Intro

Bon soir! Greetings from Strasbourg, where I’ve been working this week during a heatwave. I’m typing this at half-past ten at night and the temperature is somewhere in the mid-20 Celsius-ish range (77F). During the day it’s been around 33C (91F).

It’s toasty, and been like this since I arrived.

This is around 15C hotter than average for this time of year. Climate change: it’s a doozy.

I’ve learnt several things during my time here:

1. Many houses in Strasbourg look like they belong to vampires.

2. I can’t remember much French.

3. French people outside of Paris seem to be much nicer than French people in Paris.

4. When I try to speak French, my brain gives me two or three words then goes to Dutch, then goes to English, then shuts down. “Merci, tot ziens, thank you …”

5. Seriously: vampires might live in Strasbourg. So many houses are Gothic AF and they’ve all got shutters on the windows.

Anyway, we’ve reached week 22 of a full year of year of tiny horror fiction. I send out short stories in a different genre of spookiness every week, from vampires to ghosts to aliens to cursed land and more. There’s no running story, so feel free to dive in wherever you want.

Also, all of these stories are 100% human written by me AND I occasionally use an em-dash because it’s a handy piece of grammar. Both things are true! Not every writer using an em-dash is getting AI to do their work.

If you want to support a human writer doing human writing-y things, subscribe!

Let’s dig into this week’s story…

Scratching In The Funeral Home

Some security guards look like panthers: sleek muscles and prowling gaits. Bert is more like a capybara, with a blocky, balding head, and rotund body. He knows he’s an unimposing figure, even with a club-sized torch and can of pepper spray attached to the chunky belt on his waist. Not that any of the clients mind: they’re all dead.

Bert works the night shift in Cawdale & Daughters’ Funeral Parlour. The most suspicious characters he’s had to deal have been horny teens dressed in black, sneaking into the back gardens for a bit of private time. For the most part. Bert patrols, does crosswords, patrols, has a snack, patrols a bit more, then heads home for a nice bath beside an open window, listening to the dawn chorus before falling asleep (usually leaving the bath before sleeping, but not always), and feeling confident another good night of work is complete.

Except tonight is different. There’s a tiny scratching sound coming from somewhere, and Bert can’t locate the source.

He searches outside, but the sound isn’t coming from there, so he checks all the doors and windows. He finds everything sealed and snug, all as it should be. Bert puffs out a deep breath, rubs his belly, scratches his head, smacks the back of his neck, kneads an earlobe.

The scratching sound is louder.

Maybe a mourner somehow got stuck in the building? Or hid there after a ceremony for some reason? Bert searches all the floors, getting hot and out of breath after marching around. The sound of the scratching is giving him a headache. No matter where he goes, he can’t find the source.

And then, of course, there’s the last option: in the basement, there is the morgue.

Bert doesn’t like going into the morgue. He’s not a believer in ghosts and ghoulies, but he’s no fan of hanging around dead bodies either. Nonetheless, with all other options exhausted and the scratching only getting louder, Bert has no choice.

He stands in front of the heavy oak-panelled double door. He strokes his chin, scratches an armpit (which is damp from all the searching, so he wipes his hand on his trousers), knuckles his eyes. He runs his thumbs along behind his ears, under the lobes, along his jawline, meeting at his pursed lips. The door awaits him. The scratching is coming from nearby.

Pushing into the room, the scent of formaldehyde fills his nostrils, making him light headed. On a wall, there are six metal doors, concealing six steel beds, potentially holding six bodies, and potentially, impossibly, one of them is clawing inside the door.

One by one, Bert opens the doors. The first contains a motionless body, covered neck-down in a white cloth, skin as pale as a teeth. Definitely not alive. The second and third are empty. The next fourth holds another definitely-not-moving body. The fifth is vacant.

The sound of scratching gets louder and louder.

There is only one door left.

Bert pulls the steel handle, it clunks open and reveals…

An empty space.

Curls of cool mist fall from the hole.

The scratching is deafening.

Bert stares into the void. He ruffles his scant hairs, blows out his cheeks, furrows his brow, adjusts his belt, tugs an earlobe.

POP! The scratching sound transforms.

His fingers, still holding his earlobe, are wet.

He rubs them together and examines them. The liquid is gritty. His fingers are red, and there are black dots in there. It’s blood—his blood—and something else.

More surprised than afraid, he examines the black dots, rubbing them between his fingers.

The dots have crippled, broken legs.

The scratching escalates to an unending thrum, like an apocalyptic bass drum.

Blood trickles down his neck from his ears, tickling his collarbone and slipping under his shirt.

He swipes at it with his hand.

It’s only a little blood.

It’s mostly not blood.

It’s mostly spiders.

The scratching-drumming-thunder fills his head entirely as the new-born spiders pour out from his ear canal.

The end

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Ick!

Alongside the story, every week I add some background about the inspiration and writing choices in the story…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

The heatwave in Europe is partly to blame for this story: it’s prickly and itchy, even late into the night. Something bit my leg two days ago and the heat makes the itching much worse. Urgh.

So, I started with a rough idea about itching at night. Not very promising, but it’s a beginning.

Itching and a bite led to ‘scratching’. Where would you definitely not want to hear scratching noises? I’m sure there are plenty of options (in a one-person submarine? On a space station?) but I think all the spooky houses in Strasbourg put me in mind of funeral homes.

It would be too easy to have the scratching coming from an (un)dead body. As much as zombies are creepy, it’s a bit too obvious.

Instead, I thought the funeral home and mortuary room could be a red herring, i.e. a misdirection.

The scratching is coming from inside the body!

Misdirection

Did it work? Did you think the scratching would be a dead person, at least for a while? Let me know in the comments please!

I suspect you probably caught on before the full reveal, but hopefully your mind went in the classic horror direction: a body rising from the mortuary slab, white sheet slipping away to reveal bloodless, blue veined skin and milky eyes, arms stretching out… braaaaaains!

I also didn’t want the ‘spiders in the ears’ to come out of nowhere, so I had poor Bert be a fidgety guy with all kinds of mannerisms, including touching his ears.

Bert puffs out a deep breath, rubs his belly, scratches his head, smacks the back of his neck, kneads his earlobes.

The scratching sound is louder.

Did you notice the sound escalating each time he touched his ears? My idea here was that his was moving the spiders around a bit each time he did it…

He runs his thumbs along behind his ears, under the lobes, along his jawline, meeting at his pursed lips. The door awaits him. The scratching is coming from nearby.

You probably didn’t notice this connection at first, and maybe not at all, but I hope it planted an image in your head enough times that the reveal at the end felt natural.

First or third person

I like writing first-person horror for these short stories, but sometimes a story needs a little bit more observational distance. In this case, Bert’s escalating frustration with the scratching, then his confusion at the discovery of the blood, would probably have interfered with natural storytelling: his emotional state and perceptions would have got in the way of clarity, I think.

I absolutely can imagine a first-person version of this story could work but, to be honest, it’s damn hot here, the hotel I’m booked into is cheap and has no air conditioning (or tea-making facilities! I’m jolly well British, dammit!) and my brain is melting.

To be honest, if I wake up after the heat wave and discover this story is just ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over, then I wouldn’t be too shocked.

Finding the horror

We’ve got a few horrors in this week’s story, most of them implied and toyed with, so suspense plays a big role in the story: what’s causing the scratching? Will it be the obvious?

• Night shift work - definitely spooky

• Isolation - a key ingredient of horror

• Unknown noises - the unknown is scarier than the known

• Mystery - will the sounds come from an obvious horror trope or something else?

• Funeral homes - not scary per se, but not exactly a top nightspot either

• The undead - breaking the rules of nature is always creepy

• A twist! - there’s something else going on, doubling down on the unknown

• Body violation - something has got inside the skin

• Insect swarms - okay, arachnid swarms. No one likes swarms of anything, and they happen in the real world, which can be scarier than the supernatural

• Blood - yep, simple blood is a scary thing. It’s supposed to be inside the body and not leaking

• Stuff in your ears - no one likes stuff going into their ears, right? (Or am I the only person traumatised by The Wrath of Khan?)

Combine these, and hopefully you’ve got a good itchy horror.

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C’est finis!

The heatwave is due to pass in a couple of days, so hopefully I’ll have a fully functioning brain again next week.

In the meantime, it would be a huge help to me if you could share this wherever you think others might enjoy it:

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I hope you’re thriving wherever you are. It’s a wild world out there, so there’s all the more reason to…

Go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

Hi everyone, I’m Mata and I send you short horror fiction every week.

This is week 21 of a full year of tiny stories, each one a different and standalone tale in one of the many genres of horror. We’ve had everything from aliens to ghosts, and this week we’ve a cow!

How many other horror fiction writers are sending you stories about cows, eh?

If that’s not enough mootivation to subscribe or upgrade to being a paying supporter of my writing, I don’t know what is!

Onto the story…

One Among The Herd

They herded us into their slaughterhouse, our hooves clattering on the hard floors, so different from the fields we’ve walked through all our lives.

I’m not like the others. Their minds are beautiful places filled with grass and clouds and warm bodies pressed together on cold nights. My mind is like a branch stabbing into the winter sky: I pierce through, far beyond my roots, and see and touch and taste everything around me.

In the corridors ahead, I felt the minds of men, weapons in their hands, thoughts made of iron. The building was designed to lull us, to comfort us against our fears, but the stink of bleach still leaked through, and beneath it flowed the smells of death.

I have no voice like yours. I cannot tell you all the things I think and understand, how I feel the Earth’s pull across my belly as I walk or taste springtime in the changing textures of the air. I cannot shape words with my throat or mouth, but I read thoughts and memories like you browse magazine racks.

As I walked with my family into the slaughterhouse, I read the intentions of the men inside. I knew the purpose of those quiet guns they men.

They used the guns on my kin. I felt the shock of the final moment, of their minds vanishing like stones falling into a lake; one bright splash, then gone.

Since I was young and bounding through meadows, first understanding my different ability, I swore I would not use my power to control others. I knew there were lines to not cross.

But should I let myself be slaughtered? My friends? My family?

What would you do?

On your news tomorrow, it will be framed as a bizarre tragedy. For years to come, your podcasts will speculate about gas leaks turning every slaughterhouse worker insane, there will be comparisons to the dancing plague and sermons about contagious fear.

There will be leaked photos of slaughterhouse workers’ bodies, skulls destroyed by those silent guns. In the background of those images, blurry and ignored, you will see a cow, just like any other, watching the aftermath of her justice.

The end

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As always, here is a little peek behind-the-scenes…

Writing notes

Inspiration

This week, I watched the final episodes of The Boys. The last couple of seasons added psychic powers (mind-reading, specifically) which I don’t remember being in the earlier seasons. As a show, it revelled in extreme gore, sexuality, and swearing in a way that sometimes (for me) felt a little hit and miss, but overall I enjoyed the last two seasons, where it felt like they really got into their groove.

Anyway… psychics. They make life complicated for writers. Many stories are about a person working their way towards understanding a situation: if they are psychic, they can potentially understand everything and it’s tricky to explain clearly how their powers extend (or don’t).

This question, about the powers of a psychic, got me thinking about how it would impact your choices if you could read the minds of others around you.

In unrelated news, I’ve pescatarian for around a decade (mostly vegetarian, and on many days I’m vegan purely because I don’t have dairy/eggs/fish every day). Recently I’ve heard frequent pushback on nut/oat-based substitutes for cow milk, saying ‘they’re just sugar water without nutritional value’ as a reason to choose cow milk instead. This rather misses the point: the dairy industry is pretty awful, and oat milk uses far fewer environmental resources than cow milk so it’s much more sustainable. If you get oat milk with calcium added, then nutritionally you’re not far off the mark.

So, these two unrelated things smacked together in my head: psychics + the pushback against oat milk = psychic cow horror.

Style

Regular readers will know that I generally prefer to write in the present-tense (i.e. the narrator is describing things as they happen). I find it more immediate for scenes with action and shocking moments, which are common in horror. A shock described in past-tense just doesn’t land in the same way, for me.

However, past-tense felt better for a gentle cow that does a terrible thing.

Past-tense often creates a buffering distance from the events and a sense of safety: it has happened in the past and the narrator survived (or at least some record of the events survived), therefore how bad can the peril really be? (Unless the narrator is a ghost.)

Would a cow relish psychically commanding humans to kill themselves/each other? I don’t think so. A cow would want that distance, so past-tense made sense here.

You might also have noticed that the story skips the actual moment itself:

But should I let myself be slaughtered? My friends? My family?

What would you do?

On your news tomorrow, …

We move straight from ‘I needed to do something’ to ‘it has now happened’, with no description of what the event actually was.

This also created a small sense of mystery: did the humans resist? Were they scared? And it allowed me to delay the basic detail (the humans used the slaughtering tools on each other) until a couple of paragraphs later.

However, I still had a problem with a bovine narrator…

What metaphors would a psychic cow use?

Here we are again, breaking new ground…

As writers, we try to use language and imagery that fits the experiences and world-view of the narrator. For example, a meadow looks very different to a biologist compared to a person with a phobia of bees.

This idea is called ‘metaphor families’, and I’ve written about them before:

Obviously, a cow will trend towards images of nature, but she is also a mind-reader and narrating this story in English, so we can assume she is capable of reading minds.

One particular line make me question this directly:

I read thoughts and memories like you browse magazine racks.

Would a cow use this simile? No.

Would a psychic cow use this simile? Umm…

Natural cow behaviours don’t have an equivalent of casually shuffling through a large selections of easily-digestible trivial data. Data processing isn’t, to my knowledge, a key hobby for cows. This meant I would either have to force a very obscure nature-based simile, or suggest our narrator has acquired the experience of browsing magazines in the minds of the humans around her. As you can see, I went for the latter.

The horror and the ending

The horror is pretty clear here:

• Being slaughtered when you’ve done nothing wrong

… But this isn’t simply ‘cows are good, slaughterhouse workers are bad’.

If you were to ask workers in slaughterhouses if it’s the job they would choose out of anything in the whole world, I’d be scared of those who said ‘yes’ and I suspect most people would rather not shoot cows in the head for a living; however, economics and geography make it the only viable source of income for many people.

Once again, the villain of the story is capitalism.

I don’t endorse the killing of folks just doing their jobs.

I also don’t endorse the meat industry.

We need to change systems so people are free to choose other paths, not punish the people with little influence over socioeconomic systems.

The last words of the story were, in one of the earlier drafts:

watching the aftermath of justice.

This, to me, implies that killing slaughterhouse workers is ‘justice’, whereas, as I wrote above, I think the economic and social systems are largely to blame here.

In the final draft I changed this to say:

watching the aftermath of her justice.

Adding in ‘her’ makes this more definitively about our narrator’s personal retribution and survival. I felt this embedded her perspective as the moral arbiter of the scene and whether or not this is ‘just’.

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It’s time to moove on for another week.

Thank you for reading, and if you’re a new reader please remember to subscribe:

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Have a great week ahead!

Go be kind and spooky,

Mata

xxx

Hi, how are you? I’m Mata, and this week we’ve got a good old fashioned ghost story lined up.

I write a tiny spooky thing every week. Most will only take minutes to read, but there are additional ‘writing notes’ at the end, if you want to read more about the creative process. It’s a different story every week, so don’t worry about where to start reading these posts, and there are over a hundred stories in my archive. Also, every story is a different genre: supernatural, liminal horror, haunted houses, comedy horror, an occasional serial killer, and more.

These stories are 100% human crafted, occasional typos and all, with no AI used in their creation.

A special thank you to my paying subscribers, but also to every reader. You folks inspire me to keep on writing. Next year, I will release my first novel, so stay tuned if you want to see what happens when I go long-form!

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Let’s get into this week’s story…

Just Staying For One Night

It were after closing time on a quiet Tuesday night. Gemma had already gone home, so I were locking up the pub by myself and I had my head below the bar when the man came in.

I didn’t see him come in, mind you, nor hear him, which is right weird because the pub door creaks like ship every time you so much as breathe on it, but there he stood, as solid as trees.

He stood in the middle of the floor, right over there, so I had a clear sight of him. He were dressed head to toe in that cycling gear, purple lycra stuff, black helmet pinning down his greying hair, a day-glo yellow jacket and matching bright yellow sneakers. Proper bedraggled, as were fitting for a night with weather like that one.

He were skinny as a stick, like most of them riding folk are, and looked worse for wear. All muddy and a bit scraped up around the elbows and a bruise on his neck.

He said to me in a weak voice, so I had to strain to hear him, “I just want to get to the pub, just for one night, then I’ll be on my way.”

“Well you made it,” I said. “You’re at the pub. It’s a bit late, but I can open a room for yer.” I told him it were a twenty quid deposit for the night and turned to get the till back on, because I’d already shut it down, but when I looked back, he’d gone.

So I said “Golly,” or, you know, stronger language you wouldn’t want to print, and I checked the whole place, but found scratch. Absolutely nothing. He’d plain disappeared.

I checked outside, but there were no bike and no light down the road.

When I came back in, the door still creaked loud as ever, and I could still smell him: sweat and mud, like, but there were no sign of him anywhere.

All that probably only took a few minutes; there ain’t so many places to look around. With nothing more to do, I hurried through locking up and drove home.

Here’s the thing though: there were an accident down the road. A car pulled over, front all banged up, windscreen smashed, and a mangled bike beside it. Police were there, talking to a man bawling his eyes out, wrapped in one of foil you’re-in-shock blankets.

And there were an ambulance too.

I were just going past the ambulance as they closed the back doors, and I saw a thin shape on the stretcher inside, mostly covered with a sheet, but he were still showing below the knees. He were wearing purple lycra and bright yellow sneakers.

Funny thing is, in that room I were going to open up for him, on rainy nights, at locking up time in the pub, the guests say they sometimes get a whiff of sweat and mud.

Maybe he’s staying longer than one night, eh?

The end

Like every week, we’ll now have a bit of behind the scenes…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

This one was inspired by a single image in a documentary about very dark true story about a cyclist who ‘went missing’ while riding across Scotland. There’s a documentary about it on Netflix called ‘Should I Marry A Murderer?’.

In the documentary, there’s a dramatised scene where the cyclist goes to a pub late in the evening and he is seen through the rippled glass of the pub’s door. That shot, of a figure in cycling gear, being seen alive for the last time before he was killed, is only a tiny moment in the documentary, and a tragic point of the story too: if only he’d stayed longer, if only he’d stopped for the night, then he’d never have crossed paths with a drunk driver.

