An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Preview Snippets:
Halloween was a…mixed night for Bendy Stein. On one front, he was glad to have somewhere to be on the night of spooks. Hanging around on his own, or shmoozing various rich investors, generally wasn't how he liked to spend his evenings.
On the downside though, when you gathered a bunch of random folks in one place for Halloween, they tended to default to the old, standard tradition of what to do on Halloween night, which was tell ghost stories. And, though he would only admit it under pain of torture, Bendy really, really did not like ghost stories. He stayed away from spooky books, avoided the occasional theater act that involved a ghostie, and while he'd definitely tried not to pay attention, the fact that this was happening at the Vigilante, and people would likely talk if he tried to duck out too soon, had kept him in his seat.
And therefore he'd been able to hear every word of a grisly little number involving a story about a woman who was hanged and came back to drag her boozing and whoring husband to a similar fate. Granted, Bendy liked to think he wasn't as bad as the boozing and whoring husband, he'd definitely not wrong a dame by declaring her a crazy witch and getting her killed, but the tale left some fun mental images floating around his brain.
Especially when, in order to get to his hopefully safe bed he'd had to briefly go outside, and seeing the bare branches of the trees swaying in the autumn wind reminded him of the pantomimed description of the husband's first glimpse of the ghost in a bough of tree limbs…
Shuddering, Bendy hurried for the door, realizing just how badly he was shaking when he'd had to close and lock it. He'd also come in the side entrance; in order to get to the second floor he'd need to go through the kitchen and side hall, cut through the front entryway, and head up the stairs to the hall that would take him to his room.