To whom it may concern

Sara Sue remembered the girl, all in black, carrying the filmy outline of another person over her own face like a mask sketched in chalk. She felt sick.

The Mayor noticed her change in expression, and laughed.

"Ah," he said. "This one gets it. A shame you never loved your father or brothers; their clinging ghosts would have made you much stupider, and far less of a nuisance."

Sara Sue ground her teeth, fingers aching for a pencil to drive deep into the reality of this man, shutting him up forever.

"And Simon Holmes loved his friends so very much..."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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"Oh, I know all about the Holmes boy," the Mayor said airly. "He's loyal as a dog." He grinned, his teeth white and even and blinding. "And when he realises I've taken his little friends, he'll come running like a dog. And then, as usually happens to boys who are loyal and good and true, he'll die like a dog."

Behind a tumble-down veil of hair that she'd thought she was long past wearing, Sara Sue glared hatred. At her side, Dash laughed.

"You're thinking of the wrong brother," he said. "Simon was loyal. Harley? He's just very, very angry."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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The robe was thick and soft, the sheer bulk of it packed so tightly into the glitzy gift-wrap prison that it started to ooze out the moment she tore away that first strip of tape. She pulled, and as the tidal wave of the fabric spilled out and down and pooled about her feet in a glorious tide of pinks and blues, Sara Sue squealed in delight.

"It has pockets!"

She lifted it, feeling the velvety plush against her paint-stained fingertips, noticing the slight strain required to lift all that wonderful, snuggly weight, and slipped it on.

"Pockets, you guys!"


Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue pulled herself up and onto the ledge and sat there, wheezing. On the other side of Wolf Mountain the sun was rising, but here on the northern face the pre-dawn chill remained and her breath formed icy plumes in the cold air.

She unwrapped one of the World o' Stuff's patent-pending energy bars, inhaling the salty-sweet smells of peanut butter and banana, and devoured it in three bites.

Far below her dangling feet, the town was beginning to stir. She watched the lights come on at the Eerie Dairy, just as lights winked out all over the cemetery.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Marshall hurried down the grimy corridor, two minutes late for his next class and letting his feet handle the familiar route while his brain scrambled for a hopefully not-so-familiar excuse. That was probably why he didn't notice one of the Michaels loitering by the display case until he was almost on top of him.

"Ow!" Marshall exclaimed, jerking his hand back and shaking it to dispel the sudden sting of static electricity.

"Sorry," said the Michael, his voice as quiet as soft pencil on rough paper. He turned, and Marshall could see what had fascinated him.

"Ah," he said. "Sara-Sue."

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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The Paperwitch rustled amongst the tall shelves of the Eerie Library, trailing fine white dust and a steady stream of dangerous words freed from the pages of a dozen extremely cursed texts. Knowledge Spirits cowered between the stacks or crawled inside the glossy covers of newly released hardcovers as she passed

A children's reading circle watched in horror as the latest instalment of the Adventures of Rowan the Chaffinch and Limey the Lime swelled to monstrous proportions before devouring the volunteer whole and screaming, and the Paperwitch wheezed out a dry and spiteful laugh as sharp as a dozen paper-cuts.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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It was Sara Sue's first time meeting a monster under the bed, and it had not gone how the monster expected.

"But why?" she asked, kneeling on the worn but well-vacuumed carpet of her rented room and peering into the dark space beneath a pink ruffled valance. "What's down there?"

The monster under the bed looked embarrassed, as much as an amorphous blob of blackness and fright could manage.

"Me?" it ventured. "Usually a few dust bunnies, a couple of lost socks. Occasionally a book someone got half-way through before abandoning."

Sara Sue thought about this.

"That's weird," she said.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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The statues in Deadwood Park's small but well-appointed sculpture garden were on the move again.

Some careless idiot had decided to ignore the signs saying not to climb the statuary, fallen a good ten feet after a shove from a Venus made of reclaimed aluminium that sported rather more than two arms, and consequently bled all over the neatly-raked but very cursed gravel that lined the pathways winding between the figures.

