Five Sentence Fiction: Orange

Those four bastards had called him out to the road this morning trying to be heroes, but he sent them to hell. Waiting to see if his bloody work was worthy of the show, he didn't see the other five killers sneak up and sucker punch him. Going for the kill of the week, they had tied him up and buried him neck deep near an ant hill. The flames on the other side of the hill pushed the ants toward his head, they wanted him to see his death coming. He stared at the black death with the orange flames above it crawling toward him and wondered if he has ever seen a color more beautiful; this was a death worthy of the show.

Mommy, my eyes!

"Mommy, it has my eyes!"  she cried.

"That's nice dear."  The little girl's mother said, distracted by the garden on the top of the hill.   This was their first day in the new house, a house that none of the family had seen before late last night.  They had inherited from an uncle and decided that they would stay in it to clean it up before selling it.  The mother was busy exploring the outside while her daughter and husband were working on the inside.  She was using this excuse of checking out the garden to get away from the dust and mold that floated through out the old house.  They all had a hard night sleep last night, sleeping on air mattresses in the large living room.  Noises echoed throughout the house all night, the husband reassuring all of them that it was just 'old house noises.'  None of them were convinced.  Being outside was the mother's escape from the feeling of dread.

"Mommy, it has my EYES!"  she cried even louder.

"I see.  Did you tell daddy?"  The house had three floors, and a basement, though she had not seen any of the floors.  Seeing the bathroom and kitchen was more than enough to give her an idea of what the rest of the house looks like.  This uncle of his was someone that didn't believe in cleaning, she thought as she stared at the black growth coming out of the bathtub drain. 

According to her husband he was some sort of collector and inventor, using the basement for most of the construction.  There was an investigation into the uncle after multiple disappearances in the town.  They had looked him up when they found out they were getting this place, he was accused of killing some children and a couple of teenagers, the bodies never found.   The uncle never denied the accusations, but through some tricky courtroom maneuvers he was able to escape any judgement and shut himself into the house.  After that no one saw him again. 

Her husband had gotten up early to check out the house, he was a little excited to see what he could find.   He asked her to come with him, maybe they would find some money or some amazing invention that could make them rich.  She had shuddered when she looked at the dark staircase leading up to the second floor.  There was something disturbing to think that his uncle had all of these bedrooms but lived alone.  She told her husband, and he said exactly, he must of had something amazing in those rooms.  But, she was thinking more about those poor kids that probably died in this house, maybe locked up in those rooms.  She was not interested in seeing any of the murder rooms.  Instead she let her daughter go with him.  And now she was bugging her about something that had her eyes.

"I love you Mommy."  This voice was clearly not her daughters.  It sounded recorded, almost like a robot. 

"MY EYES!!"  Her daughter broke down into a screaming terror.  She always wanted our attention, and this is her new way to get it.  The sound finally cracked the fragile threads of her patience with this entire situation.  She was ready to yell at her, ready to pour out a week of compounded frustration on her daughter.  She turned around to look at her daughter, and all of the frustration disappeared and was replaced with fear. 

Blood was seeping out between her daughter's fingers.  She was covering her face, only her trembling mouth showing in between her hands, her screaming has slowed down to a pathetic cry.  She could hear the sadness in the cry, the sadness that mommy wasn't helping or understanding the pain she was feeling.  Seeing her daughter like that terrified her, but she had no way to comprehend what was standing next to her daughter.  It was large porcelain doll.  It looked like a five-year-old girl, brown hair, brown eyes and a blue dress.  One of its hands was holding onto her daughter's dress, as if they were the best of friends and the doll wanted to show her daughter off.  The first thought that popped into her brain was that the doll's eyes weren't the same color as her daughter's.  But, then the doll's other hand opened up and revealed her daughter's two little eyes, blood on the fingertips from where it must have clawed them out. 

"My eyes...my eyes...my eyes..."

Pushing through everyday

This isn't fiction, more of a note on writing everyday.  

I have a bit of an active imagination that plagues me all the time.  It is a blessing and a curse.  I can come up with a sweet story very easily, but sometimes this pops up when I'm in the middle of a story.  It sucks because I want to jump onto that train to see where that might lead and leave the one I'm currently on.  I currently have about three trains running and this is very frustrating. 

When I started writing, I promised myself that I would finish whatever I'm working on before starting something else.  I have read multiple writing blogs and author's thoughts on writing, and usually one of their main rules is to finish what you start.  I liked this idea and am trying to adopt it.  But, it's hard when the new story idea sounds sweet and you are stuck in the middle of a story that you are not sure what the end will be like. 

I can't give any advice on how to do this.  I'm just like you, a guy trying to capture thoughts squirming in my head and smash them down on paper.  I set a goal of a page a day.  Even if that page sucks, at least it's out on the page where I can later get embarrassed about what I wrote and change it. 

