The Candy Collector

There are two types of people in this world: candy corn fans, who are basically the human equivalent of a cheerful yet slightly squishy fruitcake—easy to point and laugh at. And then you've got black licorice enthusiasts, whose love for that stuff reveals a frostbitten heart that could suck the joy from a toddler's birthday party. Seriously, when they walk in, you can practically hear the horror movie soundtrack.

I met one of those black licorice lovers last October, on All Hallow’s eve, right here in Los Angeles.

It was a perfect week. I’d made it through another Carmageddon. The Dodgers were winning. And the Santa Ana winds were doing their annual dance through the palm trees, carrying the scent of distant wildfires and broken dreams. It was the kind of night when the moon hangs low and yellow, like a lemon drop stuck to the roof of the sky.

She worked at Willie's Sweet Shop on Sunset, a candy store that had been there since the fifties, all neon and nostalgia. The sort of place where memories crystallized like sugar syrup, where every jar and vintage tin held stories sweeter than their contents. Margaret—that was her name—always wore black, right down to her nail polish, and kept her hair pulled back so tight it must have given her headaches.

I was explaining my makeshift Halloween costume to her.

“How about if I attach some fallen leaves to my clothes, and when someone asks me what I am, I say, “I’m leaving.”

After a long pause, she coughed and let my perfectly corny joke die.

A candy corn fan would have laughed.

She however, frowned, the way someone with Botox in their forehead can’t and said that it was funny, but she didn’t laugh.

How is it funny, Margaret, if you don’t laugh?

Why would she lie to me?

"Tell me a scary ghost story instead," she said as she was closing up, counting pennies in the ancient register while I lingered in the shadows between the shelves. "It’s that time of the year. I need something to keep me company while I work."

So I told her about the candy maker in Chicago, back in 1890. A man who crafted confections so beautiful they made children weep with joy.

He had a special touch, they said, could pull sugar into threads fine as spider silk, create roses so delicate they seemed to bloom on your tongue. But his true masterpiece was something darker.

"He had a theory," I explained, watching Margaret's fingers dance across the brass keys. "He believed that fear was the finest seasoning, that terror could transform ordinary sugar into something transcendent. So he started experimenting. Not with ingredients, you understand, but with his customers."

Margaret's hands stilled on the register. Outside, a police siren wailed past like a distant scream.

"He'd invite children to special tastings in his back room. Show them his tools first—the hooks for pulling taffy, the razor-sharp scissors for snipping ribbons of hard candy, the copper pot where he'd boil sugar until it burned black as sin. He'd tell them stories while they watched, terrible stories about children who disappeared into vats of molten sugar, their screams sweetening every batch."

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting strange shadows on the jars of colorful candies. Margaret didn't move, didn't speak, but I could see her pulse fluttering in her throat like a trapped moth.

"The children who sprinted back to the safety of their homes, tears streaming down their faces—they were the fortunate ones," I began, my voice echoing ominously within the shop's confines. "The others, the ones who lingered behind, enraptured by his enticing tales—they were unwittingly incorporated into his recipe book. Their fear was transformed, crystallized into an exquisite confectionery form—a candy so dark and bitter that it appealed only to those with the most...sophisticated tastes."

Margaret's response was barely audible over the persistent buzzing of the lights. "What happened to him?" she asked, her voice trembling with both curiosity and fear.

"Oh, the usual tale you'd expect," I replied nonchalantly. "Furious parents wielding pitchforks and torches in righteous wrath, justice served as hot and sticky as molten caramel. But legend has it his ghost persists, eternally wandering from candy shop to candy shop. He seeks out those rare individuals who understand that true sweetness necessitates a touch of darkness—those who appreciate the divisive taste of black licorice, for instance."

She laughed then, a nervous sound that echoed off the glass jars.

"You're good at this. Much better than the jokes. Almost had me believing it for a minute."

"The best stories," I said, stepping out of the shadows, "always contain a grain of truth. Like this one."

The harsh light from the flickering neon sign outside the window fell upon me, revealing my true form - my disfigurement. The register drawer slammed shut with a metallic scream as she finally saw me clearly. Her gaze was drawn like a moth to a flame to the grotesque sight—my right hand, or rather, its absence. In its place, a glinting hook, an eerie echo of what once was. But my transformation didn't end there. My exposed flesh was not just marred by scars, but by a living, buzzing tapestry of bees. They crawled in and out of hollow spaces in my skin, their incessant buzzing filling the room like a thousand tiny wings beating against the silence.

"Are you ready for an extraordinary experience, Margaret?" I asked, my voice honeyed with malevolent delight. "Would you care to taste something truly unique? Something exquisitely sweet?"

Her scream was perfect, pure as spun sugar. In all my years of collecting such sounds - each one a testament to human fear—few had achieved that crystalline quality, that exquisite note of terror that transforms a simple death into a delicacy.

I always did prefer black licorice lovers to the candy corn fans.

Their screams have a certain... bitterness that complements the honey so well.

Sweets for the sweet, after all.