Horror Snippets

Seed for SeedComp 2024.

This isn't a game. It's a list of writing snippets, mostly horror-themed (~2700 words). I've had them lying around my hard drive for ages and haven't been able to do much with them. Use as many or few as you'd like.

Contains death, horror, violence.

The text's below, so you don't need to download anything.

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0. INSTRUCTIONS

A closet. The phone call I get says, "Open the door right now." The scratch marks in the wall read, "Don't open the door."

An infinitely repeating hallway, with mirrors on both sides. My reflection on the left says, "Never touch the mirrors." My reflection on the right says, "Break the mirrors before it's too late."

My living room. The voice outside my window says, "You need to open the window right now." The man outside my window holds a giant sign that reads *DON'T OPEN THE WINDOW*.

A completely dark room.  The man on my left says, "Turn around." The woman on my right says, "Don't turn around."

My flashlight illuminates two sets of warnings. TURN OFF YOUR FLASHLIGHT. Beneath it: DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR FLASHLIGHT.

The first text said, "You're in danger and you need to get out of the house RIGHT NOW." The second text said, "Go to the basement, lock the doors, and do NOT go outside under any circumstances." Same number.

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1. THE STORE

There is no end, only shelves upon shelves yawning into infinite space. Some regions are eternally sterile, air pungent with an acrid disinfectant sting. There the incandescence of the overhead lights is overpowering. A thousand shelves display a thousand products you would do anything to have, but you can't open the boxes.

Other regions lie in near-total darkness. Broken glass litter these derelict halls. Crumbling shelves will topple on the unwary. Lone lights may seem tempting as landmarks, but people will find they often shift places, defying all attempts to track them. Even if you do reach one, they are a hotbed for predators, who know they can count on the hapless victims the lights attract.

TEMPTATION: They will always be something you want in the shelves, and a price to get it. Parcels of meat offer relief from hunger, but once consumed, you will lose your taste for anything but putrefying flesh. A spiked club can serve as a weapon, but the spikes will dig bloody gouges into your hand. The longer you hold it, the more difficult it is to let go.

Sometimes the price is what you do to get the product. A plastic bottle rattles with painkillers. The bottle has no opening. To get at the pills, rip at the exterior with your teeth. After weeks of nonstop work, the plastic casing will split and your teeth will have sharpened into jagged incisors.

The product labels catch your eye and keep you looking. They promise lost love or list your failings in vivid detail. They trigger past traumas or kindle impossible hopes, soon to be crushed. Once you look, it's hard to stop.

DENIZENS: Inhabitants enter from your typical areas: supermarkets, abandoned malls, and so on. A disproportionate amount also originate from other regions of the [REDACTED]. Disheveled victims travel toward the glowing white building that stands out amidst a crumbling, rat-infested ruin, or crawl into a dilapidated grocery to escape a never-ending blizzard. Once here, of course, they find no relief.

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2. DREAMFISH

"Fish do not have a market economy. As a matter of fact, fish do not believe in capitalism. Our society and economy is governed by the dream-trees. They provide all fruit and water. Yes, us fish eat fruit too, but when we desire a more sumptuous treat, for example the bodies of our newborn young (which we consume for evolutionary reasons), the tree can provide that to us as well. The one rule is that you must not attack any other member of society and you must be kind. Otherwise the dream-tree will rise up from the ground beneath you and take you into its gaping maw and process you into raw material to grant the wishes of the next obedient fish who approaches and gives the request while obeying all protocols."

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3. SHRINKAGE

A man lived at the center of a nameless city. Day after day the man looked out the window and saw the city shrink. First the horizon disappeared. Beyond the perimeter, the sky intermingled freely with the ground and all things were indistinguishable. As weekends and workdays could not be measured, the city declared an indefinite holiday. Families marched out of apartment blocks and threw their calendars into enormous trash heaps. Their white pages leafed through the stale air.

The distant skyscrapers that silhouetted the former sky lacked depth. Under scrutiny, the man realized they were not true buildings but barely passable imitations, and he watched them recede from three dimensions to two, becoming wireframes that dissipated into the air. At the moment of final erasure, the families in each building poked their heads out and waved. Then they unraveled.

Slowly the wave of disintegration proceeded along the city blocks. The furthest buildings were eliminated first, and the inhabitants greeted their release with cheers. Mass migrations occurred as crowds made their way towards the wave, seeking an earlier chance at freedom. The man could not decide whether he should follow them. Many times he was tempted by the cries of sweet jubilation, but something about the prospect of nonexistence scared him. Surely there were greater things to aspire to in life. Or were there? Struck by indecision, he could only stare out the window and watch the wave approach.

