OcTaleBer

Is that a bad name for this thing? Almost certainly! But the idea is kinda bad too, and I’m not letting that stop me!

That’s a “c” I know it looks like an “r” but I really like this font!

Synopsis
Day 1

My Rules

I write a “chapter” (using a timer and very little editing)
I post that “chapter” here and blast it out on social media with a “you choose” list for what happens next
Readers comment their favorite choice to steer the story in its next direction
The following day, I figure out the most popular choice and write up another chapter, and we do it all again!

The goal is to create a continuous story based on reader input and to spark my creativity. I gotta do something weird and new, and this is it.

I’ll be using the hashtag #octaleber and would be thrilled if you used it too. Feel free to tailor it to your needs. Create your own schedule, do pieces of flash fiction or a comic panel or a poem instead, maybe add a new word to a sentence every day! There are so many fun possibilities!

Synopsis

Well, there isn’t one yet except this: I’m planning on a haunted house setting, following a witchy FMC, and there are bound to be a few sexy monsters lurking in the darkness. There will probably be some explicit adult content, some gore, and lots of swearing.

Readers chose ahead of time that we would have a hedge witch for the FMC who has an unimpressed black cat personality and finds a friendly little familiar right away (who happens to be a cat with a twist!)

Day 1 – The Invitation

For an extra spooky ambience, consider listening to what I had playing as I wrote today:
Dark Witch of the Woods Ambience and Music | dark fantasy music with ambient sounds of a forest

Content Warnings: discussion of death/dying, ghosts, brief mention of religious extremism/child abuse, and some gory imagery

Sable Caldwell would not have believed in ghosts if she’d had any other choice. Unfortunately, there isn’t much arguing with one’s existence when it’s standing right in front of you, unless what it wants is to argue, which Minerva Moorehead almost always did—about the colors of walls and the volume of music and the openness of cupboard doors.

Sable had finished packing while Minerva ranted about the dangers of travel, a thing she couldn’t possibly know since she was stuck.

“I’ll be back eventually,” Sable had told her while tossing a lacy, black bralette into her bag atop her cards and runes.

Minerva’s jaw worked as her gaze shifted from the unseemly undergarment to the letter lying on Sable’s bed. “I just don’t like it.”

“Oh, really? I had no idea,” Sable droned, snatching up the letter and zipping up her bag. Her trip had wheedled its way into every conversation over the last week, even their monthly argument over the wastefulness of blowing cinnamon over thresholds. “You won’t miss me too much, Nervs—I opened up all the cabinets and I flipped the kitchen stools upside down on the counters.”

The ghost gasped, her gaunt features softening, which often looked menacing on a translucent face, but Sable knew better. Pre-poltergeisting the apartment was quite the nice gesture, especially coming from the witch, but Minerva had proved herself a decent roommate over the past year, and despite her protests, Sable knew she wouldn’t relish the solitude. The ghost had been a surprise, not showing herself until after the lease was signed—impressive since Sable usually felt spirits well before seeing them—and once she’d gotten over her turning-the-bathwater-to-blood phase, they’d managed to coexist.

Or rather exist and unexist in a sort of begrudging tandem.

Minerva couldn’t really be blamed for her crankiness, though. Getting caught up in a spinning mule and being attached for eternity to a mill you’d been railing against in life due to terrible working conditions that was renovated into “luxury” apartments for uppity twenty-somethings would make any woman born in the late eighteenth century grumpy. At least she had saved that little girl, though basking in one’s worldly altruism only lasted about fifty years postmortem.

“Be back in a week.” Sable had saluted the ghost and slung her bag over her shoulder, but then she had been the one who was stuck.

Minerva stood in the bedroom’s doorway, a milky form in her apron and day cap, but it was a different vision that struck Sable. The reoccurring dream, the one of a woman standing in a doorway, unbudgeable.

Eventually she moved—Sable, not the dream woman—right through the ghost, in fact, and she loaded herself into her car and drove across the state to the address she’d been sent. It was just a dream, after all, and if it wasn’t going to tell her anymore, there wasn’t much use dwelling.

She’d traveled west, but darkness fell too soon, multiple wrong turns ruining her planned arrival before dusk. And then Sable Caldwell sat and stared and remembered the dream yet again, only this time it was because the doorway from her dream was staring right back at her.

The vision had gotten it almost exactly right. It stood up a short flight and beneath an awning, flanked by round columns set on ornate pedestals. Arched moulding hung from the porch, its embellishments pointing downward like a row of sharpened teeth. Not the best omen, but then doors were almost always akin to mouths, and Sable was a witch, not an author—surely one of those would come up with a better, less-ominous metaphor.

One of those would also know to call it a simile.

Sable hadn’t seen the door itself in the dream because it had been full of a form, one with features she couldn’t make out but knew she wouldn’t recognize regardless. It was her grandmother, the one she’d never met but shared her “affliction.” The one who’d invited her here via letter and then began appearing in her dreams, wordless and still and only recognizable because that’s what the sight did—told you things without words.

There was no one standing in the doorway this time. A set of window panes reflected her headlights instead, narrow and tall and sculpted with leading.

“I guess she didn’t want me to miss it,” Sable muttered, shaking off the vision and grabbing her bag.

