Ahs: Freak Show Characters Novels & Stories

After I got pregnant, I witnessed my boyfriend's grandmother's death. She left behind a secret, and now, everyone who knows that secret is dead. First, it was my boyfriend's father who died. My boyfriend's mother followed soon after. Lastly, my boyfriend died too. He ended his life by overdosing right before my eyes. The media went wild. They dug obsessively for the truth. Again and again, the police summoned me for questioning. Online hate toward me was overwhelming. Everyone wants to know what the secret is. People claim I cursed my boyfriend's entire family to death, just to keep the secret to myself. I stay silent, never saying a word in defense of myself. On the seventh day after my boyfriend had passed, I spot someone at his funeral. At that moment, I place my hand on my swollen belly. I am utterly calm and at peace. It is time for me and my child to die too.

I ran into my boss when I was complaining to my best friend about how he actively made the workplace hostile for me. He fired off a barrage of questions, "Where's the annual report? Where's the script for the speech? I can't believe you have the gall to enjoy a meal when you have a mountain of work to do!" That was it. I slammed the table. "It's due tomorrow! What's the rush? Are you going to hold a funeral for yourself tomorrow?" My boss stormed off in a huff. I asked for the bill, but the waiter came with two. My table came up to 60 dollars, but the other ran up to 3,750. "Your boyfriend said you're paying for both. Cash or credit, miss?" Shawn Goodall put that impossible bill on my tab and called himself my boyfriend? Unbelievable! I called him, utterly incensed. Yet, he had the gall to say, "Get the receipt and claim it from finance." Then, he hung up. The waiter was going to call the cops if I didn't pay up, so I had no choice but to accept this bitter defeat. I was trying to claim the money the next day, but the cops arrested me instead. "Shawn Goodall died at midnight and was found in his house. You're his girlfriend and the last person he met. You're coming with us."

Before meeting my girlfriend's parents, she promises me up and down, "Don't worry. My dad is super easygoing. Just a little naive, that's all!" I actually buy it and show up at their door with my arms full of gifts. But the second the door swings open, I freeze in my tracks at the entryway. My future father-in-law, Mike Bennett, is standing there dressed head-to-toe as a prince. My jaw drops, but my girlfriend, Alicia Bennett, just flashes a bright smile. "This is my dad's fetish. Don't mind him." I take a deep breath and hold out the gifts with both hands. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Bennett. Here's a little something for—" Before I can even finish speaking, Mike snaps, "Why are you calling me Mr. Bennett? You shall address me as Prince Mike!"

I’ve always been someone with a strong, restless libido I can’t quite explain. I’ve never gone to a doctor about it, but I know myself well enough to realize it’s something that comes and goes in waves, especially when I'm ovulating. During that time of the month, I'd need to do it two to three times a day or my body would feel extremely uncomfortable. Normally, my tall, broad-shouldered husband would be the one to ease that ache and fill the emptiness in me. However, lately he’s been impossibly busy, away on business trips for weeks at a time…

To celebrate Halloween, our company booked an immersive “rural horror” escape room. My boss said whoever could make it to the end without screaming would get a ten-thousand-dollar reward. As a seasoned horror movie fan, I was instantly tempted. The core character in the escape room was a scarecrow wearing an oversized pumpkin head. I admired how well the props were made, but the chainsaw noise was too loud, so I slipped into a hidden compartment, put on my headphones, and scrolled through reels. The next day, I woke up to a strong metallic stench mixed with the sickly-sweet smell of rotting pumpkin. The police told me our boss had canceled the booking at the last minute, and the actor originally assigned to play the character had gotten food poisoning. That pumpkin-headed figure wasn’t one of their staff.

At the company holiday party raffle, I'd barely stepped on stage when my superior, Victor Grant, shoved a crumpled slip into my hand. "Special prize for our top sales guy. Go on, open it. Let's show everyone." All eyes were on me as I unfolded it. Scrawled across the paper: [VIP janitor status unlocked—every toilet in the company, three days.] The room lost it—laughter everywhere. Victor crossed his arms, grinning. "Fair, right? Everyone knows you climbed the ranks hooking up with rich cougars. Gotta avoid hard feelings for the others, yeah? While the rest of us take a break, you can get busy. You're not gonna back out, are you?" The crowd cracked up. My girlfriend—and CEO—Rachel Sullivan stood off to the side, watching. Didn't say a word. Everyone waited for me to explode. Instead, I just nodded. Next day, over 300 refund requests hit. Cash flow flatlined. Victor and Rachel begged me to talk the buyers down. I shrugged. "Nah. Don't wanna save the company and make my performance too good. That'd just cause more ' hard feelings,' right?"