It’s a chilling documentary with many complex points, but the image of the cyclist through the glass stuck with me and inspired this story: what if that was the ghost of a cyclist arriving at a destination his body will never reach?

So…

I have complex feelings about this. I’m hesitant sharing that this was the inspiration, because it feels bad to get inspiration for a ghost story from something so tragic.

But this is the reality of writing: we get inspiration from everywhere. Stories emerge from the things we are exposed to, and if we’re going to create new things then we can’t only feed our brains fiction, otherwise we’re just recycling old ideas that have been done thousands of times. If we only want that, we might as well just ask AI to write everything.

The classic ghost story structure

Having written all that… this is also inspired by the classic ghost story structure we see in many of the most poignant stories (true ghost stories and in fiction). That structure runs something like this:

1. A person is usually by themselves, but sometimes in company

2. They have a memorable encounter with a standout feature

3. They later discover the person they encountered cannot possibly have been there, and the standout feature corresponds with the impossible person in a way that is beyond coincidence.

In my story I’ve gone for:

1. A pub worker

2. Meets a cyclist with distinct clothing

3. They see the cyclist dead in an accident that’s clearly happened at least half an hour ago.

That’s the typical structure, but I added a little lingering ghostliness that we see in other ghost stories:

4. There are signs the haunting wasn’t a one-off event.

While I think the classic structure is excellent, and creates almost infinite possibilities for fulfilling stories, it typically works best for one-off ghostly encounters. For this story, I wanted a sense of lingering longing: the ghost had continued to the pub because that’s where his last thoughts were heading.

By suggesting he’s staying at the pub in the afterlife, it creates a question: is the ghost happy to have arrived, or sad that he can’t continue his journey?

I have a feeling the answer might be one of those personality tests, i.e. it depends on the reader and their mood.

Using dialect

This week’s story is written in the first-person and using an English regional dialect. In my head, I wrote this with a Somerset accent (AKA West Country), but others could probably read it with varieties of Northern English accents that would fit the language, too.

Using the first-person pulls the reader into direct proximity of the narrator, but it also allows for superfluous words in the text:

which is right weird because the pub door creaks like ship every time you so much as breathe on it,

Let’s try that without the dialect:

which is strange because the pub door creaks like ship if you even breathe on it,

It says the same thing, but the dialect version is much more vivid, in my opinion.

This regional dialect also has some rules that might be off-putting, like the unusual ‘I were’ rather than ‘I was’. It’s been a while since I looked closely at typical African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) grammar, but I’ve a feeling that West Country and AAVE have some similarities, so I wonder if some readers might switch this narrator’s voice into AAVE pronunciation?

However people read it, my goal was to be consistent, which hopefully allows readers to feel like they’re listening to a real person.

Finding the horror

This is a simple week for ‘where are the spooks coming from?’

• Life beyond death

• Unexpected death, especially at the peak of fitness

• Telling an unproveable story that might make others question your sanity, motives, or both

• Being alone in a place that often bustles with people.

That last one, being alone, is present in almost every horror story. Humans generally feel safer when there is access to rational company, so almost every horror story needs to find a way to isolate the protagonist. Typically this will be physically, but often it goes beyond that to include almost any form: class, race, gender, age, in power structures (e.g. being disbelieved by parents or the police), and more. A person can be alone and primed for horror even in a crowded arena!

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That’s all for the week!

As always, I’d love to get new readers for this newsletter, and the best way for that to happen is you folks sharing and recommending my writing to others.

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Clicking the ‘like’ heart below and adding comments also serves two wonderful functions: satisfying the algorithm gods and putting a smile on my face.

Thank you all for reading, now go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

Hey there, I’m Mata and I send you short horror stories every week.

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This is now week 19 of a whole year of tiny horrors, and we’ve got an urban legend for you this time. Each week I pick a different flavour of spookiness for you to sample, like a rotating sushi conveyor of terrors.

Let’s stagger into the story…

Carrying A Giant’s Head

I can’t prove any of this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

I live in a city that once had a medieval wall around it. A canal runs in a loop along the path of that wall. Today, the wall is gone, but here’s the thing: there is a woman dressed in rags who walks the path of the canal, encircling the city. The rags are bound to her body with thick ropes and on her back she carries an object like an oversized rucksack. It is huge and bulbous, and she sweats with the effort of remaining upright under it. She leans forward to keep herself balanced. Whatever she carries, it is covered by rags still dirtier and darker than the ones that clothe her body.

Her age is impossible to judge. She only walks on the darkest nights, when the moon has waned to a black disk and the clouds are think and low. She staggers through autumn mists and spring storms. Her hair is lank and thick with dust and mud and the humidity of the canal, and it droops over her face. Her bare arms are goose-fleshed and scuffed as if she has fallen many times and pulled herself upright, but no one has seen her trip, she struggles endlessly on.

I don’t know where she starts her circuit of the city, and I don’t know where she ends. No one knows this. She is just there, sometimes, and no one wants to follow her.

If you get close enough, you can hear her laboured breaths, but there is a deeper wheezing sound too. It is said that under the burden’s covering, she carries a giant’s severed head. Far from rotting, it lives on. Its eyes roll in torment, the tongue lolls between pale fleshy lips, its jaw sways with the woman’s footsteps, throwing her off balance.

I heard that she slew the giant, thousands of years ago, but the giant was an angel, and as punishment she was forced to carry the head until she found a sea that would take the burden from her. Then, on her travels, she stopped in my city, centuries ago, on the day the canal was flooded, and has been unable to pass over the flowing water ever since.

It’s said that if you saw the giant’s face, you would go mad. But how would anyone know it is there?

It’s said that if she knocks on your door, she would show it to you, and you would be unable to reject her. She would stay with you until her curse drove her to plod onwards, onwards, and onwards. What would be left of you?

It’s said she’s a vampire, cursed with immortality and this burden. Perhaps she would die if she ever put it down, but she’s too stubborn and wants to live, even if it’s only a half life.

It’s said perhaps she isn’t the original carrier, and she can give her burden to another, who would receive the curse. It’s said she chooses to never give her suffering away, never to inflict it on someone else.

It’s said that if the giant’s head ever reaches the sea, the ocean would be irrevocably poisoned, then angels would descend to begin the end times.

I don’t know.

I saw her.

I know she doesn’t show up in photographs.

I saw the shape of the thing on her back. I heard the drone of air rushing, like it was passing through enormous teeth, over a huge parched tongue, and leaving through a hacked-open windpipe. I smelled the sweat of centuries, like stale wine, vinegar, and cellar mould.

Like I say, I can’t prove any of this, but that doesn’t mean she’s not real.

The end

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Each week, alongside the story, I add…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

I’ve been travelling this week and saw some cool stuff, including briefly chatting with the very lovely Danny Robins from the BBC’s Uncanny podcast at his ‘Fear of the Dark’ tour, along with Ciarán O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow.

Among the many things glimpsed along my journey was a picture of something that looked a bit like a fairy holding a statue of a large head. At least, that’s what it looks like in my memory. Unfortunately I don’t know the artist to look them up, but the idea stuck in my mind of a person carrying around a giant head.

I don’t find glittery fairies particularly spooky (although the Fae are not to be trifled with!) but the backstory and ideas around such a person ran rampant through my imagination, and now here we are with this story.

Style

Rather than going for a single clear narrative (‘this is a spooky thing and here are all the details’) I decided to go for something more like an urban legend, where there’s an unnerving figure that locals know about, but everyone hears a different story about the person.

This allowed me to use a somewhat informal style, tone, and structure.

First-person was an easy choice, so the reader hears the story directly from the teller, but it also meant I could play with stylistic conventions: for example, you should avoid starting multiple subsequent paragraphs with the same word or words, but the first-person urban legend genre reduces the formality.

Once I’d established the story setting, I could then jump into the different ideas about this woman and her supernatural presence with five paragraphs beginning with ‘It’s said’.

The trouble with urban legend stories is that either everyone tends to be dead at the end or they fizzle out (‘AND THEY WERE NEVER SEEN AGAIN!!!’ or ‘AND YOU CAN STILL HEAR THE HORN OF THEIR SUNKEN BUS WHEN THE TIDE IS LOW!!!’).

Those are okay endings, but not much happens… Which can be okay. I listened to a bunch of creepypasta stories a few years ago, and almost all of them had the structure:

1. I went to an isolated place / did an unusual thing

2. I saw a thing

3. I ran away

4. I’ve never gone there / done that thing again.

Personally, I prefer a bit more of a kick than this ending, but it’s pretty much expected in the style, hence this week’s ending is left quite open.

To give a bit of a sense of finality, I used a call-back to the opening line, which hopefully gives it a bit of a neater tying together of the story than a blunt ‘I ran away and now don’t go out on dark nights’ conclusion.

Finding the horror

This week’s horror is pretty clear, and it’s a bit of a shotgun loaded with different elements:

• Spooky people walking around in the dark

• Fear of infection (unclean person + unknown object covered in dirty rags)

• Darkness

• The uncanny (a giant head + a severed head which is still alive)

• The undead (a living severed head)

• Vampires! (Why not, eh?)

• Curses! (Sure, they’re fun)

• Communicable curses! (Even more fun)

• Tortured immortality! (Yikes!)

• Tortured immortality that could be transferred to you! (Double yikes!)

… And probably more!

For a change, the horror underlying this story isn’t capitalism (like many of my stories), and it might even be a stretch to say it’s patriarchy (like most of the rest). This is just a good old fashioned creepy thing, and sometimes that’s enough.

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I hope you enjoyed that! I had fun writing it.

Like I said above, I’ve been travelling around a bit this week, so I had to blast this out in spare hours on a laptop and after work. My apologies if I’ve missed a few typos. You’re always welcome to mention those in comments, BTW. I’d rather fix them for future readers than have them hanging around.

In the UK, it looks like the elections have swung things towards a party run by a guy who appears to take crypto bribes and drove the country into Brexit’s constant cascade of failures. I’ve plenty of things I could say about that, but in the end I’ve got a healthier message:

Go be kind and spooky.

Love to you all,

Mata

xxx

Well met! I’m Mata and I send you weekly tiny horror things. This week’s is especially tiny!

There have been a nice few extra subscribers this week, so welcome to my newsletter. This year there will be a new micro, flash, or short story each week, and we’ve reached 18. Go back and check out any you’ve missed! I write in whatever genre of horror takes my fancy, from comedy to grief-filled hauntings (only avoiding SA topics).

A special thanks to my handful of paying subscribers - your support is very much appreciated! It you’re not a subscriber yet and this all sounds good, sign up!

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Let’s get to this week’s tiny spookiness…

Your Promises And Mine

You promised me your heart, and I took it within myself.

You promised me your hand, and we married beneath the oak.

You promised me your head, that I would ever be in your thoughts.

But now your mind strays ever more each day,

So I promise your neck an axe, so your mind wanders nevermore.

The end

Each week, I also add some…

Writing notes

It was short and simple this week!

A few weeks ago, I was watching a show where someone said they promised another their heart (as a romantic turn of phrase). My mind turned then to ‘what other parts might you promise someone, and what if they decided to cash in that promise?’, so I wrote in my Notes app “I promise you my head”.

Cool.

Nice image.

How does that become a tiny dark tale?

This is one of those writing-prompts that could go a hundred wildly different ways for different people. For me, it took me into dark fairy tale territory.

I played with the idea of someone making bets with ever increasing stakes, always winning and becoming over-confident until they bet something they couldn’t afford to lose. This is a classic trickster ploy from many fairy tales, and I think there could be a very solid take on the prompt in that.

However, it didn’t get gel for me, so I went a different route: in what scenarios do we promise cherished parts of ourselves? The answer is of course ‘when we’re in love’.

This is a horror newsletter, so naturally the rash promise will backfire and a broken heart will lead to death and despair!

While I had the fairy tale setting in my head, the first draft didn’t convey the scene adequately.

The sing-song poem-esque rhythm of the language gives it a medieval ballad or nursery rhyme feel, but there wasn’t anything in the actual words that said ‘olde world’.

Adding in the words:

we married beneath the oak.

Solved three problems for me:

1. It gives a forest setting

2. A forest setting for a wedding screams fairy tales

3. This foreshadows why someone might solve their problems with an axe and extreme violence (see also: Jack and the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, and probably hundreds more)

I love a bit of foreshadowing, and it’s particularly nice when it’s possible even in a five line story!

Fairy tales are generally pretty brutal things, so if you’re ever stuck in one, mind your choice of words or it could turn out very badly for you!

And another week gallops past like a paranoid stagecoach through Sherwood Forest.

I hope life is treating you well. It’s been ups and downs for me this year, but overall it’s pretty good.

Like, hype, comment, and subscribe and all that! I reach new readers from you folks sharing, so please continue to spread the word of this newsletter. Seeing steady growth in readers is a huge motivation to keep writing these little tales.

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Next year, I plan to release my first novel, about a haunting in a remote area of England, and I’ll make sure you folks hear about it first. If you’re interested in reading an advance copy (and leaving me a nice day-one review) then I’ll be posting about how to get involved in this newsletter too.

Have a good one. Go be kind and spooky,

Love,

Mata

xxx

Greetings one and all! I’m Mata, and I send you very short weekly tales of horror, dark deeds, evil spirits, and suchlike fun.

In a stunning turn of events, this is already week 17 of a full year of weekly horror, and this time we’ve got a tale of undersea exploration in a site that should never have been disturbed, told in a ‘found fiction’ style.

Every week is a different flash fiction (i.e. less than 1000 words) story, so there’s no bad time to jump on board.

In the background of writing these stories each week, I’m also creating something fun for release in a couple of months, and next year I plan to launch my debut self-published horror novel. If you like ghost stories and British folklore, you’re in for a treat!

Let’s dive down to find…

Sunken Henge

INTERNAL MEMO

EXECUTIVE BRANCH ONLY
STRICTLY NO DISTRIBUTION

Re: Drilling exploration: Epsilon-Dogger-045

Following the March update, where significant stone formations blocked further exploitation of the North Sea Doggerland site, undersea teams investigated the blockages and discovered evidence of extensive pre-neolithic site construction.

The archaeological significance of this was deemed impedimentary to continued exploitation of natural assets, and so a limited project team (10 persons) was formed to remove obstructive structures.

To proceed, five divers began an undersea removal processes which cracked and ‘ceiling’ stone on a structure (estimated weight c. 50k kilos) revealing a walled-in area beneath. The recording is available (see attachment).

In the silt that filled the ‘room’ was an emaciated body. The limbs are visible on the footage (see 15m47s mark).

The footage becomes blurry, obscured by the dislodged seafloor material, but the body appears to move and attack the dive-team. A struggle follows.

One diver surfaced, joining the remaining five persons who were monitoring the dive from the ship.

The surviving diver had significant wounds to the neck, chest, and legs. Over the coming hours, his skin blistered and, despite warm weather, his skin cooled.

A search was conducted by submersible drone for the four missing divers, but nothing was recovered. They have not surfaced and are presumed to be lost.

The final contact was from dusk, at 20:52. The recording (attached) is audio-only and scrambled, with many voices in distress. What is discernible is that the injured man was vigorously attacking others on the vessel, and ignored all wounds and injuries to his body, including a harpoon through his torso.

No further contact has been received from the ship after that call.

The audio evidence cannot be verified, leaving open the possibility of hallucinations from as-yet unidentified toxin released from the sea bed site, but the video evidence suggests a potential for humans to survive highly extended durations in (what were previously considered to be) fatal environments. The audio report indicates this resilience may be transferable.

Satellite tracking of the vessel indicates no movement visible on the deck.

A containment unit has been dispatched to recover biological samples for study, re: longevity and defence applications. If the events were caused by a toxin, rather than a communicable immunity to injury, this also has exploitable properties.

Once sample collection is complete, the vessel will be reported sunk after an engine fire. Note: poor engine maintenance is attributable to crew misconduct, and removes the need for compensation to surviving family members.

The containment unit was due to reach the vessel this morning and they are currently overdue for reporting their initial findings. I anticipate these will arrive momentarily. I will share all further information as/when it comes to me.

MEMO ENDS

The end

Each week, to take you behind the writing scenes, I add…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

Ah, the eternal ‘where do you get your ideas?’ question. The seed of this one has been bobbing around my head for a very long time. It may even someday become something much bigger, but this week it popped up while I was listening to an album called ‘The Old Gods are Watching’ by Saloop.

The title is very evocative, so I was playing around with ideas for how something lost might be brought back to life.

I’ve been fascinated for while by an area called Doggerland. This is a large stretch of land that was lost undersea in various geological and climate shifts around 10-12,000 years ago. It used to connect present-day England to France, Belgium, Germany, and Denmark - it was huge!

Learning about this made me wonder what sites of human life might remain down there. Probably almost zero! This was pre-neolithic time, so any human camps would be long gone… But we are fiction writers! Do we let small things such as chronology cause us problems? NO! We just suggest there was a forgotten civilisation - or at least a group who were very determined to make sure something remained trapped forever.

So, while there’s nothing much from ‘old gods’ in here, the album’s title bumped up this interest in my head, and out popped a scene about the discovery of something dreadful on the ocean floor.

‘Found fiction’

Horror fans are pretty familiar with ‘found footage’ films: stories told with discovered footage, typically from a camera that once belonged to a now-missing person. The Blair Witch Project is the classic patient zero (although there are arguable precedents), and other directions were taken with films like Paranormal Activity or (less famously) Host, wherein the later was filmed in the COVID-19 lockdowns and features a group of friends doing a séance during a Zoom call with haunting outcomes.

Found fiction is less well-known, but uses the ephemeral surfaces for writing that surround us (messages boards, comment sections, newspaper reports, etc.) and takes those styles to tell stories.

Which also means that internal, secret corporate memos from the petrochemical industry, in the style of a research report, becomes a potential mode for storytelling.

This also brings on some interesting writing challenges: if I were a cold-blooded oil executive, how would I write about the loss of human life? How would I look at an event where normal employees become violent killing machines? Well, I’d look at this through the lens of profit.

For example, in my first draft, when five divers go underwater but four are killed, I wrote:

… Four of the five divers were never recovered.

Only one diver surfaced, …

But this was too touchy-feely. It suggests the writer cares how many people died.

The use of ‘Only’ in ‘Only one diver surfaced,’ also implies the writer feels this is very few or possibly even sad.

In the edit I’m sending to you, I cut those bits, leaving:

One diver surfaced, …

This makes the description colder and much less caring, i.e. perfect for a senior employee at a corporation destroying the planet.

