WEP Halloween Challenge: A Rotten Legacy

Please Note: I will reserve all other posts for next week. So enjoy this jem until Monday. Thank you.

Today I am sharing my entry into the WEP Halloween Challenge: Youthful Frights VS Adult Fears. This challenge runs until Friday. For more info read on below then go unto my entry. A Rotten Legacy was a story I wrote a while back with intent to expand on it. But now I think it makes a cool short story with creepy undertones. You decide.

For this challenge, share a childhood fright that might or did turn into an adult fear, real or imagined.

To start the fun you can:

1.    share a favorite frightening tale, movie, novel, photograph or painting that will leave us quaking in our boots

2.    in a short paragraph describe how it scared you, and why it did and or still does today

3.    then you can:

a.    submit your own scary piece, 1000 words or less, in any format or

b.    share a photograph or painting that captures the horror you've felt.

The movie that scared me as a child. Back in the hey day of VHS I saw this movie and it scared both my brother and I. I think it even got to my mother who generally enjoys horror movies.

1. The Horror Show

Source: Wikipedia

Plot: Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen) finally catches the serial killer named "Meat Cleaver Max" (Brion James) who killed over 100 people and watches his execution. McCarthy and the others watching the execution are shocked to see the electric chair send enough voltage through him to physically burn Max's body before finally dying. Max, however, has made a deal with the devil in order to return from the grave and frame Lucas for a series of grisly murders. He also scares the McCarthy family (who have moved into a new house) and the parapsychologist they hire. Lucas' only hope of stopping Max for good is to destroy his spirit before Max destroys his life and family.

2. Why it scared me: This movie was freaking insane! If you believe in spirits like I do it makes the whole thing fifty times as scary. I have had experiences with ghost in the past and I would never want to meet the spirit of Meat Cleaver Max. Once my cousin and I saw something ghostly reaching for us from palm trees. When you see it with someone else it makes the whole thing real. This happened after I became an adult and long after I saw this movie. But I still believe evil is out there on both the physical and spiritual plane. So this movie holds an extra fear in it for me.


3 a - Story: A Rotten Legacy

Rotten Incorporated was the business that supplied the best toys and gadgets for pranks and other acts of trickery. Whoopee cushions that passed stinky gas, flamethrowers that will set your target ablaze but not burn them (at least not extensively), food eating utensils, metal eating hammers and so much more.

The owner Marty Rotten was the latest in the line of Rotten’s to run the factory. Every Rotten was raised to believe they had a chance to own the factory, no matter how small. Despite being fourth in line, most of his siblings had forfeiting their birthright.  Choosing instead to pursuit other interests and passions in order to better fit in with society.

But alas the Rotten family wasn’t loved in their town of Unruffled Feathers. The townsfolk of Unruffled Feathers hated their feathers to be ruffled. And that’s exactly what Rotten Inc. did. Every new prank performed almost always traced back to the use of one the business’s latest invention.

Red haired Marty grew up an outcast in the community. So did his siblings before him and the ones after. They often got into fights and were placed in private school where though less frequent, the treatment wasn’t much better. He was the first to suggest home schooling for some of their studies and eventually most of the children were educated at home.

Yet even those changes didn’t ease the feelings of being set apart and overtime the children of Reginald and Glenda Rotten got fed up. Whether by forfeit or other means, one by one they left the family business behind.

Claude the eldest exited with a bullet. With his death only six children were left to inherit the family business. Susan Rotten married a Baron and requested her parents blessing to move to France. Two years younger than Claude, her mother Jennifer was hesitant to grant it. Reginald however let his seventeen year old daughter go without a second thought. “I have no use for those not interested in helping the Rotten Legacy live on.”

Next Martin fell devastatingly ill. His father complained that he was just weak willed. The third in line soon after moved to Africa and never returned.

Fifth in line, Mary Rotten married a deacon at The Unruffled Feathers Church of Family Values and Order. She willingly forfeited her inheritance and disappeared into the town’s moral elite.

The next in line became an engineer for the navy. From a young age, Gordon Rotten made it clear he had no interest in joining the family business.

And the seventh in line but no doubt the craftiest and prank loving child, Gwendolyn Rotten. No one loved playing tricks and trying to create new ones more than her. She and Marty played many pranks on the unsuspecting townspeople. But one day she got a dark wake up call. At age twelve she confessed to losing several metal eating hammers which then went off and ate a jungle gym. 

Unfortunately there were children playing on it and some got hurt. One even died. Despite the awfulness of the situation she was deemed too young to face the consequences and everything fell to her father to correct.

Reginald humbly apologized to the town and grieving families. He even compensated the parents of the injured children and paid for the deceased funerals. Then he turned on his own daughter. Declaring her a fool and a disgrace he refused to speak to or acknowledge her in anyway. She became withdrawn and sullen always begging for her father’s forgiveness. At age seventeen she was found and the bottom of the staircase unconscious. She was taken to the hospital then transferred to a sanatorium never to be heard of again.

At age twenty-five, Marty Rotten took over the family business. His mother tried to leave his father but he was able to patch things up between them and she returned. Now he is in charge of Rotten Inc. and every drop of the Rotten Legacy.

A rotten legacy indeed.