Was looking at the deepest, darkest fear thingy and tried to think of mine...it's a ramble basically. Oh, and it's un-betaededededed, sorry xxxx
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She stared at the keyboard.
This was impossible; no way could she write this stuff. The evil she knew about was all too human.
You've got black slime stinking its fetid way up your cellar steps?
Throw a bucket of antibacterial, fast acting sterilising toilet cleaner over it.
Inherited a remote ancestral home with a dark madness lurking in the attics?
Counselling and a course of drug therapy will do the trick.
Nasty witchy poo type supernatural entity ruining your newly laid Swedish woodblock flooring with spectral blood stains?
Tell her off in no uncertain terms, and treat the floor with lemon juice, ash and bees wax.
Vampires tapping at your windows at the dead of night, sucking the household pets dry and upsetting the children?
Don't take any of their nonsense, tell them the uncomfortable truth, they are out of date. We have mortgage companies to do that these days.
The Devil and all his hosts are alive and well, and running the banks of the world.
As far as she could see Horror, as a really viable genre, was well and truly past it's sell by date.
Or maybe it was just her? The innate belief that there was not much that couldn't be fixed, or at the very least, be rendered merely 'a problem', had taken away her fear of the dark. In fact there wasn't even much in the way of darkness left.
Terror came from the children having an accident, getting mixed up with drugs, your daughter marrying a violent man, your son a vicious harpy. Life has become prosaic. When we came to the edge of our knowledge we no longer said 'here be dragons'. We now sniffed, frowned and wondered where we'd get funding to look further.
Not that this helped at all. She was supposed to be writing a horror story, it was supposed to be practice.
Wasn't as if she didn't believe in enchantment. She often thought that her habit of buying nic nacs at jumble sales had netted her some cursed object, her own 'Monkey's Paw' that granted all her wishes the wrong way.
The truth was she was preparing to perform some ritual magic that very night. A spot of candle magic to try and boost the holiday savings. See, even that was boring! No grand spell, no curse on all those who thwarted her and hers. No incantation to make some wonderful man fall desperately in love with her. Oh no, she wanted to win a couple of hundred quid on the Lottery to give the kids a better holiday.
She had lost her sense of romance, of wonder.
She had become a practical woman.
It was true, she was cursed. The worst curse that could befall a person, she had become bogged down in the minutiae of life. The washing up, bills, the guttering.
The grand plan had been mislaid somewhere, under a pile of un-read books, perhaps in the basket with the knitting she never quite got round to?
There had been a plan, as far as she could remember it involved her being happy in some way or another. A wrinkle free life of book writing and emotional fulfilment, and no calls on her to care for the mundane.
Dear God, it hit her like a slap, she needed the horror, the vampires, the insane cackling ghoul. It was as necessary as the joy she had also lost.
She stared at the keyboard...