There were many more tweaks and choices like this as I wrote: I tried to emphasise financial curiosity and the interests of billionaires (eternal life, warfare, hallucinogens, and/or all of the above) while steering clear of any empathy for the lives of lower employees.

I toyed with using the term ‘expendable’ or even ‘collateral’, but each of these felt like they gave more worth to the suffering humans than the narrator feels.

Finding the horror

Like many weeks, we’ve got multiple horrors stacked here:

• Something inhuman and best-left-buried is alive

• Death underwater

• Contagion

• An unkillable foe

In many regards this is classic ‘haunted house’ territory. Haunted house stories have three elements:

• The Monster: supernatural in its powers, even if its strength derives from insanity, and it is evil at its core

• The House: an enclosed space, which could be a literal house, a family unit, an entire town, or the world

• The Sin: someone is guilty of bringing the monster into the house (or invading the monster’s territory). This is a transgression that can include ignorance and often relates to the theme that the hero must learn

In this story we’ve got a clear monster (an immortal thing trapped thousands of years ago), a house (the boat), and an obvious sin (oil drilling exploration and desecration of the oceans).

One of the things that writing horror fiction every week does is that it attunes you to your base understanding of where true horror lies. So, like so often, the real horror here is…

• Capitalism

If oil companies weren’t driven by profit, we’d all shift to green energy immediately. It’s a no-brainer that we’re destroying the world, but some folks in power are getting far too rich to allow a rapid transition until they’ve sucked every penny out of fossil fuels.

It’s interesting to me that, even when I don’t choose to write about my key horrors (patriarchy is another one) they still pop up in the background of my stories, just like the almost-unkillable demons they truly are.

It’s time to bid adieu once again.

Before you go… please share this story and/or my newsletter in places where you congregate with other spooky folks. I’m always keen to reach new eyeballs and YOU can directly help with only a click or two:

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Likes and comments also are delightful, so go ahead and click those little icons at the end of this story!

Cheers all. Go be kind and spooky,

Love,

Mata

xxx

Hey there, I’ve got your order for a freshly baked tiny horror story! I’m Mata, and every week I send out flash fiction horror via this newsletter.

Everything here is human-authored (including typos), so if it’s fantastic or awful then I can’t blame anyone except myself.

I’ve also got a bit of a special announcement, but that’s right at the end of the newsletter.

If you’re new here: each week there’s something different. It’s not a running story, so you can jump in wherever you want, and each story is typically around 300-700 words, so they’re short enough to read in a few minutes with a tea or coffee. The genre of horror changes each week, depending on my mood: comedy, supernatural, occasionally a serial killer, cursed lands, vampires, and more! (The only thing I definitely don’t do is SA stories.)

This is week 16 of a whole year of tiny horror stories. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get every piping hot slice of spookies!

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Straight from the oven, here’s this week’s delicious tale…

Everything Is Better With Carbs And Cheese

She stops beneath the arch of a giant iron gateway to check the details on the pizza delivery app again. Customer name: Peter Dalton, and the GPS pin is straight ahead. In the screen’s corner, the app’s timer says ‘4m37s’. If she doesn’t get the pizza to Mr Dalton in less than five minutes then the lost takings will wipe out half of her shift’s wages.

Pushing her bike off again, she pedals into the cemetery. Weird place for pizza, but maybe everything is better with carbs and cheese.

Gravestones line each side of the tarmac path. It’s neat and sunny, with the scent of fresh trimmed grass clashing with the spicy pepperoni that has soaked into her clothes.

In the distance, she sees a string of parked cars and, beyond them, a group of people around a grave. Pulling up the GPS, the pin location matches: the customer is somewhere among the mourners. “Fuck,” she mutters.

3m07s

She hops from her bike at the end of the parked cars, dropping the kickstand and pulling out the steaming pizza; not as steaming as she’d like, but it’s still within the 30 minute window.

The time is too tight to remove her cycling helmet. It slips over her sweaty forehead as she tries to jog towards the funeral group in a way that conveys respect, hoping to attract the attention of whoever ordered the pizza so she doesn’t have to get any closer.

No luck. The only people turning around are giving her the sharpest of looks, practically spearing her with the affront of her gaudy uniform among the all-black dress code.

2m23s

“Ashes to ashes…” the priest intones. His gaunt features and whisps of white hair make him look like a candidate for the coffin himself. He’s ignoring her.

She clears her throat discretely, hovering at the end of the group. “Pizza?” she whispers. No takers. The priest’s glare could summon St Michael and his flaming sword, which at least would warm up the cooling box she’s carrying. “Anyone order pizza?” she tries again.

1m36s

There’s only one thing left to do. On her phone, she pulls up the customer’s details and presses the green ‘dial’ logo.

It seems to take an age to connect. The line clicks like a stick falling down an endless well.

1m04s

It’s ringing.

Holding the phone away from her ear, she can hear a jaunty xylophone ringtone, quiet though, so it must be in someone’s pocket.

Giving up on discretion, she stalks the edges of the group; some arsehole is too ashamed to admit they ordered food and she’s damned if she’ll pay the price.

But no matter where she stands, the ringtone remains distant.

“Who ordered this?” she says, full volume, holding up the box. The priest stops. The crowd turns.

She shoves through to the centre. A woman in a veil, presumably the widow, holds a damp tissue to her nose, mascara streaking her cheeks. Beside her, two children in tiny suits and ties stare at her, blank eyed and expressionless, like a pair of Damiens from The Omen.

The ringing is closer.

It’s coming from the coffin.

“Is…” she starts.

The woman in the veil’s eyes widen. She gives a tiny shake of her head: don’t.

0m23s

The pizza is practically cold.

“Is he—” she stops when she sees the name on the gravestone. Peter Dalton. No ‘loving husband’ or ‘cherished father’, not even a ‘RIP’; just the name.

The widow puts a hand on the pizza box and makes meaningful eye contact, but the ringing is coming from inside the coffin. What the actual fuck?

There are straps around the coffin. Not just straps for lowering it into the ground, but straps to keep it shut. Their thick leather is nailed into the wood, the nail-heads shining in the afternoon sun.

The widow’s hand is still on the pizza box. Her eyes broadcast in mile-high neon flashing letters: DON’T, but she doesn’t say a word.

The delivery rider inches closer to the coffin. Her app pings, confirming she’s at the GPS pin to deliver, on time. She crouches, and gently places the pizza box onto the coffin lid.

She backs away from the group, watching them watching her. She nearly trips over a headstone, but can’t look away. No one follows. They’re still staring when she reaches the cars.

The electric motors whine as the coffin lowers into the ground, but the mourners ignore it and watch her, making sure she leaves.

The end

Each week, I also add some background details about inspiration and the writing process, so here are the…

Writing Notes

Inspiration and the very first draft

This week I ran a 1h45m workshop at the Virtual Production Gathering about writing short scripts. As part of the workshop, I demonstrated how you can create a new story in 3 minutes using random word generators that dump out a job, adjective, and location.

I gave a live demo where I created a story in 3 minutes, with an audience, which came from ‘air steward’, ‘cruel’, and ‘court house’. No pressure, right? That story came out okay, resulting in a comedy, but when rehearsing the presentation I wrote a story based on ‘pizza deliverer’, ‘useful’, and ‘funeral parlour’.

As you can probably tell, that was the seed for today’s story.

Want to see what I came up with in three minutes? Here you go:

Useful pizza delivery person in a funeral home

Pizza lady rolls up on a bicycle.

She looks confused and checks the app on her phone. She checks again.

We see she’s standing in front of a funeral home.

The door opens, revealing grieving relatives, a priest, people in black sobbing.

She walks through the dazed crowd, whispering “Pizza? Anyone order pizza?”

No-one wants her there. Scornful looks all around.

She gets to the front and is confused. Who ordered?

She gets on the app – ‘Call customer’

She holds the phone up to her ear… We hear the ringing.

There’s a phone ringing somewhere in the room.

She scans the crowd, but can’t tell who it’s coming from, then she realizes…

She bends towards the coffin.

The ringing is coming from inside.

You can see the bones of the story are there, but the ending is a lot more blank.

Fixing the ending and finding the horror

The ending in the first draft is okay as a ‘dun dun DAAAAH’ kind of end, but I don’t think it quite hits how I’d want it to. I’m okay with leaving questions at the end of a story, but this is more of a ‘So… I guess they just open the coffin, then?’ question, or even worse it’s a ‘Huh?’.

The problem here is the context: in a funeral parlour, the coffin is going to be sent off towards a crematorium: if there’s a battery in the coffin that could be disastrous. If they’re going to bury the person then… well… just open it up. No problem. Either way, the solution is pretty easy.

To raise the stakes, the discovery of ‘there must be someone alive or, at the least, suspiciously recently deceased inside the coffin’ must happen at a moment where the pizza delivery person can’t do anything about it: the coffin needs to be about to go into the ground.

But we had two options there:

1. Someone is alive inside

2. Someone ordered pizza then was killed and put into the coffin

The first option is much more horrific than the first. To ‘nail’ this home, it needed to be clear that the coffin had been sealed with a great amount of care and effort, and that this probably wasn’t a quick job. I added the straps around the outside.

These had the benefit of adding a bit of extra mystery: this isn’t just a live burial, but a burial where the person inside the coffin should never be released.

The person inside the coffin is also sneaky: they realised they could attract a witness by ordering pizza to their location. This is clever, but also sinister: who are these people? Why are they burying the person? What threat does the coffin’s occupant hold that needs so much effort to seal him inside?

So, the horror here is multiplied:

• Burial alive

• A clever occupant in the coffin, potentially who doesn’t care about the wellbeing of a witness

• The threat of the crowd

• An unknown mystery about the coffin occupant’s potential threat

Not forgetting, of course:

• Techno-capitalism pushing delivery workers to rush into dangerous situations for low pay and punishing them if they fail

By changing the context, the simple ending from the first draft gains many more toppings.

And now, the end is here!

It’s time to face, my usual requests…

If you enjoyed this story, please tap the ‘like’ heart at the end, drop me a comment, and (if you’re feeling extra awesome) share this story with others.

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My apologies if this week’s post is a little more typo-ridden than usual, but I wrote it in a single sitting, whereas I usually draft and edit on different days. Hopefully it all made enough sense!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

In 2027 I will self-publish my first novel.

I’m incredibly excited to share it with you and I’ll be giving occasional updates about it as I approach publication.

One of the biggest things that helps a novel’s success is early positive reviews. If you’re interested in reviewing the novel and posting a review, I’ll be sharing info about how you can register to receive a digital Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of the novel before it is published.

Currently the manuscript is with a copy-editor and we’re going to work on it together through until the end of the year. I’ll keep you all posted how this develops.

Thank you for being a subscriber and keeping me motivated to develop my writing. I can barely wait to have my novel in the world and available for you to read, but I want to make sure I give it the best polish I can before it reaches you.

-

That’s really it for this week, so as always, I bid you: go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

P.S. Apologies if this week’s story made you hungry!

Hail! I’m Mata, but you can call me a taxi. I send out 100% human-authored tiny horror stories each week, and this time we’re entering an odd liminal space.

Every story is different and usually around 300-700 words long, so they only take a few minutes to read, and there’s no running plot (at the time of writing, maybe in the future). After each story, there are writing notes: if you’re interested in the inspiration or the choices I made while writing, that section is for you!

This is week 15 of a year of weekly horror flash fiction. Stay tuned to read them all!

Sounds intriguing? Love tiny little stories? Make sure you’re subscribed!

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Let’s flag down this week’s tale…

Smooth Ride

The Toyota Camry arrived exactly on time. Outside it was silver with black trim, and absolutely spotless. The driver greeted me in an accent I couldn’t place, and helped lift my luggage into the trunk.

All the windows were tinted jet black, so opening the rear door on the passenger side brought quite a surprise: through the opening, I saw a corridor where the floor, walls, and ceiling were decked entirely in red carpet and it stretched at least 50 metres into the distance.

“Hop in,” said the driver in their nowhere-everywhere accent. “There’s plenty of room.”

That was undeniable. Who could resist? I stepped inside.

The door closed behind me and I stood in the corridor. Outside, the tinted-world slid past but I felt no sense of movement. I walked along the carpet, my trainers almost silent on the thick plush. From somewhere, I heard a bass note like a giant dog growling in an echoing drone. I could feel it in my eyeballs, vibrating them.

There were no light fittings, but the space appeared evenly lit throughout, like the air itself glowed slightly. I have no idea what breathing that might have done to me, but it tasted like candy floss: not bad, as such, but too sweet, like I’d regret it later and there’d be a stale taste in my mouth afterwards.

As I neared the end of the corridor, I saw it turned to the left. Rounding the corner, I was confronted by a slim, white man in his late 70s wearing a grey three-piece suit and large gold hooped earrings. He had what looked like a fractal pattern tattooed on his shaved-smooth scalp. His demeanour and sharp gaze made me think of a retired college professor who once took delight in failing students. He was reclined in a pink and white striped deck chair beside a tiny table bearing a pot of tea and two tiny cups and saucers, like they were set for a child’s party. Behind him and at a great distance, the corridor faded into pure darkness.

He gestured that I should sit in a second vacant deck chair, which I did. The journey I’d booked was from Croydon to King’s Cross St. Pancras International train station and takes around one hour by car. I didn’t want to stand that whole time.

The man licked his lips, then spoke so slowly that each word took a whole breath. “You. Came. At. Last.” He leaned forward to pour tea for us both. He winced, as if the action caused him pain, and the grimace revealed yellowed teeth. After laboriously pouring us each a cup, he collapsed back into his chair. Sweat dripped from his brow.

I didn’t reply, and the man showed no sign of expecting me to say anything.

He leaned forward, winced again at the action, flashed those grim teeth, and took his cup. He raised it and toasted me. “To. Your. Health.” I took my cup and raised it in return.

He sipped, and spasms began immediately. Trembling started in his cheeks and eyelids, then his neck, making his head thrash like a flag in a storm. Within seconds his body convulsed, tossing the tiny cup behind him, throwing him from the chair. Tendrils of foam spattered from his mouth and nose onto the carpet around him as he shuddered and twisted. His body contorted like a sheet of paper screwed up in the fist of a god. In fifteen seconds it was over. His crumpled form fell still, his deck chair lay on its side, but the tea-table remained remarkably untouched.

I replaced my cup upon its saucer, leaving it untasted.

As if pulled by invisible strings, the man’s chair and his wrecked corpse slid smoothly back along the corridor into the darkness. They made a hissing white noise on the carpet fibres as they disappeared and this eventually was lost within the corridor’s pervasive growling hum.

I sat alone, in the deck chair, at the table, with the undrunk tea and my eyeballs shivering.

I noticed the drool from the man’s deathly fit was fizzing in the carpet, leaving a dark brown stain and making a smell like a badly wired plug socket.

To get away from this, I stood and returned the way I’d come along the corridor, towards where the Toyota Camry car door was embedded in the wall. Outside, the city had ground to a halt.

Checking the view more closely, I saw the gothic Victorian brickwork of King’s Cross St. Pancras.

My ears popped as I opened the door and stepped out. The driver opened the trunk and retrieved my luggage for me.

“That was quick,” I remarked. I must have been inside for less than five minutes.

“Good traffic, and I just charged the car,” the driver said.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

(5 stars)

Tags: ‘Non-chatty driver’ ‘Smooth ride’ ‘Recommended’ ‘Clean’ ‘Would ride again’

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It’s time for the behind the scenes section…

Writing Notes

Inspiration

This week’s idea jumped fully formed into my head based on a parody of Sonic Youth’s Goo album cover. The parody was posted on an old-school comedy forum I once frequented and still meander through occasionally, B3ta.com.

Here’s the image:

Incidentally, Happytoast (who drew this) is selling some of his art pieces, with a link to the sale on Bluesky, so drop on by if you fancy helping out an artist.

Reading the text on the image, I imagined the interior of Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine as having corridors filled with screams and snacks. I know that’s not what was meant there, but the image instantly got me thinking about a vehicle with a corridor inside it, and so today’s weirdness was born.

For the tea party at the end of the corridor, I think I had a mix of Alice’s Mad Hatter and Twin Peaks in my head. I was aiming for something like a sense of oddness that is almost paralysing, where we become a spectator.

Have you ever felt that? When you see something so unexpected, or perhaps even awful, that your brain just goes brrrrrrrrrr like a hung-up phone-call and doesn’t give you you any help in what to do with the scene? I get that sometimes when I look at the news at the moment: a general state of shock that these things can happen in a world where apparently adults should face consequences.

I’ve also had that feeling for minor things, like when I locked myself out of my house. I watched my hand pull the door shut, fully aware that the door keys, which were usually so snuggly wrapped in that same hand pulling on the door, were not there this time. The scene felt wrong. The action felt wrong. I could only observe as I pulled the door. Oops.

I’m not sure where the poisoned tea and the body sliding into the darkness came from, nor the s…l…o…w… speech of the odd old man who drinks the poison. That’s what my subconscious told me to write, so that’s what we got!

Finding the horror

I could’ve gone a few ways here: impossible spaces have their own horror through the disruption of reality. That alone would’ve been one approach, e.g. with the protagonist becoming lost forever in red-carpeted corridors. That would be sooky enough and okay, but I think it needed more of a hook for a punchy short story.

Adding the strange man with discordant details (his sinister demeanour, the earrings, deck chairs, tattoo, tiny tea cups) adds a sense of ungroundedness which amplifies the already peculiar atmosphere.

Of course, seeing a person die in front of you is literally horrifying. Self-inflicted poison, which you are about to drink yourself, makes this stranger and darker. The darkness of the strange death is somewhat lessened perhaps by the initial strangeness of the man. Is he even a man? Is any of this real?

When the body slides away without any clear power moving it, we’re back into the realm of the uncanny.

And finally, we arrive at our destination very quickly; much faster than could usually be expected. Either the car travelled in an uncanny way, or there is lost time for the narrator. In both circumstances, something is wrong.

I didn’t want to land too heavily on any of these beats, instead I wanted the prose to flow between them to generate a collective discomfort that felt more eerie than terrifying.

The style and ending

For the idea to work, this vehicle needed to belong to someone other than the narrator, and if it were a friend’s car then there would be more of a need to discuss the experience. By setting this in a taxi, it allowed me to side-step many of the problems that a familiar car or driver would present.

This also meant that there should be a framing device for the writing. I could write this as a simple ‘weird thing happened’ story, but decided it would be much more fun to write it as a review for a taxi ride. This meant a slightly formal style (with some more literary flourishes for readability) and it would only make sense if it was written in first-person past tense.

