The Doom Town Dummies
by Liam R. Findlay

Colette Planchette talks to the dead using a supernatural sense of smell. This comes in handy, considering her best friend Lucian is a ghost. When the pair find themselves in a village of eerie shop-window dummies, the stench of danger becomes ever closer. Someone, or something, is watching…

5 out of 5 fairies

I’m not entirely sure how, but this manages to be weird, creepy, and whimsical all at once, and I absolutely love it! I’m not sure who I liked more – Colette or Lucian, I can definitely appreciate Lucian’s cautious and anxious nature, but I admite Colette’s bravery and determination. I would love to know more of Lucian’s history, and go on more adventures with him and Colette. This book just doesn’t feel like enough time spent with the two of them. I could ramble on for ages, the story and characters are so unique and fun, but I’ll just leave it at this – young or old, you need this book if you want some smiles and a few chills running down your spine!

CHAPTER ONE
A New Beginning

The lamp light flickered, shadows dancing across the mould-speckled wallpaper. Eleven-year-old Colette Planchette was shoving underwear into an open umbrella on her bed. She had gotten up before seven o’clock, and it wasn’t even a school day.

‘Uncle Pierre is gone…’ Colette said to her friend with a grin. ‘…and the fateful morning has come.’

The friend Colette was talking to wasn’t quite like the friends most people had. Protruding from the back of the umbrella’s arched handle was the carving of a boy’s head. It was about the size of a lemon, and its features included a sad mouth, long hair and big, melancholic eyes.

‘Let’s hope it’s not that fateful. Just a little bit fateful will do. A nice amount of fateful.’ These words belonged to Lucian, and he was a spectre, otherwise known as a ghost. The wood of the umbrella handle was hollow, and Lucian had been trapped within its innards ever since his life ended tragically, a long time ago. ‘Running away is scary business.’

‘Everything will be fine, Lucian. If anyone catches us, I’ll use you to give them a whack!’ Colette said, tossing a handful of socks into the umbrella as if it were a basket, then ramming on her rain hat.

‘Well, please whack carefully. I don’t want my face getting dented.’

Colette sniffed at Lucian’s words. It wasn’t because she was being rude. Sniffing was how she used the Second Smell, a mysterious ability that let her sense the words of the dead through her nose. She was the only person in the world who could do this, as far as she knew.

All spectres were made of smell, and Lucian’s fragrance had the comforting tang of lemongrass with a hint of lilies, ripe from heavy rainfall. When his vapours hit the tops of Colette’s nostrils, her smell receptors buzzed, shooting messages to her brain. Here, Lucian’s sweetly solemn aromas translated into a kind of language that she could understand.

‘Anyway, I’ve got everything thought out. I doubt I’ll actually have to whack, or even tap, a single person,’ Colette said, now yanking a shirt from a tangle of trousers on the floor. ‘This’ll be plain sailing. I bet my stinking soul on it!’

Colette’s soul was made of aromas too, like all other human souls. The essence of hers was fresh, like the paper in a new book, and it carried a briny flavour as if that book were bound up at the bottom of the ocean. Lucian, being a spectre, couldn’t hear things, but he could see and sniff, and Colette’s aroma helped him to work out how she was feeling or what she wanted to say. When Lucian wasn’t teaching Colette about smells and spectres, he was probably warning her about life’s many dangers … much to her exhaustion.

‘Mother of Sinbad!’ Lucian cried. ‘Being away from your puppets will be disastrous for your mental health. What if your uncle throws them away? Dog-headed babies need someone to look after them. So do babies with any kind of head, for that matter!’

Colette’s eyes darted up to the doll-sized, dog-headed baby on her shelf. It stood among other small beasts that looked like they had escaped from the same sinister experiment. A pink ape struggled in the grip of a twenty-tentacled squid, both under attack by a skeleton with a sword. An eel-like creature, with the face of a bored man, twisted behind them. This one was called the Seahoon; he was the oldest, and he was Colette’s favourite. When you saw her puppets, you could imagine hearing their cries and smelling their flesh, which had been the goal when they were made from scratch.

