  Horror/Scary
This week: Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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Telling a good horror story is like one of those old campfire tales we heard as kids. It makes you look around, strain your eyes to see in the dark. Then your heart beats faster and you feel uncomfortable, as if someone is watching...waiting. The story has got to grab the listener at once. It has got to intrigue the imagination, be a plausible truth, yet horrifying beyond belief.
The Uncomfortable Death
Cheryl’s shattered and broken body did not test the strength of the pallbearers. The minister prayed for her soul, her family and friends mourned her lost, and then the earth received her.
On the surface everything was as it should be, but for her husband, Will. For him everything had changed…everything.
He chose to walk home from the cemetery, vowing to never ride inside a car again. Besides, the distance between Cheryl’s new bed and her old was only three miles, and the afternoon was mild.
Walking would become a habit, and he knew that by walking he would delay his arrival at a house that had grown strange to him, a house in which every noise he made seemed to echo as if through vast caverns.
When he noticed that twilight had come and gone, he realized that he had walked twenty miles into the neighboring woods.
What had he been thinking?
He had only the vaguest recollections of the journey, but this didn’t seem that strange to him. Among the many things that no longer mattered were the concepts of distance and time.
Now he looked around, tried to gain his bearings.
Black pines spread bristled arms through the charred night, and the moon cast down a jaundiced glow that seemed more to obscure than to illuminate. The death of his wife left him with nothing to fear. Nothing mattered. Yet, the night seemed sinister, evil.
He heard a sound, just off the road and creeping in silence through the underbrush, unseen but undeniable. It glided as fluid and as cold as moonlight, but darker than the night, gaining on him.
He jumped inside his skin, and his heart knocked so hard he half expected to hear his bones rattle. It gave him the greatest fright of his life.
He abruptly turned around and walked back toward home, faster now, stalked by a sinister presence he could not see but felt.
When he finally got there, the house was empty, silent.
He went upstairs to change out of his black suit and badly scuffed shoes, then sat on the bed and opened the bedside drawer.
In the drawer was a pistol that he kept for home defense. He stared at it, trying to decide whether to go downstairs and make a sandwich or kill himself.
There was an internal cracking, he felt and heard a terrible splintering in his mind, and then came the thing like despair.
Determined, Will took the pistol from the drawer.
He thought for a moment about simply living to die. That was not much of a life to live, but if you can’t feel anything anymore…what’s the difference?
Looking up, he asked God for guidance, and then realized there was always an outside chance he’d see Cheryl again, but not if he murdered his soul.
Sweaty, chilled, trembling, he put the gun back and closed the nightstand drawer.
He decided to skip the sandwich and took a handful of extra-strength pain reliever instead, a steaming hot shower, and then realized that this was as good as it was going to get.
He stared at the nightstand drawer again, rubbed at the stumble on his chin, and wondered.
Then he heard the sound.
It was a screech, an ungodly, inhuman sound, sharp and penetrating, an eruption of rage and hatred.
He realized then that something had followed him home.
Then the lights went out from one end of the house to the other and his flesh trembled.
A good horror story always leaves you wanting more...hopefully.
I'll finish this one up soon and post it for your enjoyment. Here, now, alone in my house, I'm just too uncomfortable to finish.
Until Next Time,
billwilcox |
Stories Lying Under A Skin Of Dust
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The Dead Letters
nomlet 
Writes:
Thanks for the thoughtful look at descriptions. I just read another newsletter discussing flat versus multi-dimensional characters. It occurs to me that descriptions are the same way. Start with a sky shrouded by clouds and then build on that with the knitting metaphor and you've added depth to the picture you're painting.
Some of my early favorite authors hooked me with their colorful descriptions. I'm thinking of you, Ray Bradbury! Now I appreciate good characters more than anything else, but descriptions are still key.
Good treatment of an important topic, for any genre.
Nomar Knight 
Writes:
Awesome newsletter Bill. I got emotional just reading it. You were dead on and your descriptions were uniquely refreshing.
Scyth
Writes:
I really liked your newsletter. Itll help me get better at using different, unique verbs for my story!
LJPC - the tortoise
Writes:
Hi Bill! Well, by the plethora of responses still coming in about the Christmas NL, at least no one can say you write boring newsletters!
While I'm not a fan of the shrouded-knitting analogy (because I don't like personified objects), I was blown away by this line: "She cried in broken bird sounds: feather-soft sobs like lonely pigeons in the rafters, or the misery of windblown gulls." (You can personify if it's a simile.) The imagery is stunning and provocative. Wow! I wish I'd written that! -- Laura
very thankful
Item: "Addiction"
Writes:
Thank you for featuring one of my Deacon stories. It really made my day.
djm7401
Writes:
Realy cool newsletter and chilling too!!
mikeypugs0134
Writes:
Thank you so much for choosing my story on this months newsletter!!! The Guardian of the Dead is a great read... Watch out for Reclusive Knight... I'm studying this grammar stuff now and going back to edit a lot of my stories I thought were finished.
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Horror/Scary: March 10, 2010 Issue [#3599]
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