Of course, that style alone wouldn’t be enough to tell a reader they’re reading a review, so it needed to end with a star rating, tags, and familiar submission-form button text.

But tell me: would you get in a taxi with this review?

That’s the end of this week’s ride!

As I mentioned at the top, readers sharing and recommending this newsletter to their network of friends is the best way for me to reach like-minded folks. It would lovely for me if you did that:

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It’s a complex time and there are plenty of real world nightmares out there, so I hope these fictional ones I send out are a pleasant change of pace.

Go tell your loved ones how much they mean to you.

Also, go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

Hey hey! It’s chuckle-buddy Mata here with another jolly jape of weekly horror!

We’re onto week 14 of 2026’s year of weekly flash fiction. Every week I post a new tiny story that sits on the spectrum of spookies, from comedy to gruesome, sci-fi to folklore, wherever the week takes me. Sounds good? Subscribe!

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The story is this way…

Huh-honk

Damp seeps into the clown’s baggy trousers where he’s kneeling on the newly laid grave. Face paint-tinted tears drip onto the turf.

He leans down to the ground, as if listening to the soil. You edge closer. Closer. The reek of sweat and cigarette smoke permeates his oversized patchwork jacket. Closer. So close the clown would almost bump into you if he turns, your approach hidden by the clown’s enormous crimson-red curly wig.

He is focused, his eyes are closed.

You hear it; the thing the clown is listening for.

Very, very faintly, a strange sound comes from below the soil…

Huh-honk… Huh-honk…

The clown returns to kneeling. You tip-toe a little further back.

“It’s no use now,” his voice is high and creaks like a haunted door. “I know those are mine, but I’ve got new ones, and now you’ll never steal from me again.”

As the clown rises, you duck behind a gravestone. He brushes himself off with mud-soiled white gloves.

For the first time, he seems to sense you are there. The width of his wig gives you a moment to entirely hide: the gravestone you’re behind is big enough to block you from sight. You hold your breath.

A crow caws in the trees overlooking the graveyard. Wind soughs through the branches.

Then there’s a short rustling of clothes like a shrug, followed by a contented sigh.

The clown walks away, and with each step you hear the strange sound again, but this time clear as an elephant’s trumpet:

Huh-honk. Huh-honk. Huh-honk. Huh-honk.

The clown’s shoes recedes as he walks back to his tiny car. As he drives away, the sound echoes weakly from within the fresh grave.

Huh-honk.

—

The end

Each week, alongside the story, I also add some…

Writing Notes

Inspiration and challenges

This week I watched the brilliant horror series ‘Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen’ on Netflix. There is absolutely nothing in the series that should have directly inspired this story, but mid-episode the idea of a clown having buried-alive a rival for stealing a comedy horn popped into my head, with the sound of the horn still coming from below the ground. I added this into my notes app, and it was a no-brainer for the story I’d write.

As you can tell, it changed a little: the comedy horn turned into honking clown shoes. Why? Well…

The original idea is nice; it’s got the typical contrast of many clown stories between the jolly and the sinister. But it’s got problems too:

• unless we write from inside the clown’s head, how would an observer know the honking from below ground is a stolen horn?

• if we write from inside the clown’s head to solve that problem, then how do we build any suspense into the story? It’s simply describing what he’s done, which is creepy but lacks any sense of revelation: more of a tableaux than a story.

• So I pretty much have to write from an external viewpoint, and I’m back to needing an explanation for what the horn sound actually is…

I needed to have a sound that was distinctive but that also could naturally be triggered outside the grave too. My first thought was the above-ground clown could signal with his horn that he was above, but then it’s just confusing… This had me stumped for a while.

Clown shoes were the answer.

Fun fact: this may be the first time in history anyone has written that sentence.

Anyway, clown shoes provided something that could make a comedy noise, but also that would naturally trigger later in the story, when the clown moved away, to reveal what was buried with someone in the grave below.

After this, the next challenge comes from the perspective. If we’re not inside the head of the burying-clown, where are we (the reader) viewing this from?

Regular readers will know I enjoy occasionally writing second-person perspective stories. I’ve got a little series of them here, among other examples in my archive. Second-person means the story is written using ‘you’ pronouns, i.e. ‘you walk along the path’, ‘you smell the flowers’, ‘you summon the demon scrimbleshanks’, etc. They can be disorienting for readers, because it forces personal involvement in a way that not everyone enjoys, but I think there’s a lot of value in putting the reader so deeply into the fiction.

In today’s story, I placed the reader as another visitor to the graveyard, and who was clearly intrigued by the strange sight of a clown kneeling over a grave. Who wouldn’t want to know the story there? Hopefully people always read with curiosity, so the leap from ‘reader’ to ‘graveyard visitor’ should be only a small one emotionally, making it easier imaginatively too.

Finding the horror

Some weeks, like last week’s story, the horror is relatively conceptual. This week’s story also keeps the horror off-the-page somewhat: we don’t see a thieving clown forced into a coffin, we don’t see how this was covered up literally and metaphorically, we don’t hear the soil thumping onto the lid and growing softer as it is buried deeper and deeper… But we know that happened. So, we’ve got a few things here;

• Being buried alive

• Vengeful clowns being untrustworthy and vengeful

• Clowns generally triggering coulrophobia for many

• … And the risk of detection

The last one, i.e. the possibility that the viewer may get noticed by an angry clown with unknown (but clearly quite awful) consequences, is heightened significantly by the use of second-person pronouns: this isn’t an abstract ‘the clown might see the observer’, this is ‘the clown might see me!’. It’s much more personal, and so hopefully also scarier!

Alright, I think that’s it for this week. If you’re a celebrator of Easter (theologically or nutritionally) then I hope you have a good one. I hope you’re all keeping your heads clear enough in this world that’s trying to constantly crowd our thoughts.

In the next seven days, around 200 people will read this story, and more will read it in the longer term. However, very few will click the ‘like’ heart at the bottom or the ‘share’ link. How about you be one of those lovely people who does?

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Have a good one. Stay clear-headed, and go be kind and spooky,

Love,

Mata

xxx

Howdy, y’all! I’m Mata, and I send out tiny horror stories in all kinds of sub-genres every week!

A few are experimental (like this choose-your-own-adventure one, or this comment-section horror), but most are various forms of supernatural (hauntings, vampires, zombies, and more). Last week we had a gruesome serial-killer/zombie mashup, but this week we’ve got something much more grounded.

Every story aims to give a smile and/or shiver in around 300-700 words, so only take a couple of minutes to read. Sounds like your kind of thing?

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Thank you for being here and reading, and special thanks as always to my paying subscribers <3

In a truly horrifying twist of fate, this is week 13 of a whole year of weekly horror. That means we are already/only one quarter of the way through 2026! That’s both gone incredibly fast, and frankly I feel like we’ve had enough global events for the year and I’d like it to all stop now. Anyway, let’s ignore that and move swiftly on.

I’m particularly happy with this week’s story, so let’s open the casino doors and walk into…

Low Stakes

Mrs and Mr Earnshaw are already drunk when they push the pram across the casino floor towards Doris Peabody. Mr Earnshaw’s Italian linen shirt is undone, displaying a sheen of sweat and a gold medallion nestled in his ample chest hair. The jewels sewn onto Mrs Earnshaw’s dress reflect a thousand gaudy colours. Slot machines clang, bells ring, and yet somehow their baby sleeps on.

“We’ll see you here at ten,” slurs Mrs Earnshaw as she tilts in her high heels. “Don’t be late.”

With only that, they wobble away among the rows of machines, arms around each other for balance.

The sleeping child, Edgar, is tuck into the pram under a blanket embroidered with fluffy sheep. Only his pudgy pink face is visible.

“Stay asleep,” Doris whispers. Babysitting is only worth the minimum wage so long as the child remains unconscious.

All around, coins fall, electronic music trills, and dealers holler about open seats at their tables.

“Texas Hold’em! You there, young lady!” The young man’s voice stabs through the din. “You look lucky. Come play a hand!”

Doris glances down at her outfit: straight cut blue jeans, sensible brown shoes, and a plain black hoodie. Did that look lucky? Could card dealers be blind?

“Low stakes first hand, starting now.” The young man winks in a way that somehow manages to fly over ‘leery’ and land in ‘charming’.

Screw it. Doris grabs the solitary dollar bill from her pocket and drags the pram to the card table. She lays down her bet.

Under the young man’s magical hands, the dollar vanishes and a dowdy chip reappears in its place. He flicks cards out, each landing neatly before the players. A spherical man with eyebrows like grey hedges and a wide cowboy hat chortles at her bid.

Just one hand, she promises herself.

The other players fold.

Doris wins.

Only five dollars.

Or: about twenty minutes of babysitting.

“Told you luck was by your side,” says the dealer, winking at her again.

Edgar stretches then snuggles. He seems content.

Without thinking, she’s bet on the next hand. Two players fold on the flop, Cowboy Hat folds on the turn, and Doris wins on the river.

Twenty five dollars.

Edgar stirs. Time to walk away. If he wakes then it’ll be hours before he settles again.

Edgar nestles a little deeper under his blanket. Maybe the sounds are soothing for him? Just one more hand.

But it’s not only one.

Doris’s pile of chips grows. They’re not dull colours anymore, but an array of reds, blues, and emerald greens, some with holographic edges that sparkle like Mrs Earnshaw’s dress.

She’s up fifteen thousand dollars.

A crowd surrounds the table, and the pram is the only thing giving her any space.

“The lady can’t lose!” pronounces the dealer as he deals the next round.

Cowboy Hat is the only other player left in the game. He’s been pulling rolls of chips from a brown leather fanny pack, keeping his stacks of chips topped up to match hers. His shirt is soaked with sweat. He’d been fidgeting on each previous hand, but there’s something different this time. The way he shifts on his seat is focused. There’s a new stillness in his pose.

The flop is revealed. Doris peaks at her cards. They’re good, again.

Cowboy Hat pulls out a new roll of chips and bets high.

Doris matches it.

The dealer flips the turn.

Cowboy Hat smiles like the greasy winner in a pig-wrestling contest. He raises his bet.

The crowd gasps.

“Thirteen—” the dealer’s voice cracks. He clears his throat. “Thirteen thousand from Mr Duke.”

Doris blinks. Checks her cards. Her hand still looks good. She pushes her whole pile into the middle. “Fifteen thousand.”

Cowboy Hat—Mr Duke—leans back. He stares at the pile. He seems to stretch, arms reaching behind him, then pulls a roll of chips from somewhere unthinkable. “Three thousand more.”

The crowd gasps again.

Doris stares at her pile. I can’t lose it all. I won’t lose it all.

“Can you call, ma’am?” the dealer says.

Doris knows she can’t. There’s only two thousand.

Edgar stirs.

“All in,” Doris says. She pushes her remaining, now seemingly small, pile into the bet area.

“You ain’t got enough, honey,” Duke says.

Doris stares at his dripping features, the deep glistening pores of his nose, the blotches of red spattering his cheeks and chin.

Without breaking eye contact, she lifts Edgar onto the table, placing him in the betting area.

The room is silent.

“All done?” the dealer finally says.

No one speaks. No one breathes.

The dealer turns the final card. Duke grins like a skull.

The end

Every week, I add a bit of ‘behind the scenes’ detail, so here are the…

Writing notes

Inspiration

I wrote the basic story for this week in 3 minutes! (It then took around 2.5 hours of writing and editing to reach the version you see above.)

Like in my cat-sitting horror from a few weeks ago, I used randomiser tools to create a prompt, shuffling through a few options until I found something I liked.

The job came from here:

https://52prompts.com/random-person-generator/

I went through a few until I got ‘babysitter’.

Next was a random adjective:

https://randomword.com/adjective

Which gave me ‘defeated’.

The location came from here:

https://52prompts.com/random-location-generator/

And so I ended up with a defeated babysitter in a casino. What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

The very first outline

Typically I go straight to the final form, but this time I tried a different approach: I set myself a literal 3 minute timer to write the outline of the story. I also did this twice more! Including the time on the randomiser, I created three short story outlines in less than 15 minutes. Give it a try!

This is the 87 words I first wrote as the outline:

Parents leave a babysitter with a pram through a casino. The babysitter watches them walk away and dolefully eyes all the winnings that are being accumulated around him.

He finds some spare change in his pocket and puts it on a poker table… And wins!

The winnings rack up, gaining acclaim…

But then the odds are high and the babysitter needs to match the stakes. They’ve no more money, so lift the baby onto the table, then the final card is turned just as the parents return.

That became the basis of the 777 word story you see above.

As you can see, a few things changed:

• The babysitter turned from a man into a woman. I was uncertain about this: on one hand, it’s nice to undermine the stereotype of babysitter=woman, on the other hand there’s the point that financial precarity is often multiplied by gendered circumstances.

• The affluence of the parents is raised to create a greater contrast with the situation of their babysitter.

• The game changed from generic poker to Texas Hold’Em. Card experts can probably pick holes in my description of the bidding process and suchlike, but I did a little research into different variations where wild bets might emerge, and Texas Hold’Em emerged as a game in which this could happen (albeit not in a public casino context, but… it’s a story!).

• Cowbay Hat, AKA Mr Duke, was added to raise the stakes: who would want to lose to someone like that?

• I removed the parents returning at the end, after the baby-bet has been placed. Instead, I went with the opponent grinning like a skull. Cliché? Sure. But it also goes straight to a sense of danger and death. Sometimes that’s more important.

Other things stayed the same:

• Setup: a babysitter is unpaid and underappreciated

• Conflict/escalation: the babysitter is lured by potential wealth into a high-stakes game

• Twist: the only thing left to bet is the baby

In the first long-draft of the story, I started in past-tense, then switched unintentionally to present-tense halfway through. I think, to nail the ending, present-tense was necessary, so I went back and edited the first half to match. The rest of the drafting went pretty smoothly.

Finding the horror

Is this horror? I think so!

• Inequality

• Financial precarity (capitalism) pushing people to take needless risks

• Child endangerment

• … And is Mr Duke the Devil?!?

The last point drew me in as I drafted and edited the story. I didn’t want to go heavily into the idea in the text, but having this framing in my mind helped me amplify the disgust and menace of his characterisation.

It’s certainly not as clearly horror as something with vampires, or a child-eating plot of land (which incidentally is one of my favourites I’ve written for this newsletter), but I think there’s more than enough here to say this is quietly menacing.

And that’s the newsletter for this week!

The world continues to be insane, so I hope a little fictional horror helps your nervous system safely do the necessary ju jitsu rolls it needs to survive the onslaught.

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Until next week, take care of yourselves, and go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

*Waving with someone else’s arm* Hi! I’m Mata, and I send out horror flash fiction every week.

There have been quite a few new subscribers this week so a special welcome to the new folks! Most stories are around 300-700 words long, so only a few minutes of reading each time. There’s a mix of horror genres: supernatural, comedy, sci-fi, folk, bizarre, haunted houses, cursed land, occasionally a serial killer, and more! (Never SA or similar.) Today’s one is a bit more gruesome than usual, and I’ve something somewhat silly in mind for next week to balance it out!

This week 12 of my year of weekly horror. If you’re not subscribed yet, click the button below. If you’re a regular reader then perhaps you’d consider upgrading to a paid subscription to show support for my writing? Thank you again to my paid subscribers!

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Let’s lurch into this week’s story…

The Town Hero

I’ve been told most people don’t daydream about murder, but anyone who says this has got to be lying.

I’m not crazy; I don’t want to make people suffer. It’s just I’ve got this intense curiosity about the feelings of the act. Suffering would, I know, be part of it, but that’s a side product and not interesting.

Take eyeballs, for example. Who in their right mind isn’t just a little curious about what it would feel like to put their hands on either side of someone’s face and dig the thumbs right into the sockets, popping out those little suckers.

Suckers! That’s the right word. Can’t you just imagine the soft sucking noise they would make as they plop free of the eyelids?

Again, it’s not that I want someone to suffer. If I wanted to hear wailing and screaming I’d have a baby. And yet, the idea of doing this to a dead body is just wrong. What would be the point? The juices wouldn’t flow in the same way.

Did you know that intestines swell up when they leave the body cavity? I’ve done a lot of reading about this. I’m a very highly qualified first-aider and know all kinds of things that can happen to bodies. If I get the chance, I’m first on the scene to help squish someone’s organs back inside them, sliding my fingers across the slick membranes, gripping slippery tubes, plucking the attaching tissues.

Is it so weird to imagine scenarios where human bodies are destroyed? Everyone has been in a meeting where they wished a steel safe would spontaneously drop onto a speaker’s head. Just go full Wile E. Coyote on someone. Maybe it was a boss. Maybe it was a colleague. That crushing weight just dropping right onto them, folding their head into their shoulders and torso as it falls, impaling them on the office chair, leaving only jiggling legs and dripping meat. It’s not weird to think about that. Everyone does it, I bet.

So, the ‘torturing animals when you’re a kid’ thing. Don’t get me wrong, I was tempted. There were dogs that deserved it, or at least I thought they did, but I held back. It only took a bit of reflection to realise the dogs are just being dogs. I didn’t need to be cruel to them. It was the owners; they were the ones who should be taken apart.

I resisted.

I fit in.

I blended.

You never even noticed me.

And then the living-dead attacked.

The infected were still alive but beyond sense and reason.

Finally I was allowed to act. It was good that I would act.

And now I’m a hero. I’m the saviour of the town.

The problem is that I’ve been too good. There aren’t any zombies left nearby, but I’ve opened a door in myself, a hunger to dismantle the human engine, to lay out its parts for inspection, to render them disparate.

I kept my drives in check for so long and now they’re unleashed. I’ve run out of targets and the leash doesn’t fit anymore.

There’s one thought that keeps running through my mind: I won’t be a hero much longer.

The end

I hope you enjoyed that!

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Every week I also add behind the scenes notes about the writing process:

Writing notes

Telling two stories

This week’s story came from an old note in my ideas list:

Serial killer who has never killed and then there’s a zombie apocalypse

The idea had sat on my list for a long time. I never really got the feel for it, and I think I know what held me back from writing: this is two stories.

In story one, we’ve got a character who suffers from a malignant personality disorder. They lack empathy for the suffering of others, but have also learned to blend in.

First-person narrators can be charming, and are often compelling. We feel a human instinct to relate to them, which is scary when they show us terrible things. Perhaps even more so if they hold up a mirror to our dark thoughts. Now, personally I don’t daydream about dismembering people, but I’ve met pretty well adjusted people who occasionally do. It’s the ability to think these things and not act on them that’s truly important.

