Calling All Ghouls!

It’s Friday the 13th, the perfect time for you, my fiendish friends, to sign up for the 2010 HAUNTED ROOMS art project!

Take the locks off your cursed artifacts and dust off that creepy-eyed porcelein doll collection! This year’s theme is MUSEUM. For more details and some extra inspiration, read the Artist Guidelines.

Reply to this post if you’re interested in entering your haunted museum room.  All that’s needed when you reply is your name and YOUR COMMITMENT to send in a finished room.

The deadline to submit your room is September 24th, 2010. Otherwise, I can’t guarantee your artwork will make it into the 2010 Project.

Make sure you read and follow the Artist Guidelines and the submission procedure!

Once again, the goal is to have 31 rooms by 31 artists, one for each day of October.

Throughout September, a variety of creepy games, stories, and sites will be posted to help inspire you.

See you all in October!

Small Den Aquarium

By Rachel Eve LaChance.

Click for full-size.

Seeking Hand

By Danielle Williams.

Click for full-size.

Prologue

The wooden steps shriek as you approach the door. In some ways, the house is typical of the ones you’ve seen in the movies: old, Victorian, still whole and standing, but with enough rough edges to keep the neighbor kids using it in their dares.

When you came upon it, it wasn’t exactly looming.  In fact, it looked average-sized.   But the way it grows out of the surrounding woods, the way you can’t quite see the sides or the back…It makes you wonder if what you’re seeing is really all there is.

You don’t see any lights on inside. Still, any port in a storm. You walked two miles from your dead car to get here. It’s dark out now. Part of you hopes there really is a working phone inside. AAA to the rescue again.

But as the door lurches open, you realize, in the pit of your stomach, there’s a good reason the kids don’t dare each other to come in here in the dark…

Epigraph

“Are there may more rooms upstairs?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine.  “A great many.  A man could become lost.  In fact, men have become lost.  Sometimes it seems to me that they go on for miles.   Rooms and corridors.”

“And entrances and exits?”

His eyebrows went up slightly.  “Oh yes.  Entrances and exits.”

He waited, but I had asked enough, I thought–I had come to the very edge of something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.

–Stephen King, The Breathing Method