Raven Mortis's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Raven Mortis had six days until Halloween and a lease that started to bleed money on November first. She stood in the middle of her empty shop with a staple gun in one hand and a list in the other. The walls were bare white. The counters were chrome. It looked like every other dispensary in town, and that was the problem. She wanted the only haunted weed shop in the county, the place kids dared each other to walk into, the place adults came back to. She locked the front door and flipped the sign. Then she dragged in the crate she'd been building in her garage all month. First, the counter. She hauled out the scarecrow head, burlap stitched over splintered wood, one eye burned hollow. A slow curl of incense smoke leaked from the socket where she'd hidden a cone. She bolted it to a beam above the register so it looked down at whoever paid. The chrome under it stopped mattering. Next, the strain wall. She'd spent three paychecks on antique embalming jars from an estate sale two towns over. She lined them on a black iron shelf, filled each with a different flower, and taped a handwritten label to every lid. Purple Wake. Grave Digger. Sunday Mourning. The shelf looked like a mortician's pantry. She stepped back and grinned. The back corner was still dead space. She rolled in the tree she'd welded from rebar and painted over three weekends. The leaves were cut plastic, wired with pink and green neon, dripping fake blood down the trunk. She plugged it in. The shop washed pink. Her chrome counters finally looked like a crime scene. She cued up a playlist on the store speakers, low church organ and something screaming underneath it. Then she let her axolotl out of its travel tank into the big display tank by the window. The little pink thing pressed its face to the glass and waved its frilled gills at the street like it was greeting a crowd. Raven walked to the door, stepped outside, and turned around to see what a customer would see. Through the glass: pink neon, a smoking scarecrow, a wall of specimen jars, an axolotl grinning at nothing. A woman on the sidewalk stopped, took a picture, and kept walking without going in. Raven felt the drop in her stomach before she understood it. The shop looked incredible. It looked like a haunted house. That was the problem. People would photograph the window and post it. They would not open the door. A haunted house is something you dare yourself into once. A dispensary needs regulars. She unlocked the door and went back inside. The scarecrow smoked above her register. The organ groaned from the speakers. She had six days, a finished set, and no plan to get anyone across the threshold. She picked up her phone and started typing an ad.