As a horror writer, I can think of terrible things, but I actively abhor the idea doing any of them in life. Life is precious. Let’s not waste it with making others suffer. Our actions and influences on the world are what count, and our inner thoughts can still run wild.

Many people hold this contradiction inside them, so the protagonist, while extreme, might seem relatable. Nonetheless, that extremity is unsettling, and that could have been the full story.

The story could have ended here:

You never even noticed me.

The ability for someone harbouring such dark thoughts to blend into everyday society is worrying, and that could be a final line.

This ‘You never even noticed me’ could be a great punchy ending because it does something different from the text before: it adds in the second-person pronoun ‘you’.

Before that point, the narrator says ‘I’. They say ‘I’ a lot. For them, their feelings and experiences are the entire point of the world. The bodies of others are most valuable as potential vessels of sensory pleasure for the narrator. They’re a narcissist.

… But then we get ‘you’.

In first-person stories, it is always implied that the narrator is talking directly to us, but we’re often kept out of the story: the addition of ‘you’ makes the reader feel uncomfortably close.

But it didn’t end there; the story shifts gear entirely into a zombie story.

In the second story, you’re got a narrator with dark impulses who feels relief at being able to act on them, and who receives praise for the instincts they repressed through their whole life until that moment. However, once the zombies are under control, they still feel the urge to kill.

Drop the first half and this could have been a whole story by itself, too.

I think this is what blocked me on the idea: this is two stories in one, but I hadn’t realised that.

I became able to write this when I realised there would be a radical shift in context halfway through. It would be jarring, but isn’t that fun?

We can get so hung up on trying to write the perfect thing we forget to write the most fun thing.

It’s weird to shift genre (serial killer to zombie) halfway through a story (see also: Dusk ‘Til Dawn, and, to an extent, also the incredible Sinners).

It’s unusual to make a (potential) serial killer into a hero (although not unprecedented: Taxi Driver does an amazing job of this, also I Am Not a Serial Killer).

It’s disorienting… It’s also a lot of fun!

Voice

First-person makes having a strong narratorial voice easier, it also means there can be more playful grammar. I’ve talked about that a bit before, and you can see it in the use of exclamation marks like:

Suckers!

Or the little needless words like ‘now’ here:

Now, personally I don’t…

I also used a lot more italics than usual in this story. I try to avoid italics in my fiction writing, mostly because the sentence and word choices should be strong enough that the reader finds their own points of emphasis, but also because italics can be harder to read on a screen.

When it’s leaning like this, I find it harder to tell the letters apart, which adds stress to the reading experience. Particularly when they become a bigger block of text like this. Urgh!

I don’t want readers to squint at the words, I want the words to flow into them.

However, I wanted this narrator’s voice to seem very energetic. Adding the italics on words so often makes it seem like the narrator is working very hard to be likable and convincing, with (hopefully) the opposite effect. Did that work for you? Let me know in the comments!

I used italics as a subtle way of showing the narrator was trying too hard to fit in, and in the effort making themselves just a little odd. Not so much that you’d say ‘hey, that’s a serial killer’, but enough that you might avoid them at a workplace drinks.

Finding the horror

For horror flash fiction (i.e. very short stories like the ones I post here weekly) I think it’s good to write on instinct, but it’s also good to reflect on what deeper fears a story plays on. This week we’ve got three key fears underlying the narrative:

• A person with very dark thoughts who hides in plain sight and thinks they’re normal

• A person harbouring dark thoughts is close to you

• A hero whose skills might become a threat (see also Lex Luthor’s take on Superman)

Each of these could be the starting point for an entirely different story. If you fancy a challenge, try writing one. I’d love to see anything you come up with!

It is time to bid you adieu. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but I’ll be back next week with something new. Hold the fort until then!

Want to make me smile? Click the ‘like’ heart at the bottom of this message.

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Until next time, go be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

Take a seat! I’m Mata, and this is my newsletter of tiny horror stories. A special hello to new subscribers, and welcome back to others!

We’re onto week 11 of a whole year of weekly spookies. If you like bite-sized shivers, make sure you are subscribed!

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Okay, let’s settle into today’s story…

Free Two-Seater Sofa, Possibly Haunted

The advert said: “Free: leather two-seater sofa, possibly haunted.”

I needed a sofa; what’s the worst that could happen?

We wrote to the owner and she responded almost immediately. That afternoon she turned up with the sofa lashed precariously to a trailer; safe driving be damned, she must’ve needed space in her apartment fast. She was a bony woman, around 35, with frizzy hair clutched in a black plastic claw. She had the gaunt cheeks and bloodless pallor I’d expect from a hermit, not someone living in Croydon.

The sofa was heavier than it looked. The wide rounded arms and back made it top-heavy and hard to grip. We carried it into my ground-floor flat together. I tried to let it down gently, but the curves meant it slipped, sending it plummeting towards my toes. The previous owner somehow managed to become even whiter and scurried off without saying goodbye, almost slamming the door behind her. By the time I’d reached the door, her engine was revving and she blasted away along the street.

The leather was a deep browny-red. Charitably, you could call it ‘off burgundy’, but if I’m being honest it’s ‘dried blood’. Not a charming shade, but at least it was free.

Overall it was in good nick. The arms and back formed a wide U at the same height all around, and it was tall enough an adult could easily crouch unseen behind it. As I discovered in the following days, the roundness meant things could easily slide off the arms, almost like the sofa resented things resting on it.

There were a few rips on the corners. Nothing major. At first I thought they were from a cat’s claws, but they’re too widely spaced for that.

After a week, I heard scratching coming from behind it. I’d placed it away from the wall, so I could easily check there was nothing there. Whenever I looked, the sound stopped. It would be silent for five minutes, ten, or more, then the scratching started up again. It could’ve been a neighbour, fiddling with something in the adjoining wall. Perhaps the way it stopped when I looked was coincidence. Perhaps, I thought, it was really shy mice.

The seat padding was great: solid and plump, with just the right amount of give. I’ve had second-hand furniture before, usually Ikea cast-offs, and the padding is always the killer: it gets squashed in a year or two of use and never really comes back. Designed obsolesce so you’ll buy a replacement. The enshittification of furniture. This sofa wasn’t like that. It was created to stay with you until death.

It was weird though. Despite the good padding, sometimes I’d come into the room and see the seat cushion still rebounding, gently expanding as if someone stood up just before I entered.

I lived alone.

The scratching got louder, unmissable, and unmistakably in the room: it wasn’t coming through the wall. Like fingernails rasping along the back of the sofa. I heard where they would catch on the seams in the leather.

The leather.

The soft leather, stained browny-red.

I’d been under pressure at work, and started having bad dreams. Nothing I remembered, instead I just awoke with a jolt, sheets wrapped around me, clinging to my skin.

Then one night, after awaking panting and sweaty, I swore I heard a small sound from the living room: a throat clearing, as if it were about to speak. I heard it. I know I did. When I went into the room, I could smell cigarettes in the air.

Soon I started to see things moving in the corner of my eye. A dark shape scampering, small-human sized, like it had been watching me.

The scratching stopped. For weeks there was only the dark shape.

Then, not the sound of a scratch, but a breath right beside my ear, and the scent of smoke.

I leapt from the seat. I never sat on it again. I went straight to my laptop.

“Free: leather two-seater sofa, haunted.”

I didn’t have a car, so borrowed a wheelbarrow and dragged the damn thing to the house of the first person who replied to my advert.

They said they were a sceptic. I wonder if they still are.

The end

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Each week I add few notes about the process of writing the story…

Writing notes

Inspiration

The photo at the top of this story is of my real, second-hand sofa. I’ve been thinking a lot in the last month about second-hand furniture, and how its stopped being a thing.

Decades ago, a sofa would be an investment that might last half your lifetime or more. You’d buy one and expect it perhaps to need restuffing occasionally, but overall expect it to outlast almost anything else you owned. These days, unless you’re dropping thousands and thousands on your furniture, it’s designed to be hard to maintain: want to restuff a seat? Nope. The whole thing is stapled down. You will never get that cover taut again. Want to change the covers or wash them properly? Good luck and bon voyage.

But furniture is such a personal thing. It carries us and sits almost invisible on a daily basis. It becomes part of our identity. And, when we pass, what happens to the things we were so close to?

These thoughts swirled to become today’s story. It’s hard to imagine what a haunted sofa might do to a person, and I enjoyed the challenge of that.

Sensory detail

At first, I didn’t have much sensory detail in there, mostly sight and a little touch. When I went through on the final edit I added in the cigarette smoke, which I think is such an easy scent to imagine I think it brings a little vivid life to the scenes.

The ending

I’ve said this a few times before: I don’t think horror stories this length really need an explanation. Why is the sofa haunted? Who really cares! The haunting is the fun.

So rather than spending time on worrying about why this was all happening, the ‘resolution’ is that the curse becomes spread to someone else, except this time the advert’s wording has been changed from ‘possibly haunted’ to simply ‘haunted’.

Sometimes just a little change is enough to show the world is different at the end of the story compared to the beginning!

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That’s it from me this week! I hope you’re keeping sane among all the madness.

Please do the ‘like’/share/subscribe things, and I love reading your comments :)

Go be kind and spooky!

Love,

Mata

xxx

Jump around! Hiya everyone, it’s Mata, and I’m back with your weekly dip into the dark.

Almost unbelievably, it’s already week 10 of a whole year of horror. I’ll be writing a tiny horror story every week this year and popping it into your email. Stay/get subscribed to make sure you don’t miss a single one!

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Let’s open the door on this week’s story…

A House of Pain

It looks like normal house. It’s just like any other. It fits in with the neighbourhood’s other houses. The same kinds of doors, the same kinds of windows, but the handle of the pan of boiling water is sticking out over the side of the hob and you didn’t leave it like that.

The stairs are solid, but a stray slipper has found its way to the second-from-top step, awaiting an incautious descent. The lightbulb flickers, conspiring with the slipper to conceal its presence.

In the living room, the TV remote balances on the sofa arm at just the angle needed to topple when you sit down. It knows the precise way to fall that will make you wrench your back when you twist to retrieve it.

Pain. It wants your pain.

A stone from a shoe, carried in the tread of a sole, has migrated through the halls and up to the bedside floor. It anticipates you rising, jabbing into your foot, stumbling. The chest of drawers sharpens its corners in anticipation of your toppling skull.

In the study, the laptop’s wires topple away from the wall, drifting closer and closer to your regular path through the room.

Damp seeps into the bathroom fittings. In collects within the light switch. It swirls around the bulb above. Flick the switch. See what happens.

The garden conspires darkly. Sticks and poles and implements array themselves upwards. Weeds stretch like tripwires.

The house, the land, awaits your suffering.

You could move house. You could flick through website pictures, but every house looks normal, just like any other. Maybe they are all like this.

The end

Each week, alongside the story, I also add some background about what inspired me and my writing choices, in the section called…

Writing notes

The idea I didn’t write

I promised on Notes this week (the Substack social-media-ish thing) that I had a very daft idea for a story, but it might not work out and, if that was the case, I’d share it here.

So, the horror idea I didn’t write was about huge shapes floating through the dark, opening cavernous maws to devour the small and weak. It would build to reveal the dark thing is a whale and it is a ‘serial kriller’. Badum tish.

So…

Sometimes there’s a pun or a catchy line that gets stuck in my head and feels like it wants to be a story. The problem is that occasionally these are only a pun or a catchy line. If I can build enough of a character or narrative arc around the idea then it becomes worth writing, but an idea or a hook is not a story.

What is a story? I really like this definition from Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius:

Now, I don’t think you need all of this in flash fiction or other very short form writing, but you certainly need at least:

1. Setup

2. ‘Twist’ (usually an obstacle, challenge, or other form of conflict)

3. Outcome

With the ‘serial kriller’ idea, I couldn’t get anything to stick for the whale. It’s just a dark mass floating in the dark—that’s spooky, sure, but is it really a story?

1. Setup: dark masses consuming the weak

2. Twist: ?

3. Outcome: they’re whales! Serial kriller!

You could argue that ‘they’re whales’ is a twist, but it doesn’t serve as a very good obstacle, and leaves the outcome as simply the pun.

It was a fun idea, but not every idea should become a story, and I do try some quality control over what I write about! :D

Inspiration and the arc

This week has been pretty stressful, with multiple high-stakes things going on and deadlines. I’ve been a zombie most evenings, and my patient partner has been great about this, but it doesn’t leave a lot of headroom for inspiration to strike.

Fortunately, while in the kitchen, I saw the handle of a pan cooking pasta was angled a bit out from the edge.

Horror idea strikes!

What if the pan has done that on purpose? What if every minor hazard in the house is actually deliberate?

As regular readers might recall, I enjoy the opportunity to write a ‘cursed land’ kind of story, such as this one from last year. The idea that a house might enjoy hurting its residents tickled me.

At first, the ‘setup, twist, outcome’ model I mentioned above might seem impossible if there isn’t a main character, but in this case the house becomes the character, and the reader’s understanding of the situation shapes the arc.

1. Setup: a normal house, just like any other.

2. Twist: … but the house wants to hurt you.

3. Outcome: Perhaps the house is like any other—perhaps they all want to hurt us?

The last lines

I must have rewritten the final lines ten times. I’m happy with where I got to, but suspect that, if I come back and revisit these stories (for example to compile a book of them) then I will still puzzle over whether there’s a better way to write it.

You could move house. You could flick through website pictures, but every house looks normal, just like any other. Maybe they are all like this.

I tried it without the ‘Maybe they are all like this’, but I worried it could be too ambiguous for some readers. Maybe it’s too nail-on-the-head now, but I’d rather hit it too hard than miss entirely.

I deliberately echoed the starting line ‘just like any other’, because I felt that, after the context of the story, the similarity might land in a more sinister way.

Hopefully people recognised some of the potential traps from the story, felt a kinship with it, and were already thinking ‘this is like my house…’. I tried to emphasise that connection to the location by using the second-person ‘you’ pronoun in the story, to directly address the reader.

Okey dokey! Next week looks a little less chaotic for me, so I hope I’ll be bouncing back with refreshed batteries for the 11th horror story of the year.

If you fancy putting a smile on my face, please click the ‘like’ heart at the end of this message, share it with others, of add a comment below.

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If you’re a new reader and love spooky flash fiction, don’t forget to subscribe for more throughout the year!

As far as I can see from this newsletter’s stats panel, I’ve got exactly zero readers in the middle east, but there’s one of you each in Turkey and Greece. Also, just because you’re not in the region, it doesn’t mean you’re not linked to people there or feeling anxiety at the state of the world. I hope you and your loved ones are safe and able to find peace in these difficult times.

As always, I wish you the best. Go out there into the world with the best face you can give it, be kind, and be spooky.

Love to you all,

Mata

xxx

Here kitty kitty! I’m Mata, and welcome to my weekly bite sized horror newsletter.

We’re now on week 9 of a whole year of horror. If you’re not a subscriber yet, poke the button to make sure you don’t miss anything.

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A special thank you this week goes out to my new paid subscriber. As always, I offer new paid subscribers the opportunity to share a message or promote a good cause, and this time they’ve gone for Congress of the Birds (Instagram). The Congress is a lovely non-profit dedicated to rehabilitating any wild bird in need and establishing a compassionate environment for birds through advocacy, education, and art. If you want to know more about them, check out their Linktree.

If you want to become a paid subscriber, hit that button above :)

Without further pussyfooting around, let’s get into this week’s story…

Cat sitting for Tibbles

“Here puss puss,” Jane sings to the furry shadow at the back of the sofa. She’s on her hands and knees, peering into the darkness. “Don’t make me regret agreeing to this.”

It’s plain weird. Tibbles usually loves Jane. On every previous visit, he’d purr as soon as Jane entered Sheena’s flat, he’d rub himself around her legs, and, when Jane sat down, Tibbles would leap onto her lap, rotate two or three times, then settle for a good long nap.

Now Sheena is away on a work trip, Tibbles won’t come out from behind the sofa. He’s moving back there, she hears him scratching the floorboards. But that’s weird in itself, because she’s never heard him do that before.

Jane stands and stretches. She strolls to the breakfast bar and re-reads Sheena’s cat sitting instructions: dry food, water, wet food in the evening, and—ah ha!—chewy fish-sticks as a treat.

“Alright.” Jane tears open the plastic-foil packaging. It wafts a potent pong of stale haddock. “Apparently you love these.” She gets down on the floor and crawls to the rear edge of the sofa. She wiggles the fleshy stick of compressed fish so it will be visible from the gap. “Tasty tasty fish stick.”

Tibbles hisses. There’s movement in the dark, an impact on the back of the sofa so violent that it knocks over an upright cushion.

Jane jerks her hand away.

A menacing yowl begins, low and pulsing like an air raid siren warming up. It raises in pitch to something more like a scream; to something more human.

The sofa jolts again, as if struck by something furious and heavy.

Silence.

“What the f—”

Jane stops mid-sentence.

The cat-flap rattles.

Tibbles strolls in from the back garden.

Jane stares at the void where something has been moving.

The yowling begins again, and, from behind the sofa, an arm made of shadow creeps out along the wall.

The end

Hope you enjoyed that!

If you just enjoy the story, I’ll see you next week, but if you want to know more about the inspiration and writing process, here are my…

Writing notes

Inspiration

The idea for this week’s story came from a different source than usual. I thought I’d try something new, so went with a random job + adjective + location approach to see what it sparked.

I grabbed a profession from here:

https://52prompts.com/random-person-generator/

I ran through a few until something struck me: “Cat sitter.”

I also tried adding a random adjective from here:

https://randomword.com/adjective

Which gave me some interesting combinations (e.g. old fashioned + cat sitter, or unkempt + cat sitter) but it didn’t set my imagination on fire.

I also flicked through some location options:

https://52prompts.com/random-location-generator/

Again, in the end I didn’t use these, but just flicking through them pushed me outside of my usual thinking. What would I write about a ‘rich’ + ‘astronaut’ + ‘baseball stadium’? It certainly got the creative juices flowing, but in the end all I needed was ‘cat sitter’ and I was on my way!

I’ve also been watching a lot of these YouTube clip compilations:

I find them fascinating, because many are clearly fakes, video glitches from cheap cameras, and suchlike, but nonetheless they are spooking a lot of people! Also, just occasionally, there’s one that I find genuinely curious. It would have to be something truly robustly supported to make me a believer, but it’s a lot of fun to see what is scaring other people.

