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Short Story 1774 Words
Wank
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys, so I'm trying my hand at horror. Let me know what you think.
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Wank on
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...could lose most of the dialogue tags and be perfectly readable and a little smoother. We know Barbier is speaking sharply or with an edged voice because the dialogue and the mood establish this; you don't need to tell us. If it was whittled down to:
...it would convey the same info.
That aside, I'm concerned you might be losing some of the horror amidst the sci-fi. It's a good story and an interesting world, but every time I run into some terminology or some sci-fi concept, it slows me down a little so my brain can embrace the idea and fit it into your world. I wonder if the visceral immediacy you need in horror might be undermined by the distance instilled by tech-laden sci-fi. Something like Alien works because the horror has nothing to do with the sci-fi other than it being a creepy alien. It's a monster stalking people down spooky hallways.
I wonder if your story might be more effective as horror if you removed the sci-fi elements entirely. The core of the story is basically some creepy killer whose face is blurred out on security footage; that's all modern-day tech. That said, the sci-fi part is interesting. Just... less scary. I think this is more down to what sort of story you want it to be, though, and there's not really a right answer there.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
"Run, run, fast as you can, you don't want to play with the Blurry Man. He'll catch you and cut you and pull out your guts, you can't get away from the Blurry Man!"
Traffic had slowed to navigate the crowd of onlookers, and Homicide had to bully their way through. By the time Shadrack climbed out of the car, the blood bags were being scanned and taken down. Barbier was waiting for him with a tablet tucked up under one arm.
"Guess who," he said. "Fuck."
"Just the blood again?"
"He put the entrails in a little pile underneath." Barbier nodded his head at a stain on the concrete. "He's got a real sense of artistry, our Unsub-19. And you're supposed to be on fucking leave, man."
Shadrack shaded his eyes and cast around for the relevant cameras. "Show me the footage."
"You know what you'll see."
"I know," Shadrack said. "Show me."
It was like all the others. Unsub-19 was a tall man, spindly, and he moved as if he were underwater. The angles of his body looked incorrect inside a black jacket, like chicken bones stuffed in a garbage bag. Shadrack watched him pull the first sack of blood from under his coat, smoothly, almost daintily. His face, as always, was a pixelated mess.
Shadrack froze the picture and stared until his eyeballs ached. There wasn't a single feature to extract. Mouth, eyes, nose—all had been perfectly blurred by a skilled hacker. Some people thought it was Unsub-19 himself who had beaten the system. Smart money was on one or multiple accomplices.
"Like the last one,” Shadrack said, kneading pink eyes. “Down to the molecule."
"You're not still watching them, are you? Man, it's not going to help."
"I'll stop when he stops. Who was the victim?"
Barbier considered for a second before replying. "Yeah, this Harris kid. Anasi Harris. You know the drill, right? We checked the system, his phone stopped bouncing data at 11:38 last night. Some cameras put him in the LRT station. Looks a little lost, little tired, maybe on something. Who knows. Then Unsub-19 slides in and the cameras start cutting out."
"How’d he get the LRT cameras? It’s a closed loop."
"Fuck if I know." Barbier's voice was edged. "Same way he shorts out the victim's phone. Hacks the street cameras. Butchers a body every month without leaving a shred of DNA on anything. He's like a fucking ghost."
"That project we talked about?"
"Yeah." Barbier paused. "Yeah, I linked you to it. It's a wide net, man. Really wide. Camera feeds drop off for an hour here, hour there, it's electronic error. Happens all the time. The chances of it being our Unsub committing murder are fucking, like, miniscule."
"I know."
"And we don't have the people to check out every dropped camera feed," Barbier said. "Especially not you. You need to sleep, man."
"Still having problems."
"You try those pills I gave you?"
"I tried them," Shadrack said, rubbing at his face again. "Doesn't stop the dreaming."
An electronic bleat knifed his eyes open. Shadrack had flicked out on the couch with Red Bull cans around his feet and his fingers half-curled on an amber glass. His open laptop showed a sea of camera feeds from all over the city. They glowed sickly green on his skin, deepening the bags under his eyes. He leaned over to look with his head still fragmented by whiskey.
There was a fresh notification sitting on a stack of Violet’s vitriolic messages: a street camera across from the Corona LRT had dropped off. Shadrack hauled himself up and the dark room careened. He stared blearily at the screen, then dug his phone from the couch’s cracks. His thumb pulled up a map. The LRT station was only ten minutes away.
Shadrack went unsteadily to the bathroom. His doppelganger was haggard, glass-eyed. He knew what Barbier would think of him chasing after busted camera in the middle of the night. He knew that Violet would feel justified. The florescents sputtered and his reflection jumped slightly. Shadrack knew it wasn’t worth it. He rubbed a thumb along his gums and fumbled in the drawer for floss to pick the wreckage out of his teeth.
His hand found Violet’s toothbrush and dropped it. The dream started to come back to him. He left the bathroom and began hunting for his coat in the dark.
The street looked wrong, lamp-posts leaning at slight angles with their shadows oddly truncated. Grainy orange light spilled on the tarmac like pools of vomit. Shadrack knew it was the alcohol-and-soporific cocktail that was tipping the stairs under his feet and playing tricks on his eyes, but he still felt disjointed. Uneased.