The story I'm working on now is fun, basically my take on a slasher movie.  I'm deep in the story and discovering new things each day.  I like trying to deconstruct a horror movie and filtering it through my head, making it my way.  But, being in the middle of it is hard because I want to get it out to people and get on to my next idea, I think it's going to be about a children's tv show host trapped in the world they created.  It sounds like a great story and I'm ready to see what horrible place I can put them into and torment them with. 

Anyway, if you are writing and are stuck, just remember I'm there with you.  Haunted by words that tease you and then scuttle away before you can get them, hiding in the corners waiting to poke at you when you aren't ready.

Five Sentence Fiction: Silence

His imagination has gone wild again and is banging on the walls trying to get out. Turning on the TV and flipping to one of those boring shows his parents watch, he hopes it'll distract it enough for it to calm down. All of his teachers always told him that he had an active imagination that could get him into trouble, but they had no idea how right they were. It was birthed from his gifted young mind and has been feeding off all of his wild thoughts and dreams for years, until it recently broke free and has taken up residence in his bedroom closet, peaking out at him every night, smiling with those cartoonishly large teeth. The silence upstairs triggers the realization that it's too late to get out of the house and run, so he grabs his crayons and leaves a good-bye message to his parents on their newly painted wall telling them his imagination escaped and is going to eat him.

You've changed

I realized I was turning into a monster when I noticed that I was chewing up the inside of my cheeks.  Spitting out my dinner, I ran into the bathroom and opened my mouth.  There were sharp little points poking out of my gums, just underneath my teeth.  Touching one of my teeth caused it to move and then come loose and fall onto my tongue.  When I pulled out the tooth I noticed my hand, the hairs on my hand were getting thicker and my nails were coming off, the skin underneath black.  I looked into the mirror to see a Halloween mask staring back.  Screaming and stumbling out of the bathroom scared my wife and kid, they then became terrified at seeing the horror crawling toward them.  Their running tweaked some internal instinct to chase, tear, and eat.

Spider in the Woods

Here is the start of a story I wrote after seeing a forum post on Dark River Press. The forum isn't there anymore, unfortunately, though there wasn't a lot of activity on it, so I understand getting rid of it. Anyway, the editor of Dark River Press had posted a picture of a girl in the woods and asked people to write a 100 word story about the image. If the forum was up I would have grabbed that story and posted on here, but what I am going to post is my follow up to that story. I was instantly inspired to write about some sort of cult that lived in the woods. This is about three pages of the story, I'm planning on cleaning it up a lot and then submitting it to some websites, and most websites prefer having stories that haven't been published, hence only getting three pages. It's a bit rough, but maybe you can help out with it?



It was another boring day at work. Answer a couple of questions, a few minutes of editing a web page, correct an issue in a video that he is working on. And then hours of goofing around on the internet. This is what his days are usually like. The last couple of months he has been checking out the local newspaper site along with the usual time wasters. Getting older, he just assumed it was time to start finding out what is happening in his town. Most of the time he only scans the site, nothing out of the ordinary happens, and if something really crazy happens, he quickly posts it on the a website for the masses to make fun of. But, the last couple of weeks there has been a string of stories involved missing people. Mostly college aged guys. Nothing really connected except for the fact that they all had a tie to the woods just outside of town. The newspapers don't really go much further than mentioning that they have gone missing near the woods. He was the one to actually make the connection of the woods. Google maps helped out with that. After the third guy he started making little notes about the stories. Tracking times, how long it took for the reports to come out, and basic details about the guys. It's Friday and after staring at the computer for 7 hours, checking out pictures of the woods and re-reading the stories on the news website, he decides that he is going to go out to those woods. The boredom has got to him, he is sure his wife won't mind if he takes some time after work. "Hey babe, you know the stories I've been telling you about? About the guys going missing in the woods? I think I want to swing by there." "Why? What possible reason do you have for going there?" "Well, I want to get away from the desk and figured a nice walk in the woods would be a good way for me to chill out." "Fine, just keep you phone on you, I don't need you to be the next story." "I'm a bit older than those guys, and I don't need to run away from something, these guys probably just owe people money or don't want to deal with something, so they are taking off."


Driving to the woods, he realizes that he has never been in them before. They almost encircle the entire town, like a type of defense from the east. There are roads through them, and the highway is on the southside of them, the woods are a state park, considered a national preserve because of how old they are. The guys must have gone to the park. They did find a couple of the college guys cars left in the parking lot. That was how they determined who some of the guys are.