Sara Sue didn't like dealing with the sculpture garden. Too much metal, too many hard, sharp edges. Though it was nice to see murderous artwork that wasn't her fault.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Lightning flashed overhead, and for a moment the sky was all aflame, the land beneath it lit bright as day though midnight had come and gone long since.

Thunder rumbled, shaking the single-pane glass in the soft and rotting wood of window frames up and down that long-abandoned street.

Dash X stood in the middle of the weed-cracked road, borrowed clothes plastered to him by the driving rain. This was his least-favourite outfit, the colours too bright and the whole thing several sizes too big, but it was still clothing he could ill-afford to lose.

His feet were bare, and in the light of the storm the scars on them were red, livid and shining. Beneath him, a thick rubber mat of the kind used in offices to lessen the chance of static discharge glistened like living oil.

Lightning cracked again, closer now. At the edge of town, something was burning. The new Weatherman didn't yet have Wally's level of control, and property damage happened more often these days.

The door to one of the houses banged open, caught by the rushing wind. In hand-me-down oil-slickers and heavy-soled rubber boots, Sara Sue and Harley said nothing as they joined him.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Weather

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The sun was up and it was possible that the birds were singing, although Sara Bob Haversock wouldn't know since she couldn't hear much over the sound of her brothers yelling.

She turned over on her thin mattress, inhaling the familiar smells of washing powder and cinderblock, and squeezed her eyes shut.

A moment later she opened them again. No good. The dream was gone, her family's voices wiping it away like an eraser on pencil marks. Too bad; it had felt like a good one.

She sat up, running her fingers through her hair. Upstairs, someone screamed her name.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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When word first reached him of a dragon nesting in the highest crags of Wolf Mountain, Billy Millions wasn't worried.

Anyone venturing that high was unlikely to make it back down anyway and most dragons knew enough to stay away from human settlements. So long as man and myth were content to ignore each other, all would be well.

Then the hero came, on a white horse with a sword shining silver at his waist, and now the leader of the Unkind Ones was concerned. Dragons knew to be afraid of heroes, but heroes so often forgot to fear dragons...

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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It's not quite a Viking funeral - for all his muscle and mass, he's still a triple-folded sheet of A4 in the end and that means his body would burn up too quickly to suit the solemnity of the occasion - but it's not a bad approximation, either.

Sara Sue sketches a shallow-bottomed row boat, the benches missing, and after she's signed it into reality the three of them line it with moss gathered from the scrubland that surrounds the lake. She unfolds the rumpled sketch of the Nanny and smoothes the brittle paper over the soft, damp green.

Dash hadn't known Harley before the disappearances at the lake and his own long, dark years trapped in the cell beneath City Hall, and the quiet, slightly lost shadow left behind in Simon's absence doesn't bear much resemblance to the stories he'd heard back then. Still, he thinks he sees a glimmer of it when Harley shows up twenty minutes before Arnold's send-off with a crate of illegal fireworks and an honour guard courtesy of the Unkind Ones.

They slide the paper-light boat out onto the dark blue water, and when the gentle swell has carried it a little distance from the shore, the three of them shoot rockets at it until it catches fire, orange-white flames curling up to mingle with multi-coloured explosions that light up the night sky and reflect in the waves below.

The Unkind Ones stand with heads bowed and hands clasped, and Billy Millions doesn't answer when Dash presses him on exactly how Eerie's most notorious biker gang came to know the Haversock's mail-order nanny. Harley shrieks with laughter at some of the bigger explosions, and again Dash wonders about that six year old who could bite through reality, and how hard reality must have bitten back once Simon was gone.

Sara Sue selects a roman candle that's thicker around than she is, lining it up with the drifting, half-melted boat with the same carefully calculated precision that he's seen her apply to everything, from drawings designed to leave municipal buildings in screaming heaps of meat and rubble to the exact amount of whipped cream required to make a perfect sundae.