He took a shortcut through the manicured slice of park wedged between his apartment and mainstreet. The fake wrought-iron gates were permanently open. Dead trees marked for removal sucked up all the artificial light. It was cold now, the damp kind, and when his foot strayed onto the grass it came away wet. The chilled air was slowly cutting his buzz to pieces and
There was someone in the park. Some amalgamation of spidery limbs clad all in black, moving in a slow solemn dance. It ate through the last of the dopamine insulation and Shadrack stopped. Crouched. He reached past his phone for the less familiar weight in his pocket. The black figure danced under the bony trees and Shadrack’s hand went slimy with sweat on the Glock and his heart rattled up his throat and then
He looked closer and saw a blue backpack slung across the dancer’s shoulders and earphones trailing from under a knit hat. It was a drunk uni student.
Mainstreet was curfew-empty. Shadrack walked faster against the cold, zipping his jacket up to his mouth. The evening’s revelers had already stumbled home or passed out where they were. Twenty-four-hour advertisements mumbled nonsense, white noise. One ambulance and then another shrieked by. Not his responsibility. He couldn’t be responsible for everything, she’d said.
A billboard lost power as he passed, its scrolling text suddenly flooded by black ink. The LRT station was close now. Shadrack could see its cement gullet and backlit signs. There were deep shadows under the geometric lettering. He only knew what was in them from memory. A selection of waste cans, a ticket booth, an art deco bench from some forgotten rejuvenation project.
As he watched, one of the shadows detached itself and drifted down the subway stairs. Tall, stretched, no trace of drunken weave. Shadrack found his phone again and pulled up the map of feeds he’d linked up to. The station was still showing a scattering of green dots, watching over the night-shift workers riding the trains and cleaners scrubbing at teenage tags. Then the camera over the entrance blinked out and Shadrack broke into a half-run.
A strong chemical smell made him stop at the top of the stairs. He gagged. He triangulated. The lid of the waste can scraped away, and then Shadrack was staring down at a skinned-raw elbow, a blue-and-purple throat, a scarlet tunnel into an anatomy book.
Shadrack pelted down the stairs as the train’s doors hissed shut. His feet clattered loud on the tile. His hands smacked on glass.
First window, an old man leaning on his tired doppelganger. Second window, nobody, just hand-loops shivering like tiny nooses. Third window, a young woman with red hair plugging herself into headphones. Fourth window, his own warped reflection. Then the train was sliding too quickly and he saw only flashes of antiseptic yellow.
“Fuck!” Shadrack gutted the word from his stomach. It bounced around the hollow space and came back to him. He punted the nearest seat, hard enough to dent. He’d been close, he’d been close, he’d been close.
Then the lights began to flicker. Florescent tubes along the vacated track coughed and blinked and drew his eyes. A black jacket was disappearing down the tunnel.
Shadrack knew before he checked his screen. There were no more live cameras in the station. The map showed only empty space, and then his phone went dead and it showed nothing at all. He replaced it with the gun before he dropped down over the edge. His shoe crunched and squealed.
The lights went out completely. Shadrack steadied his breathing, listened for footfalls. He heard nothing. One hand found the grimy wall of the tunnel and then he began to stagger forward, gun clutched tight. The air was still cold, but it was a dry cold now, like something dessicated. Chemicals were singing through his body, speeding his heart.
The lights returned and Shadrack saw him. Unsub-19 was taller than he’d looked on footage, taller and almost skeletal. Marfan’s syndrome, maybe. He moved with that strange grace, those smooth steps that Shadrack had watched ad nauseum. He was tossing pebbles over his shoulder one by one. They clattered and bounced and Shadrack recognized the off-white, the pink tint, of pulled teeth.
The lights choked off again. Shadrack kept moving, slowly, gun cupped in both hands. His spine was thrumming. He could end it properly, here in the deserted tunnel. There would be no investigations. Not for Unsub-19.
The lights blinked on and the Unchip was closer now, still unaware. Shadrack felt a thick fierce heat in his head and he knew that he’d made the right choice and done the right things. Fuck what Violet said. Shadrack leveled the gun with wolfish calm. He could drill the black jacket between its shoulder blades, three quick shots to be sure. But he needed to see a face.
“Stop where you are,” he said. “It’s fucking over.”
Unsub-19 turned casually, and above the neck of his jacket there was nothing but a wash of pale pixels. The lights flicked out and Shadrack fired blind in the dark.
This was brought to my attention in my own work by a reader recently and while I'm definitely in the "it's just a word" camp, many other readers, some of whom will be editors, may not see it that way.
Just food for thought. Honestly, though, I think this is one of your tighter stories!
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Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Interesting world and I love the plot twist with the villain, makes it really creepy and adds a bit of fantasy to it. So yeah, really interesting everything and well done.
Clarifying the voices of the two cops to sound a bit different would be a good call. Also, maybe go more into Violet?
— Robert Heinlein
- You use "doppleganger" to describe a reflection on two separate occasions, and in a piece this short it stands out. I'd drop one or the other. Probably the second, because I like the usage to describe Shadrack. The alien connotations of the word apply well to someone like him.
- You mention Marfan's syndrome, which I didn't recognize and had to Wiki. I'm not sure if it's somewhat obscure or if I just fail at diseases, but you might consider moving the mention earlier in the story, where there's less penalty for a missed reference. That deep in the action, I think you want to rely on clearer and more visceral imagery.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
@Enc: I'm not totally satisfied with Violet, I don't know whether to cut her altogether or expand or just leave her as is.
@SkutSkut: When I do another pass I'll try to mix up the language and differentiate the voices a bit more.
@Jeff: Good catch on the doppelganger thing. I like that image a lot and I guess I somehow forgot I had it in there twice. As for Marfan's syndrome, I haven't gotten any other remarks on it. Emperor's new clothes? Or maybe you fail at diseases.
"Go home, Shadrock! Yer too close to this one."
"Too close, chief?" Puts on sunglasses as he does an action turn. "I'm farther than ever... from the truth!"
— Robert Heinlein