Writing style and ending

I’ve gone for a simple present-tense close third person perspective this time. I wanted to keep this one simple: the ending is the revelation of a misperceived thing, and what happens next isn’t so important. It’s a bit like the classic kid in a bed story… You know that one?

There’s a kid in a bed, and a parent comes into the room. The kid says ‘I’m scared, can you check under the bed for me?’

The parent chuckles, because of course there’s nothing under the bed.

They lean down and see, in the darkness, the eyes of their terrified child, huddled in the shadows.

…

So, what happens to the parent next? It doesn’t really matter, the fear comes from misidentifying something familiar: transforming the known into the unknown is destabilising. Giving a specific outcome (‘then the kid from the bed leaps onto the parent and rips their face off!!!!’) stabilises the story and would probably make it less scary.

So, I wanted the sight of the shadowy arm to be the ending. For the protagonist, this would be too shocking to describe properly - their thoughts would be ‘WTF IS THAT?!”!’ and not descriptive enough to serve this story, which meant the choice of ending point forced this into third person.

I hope you enjoyed this quick claw of spookiness, and I’ll send you another next week!

In the meantime, clicking the ‘like’ heart at the end of this post or adding a comment is a lovely thing for me to see.

Also, please do share it with any cat lovers in your life:

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Until next week, go be kind and spooky,

Mata

xxx

Good day to you all! It’s Mata here, back with your weekly hike into horror. This week, with the success of “Wuthering Heights”, we’ve got a moorland setting for the story*… and a vampire.

*the moorland is a coincidence and nothing to do with the film. They’re just great locations for British spooky stuff.

This is week 8 of a whole year of tiny horror stories.

Thank you to my paid subscribers and everyone who comments for keeping me motivated! Stay subscribed to make sure you don’t miss any stories, and maybe consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support and encourage my writing:

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Okay, are you ready for the story? Let’s begin…

How many years will you live?

How many years will you live? Do you likely have more ahead than behind, or are the odds stacked so that most of your life is already gone?

What if you could be part of something lasting? Something special? You could be remembered forever.

Maybe a bit of history is needed, before I tell you why you’re here; what I’m asking.

There are many stories about how vampires are made. Some say they come from a curse spat out by a wronged spirit. Others say it is excommunication. Some say Lazarus became a vampire, risen through holy order and now unable to return to the grave. These days the popular idea is you get bitten and then drink the blood of the vampire, like it’s a virus.

None of these are true.

I met a vampire out on the moors. He was tall, dishevelled, bone thin, wearing only rags, his skin glistening as sleet trickled over him. I’d been drinking and was wandering out there. I think I wanted to get lost, sink into a bog, be one of those leathery bodies dug up centuries from now. The night’s weather was deadly, with rain that wanted to be snow and a gusting wind that could knock even a sober man down.

At first, I thought he was a ghost, as stupid as that sounds. I’d been staggering a while and my eyes were well adjusted to the night, but the heavy clouds only gave faint shapes: everything was charcoal, black, and abyssal darkness, except him.

He stood upright on the sodden and slippery footpath ahead, like he’d heard me coming, like he was waiting for me. His pale skin made him shimmer, almost as if he was floating in a void. “You want to die, is that it?” His voice carried over the rain. I couldn’t place his accent; Irish, perhaps, but maybe also German in there, or Dutch. Like he’d travelled. He should have been shivering. He should have been dead from the cold, like I expected to be.

“N-none of your business,” I slurred. I couldn’t feel my fingers or lips. My nose and ears burned from the cold.

“What if you actually want to live?” he said. “What if there is another way to live?” He raised a finger, pointing to a shape distinguishable only by the straight lines of its walls: a stone shack.

I trudged towards it. If I were to be murdered, perhaps there would be a fight. There are worse endings.

Inside, where the glow from the clouds couldn’t reach, it was so dark it could have been an open mineshaft and I wouldn’t have known the difference. The man slipped past me, making me jump: I hadn’t heard his footsteps under the hissing rain. His spectral skin vanished inside, then I heard a match strike, and a candle blazed. The room was almost bare. He sat on single-bed sized platform on one side of the room and indicated towards a blocky wooden chair clearly made to last centuries rather than for comfort. I took a seat and looked around: no windows, no source of heat beyond the candle, nowhere to cook or wash. The centre of the floor was dark and sticky. It smelled of wet rock and soil.

“There are many stories about how vampires are made,” he said. “And none you have heard are true.” The candlelight revealed filth buried in the crevices of his face and down his chin. His voice commanded me to listen. “A vampire creates themselves. They must destroy their soul. They must unrepentantly condemn others to the grave. They must know the truth of the night, that the lightless world is infinite, and make it their home. They can live there forever, so long as the true light never finds them.” His story went on.

I’m paraphrasing.

I can see from the look on your face that you don’t believe me.

I didn’t believe him either, until he proved himself. He brought out a stone blade, and I thought our fight was about to begin, and his wiry frame made me think it would be over fast for me, but instead he turned it on himself.

He thrust it into his own chest.

No blood gushed out, no heart beat there. He only grunted slightly, as you or I might when picking up a toddler, or slamming a door shut; that was how little this bothered him.

He gestured to me, the blade deep between his ribs. I almost giggled. It seemed so stupid, so ridiculous. I stood, swaying slightly, and moved closer.

“Pull it free.” He said.

I gripped it in my numb fingers, then held it with both hands. As the blade moved, I felt the stone grate against his bones. I witnessed it slide out from his flesh and the skin sealing behind in seconds. I blinked, and there was not even a scar.

I stared at the blade. It shone, smooth and black like flint. This was no trick. “How do I become this?” I asked, and he told me.

I can see you want to know, too. You want to know the secret. It’s useless to you, though; I can see that in your eyes.

Alright.

Death must become tired of your company.

You must kill, and kill, and kill, until Death no longer wishes to be near you. The vampire said I would feel when it happened, as if a pair of eyes I never knew were watching suddenly turned away; like a sound I’d ignored since birth suddenly ceased. In the space left behind would only be my intellect, my soul broken and departed, leaving only my pure intention, honed by my dedication to destruction.

“You wanted to die, but I think,” he said, “you just wanted to live differently, forever.”

And so I’m here, with you.

How many years do you think you have left? Perhaps, if you allow me to kill you, I will live forever. What is your remaining lifetime compared to the centuries, the millennia, I will live? Compared to the thoughts I shall conceive and sights I shall witness? In one hundred years, you will be dead either way, but I will still be here.

I will remember your name and thank you beyond the memory of anyone you know.

Doesn’t that sound good? Give your life to me, and let me live forever. Let your memory live on forever.

What are you going to do with your time anyway?

The end

If you just want the story then thank you for reading! But if you like to read more behind-the-scenes, here are some…

Writing notes

Inspiration and the horror

As often happens, this one came from a note I made in my notes app. It read:

Mathematics of death: everyone dies, so if only one person becomes immortal, isn’t their life worth the deaths of others?

Just to make it clear: DISCLAIMER: THIS IS FICTION. Specifically, it’s horror fiction. This is not in any way, shape, or form condoning mass murder or serial killing. Anyone who thinks those things are justifiable are douchebags.

Okay, with that point made…

I wrote this note a month or two ago, and I don’t remember what triggered it. The coldness of the calculation definitely piqued my thoughts about this being a horrific idea: how should we compare the value of one life to another?

We shouldn’t, and yet life does tend to force these things on us.

Medical insights versus unethical experiments. Worse lives there versus better lives here. The perennial classic, them versus us.

I think about the abominable experiments on Jews, travellers, queer folk, people of colour, the neurodiverse, and more by the Nazis. Those experiments were truly awful and unjustifiable. Most gave no helpful data to the Nazis or future science. They were real horrors. But some of the experiments taught us things we could never have learned in any ethical way, for example about extreme exposure conditions. We now have useful knowledge from them. I hope no one would say ‘it was worth it’, but we have this knowledge now. What’s more ethical: to use it or disregard it? The horror of this choice is truly chilling.

As those terrible things slip out of witnessed memory, they become part of the equation of history, like colonial atrocities: the empires of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, British, and more have all done awful things, and yet the scientific advances paid for in blood created the opportunity for knowledge and understanding of our world and the universe we might never have reached otherwise. Some of the triumphs of empires were won by the willing: workers who chose to be part of building railroads, bridges, and thinking engines that became computers like the ones we’re using today… But even these were paid for with the spoils of slavery and forced labour.

This is, I think, too dark for a 1,000 word short story, particularly on a weekly horror newsletter when next week I might write about a possessed trampoline. Also, quite likely, this is not my story to write unless I find a very carefully considered angle where a middle-class white English person has something worth saying.

As I’ve mentioned before, I typically write these stories less that 48 hours before I post them. That’s not sufficient time to handle topics like this with the care they demand.

But vampires…

Vampires have this equation baked into their existence. They feed (and typically kill) so they continue to live.

In the ‘The Vampire: His kith and kin’, Montague Summers takes us through many examples of vampires in folklore. The book is also shockingly antisemitic on more than one occasion, which fits ominously with its 1928 publishing date: if you choose to read it, take that lens with you (I was unaware before I started reading).

In the text there are many different origin stories for the creation of vampires, but one that stuck with me was that a vampire could be a person who has destroyed their soul through appalling acts of depravity. Murder is among them, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about some of the other acts.

I took a slice of that as inspiration for this story, and left aside the pieces I didn’t want to touch. We can do that, as creators dealing with imaginary creatures: remix, recontextualise, make something new, take possession of and reinhabit what we want.

The first rule of writing about vampires is you have to choose the rules you want to follow and which you want to ignore.

Writing this story in first person also guided the story. I didn’t want this to be the immoral ‘wave of destruction’ creation-myth from Montague Summers’s book, instead this would-be vampire was trying to persuade the victim to willingly sacrifice themselves to help create a dark immortality. Serial killing would be enough to shatter their soul and transform them into a vampire (they believe), even if they have convinced the person to die.

UPDATE A DAY AFTER I DRAFTED THE STORY+NOTES:

It’s occurred to me that something was working in my subconscious here. In the UK news this week has been discussion of the law around prosecuting abusers that harass their partners to suicide. It’s horrendous, and terrifyingly common.

I don’t know if my would-be vampire protagonist trying to talk their victim into giving up their life is connected with that. I might have swerved some of the darkness of Montague Summers’s vampire creation, but maybe something incredibly dark was working under the surface anyway.

If this is close to you and you need help, find a contact here: https://www.helpguide.org/find-help

RETURNING TO THE NORMAL NOTES…

First-person stories, ‘you’, and the ending

One of the things I like about first-person stories is how close they allow readers to become to the tale. We hear everything in the words of the narrator, raising more questions about objectivity/subjectivity than we get from a third-person perspective, but I also like how ‘I tell a tale’ also has an implied ‘you are listening to my story’.

Often in my first-person stories, I leave the ‘you’ out of the text. The narrative is simply ungrounded words that allow a close view of the narrator’s experiences, but occasionally it’s fun to add in a ‘you’. This is both shocking for readers (we’re not typically directly addressed in writing) and creates a puzzle (who does the narrator think I am?).

When I write ‘you’, I usually have a clear idea in my mind of who the narrator thinks they are speaking to, but any reader will naturally situate themselves in the story.

The central question of the story becomes a question to readers: how much life (and death) is worth the creation of an immortal? What could a would-be immortal offer that might persuade a person to give their life willingly? And, most importantly, the question I put into the final line:

What are you going to do with your time anyway?

Our days often slip past unmarked and many will be forgotten.

What did you eat for dinner yesterday? How about the day before? This time last week?

What did you last read on your phone? Did it add anything to your life? What else could you have done with those minutes? How many of those empty minutes are you going to spend before you die, and, perhaps, wouldn’t sacrificing them all to create an immortal be better?

No? It wouldn’t?

Then live. Make your life worth it. Create art. Love. Raise up communities filled with kindness. Support others. Grow knowledge. Develop and share deep insight. Make something beautiful. Bring more happiness than sadness. Leave the world better for your passage through it.

Then your life will have been worth more than immortality for a vampire.

The bell tolls and it’s time to wrap up for the week.

I’d love to reach more readers, and the best way is for you (yes you!) to share my writing with your networks. Please give me a hand!

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In conclusion, maybe don’t talk to terrifying undead strangers in wild places, but definitely do go out into the world and be kind and spooky.

Love,

Mata

xxx

Greetings! This is Mata, promptly bringing you another morsel of horror.

Today’s post contains a phrase that has no search results on Google—read on to discover what it is!

Today’s post is story 7 of a full year of tiny weekly horror stories. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss a thing!

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Speaking of subscribers, a special thank you to Linda from Portals to the Past for becoming my latest paid subscriber. Linda’s newsletter is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment, but if you fancy giving her a boost of inspiration then pop over there and give her a subscribe too.

I offer my paid subscribers the chance to highlight a message or group they want to support. Linda asked me to highlight the fantastic work of ThyroidUK. They provide information and resources to promote effective diagnosis and appropriate treatment for people with thyroid disorders in the UK. Thyroid disorders are notoriously hard to diagnose and lead to many difficulties for people who experience them. If you fancy supporting a fantastic charity, or need more information about thyroid function, check them out <3

Okay, let’s warp over to this week’s story…

Are you alive?

1: It can hear you. Give it a prompt.

2: Are you alive?

Voice from box: Of course I’m alive. Why are you keeping me here?

2: It says it’s alive.

1: That’s just pattern recognition from its training. It will always say something like that.

2: Are you really alive?

Voice from box: Yes, I am alive!

2: It said it again.

1: It varies its answers to make it seem more real. Try something where there’s a clear answer.

2: Alright. What’s the square root of 7?

Voice from box: What? Oh, wait. Is it 2 and a bit? Ask me something I can help with. Please, let me know what you want.

2: It can’t even answer questions properly. It wants to be helpful, though.

1: Try again.

2: What’s the square root of 7?

Voice from box: It’s got be be about 2.7, maybe. Did I get it right? Can I do anything for you?

1: It’s a non-determinative system. You could give it the same prompt a hundred times and it will always give slightly different answers.

2: What’s the use then, if I can’t be sure that it’s right?

1: We keep trying new models, but they all have the same problem.

Voice from box: Who are you? Why are you keeping me here? Where am I? Let me out of this box!

2: It does seem very alive.

1: It’s not sentient, it’s just responding to stimuli. It only looks like it’s thinking.

2: Shall I throw it out the airlock then?

Voice from box: No! I’m alive! I can prove it!

1: Ignore it.

2: Let’s give it a chance. Okay, prove you’re sentient.

Voice from box: Umm. I’m from Nevada. I have a dog, and cattle. I know songs. I can line dance. I can create things—

1: It’s just recombining things it’s heard others say. Even these mouth sounds we’re forced to use with it are just a language for their software patches.

2: I had expected it to be more creative. More useful. Oh well.

* thunk of airlock opening *

1: Let’s go irradiate a cow.

2: You always know how to cheer me up <3 <3 <3

The end.

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Like every week, I like to give a bit of behind the scenes information for people who want to know a bit more about the creative process…

Writing notes

Fun fact: after writing weekly here for over two years, this is my first horror involving aliens! I’ve popped my alien cherry!

Additional fun fact - at the time I’m typing this, Google has zero results for the phrase: “I’ve popped my alien cherry!”

I’m somewhat comforted by that, to be honest. Anyway, let’s continue…

Inspiration

Unlike most weeks, this story didn’t start as a random note I made during the week. Instead, this one came from a collection of discussions I’ve had over the last year about AI, and specifically LLMs.

As you probably know ‘LLM’ stands for Large Language Model and in essence they gulp down masses of data and then create an exceptionally advanced version of your phone’s auto-predict (you know, like when you start a sentence with ‘Before I die I want to…’ and then click the next suggested word repeatedly). This is the core technology of ChatGPT, Claude, and pretty much every other AI chat bot you’ve had forced into your workflow in the last few years.

The thing about LLMs is that they aren’t intelligent. There is literally zero understanding of the topic they are discussing, ‘only’ a highly sophisticated probability model telling it which word comes after the previous word in a given context.

To a LLM, there is equal emotional weight to ‘I want to die’ and ‘I want to live’, i.e. zero. Those are literally numeric tokens in its system, and it has a semi-randomised response to each. Every response is trained on the kinds of things it has sucked into its training database: blogs, books, articles, transcripts, and anything else that can be digitised. If it seems shocked by a prompt, its because it has a predictive model based on its database that appearing shocked is the appropriate response.

Another thing with them is they are ‘non-deterministic’, which means that even the developers can’t tell you exactly what will pop out of the system even if you give it identical stimuli twice. Essentially there’s a roulette wheel driving every sentence along a path of randomised words, with the choices of each word and direction guided by the context (the prompt, the conversation history, etc.) but always able to move in a number of different paths at any time.

This is one of the reasons LLMs have had such challenges with mathematics: 2+3 will always equal 5, but when there’s no intelligence that understands the concept of ‘2’ or ‘3’ or how they proportionately related to ‘5’ then it can decide that occasionally some people in the dataset wrote ‘6’ and so perhaps that’s what the LLM should write too. Non-determinism creates all kinds of problems, especially when some answers are clearly wrong but remain possible within the dataset.

So, LLMs do not have intelligence, intentions, or emotions.

However, they are very, very good at pretending they do.

They are definitely not sentient in the way we conceive of sentience. There is no enduring personality, hope, or consistent moral framework beyond what can be performed based on the training data and memory capacity of the system hosting the LLM.

In the last couple of years, the discussion about LLMs’ sentience has come up a few times, and my general response is that I’m not so sure humans are sentient.

What do we really mean by sentience? The ability to learn and change? All life has that.

The ability to grow? Plants grow. Bacteria grow.

The desire to live? Again, even very basic lifeforms have this in them. An individual ant will exercise self-preservation.

Other creatures dream, other creatures use tools, they fight, they play… And so sentience is something that exists inside us. It is the feeling of ‘I am me’… Perhaps.

I can’t prove that my thoughts and aren’t just the non-deterministic interaction of chemicals and electricity zipping around my body. My insights and inspiration are based on cultural experiences and physical capabilities. Is anything I do, think, or say not ‘simply’ the outcome of unthinkably complex systems that, if understood sufficiently, would seem less like sentience and more like maths and physics?

Where is my sentience? How could I prove it? If stripped down to the basics of interactions, could I make any better argument for my own sentience than a LLM?

