horror | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

21/Jan/2013

Plots You Can Have #5, Ambiguous Monsters Edition

[Content Warning: suicide, human sacrifice]

Previous part here: /2012/10/31/for-the-undecided-plots-you-can-have-nanowrimo-edition/

First part here: /2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

The Dalmour Parasite

a parasite that only infects suicidal people and turns them into psychopaths to make their lives better

Neil Ruthsmoke is a man who makes his friends suicidal. He cannot help it; it is not to do with his personality per se, it is just that his particular body odour trips bad wires in people’s brains; he is a freak of nature undiscovered by science. He is also quite depressed on account of this. Story is about how his psychologist both tracks the spread of the parasite and how it starts to take over hir. There is research into Ruthsmoke’s life, and the point where his friends stopped killing themselves and started becoming sociopaths is found. Good scenes might include: when the psychologist puts forth the idea that maybe, possibly, it’s all Ruthsmoke’s fault; when a friend breaks the pattern by topping hirself; when the psychologist realizes ze has probably been infected hirself.

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17/Jan/2013

Home without Books

Your body will go on living after your death. You wake up in the darkness, shivering, from a nebulous nightmare; that cold spell is what it feels like when you are let back in. It is confirmed since long ago you are superfluous, the body has shut you out before.

One day you will haunt your own home. Your body will explain to the exorcist, the slamming of doors and sackcloth unthreading itself. The exorcist (he will wear a cape) will nod – he has seen it all before – and ask your body to leave for now.

You will be banished.

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28/Nov/2012

Paramedic

There is a creature made of ambulances roaming our city. It likes to watch people die. Its sirens sound too muffled; its shadow moves too much; the ambulances have no drivers. Cell phones stop working near them.

It makes sure to not be the first to arrive at an accident scene. It’s a living museum, made of the rusty, broken ambulances of old. If one climbs into one of them, one falls asleep to wake up somewhere else.

Individual ambulances can stand being apart from the group a few hours, but start to fall apart if separated for too long.

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21/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 20

A village on the side of the road with old timberframe houses and lantern light in the windows after dark, where your death has been foretold ever since you were born. Miss Buhnaf is taking care of the logistics; in her great wooden temple there is a stone on which you will be laid. Torches have burnt since ten years back and will fall when you are tied and secure. Men with burlap sacks and silent feet have been sent out to fetch you. It is prophesied you will come of your own volition, but the men have their ways.

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21/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 19

“Just a what?”

Elle stared at herself, then back at her girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Elle wore the laces, high boots with a short skirt, sporting curly red hair and a corset. Belts everywhere. Cecilia, on the other hand, was a sore thumb. Her hair fell straight and blond past her hips. Minimal make-up. A jumper with some university name on it. Trousers that went the whole way down her legs; regular shoes. She clutched a little icon on a golden necklace; the icon represented a martyr on a cross.

“Just a phase,” Cecilia repeated, “I am not a what you are anymore.”

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20/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 18

Today’s image makes me shudder every time I see it so I shall link it and not show it here like I usually do. No known source.

http://i.imgur.com/Yd12t.jpg

It starts off as an aperture of the skin here and there, all over the diseased’s body. Feelings of panic and anxiety are normal. You should seek out your doctor immediately for treatment. If not, the apertures will grow long, thin hairs around the edges, and they might expand. At this point, the spread of the parasite is mostly subdermal. Nerves grow over the arm and leg muscles, taking shortcuts through them if they need to, until the nerves have reached the brain. This is accompanied by a feeling of coldness and vast depths near the apertures. Then they blink.

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17/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 16

Image courtesy of Shelby Goatz at Google+

Chests heave. Knives are dropped. Plates stop spinning on the checkerboard floor. The cellar door bangs shut. As the dust settles from their last fight, Marianne hides where no dust has ever even been stirred. Except, something stirs. There, down between two crates filled with Fragile somethings, something moved. Could have been a trick of the light if there was any light down here. Her pulse quickens. She sticks to the classics.

“Hello?”

Unfortunately for her, so do I.

“Don’t you just wish,” I say, voice sweet and slow and dark like molasses, “that he could understand how it feels?”

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15/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 15

There will be worms, maggots, and eggs in everybody else’s corpse but your body will smell of rosewater with a hint of tangerine and cinnamon. When the others rot, when their skin will iris open everywhere to let the insects and dirt in, your skin will glass and smoothen and you will only grow more beautiful. Every eyelash you lose is a step to perfection; you cannot bruise, blacken, or blister. Your deep green eyes will keep staring unintimidated toward the sky when I dig you up from your grave and this time I will be right; you will last.

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14/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 14

“Why would we be safe in this temple?”

“Because the undead can’t enter there.”

Gilmichael closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “Right, but what about the ones already here?”

I laughed, nervously. “What are you talking about? This place doesn’t have a graveyard.”

“No, you don’t get it.”

The building rumbled.

He looked up at me from his hands.

“Probably… just thunder. Been a lot of, uh, thunderstorms lately.”

“Everyone is brought back to life. Hell is being evacuated,” he said.

The bones of many, many dead stirred inside the templestones. I felt all heat disappear from my face.

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14/Oct/2012

Nightmare Fuel October 2012, Day 13

Twice as long today to make up for having nothing for yesterday’s picture, or something.

There is a TV commercial which no-one else has ever seen. Going for 6 years now. It is about this miracle powder called Pristine. It is a dumb commercial. Completely unrealistic, I tell myself. I’m often shaking when I tell myself that. I am out of sleeping pills now and it seems to happen more often recently. I do not often realize until it is too late to turn the machine off, but even if I try, I stumble, the TV is sluggish, or if I pull the plug it still runs until the commercial’s 45 seconds are all done:

A simple scene, without dialogue.

A home. A soft white mat. A window shatters. Two pairs of boots climb in– everything’s filmed from the floor. They go into the kitchen; a barefoot man is presumably cooking. His yelp’s silenced. He’s dragged into the living room. One of the boot-clad men bends down for a big glass shard and then it’s just boots and trembling feet again. Cloth rips. We hear the slick, sloppy noise of cutting meat. That continues for a good while, until my head falls upside-down in a close-up, and the men who killed me start cleaning up.

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Tag: horror