With cardboard sets, Colette would photograph her monstrous models in different positions, so when the pictures were put together in a flip book and watched one after the other, the creatures would appear to live and breathe with their own spirits, ready to tear the heads from foolish explorers. According to magazines, this trick was called stop-motion animation, and Colette dreamt of using a proper film camera one day, so she could see her beasts star in their own movies.

‘I’ll miss them,’ she sighed, taking a moment to admire them one last time. ‘Even more than I miss my…’ She decided not to say it. That word. Parents. Ugh.

Colette’s less-than-perfect parents had been jailed for selling venomous cone snails to the mafia (a long, slimy story she would rather forget). Because of that, she was now staying with her uncle in his ghastly lake house, and the two of them got on as well as a fork and a wet plug socket. Living through her monsters had been Colette’s best way of escaping—until today, of course.

‘You know what? I think I can fit at least one puppet in the umbrella. I’ll take the Seahoon, so I can use him to show off my skills if we bump into any directors on our big adventure,’ Colette said, taking the Seahoon and folding him into a tin lunch box for protection. She tossed in a handful of flip books to keep him entertained, then dropped the lunch box into the open umbrella. ‘We should get going.’ After closing it, Colette fastened the umbrella’s bulging sides with a belt so that nothing would fall out, then she tested its weight. It was the perfect satchel because it also worked as a stick to lean on, a sword to slash about, and a lock pick to open secret doors with—its metal end had been carefully sculpted this way for its previous owner, and it could open almost anything. Colette carried the umbrella close to her side as she hurried into the hall, heading for the stairs.

‘Where are we actually going once we get out of town?’ Lucian said. ‘You haven’t told me much about this scheme of yours, and it’s making me uneasy.’

‘Did I not mention it? We’re going to the second-best place in the world to meet big-shot movie directors: Nettlewood!’ Colette said as she shuffled herself onto the stair bannister. ‘We could go to Hollywood, but I looked on my globe, and it’s right next to a place called Death Valley. You’d just freak out about that.’ She wheeeeeed down the bannister, landing perfectly on her feet at the bottom. ‘Nettlewood is my chance to hit the big time as an animator.’

‘You’d be lucky to find a corner shop who’d want to give a job to a child!’ Lucian said through a souring aroma, before it softened slightly. ‘I suppose nobody would find you so far away though. It’d be a new beginning! Isn’t Nettlewood across the sea?’

Colette wiggled her eyebrows as she marched through the kitchen door.

‘I’ve booked my place on the Doldrum Ferry. Called them up yesterday and used my uncle’s bank details. It leaves on Friday 13th, just over two days from now.’

‘The same day your scary uncle plans to put you into … you know…’Colette knew. And she didn’t want to talk about it. Whatever happened on Friday 13th, it was going to change her life. For better or for worse.

‘Speaking of your uncle…’ Lucian sniffed, looking about the kitchen urgently. ‘Why can I sense him in this room?’

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Lily:  Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview Liam I enjoyed reading The Doom Town Dummies. Have you ever had a supernatural experience? Do you believe in ghosts?

Liam: I believe in ghosts insomuch as I believe in emotional memories and the power of imagination. A ghost is an apparition of what once was, and when you sniff the tobacco that your long-dead great grandfather used to smoke, you may find yourself back in his living room, listening to his stories, experiencing his presence as if he were still here. Experiencing an apparition of what once was.

Some might call such an olfactory apparition the Second Smell, as it happens.

Lily:  Scents can definitely hold some powerful memories. Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, who and why?

Liam: I feel similar to the story’s hero Colette in her attitude, but I’m especially fond of Colette’s best friend Lucian. It turns out that many readers are fond of him too. Lucian is a worrisome spectre (also known as a ghost), who resides within a hollow umbrella handle. His soul smells of lemongrass, mixed with lilies under heavy rainfall.

Lily:  I loved the way his scent was described, lemongrass is such a relaxing scent for me, and I can appreciate how anxious he is. Did the story end up where you thought it would when you first started writing?