The early October foliage was bursting with scarlet and gold on the drive, but a gusty storm had knocked the trees on the property half bare. Scraggly, gnarled branches bent toward the building, unable to reach where it sat at the highest point of the lawn. There were no other houses in sight, the road lost down the winding drive and a forest thick with elms surrounding the plot. But then liking one’s privacy seemed a reasonable trait for hedge witches to share.

As Sable took the cobbled path up to the porch, her gaze floated from window to window, lights glowing dimly behind curtains in some. The place was massive and sprawling, and each window had a different shape, yet they melded together under a mostly Victorian design. It was probably pretty in the light.

Probably.

And in the light, the roof probably didn’t seem so dangerously pitched, and the spires probably didn’t seem to pierce the sky, and the movement behind the curtains probably didn’t seem so eerie. Especially that uppermost one.

Of course the house was haunted. It would be a much bigger shock if there were no spirits mulling around a hedge witch’s home, a thing Sable reminded herself as about a hundred different voices passed through her mind at once. She stuck a finger in her ear, wiggled it around, and climbed up onto the porch.

A breeze blew the crisp leaves out of her way, and the door creaked open a sliver.

She knocked out shave and a haircut anyway because that was the polite thing to do.

The door creaked back two bits as it opened the rest of the way.

Inviting was…not a word for the foyer, though maybe that was the point. Discouraging visitors, alive or otherwise, was often necessary, and Sable immediately felt that urgency to leave. She squeezed the strap of her bag and stepped in anyway, taking a deep breath. Rosemary and mint lingered but it was like they’d been suspended in rancid oil, bitterness biting at her nose.

Everything Sable knew about witchcraft had been self-taught. The skills and knowledge had to stay hidden from her parents who’d threatened her with exorcism too many times to count, and once she’d finally freed herself of their house, the window for developing people skills was firmly shut and the sash had been painted over. So she continued on a solitary path and stuck to what she knew: web searches and discernment. Unfortunately that meant she didn’t always get it right.

The entry didn’t sprawl like the exterior of the house, a singular hall with an L-shaped stairway that led up into darkness. The walls were paneled with wooden wainscoting and a decorative paper too shadowed to make out the pattern. The only light came from a lamp atop the console table, and under the brightest patch lay an envelope. It didn’t need to have Sable’s name on it to call to her.

My Dearest Granddaughter,
If you are reading this, then I am dead.

Sable clicked her tongue. “Well, that really shouldn’t be a problem for us.”

And as you know, newly departed spirits cannot commune with the living.

“Oh.”

I beckoned you here upon my deathbed in hopes that you would inherit this house and all it contains in my stead. I am aggrieved I cannot be there to meet and guide you, but I trust you will know what to do.

A dozen questions rattled around in her skull. Her grandmother’s invitation had come with a promise to uncover the full breadth of Sable’s magic through close guidance; clearly she did not know what to do.

The house will attend you, but be forewarned: it is full of deceitful beasties. Though they have been caged, your power need only be unleashed to tame them. Practice well and come into all that you were meant to be.

Sable glanced over her shoulder, and before the full thought of leaving could have itself, the front door slammed shut. With a lifted brow, she tried the knob, and it predictably didn’t turn. She snorted and pressed her face to the glass, a wavy image of the drive just visible in the moonlight. “Rude,” she said, and peered back into the foyer.

It was all doors, and they were all shut. To keep out the cold, probably—certainly not for anything nefarious. She tried the one directly to her right, not locked, and a sound rose up from the pitch black depths inside, the guttural scream of six thousand souls enduring the torture of hell itself.

Sable stood momentarily deafened in the aftermath, a vision of spattered blood and severed entrails flashing in the dark. When it passed, she huffed, “Extremely rude,” and shut it once again.

Opposite was an identical looking door that was a distinctly soundless broom closet. Well, a brooms closet considering how many were hung against the wall, though each was uniquely shaped and none seemed meant for sweeping. Leaves sprouted from the handles, the wood twisting and natural, and the bristles were alive with blooms rather than dried straw.

Instinct told her the choice was important, but annoyance made her pick without thinking, and from the dark she lifted a broom that had orange oak leaves for bristles and acorns dangling from its twisted handle. With a blink, the others disappeared.

“Cute,” she murmured, but a mewling reply stopped her from shutting yet another door.

It had probably once been black, but the kitten curled up in the closet’s corner had taken on a glowing green gleam in death. It poked a white-whiskered nose out from beneath it’s paw and blinked bulbous black eyes up at her.

“Oh, well now that is cute,” she said as she knelt and curled a finger at the spirit. “How long have you been here?”

The kitten didn’t answer because animals rarely gained much sapience after death. This one, though, had not lost its playfulness, leaping at her finger and falling through it. A chill ran up her arm, and the kitten nuzzled her knee, head half disappearing with each bump.

“You’ll get the hang of that,” she said, patting the space around its head and standing to face the foyer, broom in hand. She hadn’t expected to be alone in the house, but a hedge witch was never really alone anyway. “Deceitful beasties,” she repeated, eyeing the rest of the foyer’s exits. “Well, grandma, let’s see what you caught.”

To exit the foyer, Sable has three choices:

🪙 A set of double doors to the left with gilded handles
🐺 An arched door at the back with an iron animal-head knocker
🌑 The stairwell up to the darkened second floor

Whatever shall she do?

As a bonus, I mocked up Sable on Maddel_art’s Picrew: