Sophie lugged the bags up to her room, barely managing to open the door without dropping everything. Her balance was something to marvel at that had come from many years of buying more fabric than should be carried – she was an expert at blindly walking now (or at least she thought so). The bags fell unceremoniously to the floor – the opposite of the care and skill she took to cart them from the mall to the school. A roll of tape escaped and rolled its way under her desk but she made no attempt to retrieve it – it was part of the abyss now and things rarely came out of there once they were lost.

Flopping to the floor, she began to sort through her bags, making neat little piles. Fake cobwebs, rubber spiders and snakes, eyeballs of various colours and size and a concerning amount of redness. She’d gotten a string of lanterns that, when lit, spread the shadows of spooky faces across the room, glaring in an eerie glow. There were a bunch of other miscellaneous things she found along the way; pieces that were singular or just so cute or odd she couldn’t help but buy them (like, for example, the skeleton hand that ran around whenever someone entered the room or the jack-in-the box style pop-up zombie).

With her haul organised in a chaotic heap that only had order in her mind, Sophie began to put things around her room. She was meticulous; everything was placed perfectly at the right angle for perfect spookiness. The cobwebs were hung in the corners, the fake material pulled and played with so much that it appeared as if they were real (she could have paid for actual real ones but they were double the price and she had enough real cobwebs in corners she never dusted to make up for it). The spiders she placed in close proximity to the web were difficult to secure and on more than one occasion fell, giving her quite the fright. With enough tape however, she managed to secure them for the time being (they seemed persistent in their escape attempts).

The lanterns she strung from the roof – which she was proud of installing as they required her to install hooks to her roof and she wasn’t exactly Mrs. Fix It. She tested them with the lights off and loved them so much she decided to work using their light only – it really helped her get into the mood. She was delighted to find that some of the lights glowed in the dark and so she lined them up with the shadows; giving them vision. Some got two, some got eight, one was lucky enough to earn the largest eye on its own.

The pop up zombie was set up a little to the side of her room, hiding among a pile of fake dead branches and leaves. A button released him and Sophie kept it on her so she could make use of it whenever she needed to. She added a tombstone to his resting place and gave it a little pat. It was a masterpiece. The little hand she let roam freely. It seemed to have a mind of its own and moved around as if almost curious.

She made a few finishing touches, a splatter of fake – and easily removable – blood here and there, some terribly cute boo!ghosts that floated about from her ceiling with comical O: faces. A few candles that were more for her rather than for decoration – one of them smelt like eye scream when it melted and it was her favourite. She smartly left these unlit lest a fire breakout. She shuddered a little – that was the scariest thing in her room. When she decided she was done, she grabbed her bag and headed out, looking for someone to invite over so that she might test her zombie and creeper hand.