Liam: The idea for the story came to me when I was taking a break in my university library, looking at the work of Bernard Faucon. His photography collection Summer Camp features strange, dreamlike scenes of mannequins playing in rustic French locations. As I was looking through this, I was instantly struck by the idea for a story. What if one found themselves in such an ominous yet beautiful place, with eerie, glass-eyed mannequins gazing at them from the distance? At that moment, I wrote the story’s outline on a piece of paper, and although details have changed since, the general concept has stayed the same.

My other answer to this question is that the story never changed because it was all told to me by Colette Planchette herself in a séance.

One of these answers is a lie.

Lily:  Either way, it’s as great way to get a story! What would you do if you found yourself in a village with shop-window dummies?

Liam: I would take lots of photographs and videos to exploit the opportunity for marketing purposes.

Lily:  I think I’d probably be curious then creeped out, but I’d love to see Doom Town setup for real. Now we’d like to talk about you as a writer. What is your writing Kryptonite?

Liam: My weakness when it comes to any kind of work, whether writing, reading, rhino training or replying to emails, is tiredness. Sometimes, as urgent as you are in your determination to work, you just have to accept that it’s not going to happen that day.

Lily:  I can totally understand that. What technologies do you rely on most when writing?

Liam: I rely on the invention of the laptop for its amazing capabilities that perhaps go underappreciated. I also rely on the invention of the internet for providing almost any information I need (grammar advice, spellings, facts about 1970s party food).

Lily:  It’s amazing how much information is at our fingertips now. Are you working on anything at the present you would like to share with your readers?

Liam: My full-time job is as a Theme Park & Museum Smell Consultant at AromaPrime. This involves advising theme parks and museums about the most effective ways to use smells to tell stories. My next book will be a beginner’s guide on this subject, covering topics such as building anticipation in guests before they board a roller coaster, or recreating the smell of a T-rex to give a life-like impression of pre-historic life.

Lily:  That’s awesome! Let’s finish up with some fun questions and get inside your mind. What cute cartoon character would be absolutely terrifying if it existed in the real world?

Liam: Marvin the Martian, because he has the capability and intention to kill us all.

Lily:  Luckily he hasn’t succeeded…yet. Would you rather your shirts be always two sizes too big or one size too small?

Liam:  Two sizes too big, so I can make new clothing with the excess, make it profitable and develop a means of protection against Marvin the Martian.

Lily:  I’m a fan of oversized too – more options! If you had a pen with magical ink inside, what would happen when you wrote something?

Liam: At this point, it should be clear that the outcome will go one of two ways: I will exploit the marvel for marketing purposes or I will exploit the powers of the marvel to defend the Earth from Marvin the Martian.

Lily:  I’m sure you could find a way to do both. What was the last thing you read?

Liam:  The sentence “What is the last thing you read?”

Lily: Now I’m getting side eye as I sit at my laptop full on laughing, this has been such a fun interview! How can readers discover more about you and your work?

Liam:  They can go to Amazon dot com, type in ‘The Doom Town Dummies’, find The Doom Town Dummies, place an order for The Doom Town Dummies, wait for The Doom Town Dummies to arrive, then read the Author page at the back of The Doom Town Dummies. Here, they can discover more about me and my work, and if they feel like it, they can also go to the start of the book and read an exciting tale of mystery, adventure and sinister smells.

Liam R. Findlay grew up in the town where the Black Death first arrived in England. His favourite lessons in school were English and Art, later inspiring him to study Stop-Motion Animation at university. This degree taught Liam how to craft exciting stories through words, sights and sounds.

Today, aside from writing articles and puzzles for AQUILA Children’s Magazine, Liam works as a designer for visitor attractions such as castles and escape rooms. He also specialises in using smells through his creative role at AromaPrime; whether it’s the stench of a Viking toilet for a museum, the whiff of a pirate ship for a theme park or the fishy fragrance of penguin vomit for a zoo.

Liam’s passions for storytelling, smells and stop-motion combine in his new novel, The Doom Town Dummies!

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