension called the Nether Realm,” I explained, giving her the bare-bones, stripped-down, explain-like-I’m-five version. “Some call them demons. Others call them monsters. Whatever you call them, they’re pure evil, and they must either be killed or banished back to their own plane of existence.”

  There was much more to it than that, but a layman’s explanation would suffice for now.

  “So you’re saying there’s a creature from another dimension hanging out in my kitchen? In my groceries?”

  I nodded. “In a tin can, if you want to get technical.”

  “And it wants to eat me? Like I’m a piece of bacon or something?”

  “More like chocolate cake. They’re sloppy eaters, you see. You’re very lucky to have escaped with your life.”

  “Beautiful.” She sighed and leaned back in the chair. “How come nobody else knows about this Nether-whatever stuff?”

  “Most that do keep their mouths shut, since there are those out there who’d gladly shut it for them. Even when they do talk— and yes, some still do, check the internet— they have very little proof to back up what they’re saying,” I explained. “Otherworldly beings don’t appear on cameras or on phones.”

  And that, my friends, is why every ghost hunting show ever made was complete and utter bunk.

  “And why not?”

  “Our technology doesn’t have the ability to record their imprint on this world, being that they’re from other planes of existence. But they do exist. Your experience is a testament to that fact.”

  “Well, then. Can you get rid of it?”

  “I’m not going to lie: I’ve never actually banished a Darkon before. But my dad did many times—at least, he did before he passed away— and I think I’ve observed him enough to know what to do.”

  And I’d also observed him enough to see the way this job had chewed through his soul until there was nothing left.

  I didn’t want to end up broken like him. I’d never wanted that for myself. But she also didn’t want to have a tomato haunting her apartment, because who the hell would? I had to help her. I'd want the same, too, if I were a helpless human.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” the woman said. I’d heard those words many times over the past month, but they didn’t live up to just how sorry I felt on the inside. “Are you taking over his business now that he’s gone?”

  “I am,” I said. “And you have the honor of being my first case.”

  “Really?" She raised an eyebrow. "Um. Aren’t you a little young for this? You can’t be a day older than fifteen.”

  “Just turned sixteen about a month ago, actually. Same age my dad was when he took over from his father.”

  She nodded slowly, as if she were dissatisfied with that answer. “James Candle… was that his name?”

  I realized then that my father’s nameplate was still on the desk. If I failed to replace his name with mine on Halloween night and thereby cement my place as the owner of Candle Paranormal Investigations, I’d lose my magic and no longer be a wizard. A wizard without magic was like a pumpkin pie without the filling — and if my magic went, my connection with Rusty would go right along with it.

  Though it was framed as a “choice” for us Candle wizards, it really wasn’t much of one. Magic was more than just a power that flowed within our veins. It was part of who we were. I may as well lose my vision or my hearing. Or, Merlin forbid, my soul. So it was for the past ten generations of Candle wizards, every Halloween night on their sixteenth year: magic or human. Business or not.

  Some decision.

  “Yep. And my name’s Henry. Don’t feel like you have to tell me yours, though; we never ask.”

  Confidentiality was always Dad’s strictest policy. Now, it was mine, too.

  “Tiffany,” she said. “And thank you, Henry. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “Well, you’ve turned in the right direction. We can go back to your apartment right now, if you’d like.” I got to my feet and Rusty hurried to my side. “Is it okay if he comes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. I’ll do just about anything to return to my life again.”

  I knew the feeling.

  I knew the feeling all too well.

  The computer would just have to wait.

  I was open for business, like it or not.

  ~&~

  For centuries, this is how we Candle wizards have lived and how we’ve died.

  Chasing spooks like cats chase mice.

  Hunting entities lurking in the shadows cast by everyday life.

  Waging war against the kind of people who smiled at you during the day and raised the corpse of your dead Aunt Gertrude at night.

  Either we fought the forces of darkness or stood by while innocent souls were devoured by them—and their blood, according to Dad, was on our hands. This is what he told me time and again. And time and again, I resisted him.<
br />
  But really, can you blame me for being hesitant to take over the family business? It’s not like I used to sit up in bed at night fantasizing about how many werewolf-mauled corpses I could see in a day, how many lamps I could get chucked at my head by angry poltergeists, or how many times I could narrowly escape having my soul gobbled up like an entrée.

  I’m not the kind of guy who thinks that stuff is cool. Books, yes. Doctor Who, hell yeah. Fighting the forces of darkness? No thanks, pass me the remote and a nice, warm mug of hot chocolate.

  Tiffany’s case was like a trial run for me. I was dipping my toes in the preternatural muck, so to speak. If it worked out, then maybe I could live the strange half-life my father had lived and still live my own full life at the same time. Maybe I could keep my human dreams, human friends, and human life in the process, no matter what he always said about sacrifice.

  I’d have my work cut out for me with this city. Boston was a big place, and weirdness slipped up through its cracks like miasma. But I could handle it.

  I think.

  “Here it is,” Tiffany announced as we stepped out of the Uber. The evening was overcast and chilly; not a spot of sunlight shone through in the sky. “My humble abode.”

  Humble was an understatement. The Uber had taken us to a quiet corner of northern Boston a couple blocks down from my father’s office. Her apartment complex was wedged between a Laundromat and an old, abandoned BBQ joint, a squat brick building that had once been red but now looked brown.

  “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I mean, aside from… well, you know.”

  I knew.

  She held open the door as Rusty and I entered. The inside of the apartment complex was just as dreary as the outside and smelled like an old closet that someone had never gotten around to cleaning. The carpet was also in need of replacing, with stains and frays where it met the wall. I already decided that I would be doing this case free-of-charge from the start, since it was my first one. I was happy I’d made that decision, based on what I was seeing now.