As Doctor Who episode aired tonight has shown a winged beastie at the centrepiece of its plot, I feel I should commit to weblog something which i had written back in November. The story is complete and it has an explanation of its inspiration at the end, which has remained unchanged since I wrote it last year. Here it is.
The beginning (By Anthony Horowitz)I always used to think that horror was something that happened at night. You know the sort of thing. It’s dark and cloudy and maybe there’s a storm trembling in the air and you’re lost in the middle of the countryside and suddenly, somewhere a wolf howls…
By the time I was 14 I’d read all of Darren Shan and I’d even started on Stephen King although my mum didn’t like that because of all the rude words. The sort of horror stories I liked best had ghosts and vampires and hideous monsters that jumped out at you when you weren’t expecting them. I once saw a film about a man being chased by cannibals and I swear I didn’t sleep for a week.
But as I discovered, real horror isn’t like that.
Real horror is worse.
For me, it all started on a beautiful September afternoon. It was the end of our first week at school and I was walking home down streets that I’d known all my life. I remember hearing the chimes of an ice cream van. A bunch of little kids ran past me, chasing after it. There were a couple of workmen painting one of the houses and one of them raised a hand in greeting as I walked past. I other words, everything was normal. It was so normal that I didn’t even notice it how normal it was, if you know what I mean.
No. That’s not quite true.
There was one thing.
I live with my mum and dad in a sort of crescent. All the houses are modern and to look at them you’d think they were all competing to have the prettiest front gardens. We’re right in the middle and as I approached the front door, I noticed a crow, perched on the roof. It would have been hard to miss. It was a great, fat thing, almost twice the size of any bird I’d ever seen. And it was black. It’s feathers could have been dipped in oil, the way they hung off. It’s eyes - also black - were as bright as diamonds.
There was something pink and nasty, writhing in it’s beak. The crow was eating it. But as I approached, it stopped and for a moment it seemed to stare right at me. I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at it - probably just two or three seconds, although it felt longer. Then, acting on impulse, I leaned down, picked up a stick and threw it at the crow.
“Shoo!” I shouted. “Buzz off!” The crow lurched into the sky and disappeared. And that was it. It was just a bird, eating a worm and I thought I had scared it away. That was what I thought.
I’d already forgotten about it as I fumbled for the keys and opened the front door. As usual, I threw my nag down in the hall and went straight into the kitchen. But nothing was ever going to be “as usual” again. I smelled it first. Sweet and sickening.
And then I saw it.
What happens next?The end (By Alex Plumb)
The scene of both parents lying on kitchen floor, blood oozing out from them onto the tiled surface, was like a wall slamming into me and I involuntarily took two steps back. On the double take, I wanted to yell, bawl, moan, but my breath recoiled into my lungs and refused to leave.
Raw emotion flooded me and I ran over quietly sobbing. My mum was face down, my dad on his back, his hand clutching a brass fire poker. I scrunched down on my knees to shake mum, but it was no use. Had they fought? Why? My mind was racing. I kind of already knew I was an orphan but it was only weeks later that I accepted I was the sole surviving member of my family.
Mum was deteriorating fast, both were - almost melting. A virus? MRSA? Surely that only happened in hospitals? And could any bug be this super? Both the wounds were festering disgustingly and the smell was getting worse. A flicker caught the corner of my eye. Through tear-stained vision, I looked up and then I saw the broken window.
Our house backed onto a field and beyond it were marshes, but no-one went near there. Barbed wire running through it cordoned off the government-run animal research labs on the other side of the marshes and that was where the distant fire was coming from.
The virus must have escaped, I reckoned. Were the flames destroying it or spreading it? Then the crow filled my sight, landing on the jagged glass rim, still with that wretched worm in its beak. But it wasn’t a worm - close up, I now saw it was a finger, not wriggling but rapidly decomposing. I looked down - my mother’s little finger. The crow tipped its head back, gobbling it up. Then it barked, loudly, imperiously at me. A dull throbbing started upstairs. Something had awakened.
I climbed the stairs with trepidation. I had to find out the mystery, but my fear was only narrowly trumped by my goading curiosity. My tears burned on my cheeks. My bedroom door was open as usual and the banal thrumming emanated from there.
Unable to draw it out any longer, I rushed into the doorway and was struck with pure terror. A huge fly-mosquito thing was hovering in my bedroom, it’s tendril legs twitching, it’s globular eyes fixating on me, the wings not whining, but chopping the air. It was the size of an Alsatian dog. Was this some nightmarish revenge for all those flies I swatted? Researchers had just bred some super stamina mice, but who would create this? I was petrified. I was going to die.