It was late February, all of the snow melted and it feels like a cool spring day. The woods are not dense, yet it's clear it is a forest. The trees are tall, jagged arms reaching up to pull the sky down. The ground is covered in moldy yellow and brown leaves and bits of wheat grass. There are a lot of paths in these woods, hikers and city dwellers love to wander around here. The woods have a shy scared animal feel to them, most of the time the animal will just watch you and leave you alone, but there is always a feeling that it might lash out and maim you. He's been here before, but isn't out here all of the time. He at least knows the general path of the trails.


Parking his car, he notices that there are not that many people out here. There is a post up with some yellowed papers announcing weekly hikes or bird watching events. He notices something painted on the corkboard, looks a little like a spider, but could easily be some kid's tag. The main trail is next to this post, it's a dirt path packed down hard making it hard to see if there are any recent boot prints. It seems as though the trees near the path are pointing forward on the path, telling him the way to go. He has his cheap notebook in his pocket, a pen with him, and his cell phone with a camera. His cell service is spotty over here, but he has some. His guess is that the other guys probably had similar service here too. Not sure what he is going to find, but the crisp air feels good. The sky is a dark gray, giving the brown trees a stark contrast. After the long boring week, he believes the walk in the woods is going to feel good.


He's been walking in the woods for about a half an hour, following the main path and ignoring the side paths when he notices the first sign. This sign wasn't made by the government or some local group pointing out different hiking paths, this sign was made out of animal bones and sticks. They are laid out at the trunk of a tree and seem to point to a path on the left. He pulls out his phone and snaps a picture, the shape isn't discernible, just a circle of bones with the sticks laid out on each side, the left side with more sticks than the right. The objects were clearly placed here on purpose, the leaves were cleared out around it, but it's hard to tell how long they have been there. The left path looks a little more abandoned, but not in any clear way he can point out. Not sure if this sign was here when the guys went on the path, not even sure if they didn't turn down one of the side paths, he decides to go to the left and see where this leads. His cell phone still has service.


As he walks this path, the abandonment feeling appears and disappears quickly. Almost as if something large was on the path and is now gone. The path has areas that are cleared off and then areas that are covered in leaves, almost like someone had recently picked something up off of the ground. And for the lack of markings on the trees. The trees in these cleared areas have what at first appeared to be scratches in the bark, but further along the path appear to be designs of spiders. These designs are similar to the one on the post at the beginning of the path. It has eight legs and a large abdomen and what appears to be two large fangs, they look like a child’s drawing of a spider. He can tell that they were done with a knife. And while they might all be of a spider, none of them look exactly the same. The trees are covered with them. He also notices that the designs appear around the higher limbs of the trees, as if someone was sitting on the limbs and carved them into the tree. He is not sure if it’s the cleared areas on the paths, or the spider carvings, or the quietness of the woods, but he is on edge, hairs on the back of his neck are straight up. “This is as far as I am going, I think I have enough to go on...” He said this out loud, just to add some noise to the empty space that is covering the entire woods. Quickly he pulls out his phone, deciding to take some pictures and call his wife. He feels that right now he needs to hear her voice.


He moves around the area to get some pictures. There is one tree, a larger tree, one that looks much older than all the rest. He noticed it earlier, but had the feeling that he didn’t want to look at it. Once when he was little, he was spending the night at his grandparent’s house and had to sleep in the basement. This was an old house. There was a door under the stairs in the basement. As he was down there trying to sleep, he did his best to not look at the door. He just knew that if he looked at that door, it would move and something would come out. This same feeling came over him as he was in the presence of that old large tree. It was a large dead oak tree. There were some rocks around the trunk of the tree, and a large gaping hole facing the path. The carvings that were on the other trees were no where to be seen on this tree, as if the tree didn’t need to be covered with those crude tattoos. He can’t stop staring at it, the tall dead grass giving the tree a cowl on the back side of the tree, the dark in side of the hole which gives him no view of the back of the hole. This tree seems to watch over the trees and path of the area. He now notices that the area around the tree is one of the bigger cleared areas on the path, as if there was a large gathering in front of the tree. And he is standing in the middle of it.


“You are not suppose to be here.”

Grandma's basement closet

This story came up from a thought about what could make you pee your pants.  You know those parts of movies or books that just freak you out.  Sometimes it can be an intense scene (such as the end of Oldboy) or it can be something that makes you jump (usually a haunted house type of scare).  I think the jump scares are good for those late night movies that you watch in a dark basement, but the intense scenes are perfect for books.  You are stuck reading it, stuck living each second of the horror that is happening, only hoping that the scare ends with the chapter.  Some of Stephen King's stories can wrap you up in that type of horror.  When Danny Torrance is running through the halls of the Overlook with his father chasing after him carrying a croquet mallet, you are stuck running with him, hoping the alcoholic father doesn't catch up with you.

