As much as I love horror – and when I say horror I mean actual horror, not “OH NOES HERE COMES A GUY WITH A KNIFE RUUNNNN” horror, or Saw-esque Torture Porn – I’ve never really considered myself any good at writing it. Nevertheless I accidentally found myself writing some horror this afternoon on Twitter after the sound of a yelling homeless man outside echoed through the building.
Originally I just tweeted about that. Then, as a joke, I decided to tweet that I’d barricaded the door. But it didn’t stop there.
Here’s the story in full:
I hear the rambling and moaning of one of the local homeless people. But it sounds like it’s coming from inside the apartment building…
I have locked and bolted the front door. A chair is propped under the door knob. I hear him salivating on the other side. Terror, panic.
Scratching at the door. I peer through the peephole to see a creature, perhaps once human, covered in hair and tinfoil, looking back at me.
He examines the door, the peephole, momentarily transfixed. An indecipherable cacophony of dead language shrieks from his maw.
An eye, red like a ruby with a yellow dot-like iris, presses against the peep hole. It is sudden, unexpected, intimidating.
I can almost smell his hatred seeping through the door, as no doubt he catches the scent of my fear.
I am pressed up against the peep hole now, too terrified to move, too transfixed by the creature to look away.
His head suddenly jerks away, looking elsewhere. He sniffs the air, eyes closed. A slight smile creeps out from under his beard.
He skulks away down the hall, mumbling otherworldly nonsense. He has found better prey than I.
It is only now I become aware of the sweat on my brow. I wipe it away, relieved – I have been freed. But a neighbor will not be so lucky.
The building fills with the sounds of garbled screams, of crunching bones and gnashing teeth. A fleck of blood splatters across my window.
I open the door and peak down the hall. The creature, its belly filled with flesh and its mouth filled with blood, cries out with joy.
A singularly abhorrent sound that seems to penetrate the mind and reverberate through the bones.
I slam the door shut, retreat to my bedroom, shut the door, hide under the duvet. I wasn’t spared at all. I was chosen to be witness.
I think it loses something being transcribed in this nature – I got a few messages after I’d wrapped it up thanking me for a nice bit of a creepy suspense, and at least one from my friend Pascalle asking me if this was really happening) – and reading it back like this doesn’t feel anywhere near as exciting as it felt while I was writing it on-the-fly.
Anyway, here it is. Archived for your pleasure. Or something.