Ellie Burmeister takes us to the Iron Maiden (Excellent!!!) and has some books to give away

**Giveaway is now closed**

Our last day of humor month just happens to coincide with Halloween. So we invited Ellie Burmeister, author of a new chick lit mystery, "How to Get a Literary Agent in Two Murders or Less" (reviewed here) to share a Halloween story with us. We promise it won't give you nightmares....

As a special Halloween TREAT, her novel is available for 99 cents on Kindle and Nook For some fun Halloween (or anytime) reading and a nice preview of her book, you can check out a 30-page excerpt here. Better yet...she has ONE copy (either e-book or paperback) to give to a lucky reader anywhere in the world!

For more information about Ellie, visit her on Facebook.

I was a Teenage Renaissance Jungle Slave Girl

What was my biggest Halloween adventure? It would have to be the college Halloween carnival when my twin sister Anya lost all her money. We were 19 at the time, and I don’t mean lost in a “oh-my-god, where’s-my-wallet” sort of way, though that’s what I thought when I saw her sitting in the sawdust and crying. She’s lost it all in a “don’t leave-your-varsity-basketball-champ-sister-near-the-carnival-games-while-you-go-on-the-Ferris-wheel” sort of way.
“I wanted to surprise you by winning a stuffed tiger,” she said. Apparently, she didn’t realize the games were rigged.

“It’s okay,” I picked up the purse I'd asked her to watch. “I’ve got $40. That should be just enough to buy some lunch and then get us into the haunted house when it opens.”
“You had $40,” she said and wailed louder. I felt myself bristle. She’d gambled away my money too? For heaven sakes, for $40 she could buy a stuffed animal! But she was already punishing herself enough, so I decided to let it slide.

At first.

Until I discovered that a Halloween carnival is no fun when you have no money. My feet hurt and stomach growled but all we could afford to do was wander around and watch everyone else having fun. I quickly turned snarky. “Oh, look. Funnel cakes. Too bad we have no money… Look, apples-on-a-stick, should I get mine with toffee or chocolate or both? Or neither, since we have no money… Look, we’re outside the haunted house. It opens in about an hour. What a shame we can’t go inside because my twin sister lost all our money!”

“Zip it, hag. I said I was sorry!”

A young man a black tee-shirt cleared his throat behind us. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but overhear. Did you say you were twins? I need a pair of girls, but I can only pay you $20 each. But it’s for a good cause. Would you mind slipping into a pair of bikinis?”

Our jaws dropped. Anya grabbed my arm. “Come on, Ellie. Get away from this pervert.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m the director for the haunted house. We had a pair of identical twins cancel at the last minute, and I desperately to find a pair of lookalikes for the iron maiden.”

I should explain now that Anya and I may be twins, but we don’t look alike. I’m 5’3” with sharp features. She’s 5’10” with a button nose. But we’re roughly the same shape and color and that was enough for him. “Great,” he said when we agreed. We went to the wardrobe trailer where we changed into matching leopard print bikinis. Then we went to hair and makeup, where a girl with pink hair and piercings painted my face with 50's style cat-eye makeup and blood red lipstick.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I must say it looked pretty hot. “My turn,” Anya said, hopping into the chair and awaiting her own transformation.

“Oh, no." The makeup girl said as she reached for a bucket of red slime with a paintbrush sticking out of it. "You stand on that piece of plastic over there.”

Anya wrinkled her button nose in alarm. “What is that?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just corn syrup and red food color. It will all come off after a couple of showers.”

She flung her arm at me. “Why does she get to be the sultry sex kitten while I’m the one drenched in blood?”

“Because you’re the one who lost our money,” I deadpanned.

The director ordered me to the stage so I could rehearse my role before curtain time. He led me into a stageroom made up to look like a medieval torture chamber hewn out of big stone blocks, with flickering electric torchs and chains built into the wall. A bunch of college girls in animal print bikinis lounged around head presses and thumbscrews and other assorted instruments of torture. Inquisitors and jungle girls...talk about mixing your metaphors.

“You start out with your wrists in the chains. Drake will come over and load you into the Iron Maiden.” He opened a huge coffin to reveal long rows of foam spikes. “As soon as the door is closed, you slip through the curtain in back and your sister will take your place. Create the illusion that you were impaled by the spikes.”

Except I was the Gabrielle to her Xena, so I didn’t think it would be much of an illusion.
Since I was starving at this point I helped myself to a soda and cookie from a strategically hidden snack area. A hunchback in tattered rags quickly joined me. “Hi I'm Drake. I haven’t seen you around. Are you part of the drama club?

I smiled, because even with the hump on his back, this Quasimodo was HoT. “No, but my sister and I are actresses. We’ve been a movie.”

“No kidding?”

Well… Technically we were extras, and not real actresses. And we were nine. And we only had one scene. And the scene was later cut from the movie. And the movie was never released domestically. But hey, at that moment, it counted.

The director crossed by with Anya, whose eyes lit up for the fraction of a moment between when she saw Franken-fine, and when she remembered that she was currently spattered from head to toe in red goo.

“Bitch!” she hissed at me under her breath as the director loaded her into the darkened box where she was to spend the next four hours, all by herself.

***

It turned out that the director really did know his stuff. The families screamed in real terror whenever Drake opened the lid and they saw that I’d not only been impaled by the iron maiden, but also squashed flat like a bug, adding seven inches to my height.

At the end of the night, Anya tried to give me her twenty.

“Keep it,” I said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Just remind me not to spend our twenty-first birthday in Vegas. We might not survive.”

Thanks to Ellie for sharing her humorous Halloween tale with us and for sharing her book with our readers!

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Giveaway ends November 6th at midnight EST.