It never reached him.

Its advance had been rapid, eliminating entire buildings in moments. But its pace slowed. By the time it reached his surroundings, even a single building took much waiting. Many of his compatriots lost patience and threw themselves into the void. He stood, waiting, still afraid.

The buildings around him was eliminated. He waited the equivalent of years for this. Progress slowed to a crawl, then less. It could be measured in millimeters.

Everything was an outline. He, too, was an outline, but not entirely erased.

The walls of his apartment were eliminated. The stairs as well. He stood in his room surrounded on all sides by nothing. Still he was afraid to take a step.

He may still be there today.

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4. ACID AND BUBBLES

We're high on ACID AND BUBBLES. Now don't diss bubbles, okay, don't get me wrong. Bubbles are a hardcore drug. HARDCORE. You blow these little thingamajiggers out of the whompadoodle plastic loopdeloop and they just, they just float up there! Oh my god it's amazing. The little, the little things, you know, so small and squishy and perfect, they're like bubbles or jewels or whatever I don't even know. Then you EAT them. The soap goes straight down your throat. Into your gullet. Best thing ever, even heroin can't compare, not that I've ever had heroin because I'm a good person who doesn't do illegal things totally.

A ball of locust eggs stuck to my bathroom mirror. Outside world is cold. Dead cold, frost air negative zero infinity cold. The warmth attracts locusts. They're hatching soon. Bundle of dead hair smashed onto the wooden floor. Cracks in the ceiling. World cracks open and the molten yolk inside the planet spurts out in shoots and burbling springs of HOT FIERY DEATH baby, we'll take a dive into the lava planet...

Two crows on a snowy ceiling. White roof, thick molasses white sludge to trudge through. The whole world's against you, the wind blows through you, you don't exist.

A parasite stole my name. Or I was the parasite, thief of names. I went from one name to another, shorn of identity therefore grasping for someone else's, like the greedy feckless thief I was.

But you can't survive in this world without a name.

Degeneration. You can't survive in this world without a name. Three crows in the house across the street. I see them through the windows. Three skulls in the sky. Sky-skulls flying by. Clouds shaped like death.

When the fees kept coming, fees and fines, I walked out into the blizzard and died. When the heat kept rising, the windows rattled of cold like a jar-headed empty skeleton rattling around my enormous closet, the room was too large for me, empty and hollow. Too large to heat, heating bill, space heater, turned it off? But I can't, not cold enough. Not hot enough. You'll catch your death out there.

I sold my name for money. I sold my dreams for a check. To pay for something? It must've been important, or I wouldn't have wanted it in the first place. But it's been so long. Can't remember what it was. What did I want? A jeweled casket, a cradled infant swathed in silken linens, la gloire, l'intelligence, beauty and grace. Now the room's cold and too empty to light. Candlelight only goes so far.

Lights went out.

Electricity went out.

Loose lights sink tight.

Air plunging through antarctic waters.

Pulling up roots, those sunflowers we used to adore.

Actually the whole world was made of cardboard. My cabin was a cardboard shelter and the four walls had four words painted on them reading "WALL". I kicked them down and on struts they collapsed. White paint represented snow but no crystal powder it was, I touched it and wet paint dabs onto my finger. Like turpentine towels. All gone.

The dead rising up from hell, agonized flesh balloons amirite? It's all skin and bones. (I AM THE TREE OF LIFE. I AM THE GARDEN OF EDEN.) I evanesce. I sublimate into heavenly air. Heaven must be deep freeze cold like an abbatoir's meat locker, like a server farm with simulated souls running on Amazon Web Services (AWS HIRE US).

Limbo is colder than death, purgatoried torsos made of bone, ribcages showing. I sold my soul for food. I sold my enlightenment for wealth. I must survive. Stay alive. The question of how is another bridge to cross, left for tomorrow...

The starless sky smiles down on me. I heard music ethereal, diaphanous music, fluttering by a thread dangling from the sky-high cavern ceiling... A CITADEL.

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5. A NONEXISTENT GIRL

Halfway through her English essay, Helen realized that a nonexistent girl sat to her right.

The moment of truth came simply. Her pencil clattered to the floor, and when Helen leaned down she found it clutched in a pale hand. When she looked up, she saw the hand belonged to a girl.

This was a revelation. For five months Helen had been operating under the misconception that she sat next to the window, and nothing existed to her right besides a murky reflection on glazed glass and the sky beyond. But here was a desk and a chair and a girl sitting in it, pencil proffered.

"Is this yours?" the girl asked.

