The world is a scary place. Every day
we’re forced to make choices, no matter how small, that may be leading us along
a new path. Whether that path is heading towards something good, like a
promotion or meeting some special, or towards something bad, like an accident,
or even death, we can never know. In the end, that’s possibly the scariest
thing of all.
That’s why I need your help to guide
a character, or characters, through the possible dangers that await them in #YourHorror,
an interactive horror story that will be shaped by the
choices you make. Even I don’t know what will happen, and I’m the writer…
From Monday to Friday, at
roughly 8pm GMT each day, there will be a new Twitter poll.
These polls will ask you to choose between a number of options, each of which
may take the story in a new direction. Sometimes a decision will give a bit
more insight into the character, setting, or backstory, while other times the
decision will solely focus on driving the narrative forward.
Excited? Intrigued? A little bit
terrified of the unknown? Yeah, me too. Get involved.
Week 4
It could have been a
nice dream, surrounded by friends and family, or with some far-off future where
she’d won the lottery and retired herself to a life of lunching, lounging, and
lost animals (with money and space to spare, it was the natural progression of
things, right?). Unfortunately, this wasn’t that kind of dream.
She was alone.
Completely alone in the darkness, with the world inside her head yet to take
any shape or form. It was pitch black, and she reached out into the emptiness.
She wanted to find something to hold onto, but snatched it back when she
wondered whether something else might also be reaching out. Not worth the risk.
Endless abyss it was,
then.
(Wait… what’s that?)
It was if her eyes
were adjusting to the complete blackness. The darkness changed from solid black
to a slightly less solid black, then grey, then gradually to a white light that
was almost too bright. So intense
that it forced her to squint and raise her hand above her eyes, unable to make
out anything other than whiteness. If anything, this was the exact same as the
previous darkness, only more annoying. No-one squints for fun.
Bit by bit, the
light faded away until she could see shapes and colours, and then the shapes
and colours pieced themselves into a familiar, though not quite welcomed,
jigsaw. She was back in the café.
If it hadn’t been
for the incident earlier that day, it wouldn’t have been a strange place to
find herself, but she wasn’t quite ready to revisit this particular café anytime
soon. It was dark outside now, she thought, though it was hard to tell. A thick
mist had enveloped the town, or at least the café. As far as she knew, the café
was the only thing that existed. The rest of the town – shops, houses, people –
had been swallowed whole, or perhaps lulled into an eternal slumber, until the
mist decided that they could be free.
All she knew was
that she wasn’t about to take a walking tour. With one last look into the mist,
she turned her back to the window and looked around the café.
It was empty now,
and the tables and chairs were stacked up on one side – all except one. One
table was positioned in the middle of the café. Her table. She knew because of the book. That damn book. She took a
step closer, then paused.
The air around the book
seemed to get heaver as she drew closer. She could almost feel her clothes
pressing down around her. Even so, she couldn’t help but take another step
closer. As she did, the book flew open. The pages began to turn. Unable to move
as she watched, the pages turned, turned, turned, like the Invisible Woman was flicking
through an ancient issue of Cosmo.
The pages stopped
turning, and the café was still once more. On her table, the book lay open.
She crept closer,
and for the third time that day, she saw it.
Madness.
Before she could
even decide what to do next, the words on the page, most of which she didn’t
understand, started to move. It was as if the ink itself was trying to decide whether
it was happy with the sentences it had been shaped into. Each line, curve,
dash, full stop – it all writhed and struggled against the paper. Until it didn’t
need to struggle anymore.
Each letter tore
itself from the page and morphed into a collective mass of scuttling insects.
Ants. Beetles. Flies. Maggots. Crickets. Spiders. Termites. Earwigs. Worms. The
mound of insects grew and spilled from the book to the table. All this time,
the symbol on the page had remained still, but it began to move now, clearly
visible inside a ring of insects. They avoided it.
She already knew
what it would become. There was just one particular insect that was missing
from this orgy of creepy-crawlies. Before long, it rose above the rest. Almost
one-hundred legs reached out towards her as it wriggled upwards like a repulsive
phoenix from its nest of slimy brethren. The rest of the insects, clearly
inferior to the reincarnated centipede, dropped to the floor, now too numerous
to fit within the confines of the table.
(Wake up. Please,
just wake up.)
No luck. Slowly
being backed up to the window by the ever-growing number of insects, she was
trapped inside this nightmare. Then she was reminded that she should be
grateful of her current situation, because everything can always get worse. It did.
The mound of insects
began to grow upwards. Legs, antennae, shell, and pincers swarmed tightly
together until it looked like a dense, constantly moving, figure. Almost
humanoid.
There were no eyes
to look into, no ears to hear the hammering in her chest, but a gaping hole
formed where a face should be. Inside it, the centipede, like a wagging tongue.
The gaping face hole closed and opened, and even though it should have been
impossible, words were formed.
“You
have been chosen.” As it spoke, lesser insects were impaled on the centipede’s
sharp legs, now more focused in its movements. They fell to the floor,
discarded.
“W-why? By who? For what?” She rasped,
afraid to hear the responses.
“You have been chosen,” it repeated.
She backed up against the window and felt the cool window pane against her
back, now slick with sweat. “You have been chosen.”
“What do you mean?” she asked,
almost pleaded. “Tell me.”
Without warning, the
figure burst into flames. Insects screamed and popped. An acidic burning smell
filled the air, and the insects began to lose shape as they melted to the café floor.
A booming sound
snapped her attention back to the window. In the distance, a fiery glow was
burning its way towards the café, turning the mist into a lightshow of reds and
oranges. It was beautiful. If it had looked like this before, maybe she’d have
gone outside. Only it wasn’t light. It was fire. In fact, a wall of fire, and
it rushed towards the café as it driven forward by the horses of the damn
apocalypse.
(Could I have a
minute here, guys? Already kind of got something on the back-burner…)
She turned back to
the burning insects, and the wall of fire was forgotten.
(Shit.)
The insects had been
reduced to a pile of ash and corpses. Only the bugs with harder exoskeletons
had avoided complete cremation, and in one last “fuck you” had crawled into a
shape she’d have been able to recognise anywhere.
Madness.
(What is going on?)
She turned to the
window, placed her hand against the pane – unsurprisingly not quite as cool as
before - and steeled herself against what was coming. Fire and pain. Pain and
fire. Burning.
She closed her eyes
as the fire reached the café, and was consumed.
(It’s not real. It’s
not real. It’s not real. It’s not r-
*
“eal,”
she gasped, startled to consciousness. Alive. It was a nightmare. Just a
nightmare. She raised her hand to her forehead, relieved to be back on her
sofa. “Ssss-,” she sucked air between clenched teeth, surprised by the intense
stinging in her hand. When the pain receded, she forced herself to turn on the light.
“No.”
she whispered. “No. It’s not possible. It’s not real.”
Her hand was burnt.
