Pinecrest Hollow, Halloween night, 1959. This is part two of Dottie’s Technicolor Halloween special. If you missed it, start with Feature One: Step Right Up, where the carnival nobody booked turned Chet into a scarecrow and left him at the top of the Ferris wheel.
Feature Two: Last Ride of the Night
Act 1: The Fun House
The Ferris wheel creaked in the fog, one prize bear dangled from the top, and somewhere a calliope played backwards. Dottie, Vernon, the Count, Nurse Pruitt and Gill-Bert regrouped at its base. Chet was still a scarecrow.
In the fun house mirrors, Dottie stretched tall, Vernon squashed short, and the Count wasn’t there at all.
Then the tilting room tipped. Everyone slid, except Nurse Pruitt, who walked perfectly straight and tried to take Dottie’s temperature on the way.
In the barrel roll, Gill-Bert went round and round like Monday’s laundry.
A blast from the air-jet floor! Vernon’s fur stood on end. Dottie held her skirt down with one hand and her pom-pom with the other, thoroughly unimpressed.
Behind the last mirror was Professor Crane’s workshop: shelves of jars holding nothing but straw.
Act 2: The Witch Comes Back
A broomstick tapped on the window. Madame Zoltana was back, and she looked sorry.
“He wound me up like a clock for a hundred years,” she said, and turned so they could see the brass key still in her back. Vernon, trembling but kind, reached to turn it out.
In her crystal ball: a roller coaster, the scarecrow Chet strapped in the front car, and a clock at five to midnight.
At the bandstand the Moonlighters played faster and faster. The Count leaned toward Dottie’s neck, and a flying drumstick bopped him on the head.
Act 3: The Coaster
At the coaster station, scarecrow Chet sat strapped in the front car, cowboy hat and all, with Professor Crane’s hand on the brake.
Dottie, Vernon and the Count leapt into the last car as it began to climb. Zoltana rode alongside on her broom.
Over the big drop, the monsters screamed. Dottie cheered.
Gill-Bert scooped the duck pond into the brake pit, and Zoltana pointed one long finger at Crane.
Crane crackled and blew away as straw. The scarecrows woke up as the baker, the postman and the Mayor, and Chet sat up in the front car, dazed, picking straw from his hair, hat still on.
Morning on Miller’s Field: no carnival, just one scarecrow in a straw boater, and the hay wagon heading home with everyone aboard and Dottie at the reins. Chet got his giant bear, Zoltana waved goodbye from her broom, and Vernon whistled. Dottie let him. THE END.
That’s the last ride of the night. Thanks for spending Halloween at the carnival with Dottie and the gang. Pinecrest Hollow will be back.
Listen to the album: Midnight Creature Feature on Suno, with Dottie’s two songs and the five Midnight Creature Feature instrumentals.
Dottie’s Halloween songs: “Not Scared of the Moonlight” (Dottie’s Song) is her theme for the whole Carnival of the Creeps double bill, and “Three Shots for a Dime” is her midway number from Feature One. Same voice, same girl, two sides of one Halloween night.
Images and songs made with AI tools and edited by Kaiser Maschine.
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