It bursts with a thousand cascading explosions of green and pink and blue, and the shrill whistle as it goes off is magnified tenfold by the empty space around them. As the last traces of Nanny Arnold are obliterated in alternating flashes of light and dark, Sara Sue's eyes are wide and wet, and she drinks in the final death of her oldest creation.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Froodle used that concept in the fic series where Dash, Harley and Sara Sue have to save Mars and Dash didn't she?
i can't remember the series name srry

(it's Pay Attention, btw)

"Back so soon, kid?" asked Billy Millions, glancing up from the freshly-shined chrome exhaust in which he was admiring his newly-trimmed beard. "You lose something?"

"No," said Marshall, whose arm was wrapped in hastily-applied gauze that smelled strongly of antiseptic. "I came to warn you that the Garbage Guys are planning to burn your clubhouse to the ground later today. You need to clear out your recycling now before they put the torch to all those old newspapers."

The Unkind One's leader gave him a long, considering look.

"Well," he said. "That's alarmingly specific, but I expect if you tell me any more, we'd be risking the collapse of the space-time continuum, right?"

"Right," said Marshall, then, "Wait, how did you-"

"I might have had this conversation before," said Billy Millions, rising to his feet with a creak of very tight leather clothing. "But I can't say more, because I'm bound by causality and my given word."

He turned towards the open door of the clubhouse and beckoned to someone inside.

"I also happen to have a ball of dino-proof twine lying around," he said. "Which you may have a use for, at some unspecified point in time."

Marshall gaped.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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He reached for the handle, but was unsurprised to find it remained flat and two-dimensional. Of course, she would have shut it tight behind her. Sara Sue Haverstock tended not to leave a lot of open doors in her wake.

Still, as Marshall stared at the calendar with it's crossed-out mass of unlived days, and the smudgy door that was now only ever a drawing, he had an idea.

He rolled up the sleeve on his right arm, the one that was usually covered to the elbow in more than a dozen watches. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he used the gritty dirt of the unswept floor to draw a rough circle on the pale, exposed skin.

At his back, the door that was not and had never been a door creaked encouragement through non-existent hinges. A faint breeze blew from beneath it, smelling of newly-cut grass and the spring tide that was always slightly pink with blood.

He opted for roman numerals, figuring the straight lines would lend itself better to writing on skin with the greasy black grime of the prison cell. He drew a minute hand, and a shorter, thicker one to mark the hours.


Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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"Can I borrow a pen?" said Harley, gesturing to the glitter-glue encrusted desk tidy stuffed with half-chewed biros and pencils worn to stubs. "I want to get some of this down before I forget."

"Sure," said Sara Sue automatically, then immediately corrected herself. "Wait, no! Not if you're going to make stupid ass jokes, use your own stuff!"

"Stupid?" said Harley, grabbing an only slightly-mangled ballpoint that was, inevitably, missing it's cap. "More like witty and sophisticated. Isn't that right, Professor?" he added, turning to the doll that had started all this.

"That's correct," said Prof. Moth, in Harley's voice.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue picked up a half-used stick of charcoal from the cluttered bowl set beside a long-gone-cold cup of coffee and sketched a few lines.

"What about 'Motheus Maybe'?" she asked. "Looks kind of like Batteus, kind of like Mothman, but we never confirm who he's related to one way or another."

"Huh," said Harley, pulling up a chair as she worked. "Schrodinger's Cryptid."

"Prof. Moth's uncertainty principle."

"Spooky action at a distance?"

"That'll give Bert and Ernie something to blog about," said Sara Sue. "'Intellectually inaccessible', it was a bowl of pudding with wings and a set of fangs!"

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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"Oh," said Sara Sue, who had noticed but not commented on the dedication that accompanied every new children's book. "Yeah."

Harley set Professor Moth down. He immediately tilted backwards to rest upon his pert plush glutes.