After guarding the nation's border for ten years, I return home only to see my younger sister, Piper Wright, being trampled under someone’s foot. "Where did this country bumpkin come from? How dare you show up at a place like this?" The man in a suit throws an invitation in her face. "Take a look at yourself. What do you think you are? My sister is Velda Mercer, the top socialite of Hyporion. If you offend me, I will have your whole family thrown into the river!" I smash his nose with a single punch. I help Piper to her feet and dial Velda's number. "Velda Mercer, if it were not for me back then, you would still be begging for food. How dare you bully my sister?"

My dormmate, Summer Lodge, always uses heavy-duty electrical appliances to cook in our dorm. I kindly remind her that it's a fire hazard and that she'll get a demerit if the college finds her out, but she snaps at me and tells me to mind my own business. One day, her oven bursts into flames and burns one of our dormmates—the daughter of an affluent family—to death. When the college investigates the matter to apportion the blame, Summer and another dormmate push the blame on me. I'm expelled and cyberbullied. My dead dormmate's boyfriend even comes after me for revenge. He shoves me and my family into the furnace at a crematorium. When I open my eyes again, I'm back to the day when Summer decides to make a meal with the oven.

My husband and I have been married for a decade. When I finally conceive for the first time in ten years, I realize my worst enemies are my family, who all want me dead. I've made a promise to return to the fertility shrine on the mountain and fulfill my vow if things work out, but my mother-in-law deliberately messes up the cable car tickets. In the process of hiking up the mountain for two hours, I lose my baby. In the hospital, I cry to my husband about all the vicious things his mother has done to me, but he kicks me in the stomach. "I had a vasectomy a long time ago. There's no way that bastard inside you is mine!" When he hands me the proof, I'm completely speechless. I break down in tears and run back to my parents' place. Not only do my parents hire a nanny to help take care of me, but they even move out of the house so I can rest in tranquility. When I'm eight months pregnant, I overhear them whispering in the bathroom. "We can never let Gina have the baby. I don't care if it kills her—we're all screwed if the child is born!" "Relax. The doctor already told me that Gina's got leukemia from all the formaldehyde in our new house. Even the baby's deformed!" Shocked, I burst into the bathroom to confront them, but the slippery floor causes me to fall hard. Instantly, blood snakes across the tiles. As I lie there in pain, I look up and see the cold, twisted smiles on my parents' faces before taking my last breath. I cannot fathom why my family wants me dead. I thought they'd been looking forward to his baby for a decade. When I open my eyes again, I return to the very day my mother-in-law insists on taking me to the mountain.

While I'm enjoying a promotional set that I've ordered from a restaurant, my best friend sends me screenshots she has taken from someone's social media feed. "I just met a weird customer who's clearly impoverished but acts like she isn't. How can I make her realize that she has no right to be dining in such a fine establishment?" The screenshot's descriptions grow even more familiar. "One has to spend an average of two thousand dollars in this fine dining restaurant, and yet this broke loser has the nerve to order the cheapest promotional set instead! On top of that, she's shameless and pathetic enough to make me take a photo of her that makes her look very fancy! "Seriously, I want nothing more than to post that ugly and unedited photo of hers on my social media feed and pin it there, just so I can humiliate her to no end!" Someone in the comment section tells the floor captain of the restaurant to watch her behavior. "She's a customer at the end of the day; your restaurant's reputation will suffer from a blemish if things get out of hand. "You should know when to stop. After all, you're in the hospitality industry, so you shouldn't act too arrogantly." The original poster has the guts to respond to that comment. "I will never show respect to those who can't afford a 14-thousand-dollar meal! The fact that I have the balls to post the entire thing on my social media means I'm not scared of that peasant at all! What can she do to me anyway?"