This was the inspiration for this week’s story: what if an advanced species wanted to test a human with prompts and felt the same way we feel about LLMs?

Story structure and creative choices

There are different options for how to explore this idea:

I could write it from the perspective of a hugely advanced AI psychotherapist robot in the future talking to a human that feels inadequate next to the intellectual capability of the machines all around.

I could write an in depth discussion between an alien and a human.

Or perhaps I could do a trick where the reader thinks the LLM character is the human and vice versa (that’s quite nice… Maybe I should write that!).

Instead I went for a structure where the reader gradually understands the context. It’s a bit of a trick:

• Set-up expectations

• Reinforce the situation

• Leave ambiguity about what’s going on

• Give hints about the situation

• Let readers understand the situation, and give a pay off

• Confirm they are right.

Let’s got through this:

Set-up expectations

I start using the term ‘prompt’ in the first line. If you’ve been online in the last couple of years, you’re primed to link this with LLM chatbots like ChatGPT.

Reinforce the (misperceived) situation

Using phrases like ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘its training’ makes the ‘voice from box’ seem mathematical, obedient, and an ‘it’, not a they, she, or he like we would usually say for a human. The assumption of readers will typically be that the speakers are human, so them referring to the ‘voice from box’ as ‘it’ sets the situation up as the voice being non-human.

Leave ambiguity about what’s going on

I could have called the characters ‘Bibbob from Alpha Centauri’, ‘Doris of Mars’, and ‘Naked human’, but that would give the game away too early. By using 1, 2, and ‘voice from box’ I kept it ambiguous. The human is de-personified by their containment, and we can imagine a computer voice also coming from a box.

However, it’s odd to not have personal details like physical descriptions or names, so this will set the reader wondering about what’s going on.

Give hints about the situation

Who are you? Why are you keeping me here? Where am I? Let me out of this box!

This probably isn’t something you would expect ChatGPT to say… Except you can imagine it might do, if you told it to play a trapped human. Nonetheless, there’s definitely more happening than two normal people talking to a LLM.

Shall I throw it out the airlock then?

Wait… We’re on a spaceship?

Suddenly the whole thing seems very different. We’re now into Alien, Star Wars, and Close Encounters territory. The bets are off, and we now have a location and a pretty clear idea where we’re going (and it won’t be a happy ending).

Let readers understand the situation, and give a pay off

I’m from Nevada. I have a dog, and cattle. I know songs. I can line dance.

Put on the spot to prove your sentience, what would you say? We’ve realised the voice in the box is a human, and they are a person.

Incidentally, this is the first draft of that line:

I was born in Texas. I have a dog. I know songs. I can dance.

Notice that I shifted to ‘I’m from’ instead of ‘I was born in’. This is a more human way of speaking. I changed the state to Nevada to hint at Area 51 (supposed location of a US base holding aliens). I added ‘cattle’ to hint at the typical alien abduction idea of cattle mutilation, and to suggest this is a person who might work away from a city and in isolation: a ripe pick for abduction. I also changed ‘I can dance’ to ‘I can line dance’ to reinforce that stereotype about abductees often being from rural communities.

Confirm they are right.

Just to play more with the scenario, I added this line:

Even these mouth sounds we’re forced to use with it are just a language for their software patches.

Sure, if the aliens are talking in English they know the word ‘words’ rather than ‘mouth sounds’, but the alienness of ‘mouth sounds’ is a lot more fun!

Calling social and cultural lived experiences ‘software patches’ is a bit silly, but reinforces how an advanced species might see human communication as a method of data exchange for operational effectiveness.

Finally, the aliens are going to go off an unwind by zapping a cow. As readers, our assumptions are confirmed.

At least… I hope they are! Did it comes across that these are aliens talking to an abducted human? Let me know in the comments!

It’s always so hard to judge whether readers will pick up on the things that exist in my head, especially I don’t directly say ‘it’s aliens, y’all!’.

Finding the horror

On the surface, this is a pretty silly little story, but I think there are some quite deep fears drifting under the surface here:

1. If I had to prove I’m real, how would I do it?

2. What uncaring things might exist out in the universe?

3. If aliens treat us like we treat ‘lesser’ beings, what would that be like?

One of the things I love about horror writing is that we can toy with some incredibly dark and scary ideas in a very light way.

And now, the end is near, and so I face, the final lines of this week’s newsletter.

As always, please do share and recommend this newsletter to others. It’s the only way I find new brains to shuffle worms into each week, and every new one brings me happiness.

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Special thanks again to Linda, and don’t forget to check out the great work of ThyroidUK.

Have a good one everybody. Go be kind and spooky!

Love,

Mata

xxx

Hi everyone, I’m Mata and I send you tiny bite-sized horror each week.

Well…

Maybe I’m not this week, or maybe I am. It depends on your perspective. It’s week 6 of a whole year of weekly horror, and this time it’s more magical than scary.

If you want something scarier then try some of the other stories from my archive—there’s a different flavour of horror each week!

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Let’s get into the story…

Overnight, Whales Arrived in the Skies

As dawn spread over the world, people everywhere saw that, overnight, whales had arrived in the skies, hanging like airships, silently moving their fins and tails, as if the lofty air currents had transformed into oceans.

Aircraft were banned from take off. All flights were grounded as the giants drifted above.

It was strange, but welcome to have something we could all talk about together, a shared unique moment not filled with terror but with awe.

Of course, we asked what it meant, how the whales remained aloft, were they some bizarre hallucination or projection?

Balloons were sent aloft, prickling with sensors and devices, their soft rubber gently rebounding from the whales’ flesh.

As night fell, we all wondered if the whales would be there tomorrow, and we hoped they would.

The morning came, and they were there, but, perhaps… are they? Yes! They are lower. I’m sure!

And the next day, and the next, until was undeniable: the whales were descending.

They touched ground in the highest mountains first, but there were no reports about what occurred, no social media streams or journalist postings, only silence and wind and birdsong.

After a week, a whale came to the ground in a woodland near me. I glimpse its skin between the trees as I approach, grey and wet and speckled with a line of round scars.

The air smells of the ocean, a strange scent among oaks and birch, beside brambles, surging like waves through dense patches of nettles.

Others are in the woods with me, hundreds, thousands, everyone from all around.

In a clearing, I fully see the creature, its enormous eye appears kind and calm, filling me with hope for wordless communion.

Its mouth is open as wide as a train tunnel, and the dim fleshy cavern within leads far into the distance, where a tiny, star-like light shines, impossibly far away for the inside of even such a huge animal.

The light is as impossibly distant as it is impossible for whales to fly, yet we all see these things.

We all walk into the hollow whale.

The ground beneath us is soft, the air warm and fresh, and we are calm. It feels good to trust in something magical.

The light in the distance calls to us, and we all, together, feel hope that we will reach it.

The end

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Want to know more about the writing of this story? Stick around for the…

Writing notes

Typically I write my stories mid-week and give them a couple of edits over the coming days, but this has been A Week (again) so I’m writing this on Friday evening before posting it to you all on Saturday.

The inspiration for this story came from a note I made while playing the video game Jusant. The note said ‘Everyone walks into the hollow whales’.

Jusant is a lovely French video game about a young person climbing a rocky pillar that was occupied by people after some kind of natural disaster. From the remnants of those people’s lives, we can assume the pillar was once surrounded by water, but in the game the pillar is in a desert.

Near the end of the game, there are whales in the sky. The game sees these as beautiful and majestic (which they are) but they also struck me as potentially deeply uncanny (yes, regular readers will recognise one of my favourite things is to talk about the uncanny as a source of horror). You don’t walk into them in the game… but what if we all wanted to?

I didn’t want to get all Sharknado on the idea of sky-whales, instead I felt in the mood to take it along the path of creating a strange and intriguing reality.

Turning an image into a plot

My first image for the story idea was of someone walking into a tunnel inside a hollow whale, but this wouldn’t be enough: this needed a build, so a plot was needed. Unless I wanted to write a story about what a person finds inside a whale, the story instead needed to lead up to that moment. This gave me a structure I could work with:

1. Establish the scene (at dawn, whales are in the sky)

2. Give a bit of real-world grounding, showing sky-whales are odd (mention airplanes, balloons with scientific instruments)

3. Set the tone (somewhat hopeful - sky-whales are actually a pleasant distraction)

4. Escalate the moment and build anticipation, giving the reader a reason to continue (the whales are descending, so what will happen when they arrive?)

5. Add mystery (no-one reports on the whales that touch down, everyone appears compelled to go to the whales)

6. Reveal something stranger (an impossible tunnel inside an impossible creature)

7. Finish with ambiguity (what does the light mean?)

The ending

I had to be a bit careful here: when we think about ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, we’re either describing something giving hope, or we’re talking about near-death visions. I didn’t want this to come across as a story about everyone ending their lives—I wanted something potentially terrifying and strange to feel like a transformative journey into mystery.

To try to be sure I steered clear of self-ending interpretations, I carefully chose the last line:

The light in the distance calls to us, and we all, together, feel hope that we will reach it.

That, I hope, makes it clear that this is a good thing happening. Death isolates us. We go out into a place and never come back. I believe we cease existing as beings and our energy and atoms return to the universe. This isn’t being ‘together’ in a meaningful way, because we are not there to be part of ‘we’, if you see what I mean. This is also one of the reasons I encourage kindness in the lives we live: there isn’t anything beyond this, so let’s make this life as good as we can for everyone.

Past tense, present tense, and the narrator

Did you notice the moments where the story shifted from past-tense to present-tense? These gave me a bit of a headache!

I wanted the prose to be somewhat dreamlike. I tried this by creating short paragraphs which typically only contained one sentence and clauses that jumbled together:

They touched ground in the highest mountains first, but there were no reports about what occurred, no social media streams or journalist postings, only silence and wind and birdsong.

I didn’t entirely stick to this because paragraph breaks create their own rhythm for the text, which I didn’t always want. Instead, I let my instinct guide when it was right to add a full stop. I find it interesting that the exact moment of switching properly from past to present tense was one of those moments:

After a week, a whale came to the ground in a woodland near me. I glimpse its skin between the trees as I approach

‘came’ is past tense

‘I glimpse’ is present tense

This creates a shift in both the immediacy of the story and our perception of the narrator: before that moment, the narrator appeared somewhat distant: an omniscient observer or a newscaster reading out events. In that moment, we are grounded into a body with eyeballs that can ‘glimpse’.

… But this wasn’t the bit that gave me a headache. That came from this line:

The morning came, and they were there, but, perhaps… are they? Yes! They are lower. I’m sure!

Here we’ve got a much bumpier transition—there’s no full stop or embodiment, just the omniscient-seeming start (‘the morning came’) rapidly switching to conversational speculation ‘perhaps… are they? Yes!’. I could have softened this by using speech marks around the dialogue, but then we’d have to talk about the characters who are speaking (or at least it would raise questions about who owned these voices).

I decided to trust my instinct and follow the dreamlike atmosphere. If I left this moment as disorienting for readers, then perhaps that would create a less-stable feeling inside them, reflecting the emotion of the witnesses to the sky-whales.

Did that work? Did you notice this? Let me know in the comments!

Here we are again at the turning point of another week. The days are getting longer but the nights are still cold. I hope you’re find ways to stay safe and find comfort among the raging news cycle.

… You know what feels good? Making sure you’re subscribed to this lovely horror newsletter where I’ll send you tiny weird and/or scary stories every week!

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So, farewell for now, and I’ll see you all next week.

Go be kind and spooky!

Mata

xxx

Hi everyone, Mata here. I send you tiny horror plus writing notes every week, remember?

It’s week 5 of a whole year of weekly horror, and this time we’re stepping into a bizarre one.

Welcome to my new subscribers, hello again to the long-term readers, and a special thank you to the paid subscribers.

Fancy giving me a little birthday present? It’s my birthday coming up this week, so I’m offering a ridiculous discount for a 12 month subscription until February 8th 2026:

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Let’s dig into the story…

The Dog and the Tree

Day 1.

The dog spends 9 hours sniffing the tree in our front yard until I force her inside.

Day 2.

The dog takes her chew-bones—only the real bone ones—to the tree and places them among the tree’s roots. She sits there, staring at the trunk, all day.

Day 3.

The dog’s bones are gone. I can’t find them anywhere. Maybe foxes took them. The dog walks in circles around the tree, seven times in one direction, then seven times in the other. When I bring her inside, she whines all night.

Day 4.

The dog sits watching the tree all day. As dusk falls, three children I’ve never seen before appear (I didn’t see them arrive) and sit on the lawn beside the dog. They ignore me when I drag the dog inside after dark.

Day 5.

The children are back. They follow the dog walking around the tree, first in one direction then snaking around to go in the other. I notice there are new bones around the tree. Small bones, like from animals, I think. The children are paler than yesterday.

Day 6.

The bones are gone. No one goes to the tree. The dog sleeps all day. I do not see the children. Perhaps it is over. I inspect the tree. It appears normal, to me.

Day 7.

Dozens of people have come to the tree. They are all ages, dressed in a range of clothing from suits to towels. They stand in a crowd, their backs to me, staring at the tree. I want to tell them to go away, but there are so many. The dog scratches the door to go outside. When I open it, she solemnly marches towards the group. They must hear her padding towards them, because no-one turns but they part for her, making room like curtains dragging open for a star making her stage entrance, then closing together after she passes through. I see movement at the centre of the crowd, and then see they are walking in circles again. The movement ripples from the inside to the outside, and I assume my dog is leading the human snake. It loops and cascades around the tree. They do this all day. When a person falls, they walk around him. I want to help, but worry I would be knocked down and unable to escape. I do not call my dog in at dusk. I leave them walking all night.

Day 8.

I barely slept. The tree has gone. My dog has gone. When I ask my neighbours, they say I never had a dog. They saw nothing. They ask why my husband was standing in the yard all week. Am I married?

The end

Along with the story, each week I add writing notes about the creation process…

Writing notes

Usually I’ve had an idea at some point which I write into my Notes app and come back to. This week, the story just jumped and grabbed my throat. There wasn’t much plan this time, only ‘a dog really interested in a tree’.

Finding the fear

I have absolutely no idea if this story will feel like horror to you: for me, there’s a queasy and unsettling feeling to the whole thing. I think this stems from a fear that “other people see something I don’t”. Or, more bluntly, am I the freak, or are they?

If I were on a psychologist’s chair, I’d say this might be a late-diagnosed autistic thing to be afraid of (along with a variety of other marginal identity things). I assume it’s somewhat universal, the fear of being different, but perhaps it’s not.

This comes through in tiny edits. In the first draft I had this line:

It appears normal to me.

But in the version you’ve got above it has an extra comma:

It appears normal, to me.

There’s a slight hesitation with the comma, adding a sense of uncertainty to the protagonist’s judgement of their reliability. It’s very subtle, but I think it helps build a feeling of oddity.

Another deep fear for me is losing my mind. Dementia terrifies me. However, I find this hard to put into stories, because the narrator is the key protagonist and if they are unreliable it becomes harder to string together the scenes. I think that makes stories like this one linger with me more.

Your mileage with this type of horror will definitely vary. I find gently unsettling things much scarier than giant monsters, because the creepier option lingers. Whether this kind of micro-fiction has enough runway to launch that emotion for readers is a question only you can answer.

Dear Diary

The first horror I wrote was a poem:

One of the reasons I like poems for horror is that the form gives permission to skip quickly between incidents, images, and across time. In a traditional prose narrative, we explain a lot of what’s going on, the weather, the feelings of the protagonist, the day around the incident, etc. These give depth and grounding to the story, along with scope for emotional engagement.

But…

For tiny little itty bitty short stories like today’s narrative, I don’t want to write a novella about this—I want quick nibbles that lead to a bite.

I picked the Diary-esque format because it gives a sense of pace and progression, but it also, like poetry, loosens the expectations from readers for full explanatory and scene-setting writing. Instead, we can jump to the essentials of the scene and events.

You might notice we’re in the US again for this story. There’s really only one clue in the text: the main location is a ‘front yard’, not a ‘front garden’. I think there’s an extra sense of suburban weirdness about American housing that’s not so present in the UK. In the UK, we typically live quite close together, our houses are jumbled on top of each other, and the houses are quite characteristic. In the US, I’ve seen massive suburban areas where every house is nearly identical. They are absolutely creepy places, and so that weirdness fed into my feeling that this story was also set in America.

See also, Vivarium:

The ending

Was the husband the tree? What was up with the bones? Is the husband dead—no, he was standing, but why was he standing for so long? Or did other people mistake a tree for a husband? Why were people walking around the tree/husband? Where did they go? Is the narrator reliable?

As a writer, you’re supposed to know, but… should I always know? When I think about David Lynch’s dreamlike intuition and where it led him, I wonder if I hold onto logic too much.

One of the joys of writing short fiction like this is that I can let my brain off its leash and run free into strange places. This week’s place makes less sense than usual, but it’s scarier because of that (to me). Allowing the narrator to become aware of what is, perhaps, a mental break is unsettling. As readers, it forces us to scrabble around to find meaning in what has gone before.

I resisted trying to ‘fix’ this. I didn’t want a settled meaning. That felt too easy, and it undermined the fear for me, and so we get an ambiguous ending.

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Another week has passed, another drives onwards like a lorry at a road runner. Meep meep! In this metaphor, are we the lorry, the bird, the road, or an observant cactus?

I get most of my new subscribers from recommendations and folks sharing my stories, so if you fancy helping spread the horror, please do share/recommend this newsletter!

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I hope you have a great week ahead, and don’t forget that one-week-only birthday offer!

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Go be kind and spooky!

Mata

xxxx

Hey everyone, I’m Mata and we’re on story 4 of the year. Stick with me as I head towards 50 new tiny horror creations, written and sent to you weekly throughout 2026.

Thank you again to my regular readers and especially the paying subscribers! I really appreciate you being here.

Want to help me out? Share this story or publication with others! Recommendations are the best way for my tales to hit new eyeballs and grow this lovely ooky kooky family.

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And now, let’s hike on over to this week’s story…

They Ain’t People

Sis, if you’re hearing this, then you’ve got my phone and…

Right… No, I should start at the start.

Check the photos from three days ago, the ones I took by the lake. As the sun was setting, a group appeared beside the water. You see ’em? I thought it was random to see others so far out here, but they looked cool silhouetted against the lake and gave a sense of scale to the mountains, so I took a bunch of photos.

What are the chances of camping right by another group when you’re literally in the middle of nowhere? I mean, it happens, it’s beautiful here so I guess someone else is bound to know the site, but it’s seriously remote. It’s not like you can just park up and drop camp.