Then the crow flew in behind me, it’s wingtips clattering my head, breaking the spell. It, however, was most alarmed at this role reversal of predator and prey. Scientists would call it a proboscis, I call it a large javelin. It shot out from the monster - and speared the crow.
I jerked back and slammed the door. The crow had saved my life but I wasn’t safe. My window was a single pane like the one in the kitchen. It could still escape. I jumped down the stairs, four at a time. My door was being thumped against. I dashed into the kitchen, knocked on all of the gas hobs and struck a match to light one. I desperately ran out of the house, tripping on my satchel - that felt like bursting my heart.
Back out in the normality I felt like I’d entered a new world. I dragged myself out the front fence gate and, with dread draining right through me, looked up towards my bedroom. It’s face loomed at the window. It was still coming for me. Please, please, please, oh please, no! That stick, which I had thrown at the crow; it had bounced off the side of the house and landed in one of my mum’s prize bushes. I snatched it and hurled it at that despicable creature. The pane fractured and it spun away.
Flames were licking the side of the house and the kids, licking their ice creams, had come over to see what the fuss was about. “Go away,” I shouted like a madman. “Just get, get away.” My voice was cracking, my tear ducts broke again. They stared at me baffled. I shoved them back and turned round to see the edifice - the centre of my life - consumed in scorching red tongues.
My heart ached from beating so frantically, but it wasn’t over yet. And then, I heard it, everyone did. A hysterical high pitch staccato shriek, like a fast-motion ratchet rending the air - the scream of the unnatural, the death of something which never should have been born.
ExplanationThis was for a writing competition in The Guardian, at the back of its Saturday Comic supplement. Author Anthony Horowitz had supplied the beginning of a horror story (with Halloween a few days away, this newspaper edition being 27th October) and the reader had to complete it in no more than 800 words. Mine is 799. The first prize was a £50 book token, ten Anthony Horowitz novels and the work in print, the latter the most important to me. Two runners-up would get a £25 book token and a set of Horowitz’s novels, their work too published (albeit implied only on the Guardian website). The winner would have the scariest and most original story, one picked by Horowitz from a long-list compiled by Becky Gardiner, editor of the Comic.
The entry had to be submitted by midnight November 7th 2007, a Wednesday. So on the Tuesday, I thought up the scenario. I wrote down my ideas on a piece of notepaper and just as I was going to set them into type, I read the rules more thoroughly. The competition was open to children living in the UK, aged seven to 16. That rather undercut what I was about to do.
Still, I had gone to such lengths imagining it, I was not going to just forget about it. So I have typed it up now (10th November 2007). The website is to be found at:
www.guardian.co.uk/family/comic. It said it would tell those who had won by November 21st.
Horowitz had specified to avoid blood and guts, the scariest things being in the imagination. Other tips said that something horrible was in the house and also this was on a bright, sunny day, taking place in what had been the normalcy of life. I opted for some science gone wrong , taking it away from ghouls and goblins, as Horowitz seemed to be steering away from the latter in his opening. This was appropriate since it was in the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth virus escaping from government laboratories in the late summer and American scientists had just bred, only days before I put my brain into action, a type of ‘mighty mouse’. The faraway fire at the labs suggests a bad incident has occurred, without exactly stating what. Previously, I had imagined what horror would be in the house, what scared most people, first alighting on putting a huge spider in it, then deciding a monstrous fly-mosquito thingy would give more possibilities to work with. My view is that the insect and the crow (because the crow is very big) both got loose somehow and the scientists were using the marshes in some nefarious way, possibly to create the insect over there.
I was not impressed by Horowitz’s “it was just a normal day” scenario, finding that a bit hackneyed in itself, but I set to the task in hand. I throw in a few red herrings, the protagonist at first thinking his parents had killed each other, then it was a superbug virus. I envisage the insect smashing through the kitchen window, killing the mother from behind. The father reacts, grabs a fire poker and as he attacks the monster, he too is killed, hence why she is on her front, he on his back. I was going to throw in a little aside about the protagonist and the mother earlier protesting about energy efficiency, but the father standing firm in believing the single pane window to be quaint and so he died for being energy inefficient. In the end, however, I felt it to be a distraction.
I thought in an androgynous way so as to appeal to both genders reading, that they can identify more readily with the protagonist - I imagined her more as a girl than a boy to offset my masculine preferences. For a child, the ultimate sanctuary is the bedroom, so this is where the monster lurks. I thought it fitting, that the crow, which so heartlessly eats the dead mother’s finger, itself is made into food and, ironically, saves the protagonist’s life. The story also reflects on an untrustworthy and reckless government, which destroys the family and the home of the protagonist by meddling in things which it should not and then being unable to control them.