Sara Sue sighed.

"Seriously though, the company has to get rid of that ass. It's ridiculous, Harley, I'm not drawing that."

Harley adopted a look of mock offense.

"Are you saying academics can't have buns of steel? And you a teacher yourself? What would your colleagues say?"

"Probably 'Miss Haverstock, please take the weird butt-doll out of our classroom, it's creeping the kids out.'"

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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The bowtie was made of yellow felt. Harley had tried to draw blue polka dots on it in felt, but the colours had seeped and ran, leaving ragged green blotches on the absorbent fabric.

"Ta-da!" he said. "No more failed Batteus Baby toy; this is now the newest addition to our pantheon, Prof. Moth."

He held the newly-accessorised Prof. Moth up to the light, and Sara Sue could see he'd fashioned a small, crooked pair of spectacles out of pipe cleaner. They encircled the Professor's huge red eyes, the glasses' arms disappearing in the miniscule space between wing and ears.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue set the round plush-furred prototype down at one end of the coffee table, then flicked it with a paint-speckled finger. It rolled a single, solitary rotation before coming to rest on the carefully-sculpted cloth buttocks.

"Why?!" she said, throwing up her hands. "Why would the toy company send us this? That's not in any of the drawings!"

Harley nudged the Batteus Baby toy back in her direction, turning the pages of a brightly-coloured board book with his free hand.

"He does look a bit like Mothman," he said. "Maybe they remembered the statue in Virginia and got confused?"

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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The pencil was bright aquamarine and felt rubbery under her fingers. There was no letter or number to indicate texture or shade; only a bright pink infinity symbol that looped around the very top.

"Use as directed," the old woman hissed, grabbing Sara Sue's arm in a grip that sucked like a vacuum. The old lady's eyes were wild and staring and her pink pillbox hat sat crookedly atop thin white hair. "Last you a lifetime! Maybe longer!"

The worn-down stub of the Eerie No.2 pencil prickled against her skin, and Sara Sue recognised it for the warning it was.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Batteus Baby was round, jet black and softly furred, with tiny jagged-edged wings, long floppy ears and huge red eyes.

Sara Sue rolled the little plush ball in one hand, the other turning the pages of a glossy, hardcover first edition of "Batteus Bat and Batteus Baby Go on An Adventure," a tale told in verse by one H. S. Holmes, with illustrations by S. Haverstock.

"Looks good," she said. "Nice heft. I like the little concentration-frown he gets with the eyebrows, that's very in-character..."

She paused, then turned the doll around.

"Why the hell does he have Mothman glutes?!"

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue reached for the handle of a door that had not been there a moment before, twisted it, and walked through.

The halls of BF Skinner Junior High were deserted, smelling of beeswax polish and the hot dust of a long, silent summer. The lights were off, but that didn't matter. The sticky golden sunlight of late afternoon streamed through high recessed windows and pooled on the gleaming floor.

Anyway, she could have found the art department with her eyes closed.

The drawing was still there, the blue rosette faded with the passage of time. She reached for it.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue knew instantly that he was one of hers. There was no mistaking the silver-grey undertone to his skin, the fuzziness at the edge of his face, or the way his voice sounded like paper rustling.

She stepped out from behind a row of parked cars, and he saw her. His mouth dropped open and his eyes were full of the terror and adoration of someone meeting a God face-to-face. The tiny, squirming, Technicolor part of him that was still a person screamed, as the parts of him that were just a portrait dropped to it's knees and wept.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Sara Sue stretched her bare feet out towards the roaring fire, wriggling her toes in the warmth of the flames.

Her hotel room had no hearth, no flue, not even the jutting outline of a long-ago chimney breast. Still, the day outside was cold and damp, weather that called for a fire. So she'd drawn one.

There was a knock at the door. The heat and the glow had made her drowsy, so she gestured to the Paper Doll to go answer. It grasped the handle with strange, flat hands, and that's when a stray spark set it on fire.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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