Anyway, this short story is something that would totally make me pee my pants.  It's a little rough, I wrote it quickly and then freaked myself out.  Enjoy...

It was a long and exhausting day cleaning up my grandmother's house after she passed away. My dad had my brother and I working all day throwing things away in the basement. She was a bit of packrat, so the basement was packed with her sewing kits, cooking utensils, and general crap that collects in house owned by a family for forty years. It felt like we were working in a mine, there were only a couple of windows, all covered with dirty white lace curtains, and the lighting was a couple of fluorescent lights beneath yellowed plastic tiles hung in the drop ceiling.

Near the end of the day my brother was upstairs getting a drink when I found the room. The room was behind a door that matched the paneling that covered the walls of the basement, the only way I knew it was a door was from the thin metal ring that hung from it. I touched that ring and the hairs on the back of my neck instantly stood up. Whatever was behind this door, my senses were telling me not to open it. We had been down here tons of times in the past and I guess we never noticed this door, there had to be a reason it was hidden, maybe my grandparents had a lot of money or they had some secret tunnel? My fourteen-year-old mind jumped to all of the treasures I was sure to find. My other thought was to hide in the room and jump out at my younger brother.

I ignored the hairs on my neck and pulled the ring opening the door. It was dark, except for the bit of starlight reflecting from something I couldn't see, something small and glass, these stars were in pairs and all through the room. I reached for a light switch and couldn't find one. There must have been a pull string somewhere in the room, and against every piece of my being I walked into that dark room. I was just outside of the triangle of light coming from the open door when I brushed up against the frayed piece of string that was connected to the light. I pulled it.

All along the walls were shelves of porcelain dolls, all looking at me. Their dead glass eyes reflecting the horror on my face. I went to run out of the room when an old broom handle fell in front of me and I tripped right into one of those shelves, knocking it and all of the dolls down and on me. The shelf was long and when it fell, knocked some of the shelves on the other side of the room off the wall, spilling more of those porcelain demons on to the floor. I tried getting up, but something was on my leg. I went to call out but no one could hear me. I guess the light was old because it flashed and went out. I was stuck in the dark with these things all over me. Struggling to get to the door, I swore I felt something move. With the whisper of a voice and caress of small fingers on my back I passed out.

It wasn't till the next day that my dad found me in an empty room that was spotless.

Five Sentence Fiction: Foggy

I'm a big time Redditor(a total time sink...but some bits of wisdom can be found), and look at quite a few writing sub-reddits.  There is a guy that posts every Tuesday "Five Sentence Fiction" and then gives you a topic.  A couple of weeks ago I thought I'd start submitting my five sentence fiction to it.  And killing two birds with one stone, I'll start throwing those up here as well. 

Here is my first, subject being 'Foggy'...

She is in the kitchen washing the knives, cleaning off any memory of the night before. Looking out the window she notices the small shape using the fog as cover as it stalks its prey. It'll be his first time and she hopes he remembers everything she has taught him, all the things that she can pass on to him before she is caught. The kid across the street has no idea her sweet son is behind him, the shadow moving to quietly pull him into the fog. A little while later he comes to the door smiling and she hugs him, then points him to the basement so that he can start the cleaning ritual before going to school.

Welcome

Hi, I'm Matt and this is going to be blog of my horror fiction.  I have been a closet writer for years, scribbling in notebooks and on Word but never sharing anything.  After getting inspired by multiple famous type people about just doing what you love and making it work, I've decided to try my hand at sharing my stories. 

I am a huge horror fan, ask my wife, friends or my Netflix Que.  I have always been a fan of the genre and feel like I can at least contribute to it.  This blog will collect my little bits of horror fiction that I have been writing down and hopefully give you a little something to think about when in your house in the dark. 

I'm going to do my best to not give you another zombie, werewolf, vampire, apocalypse story, but I can't say those horror tropes won't cross this blog.  They are all apart of horror, no matter if it's a trend now or not.  Stephen King has covered just about all of those topics, yet you don't see teenage girls wearing shirts with Barlow on them, proving that you don't have to be trendy with teenagers to write about them.  But, having been heavily influenced by King as well as Harlan Ellison, Rob Zombie, George Romero, Ray Bradbury, Eli Roth, Ti West, and countless B-movies, I will do my best to give you creepy horror stories that might have you question my mind.

Now, being a blog and just a part time writer guy, these stories might be a little rough.  I'm sorry for that, but am completely open to you giving me writing advice, I'm a military guy I can take it.  I just want to get it out there, forcing me to continue to write, they say you should write every day to make yourself better, well that's what this is.  So, if I have two readers or a 1000, I'm going to just give you what I can.

Thanks and enjoy.