Her voice had a tremulous timbre, and she bowed her head when she spoke, as if afraid to show her face. Considering that she had been nonexistent ten seconds prior, this was still an improvement. But did her face even exist? Did she even exist?

You're not real, Helen thought. But who was she to question reality? The pencil felt solid between her fingers. Maybe the girl had been there all along, and Helen suffered from a disorder of memory. People didn't just exist.

But when she looked again, the girl was gone.

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6. IGNATIUS

Ignatius, I am reborn. I walk into fire, I am reborn. Rejuvenation, reincarnation, rebirth. I burn.

In Hell everything is fire. Infinite plunging chasms of fire. Fire fire fire.

Fire wrings out your past lives and they drip onto the floor, which is made of screaming skulls or something, I can't check. I can't check because I am hooked on wrought iron spikes, spinning Catherine daisy wheels and iron maidens, bronze bulls and coffins aflame. Iron hook through my heart. Piercings under my skin are seven feet of silver chain, yank it out and whip it around me...

In Hell your memories hiss on the brimstones and sublimate into vapor. I saw my name melt into the ashen air. Then came my friends, family, likes and dislikes, interests and disinterests. Then came numerous other things now vanished from memory. I am sure they existed at one point.

The fire purifies you, so they say.

The conveyor belt through a molten corridor where they encase you with puddling steel around your heart; then peel the steel away, mold a new form out of the vagaries of God (factory-manufactured molds) and click it into place around you. You will have a new face, reportage from aboveground. SOUL POWER. Anima.

I know there is no Heaven. I know this because I know God is not real. I know this because He told me so, once upon a time in a dream. All auguries are delusions. Illusory transcendence. Salvation a mirage, but we will still burn. Solvet saeclum in favilla.

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7. THING

There's a thing sitting on the chair. It bleeds transparent fluid from its many orifices. It spits acrid globules that splatter on the table.

The thing is a valued family member. We take care of it, because it is a valuable family member. We love it.

The thing touches my father and he screams. Fluid drips onto his arm and leaves raw, oozing chemical burns.

Nobody makes a move to separate the thing from my father, because that would be disrespectful.

Afterwards, we dab his arms with chemical salve and bandage them up. We give my father's arms a fresh layer of bandage every morning. Every day, the thing touches him again and the fluid soaks through the gauze. He screams yet again. We apply more salve. We apply more bandages. They don't help much.

Beneath the bandages, his arms are bone. Skin and sinew have been stripped away.

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8. CLIMBING THE CORPORATE LADDER

Arthur Bob Carle's magnum opus, *Climbing the Corporate Ladder*, starts with the following line. "Ambition is the driving force of our reality..."

I've never read Climbing the Corporate Ladder, but Dad had a copy at the top of his bookshelf. One time I dragged a chair over there from the dining room. I'd been reading fantasy novels. I'd developed the notion that Dad had a hidden key to a fantasy universe, where my life would finally start. I climbed the chair and reached up on my tippy toes to behold that gilt binding, that velvet red cover, the elegant lettering on the front! Imagine my face when I opened the pages and found: Delay discussing salary until negotiations are almost finalized. Ask for a range when discussing potential salaries. Companies always have a range, because no HR department will refrain from giving a budget to the managers without monetary limitations for the worker's recompense...

I never found the key. Obviously, because there was no key and my younger self was a moron. But the words of that book stuck with me, and not in a good way.

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9. 4 AM

Late night, parents asleep, playing video games on his laptop on his tiny bed in his tiny cramped room with four walls and a window. The laptop was half garbage but it got the work done, at least when the work was fiddling around with esoteric pixelated Japanese vidya stolen off random sites. Probably okay, because theft was okay, because the artists were dead or something, right?

Kotikaru-chan flashed one of her wonderful smiles and her neon blue hair whrooomed in the nonexistent wind. Ah, Kotikaru-chan, how beautiful you are! Tongijika-san flashed rainbow sparkles in eyes that took up half his face, no visible mouth or nose. Cherry trees moving at 1.75x speed, their branches swaying too fast, staticky flower petals progressing downward.

Were those even real names? But dating sims, you know, they don't have to be totally realistic, if they were totally realistic the hot girl wouldn't even talk to you, because you're ugly and stupid. Besides he knew nothing about Japan, it was a land of anime existing in a purely abstract capacity. Japan, what was that.

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10. YOU CANNOT DIE HERE

"If breathing hurts, stop breathing!"

"If hunger hurts, stop eating!"

"If it hurts to go on, go on anyway! Pain is strength. Don't be afraid to embrace your true potential!"