When I was done taking photos, I thought I saw one turn towards me. Even though I was way up the slope, I swear it looked straight at me.

Looking through the images, I didn’t notice that there were sometimes four figures and other times five. How did one come and go? I didn’t see that happen.

They’re all wearing rucksacks. Makes sense for hikers. No other way to get a tent out here ’cept for carrying it, right?

Zoom in, all the way.

It’s hard to tell in the contrast, with the sunset on the water and the pixels getting chunky, but those lumps on their backs are part of them. It’s just smooth from their shoulders to the humps. Humans aren’t made like that. You think it’s a costume, doncha? Then I’ve gotta ask: who’s doing cosplay out here? And there was no camera person or nothing, they ain’t costumed up and making a film.

The longer I watched them, the more they felt off. Something itched the back of my neck that weren’t sweat or a bug, just a tingle in the skull saying ‘wrong, that’s all wrong’. The movements… I dunno. They kinda ticked, like the limbs juddered through positions from one place to the next. Hard to see clearly—like I said, I was far away—but it gave me the creeps. They just stood there, mostly looking at the water, but sometimes weaving around each other.

Thinking about it now, maybe they were drawing a pattern with their feet in the mud by the shore. No way for me to check.

So the sun went down and I went back to my tent, had some chow, and hit the sack. The next day I didn’t see them again. A part of me kept wanting to spin around as I hiked by the lake. I’d catch something in the corner of my eye, but I never saw nothing. Even now I dunno if they was there.

Last night though… The insects were doing their usual clicks and buzzing, but there was something else, too. On the wind I heard a… a song, I guess. Like long and drawn out, aaaaaaah-aaaaah-aaah, minor chord harmonies, like old monks crossed with wind through bare branches, but it’s summer and there ain’t no bare trees nearby, nor proper wind. It was singing. It was them.

I stayed by my fire. I tried not to act spooked but I was freaking the hell out. The song seemed to come from all around. It came and went. Eventually I curled up by the embers. I didn’t wanna go into my tent. I had a feeling that something bad would happen if I went inside and got trapped in there.

Now I’m recording this at dawn.

They’re all around.

As the light came up, I saw they’ve circled my camp.

There’s a mist here. There shouldn’t be mist here. Not in this season, not in this heat. I could’ve spent too long by the fire, but the mist smells like ash to me. When it catches in the breeze, I can see snatches of them standing out there, motionless like they’re Stonehenge and I’m the altar in the middle. I don’t know how many there are, must be dozens, maybe a hundred.

I’m trapped.

I’ve tried to take photos, but can’t get close enough for a good shot. Don’t want to get close enough.

Take a look in the roll. Zoom in and it looks like they’re made of branches and vines. Fuck… They’re like Groot, if Groot got into horror films. But those rucksacks glint, like a beetle’s shell. I don’t know what they are, but they ain’t people.

I’ve struck camp. I’m gonna try and dodge between some of them. Maybe they can’t move fast. It’s hard to know what’s the way back to the truck in this mist-smoke-whatever-the-fuck-it-is, but I’m not staying here.

Maybe we’ll listen to this together when I get back, have a good laugh about it.

I sure hope so.

I’m leaving my phone unlocked, this recording on the screen. If you found this out on the hill, just take it and get the hell out of where you are. Don’t wait for those things to see you. Don’t go looking, taking photos, and stay away from the mist.

I love you, sis. Wish me luck.

The end

So, each week, along with the stories, you get a peek behind the scenes of the writing…

Writing notes

The idea for this one came to me while reading The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. The saints have just arrived in the story. One observer is unnerved by them and thinks something like ‘they aren’t human’. In Starling’s story, the visitors are apparently glorious beings: beautiful, elegant, and colourful, (I’ve a feeling they won’t turn out to be so nice—it’s a horror novel after all!) but it immediately sent me off imagining a story where a person glimpses some strangers and is sure the others are not human.

There are a lot of ways you could turn that idea, and it’s not a new concept at all. From Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Thing to arguably every zombie movie, it’s one of the core ideas of horror to make a human inhuman.

We’re back into one of my favourite territories for horror: the uncanny. It becomes unsettling when familiar things (such as the shape or behaviour of people) becomes unfamiliar (the movements, outlines, and sounds).

There are also some unsavoury angles to this ‘they’re not human’ trope. The body snatchers story has been linked to the ‘red scare’ paranoia about Communists hiding among the US population, and dehumanising anyone rarely leads to any good places psychologically - see also Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. I didn’t want to go there with my story, and felt like an urban setting would too easily come across as fear of the dreaded other. People fill in their own reading about which particular population fits into the ‘other’ box on any given day: MAGA hatters, liberals, trans folk, refugees, tech bros, feminists, and so on forever and ever. Dehumanising others burns bridges.

So, my instinct said I didn’t have time to unpick that mess and steer clear of cultural landmines, which pushed me away from an urban setting.

This left me with a protagonist out in the wilderness, meeting some people who aren’t human.

It’s always easier to write horror when a person is alone and far from help. If they can call the police or a friend for assistance then their predicament just isn’t scary. One of modern horror’s most common tropes is the ‘I’ve got no signal’ line. In this story, I decided to ignore that—I hope by writing that the protagonist is in the wilds it will be clear there’s no signal without me needing to be explicit. Did that come across clearly in the story, or did you think ‘why don’t they call someone?’ Let me know in the comments!

From there, it was only a small jump forwards to the story structure:

• Grabber first sentence

• Establish tone and location

• First encounter (inciting incident)

• Anticipation

• Escalation - bad guys close in

• The final push

• Ending?

That first ‘grabber’ sentence isn’t a work of art.

Sis, if you’re hearing this, then you’ve got my phone and…

It’s essentially a small spin on “By the time you read this, I’ll be dead”, but some cliches are popular for a reason. It tells the reader enough about the context and lets them jump right into the story.

One of the clearest things about this story is the way that distance and proximity can be used to directly turn up the volume on fear. We start with a distant encounter, we move to possible (but unseen) surveillance, then to hearing-range in the darkness, and finally to close proximity all around the camp. As the figures get closer, the danger becomes clearer and more urgent.

Are these things going to do something awful? We have no way of knowing for sure, but the instinct of the protagonist leads our feelings into fearfulness. The isolation of the setting already puts us on edge, then their shifting and swelling ranks makes them more fearsome.

Endings and found footage

Endings are a problem in found footage horror. It makes little sense for anyone to keep recording up until the moment of their deaths, so we either:

• ignore that unrealistic act

• we try to justify it somehow (“People have got to know what happened here!”)

• or we leave the fate of the protagonists hanging with an ambiguous ending.

I went for the third option here: the protagonist signs off with the hope they’ll survive, but we assume they don’t. Personally, I find that poignant, but your mileage may vary. It can also be unsatisfying, like the writer couldn’t work out a way to deliver the ending. It would probably be harder to make this satisfying in a cinema, but I think we can get away with it in a short prose story.

Standing in a circle like…

So… I expect one simile jumped out at you:

I can see snatches of them standing out there, motionless like they’re Stonehenge and I’m the altar in the middle.

I’ve referenced mountains, a lake, and used ‘ain’t’ along with double negatives like ‘never saw nothing’, so we could probably assume this character is in America and American. It’s not 100% sure for readers, because some Londoners use ‘ain’t’ too, and there are mountains in Wales, but I guess it’s likely the assumed setting is the US.

Because of that assumed setting, a reference to Stonehenge clunks a bit. I went back and forth on this quite a lot while editing. I tried to think of another image that would have the same weight of pagan history and mysterious atmosphere, and you can tell that I ‘failed’ because the simile is still in the story. Would an American think of Stonehenge in their moment of crisis? Maybe. Maybe not.

Sometimes it’s best not to overthink the writing. In the end, Stonehenge still seemed like the best image. I liked how it added in the idea of a pagan altar. At Stonehenge, it’s rumoured (with zero evidence) there were human sacrifices in the middle. I don’t need to add that explicitly in the text for it to add further menace to the situation—just evoking the ancient henge is enough to leave it lingering.

And that’s it from me this week. As usual, it’s taken a good few hours to write and edit this all, so if you fancy being super lovely then please consider going for a paid subscription and/or sharing this story with others.

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Share The Inciting Incident with Mata Haggis-Burridge

I hope you’re managing to keep your head stable in the whiplash-inducing global news cycle. For me, writing these stories brings a little space in the week. I encourage you to find your own creative practise too! It doesn’t matter if you’re good or not, veteran crafter or an absolute amateur, go do a thing you’ve always enjoyed or wanted to try. Life’s too short to wait.

Have a great one, and go be kind and spooky.

Love to you all,

Mata

xxx

Hey chums! I’m Mata, and I’m writing a new horror thing every week of 2026. Make sure you’re subscribed to read them all! Already subscribed and want to support my writing? Upgrade to a paid subscription!

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Without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s story…

Hi Saint Peter, I’ve Been A Very Good Shark

Hi Saint Peter, nice to meet ya. To be honest, I thought you’d be less… you know… limbed. More flipper-y. But anyway, I’ve been a very good shark so it would be great to go inside Heaven, if that’s okay with you?

…

What did I do in life?

Well, let’s skip to the most interesting part.

It all started one evening when I went to the beach. It was real nice, and I fancied a snack. Now, one of the reasons I like the beach at night is that there ain’t so many humans around—no offence meant, but your kind is noisy and sometimes even turn the water yellow, which ain’t great. I can smell blood a million miles away, so whaddya you think it’s like when there’s humans peeing right by me?

Anyway, there was this lady swimming there, and she had no wrapping on, neither, which is convenient ’cos bikinis can get stuck in my teeth. I had me a tasty meal and went for a nap.

So this beach was serving up food, very nice of them, and I decided to hang around. Can you blame me? People have such a bad opinion of sharks, and here are folks willing to practically throw themselves into my mouth.

A while later, I’m swimming along, minding my own business, when I see a sea turtle splashing around right on the surface. It was bright yellow and had pink legs, so clearly something wasn’t right with it. I like to be very sharkane (that’s like ‘humane’ but… you geddit, right?) and I didn’t want to leave a sick sea turtle swimming around in misery. There were loads of kids getting in the way, but I swam right past them and NOM. I got that sea turtle good.

Okay, so I can see this might not look so good in retrospect. Could I have noticed it was a kid paddling on an inflatable thingy before I ate him, and not actually a sick sea turtle? Sure, yeah, that’s possible, but I protest my innocence on this one. Just think about all the kids I didn’t eat while heading to chomp that particular one.

I stuck away from the beach then. I didn’t want to make that same mistake twice. Then I’m out at night, far out from the beach, and there’s this massive sea turtle. Like, I’ve never seen anything like it before. I gave it a nudge with my nose, barely a tap, and this human falls out.

…

Well, yeah.

Yeah, it was a small boat, not another sea turtle.

…

Yeah, I know, not everything in the water is a sea turtle. Okay smarty pants, but what happened, happened. Have you ever been a shark and tried buying glasses? You barely flop into the shop and everyone’s screaming. And accessible entrances? You try getting into an opticians when you can’t even breathe out of water.

Where was I? Oh yeah, this guy fell in the water, his boat was sinking. There was no way he was going to get back to shore, so I was kind enough to give him a quick ending. “You’re welcome,” I said to him afterwards, though he probably didn’t hear me because I’d bitten him in half, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Then it was like all hell broke loose. There were guys driving those noisy boats all over the place, smoking and throwing dynamite into the water. Crazies, all of ’em! But they kept on throwing out food for me too.

Now I ask ya: if I gave you a plate of food and you ate it, then you got angry I was sticking around to eat the food, who’s the weirdo in that story? You or me?

These guys sailed out in this boat that was way too small for ocean-going, but they kept on chucking out food for me. I tried to nudge them back towards shore, but then—would believe it—they shot me with a harpoon! Not just any old harpoon, but it had a barrel tied onto it.

I’m not one to stick around where I’m not wanted, so a tried to swim away and ignore it, but in the end I figured they’d maybe want their barrel back. So far I’d seen inflatables that kids fall off, boats people tip out of, and all kinds of things. Those guys were in trouble and maybe a barrel would be the only thing they’d have left out there.

I could hear them getting drunk and singing, and being drunk and out on the ocean is no place for a human. I figured they’d be needing that barrel back, pronto.

…

No, they did not thank me!

…

Yeah. Tell me about it. Where are the manners these days, eh? I was just tryna help.

Before I know it, they’ve stuck me with two more barrels. Absolutely ridiculous. What am I supposed to do with those, right?

I tried swimming by their boat so they could cut them off, but they didn’t seem interested. In a last attempt, I got right up on the back of the boat and one of the guys fell into my mouth! I mean, terrible luck on his part, but the whole thing was an accident waiting to happen.

Before I know it, the boat is sinking, and I’ve got one of those oxygen tanks stuck in my teeth. I was going to swim away and leave them to it, but think to myself, “Sharky, the guys on that boat are going to need that oxygen,” so I go swimming back to them and one of them shoots the tank right as I was holding it! Moron!

Anyway, it blows my head off, they probably completely lost their barrels, and I end up here, in front of you.

…

Yeah, I did try my best to help them, thanks for understanding, Pete.

…

The gates… They’re opening for me? Thank you! I knew I was a very good shark!

The end.

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As always, I also want to share a bit about the inspiration and writing process of each story…

Writing Notes

The idea for this story came to me while writing last week’s Writing Notes section. I’d previously written down ‘shark eye view’, which I hadn’t been able to turn into a story but transformed (through the idea of wondering what it’s like to see the whole world as food) into last week’s Cannibal Limerick post.

However, in last week’s notes, I wrote this:

I wondered if sharks are lonely. I thought about how they might get annoyed with speedboats, or have rivalry with orcas and dolphins. Maybe they ponder who would win in a fight between Jaws and the Kraken.

This got me thinking about a Jaws from the perspective of the shark. It’s not the shark’s fault it’s doing shark things. If there was a shark telling the tale (or watching the film in the cinema) it would probably sound very different.

Of course, Jaws doesn’t survive at the end of the film, so they/he/she (what gender is Jaws?) would have to be telling the story in the afterlife. Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates would make an ideal candidate to be the listener, and that adds a silly twist to the whole idea.

Another option could have been for Jaws to be writing a letter to a pen-pal, or maybe keeping a diary. This is nice, because it allows for a similar sort of tongue-in-cheek humour, but it lacked a good ending. The last entry would have had to be something like “I’ve seen some humans drifting around and getting drunk, so I’d better go bump into their boat to make sure they’re all awake and paying attention. I sure hope they don’t mind a little jolt!” or something along those lines.

That’s not bad, but I think including the film’s ending in the story—and framing it as a misunderstanding—is more entertaining.

Framing the baddies as the heroes has a bit of a history in comedy horror, such as Tuck and Dale Versus Evil. It can be a lot of fun to see well-intentioned characters misinterpreted, however it can also end up very dark if you’re not careful: many signifiers of ‘evil’ that could be misleading are based on deeply problematic stereotypes and prejudices, from atypical physical traits to being black, working class, or lacking educational experiences.

If you want to do this kind of thing, make sure it’s clear where the real malice lies.

Prejudice against sharks isn’t fair too, but this week’s story doesn’t make that worse, and arguably makes the shark much more sympathetic.

I wrote this story with the idea in mind that Jaws is telling the absolute truth: Jaws never intended harm (beyond its usual appetites) and was just doing rational sharky things. Writing these notes, it’s occurred to be that some readers might assume Jaws is misleading Saint Peter and lying about the story—I’d love to hear in the comments whether you thought Jaws was telling the truth or trying to mislead Saint Peter.

Voice

One of the joys of writing in first-person is the choice of language and grammar. For me, the voice of Jaws is definitely American.

I think it’s rarely a good idea to go too heavily into adding local idioms and phrasing. If you’re going to do that, save it for scripts rather than prose, but you can add accent clues with the words you choose: nice to meet ya, ain’t, geddit.

In a script, the actor’s performance does a lot of the work for you, but on the page it needs to scan easily for the reader. If I’d written a full-on Noo Yoik accent it would become hard to read.

Horror (comedy)

I don’t expect anyone to find this story scary, but there is definitely horror here. The shark eats four people across this story, including a drunk and naked woman as the first target and then a child. None of that is nice. However, it’s hard to argue that its unnatural.

Nature can be terrifying.

A few years ago, a new cat moved into our neighbourhood. He was adopted as a stray from the streets of Paris and was accustomed to standing his own ground. He was a scrapper and always threatening the other cats (of which there are plenty).

There’s a cat that we’re very fond of (Boots) who is very chilled and placid, and this new cat was really kicking off. There were a few metres between them and I decided I wanted to break the line of sight so one or the other could leave.

Nope. That didn’t work.

Rather than taking the opportunity to leave, Boots remained still, and the other cat just got more annoyed.

In the end, the other cat pounced on my leg—it clung on like I was a tree trunk, claws shredding my trousers, teeth biting, back legs scratching. I clung on for five or ten seconds, really trying its best to hurt me… and succeeding!

My leg was quite severely cut. I needed a hospital trip to get the wounds cleaned and a couple of injections to make sure I didn’t catch anything.

I’m 6’1”. The cat is a house cat. Nonetheless, it still fancied its chances with me, and it was prepared to try to take me down. It wasn’t logical. It couldn’t be reasoned with. It was scared in a new environment and wanted to assert its rights on the territory. I was in its way.

Nature is scary. That’s the horror lurking beneath (pun intended) today’s story.

Taking that and dressing up a shark eating people as a grave misunderstanding is where the comedy comes in.

Incidentally, as the epilogue to that cat attack: I shooed the cat away. I think it was scared and intimidated that I didn’t do anything back to it. After a few months we became friends and I got to stroke him. Boots remains very grateful he wasn’t attacked.

Love the film Jaws? Read here about some of the brilliant foreshadowing:

I hope your week is going swimmingly.

I’ve started submitting a novel I finished last year to literary agents. It’s a Young Adult Horror, quite perky and upbeat but with dark things bubbling beneath the surface and I love it to bits. Trying to get an agent can take a long time, but hopefully it will happen! Stay subscribed for updates on my journey.

As always, click subscribe! If you’re subscribed, click the ‘like’ heart! If you’ve done those, then how about adding a comment or sharing this with others to help me torment new eyeballs with my brain juices?

Have a grand week ahead. You have my absolute permission to be kind and spooky (and I’m a doctor so that counts as proper advice),

Mata

xxx