#not quite horror

[fortunaestalta]

[christiew]

Ok, let's do something one CAN'T do on the bird site. A WIP that has sat, untouched, for almost a year (yay, depression!). You, dear reader, get to see its debut. Enjoy the opening excerpt from a highly unfinished WIP, Mirrors:

*•.°*•.°*•.°*•.°*•.°

I frown as I catch a glimpse of the back edge of my jaw. I hate that angle. Frankly, I’m less than enthralled by most angles that are caught in the hundred or so mirrors in my house.

But I’m not a ghost.

And that is the point of all of these mirrors - far from feeding my vanity, they are in place to keep me and the people around me safe.

I am a medium, and ghosts are drawn to me. The spirits of the departed can be drawn INTO mirrors. Most ghosts avoid mirrors at all costs, which is why they are absolutely everywhere in my house. The damned things follow me home. The mirrors, at the very least, keep most of them outside. Except for Gary. Fucking Gary. 

Gary is a ghost who followed me home three years ago. Now, he’s my roommate. Weirdly, the mirrors don’t bother Gary precisely because he isn’t, and presumably never was, hung up on his looks.

You see, he looks dead. Gray pallor, slightly slack skin, clouded eyes. He has a full range of expressions that you don’t usually see on the recently deceased, but otherwise, on first glance, he’d fit right in on a morgue slab. Which is not where I found him. Look, I don’t go hunting for ghosts. I’m not a thrill-seeker, or a truth-seeker or any other kind of nut in search of some high unattainable to mere mortals. I am a mere mortal. I eat, I sleep, I work. And I see dead people.

I was always “sensitive”, you might say. I got goosebumps for no reason at all, and saw things out of the corner of my eye, that sort of thing. I brushed it off as being cold or tired or imagining things. Until the car accident. I’m told my heart stopped for 2 minutes before they could get it beating again.

All I know is that one day, I was driving home from my job as a barista at a coffee shop, in the rain, and the next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed bruised from head to toe, hooked up to a bunch of beeping machines, with three men staring at me from the foot of the hospital bed.

The men looked worse than I did, despite being dressed in real clothes and not hospital gowns. All three were dead. All three were ghosts. I passed out and just barely managed to avoid being put on antipsychotics.

It was a near thing. Gary told me what to say. He’d been a psychiatrist who died on a surgery table in the hospital. He has a lot of opinions about how that surgery went. He’ll tell you all about them if you hold still long enough. And can hear him. At the time, I was totally freaked out, but definitely sure I did not want to end up on heavy sedatives, so I took his advice. And then he followed me home.

I suppose I could have tried to have him exorcized or some such thing, but he told me about the mirror thing and got rid of the other seven ghosts I somehow picked up on the way out of the hospital (there are a LOT of ghosts in hospitals). If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would have been locked up, heavily medicated, and still surrounded by the whispers of the dead.  So Gary stays. I don’t know why. I’ve asked him, repeatedly, if there’s something I need to do to help him “pass on”. He just shrugs and says he’ll let me know if he finds out. 

[creamcitywriter]

Excerpt, from finished short story The Watch, The Watched.

Brief: The Watch, The Watched, follows a nondescript person looking for a sense of identity by breaking into peoples homes and observing them as they go about their daily lives. They are a hundred different aspects of a hundred people and none of them are authentic or organic.

T begins to sweat. It’s not good, it’s not enough. The mimicked body language is pulled primarily from a four minute observation waiting in line. When T watched the house, there was no studying of body language and movement. It was watching the cars leave and who drove what. There was no glint at intimacy and hidden traits.

T needs to be able to see them, and so they spend the rest of the day in the garage going through tool boxes. Nothing taken, just seeing what’s there and writing it down before making one last lap of the home, putting back anything that was moved, grabbing a yogurt and four granola bars, and returning to the attic.

They sit in the corner above the entrance from the garage, wait until 4:17 when the husband comes home, and draw a circle. Listening to him navigate the home, mapping out high traffic areas. Above the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the shower. The kitchen and living room. All of it. The wife comes home at 4:57 and they order takeout. T pays no attention to them for the rest of the night and struggles to fall asleep. If only T knew how the husband slept, in what position and how rigid his limbs laid, sleep and comfort would be found, but in these new plastic molded pre-fab developments no hidden rooms or passageways exist. Nothing that would allow them to observe the residents in full yet remain unseen like there are in older parts of the city. Everything built in the exurbs can only be seen as it allows itself to be seen, and to demand that there is more is an unthinkable perversion.

It is a big risk, drilling tiny holes to peer through, but necessary. How can T understand and embody this man without seeing him? All the white shavings from the drywall on the ceiling are vacuumed up and the vacuum is put away precisely where it was found, with the cord dangling precisely in the same manner it was found. T grabs a cheese stick, granola bar, and a handful of snap peas before returning to their lair and peering through.

T squared the drawn circles and put a hole in each corner and center, five separate vantage points. They sit in the corner above the garage entrance. When the husband returns T lays on their stomach and shoves an eye to the hole, positioning the head just right until they can make out the shoulder and head of the husband's high-vis sweatshirt. Rotating their awkward body 90 degrees to the hole to their left and peering and T makes out the front of the husband’s body.

From each of these pov’s T sees a fraction of a body, never the whole man at once. But still T adds the individual to the whole; the right shoulder moves and rests like this no matter what the left shoulder and arm are doing, and vice versa.

The Wife comes home and T does the same. Gleaning the essence of this man and woman from drawn and quartered movements.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

sick of this anti-aging obsession. let's go in the opposite direction. i want more characters who are hardened & grizzled & have a face lined with the harrowing tribulations of time--and then halfway through the narrative u find out they're 27

[ruporas]

dragon meat, you, and me

[stil-lindigo]

scorched earth.

a comic about a princess who died in a fire.

(this is a sequel to bite of winter, a comic about Snow and what became of her after her death.)

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creative notes:

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all my other comics

store

[daenystheedreamer]

ive been thinking about "there must always be a stark in winterfell" as a threat... i love the theory that the starks had some hand in the others, i LOVE the theory that the starks MADE the others in order to become the kings of winter. i think the idea of winterfell as a prison is so fun the idea that the starks MUST stay there as divine punishment for their choices. "if you leave, you will die, you will stay here forever". it's so antithetical to everything the starks and winterfell mean to the characters and i think that's fun! winterfell is so warm and loving and the castle that feels most like a true home for its inhabitants, the one LEAST like a prison. but its got that ominous crypt of corpses beneath it...

[lilli-eyr]

ꁝꏂ꒒꒒ꄲ ꉔꋪꋬꊰ꓄꒐ꏂꇙ

[lucabyte]

Comfortable in New Skin

[purple-raspberries]

(Click for better quality if needed)

NEWS PRESENTER: Despite their best efforts, police in the area have yet to find the location of the events in the videos on the camera found in [unintelligible audio]. Police ask the public to please submit any information they might have concerning the people or “characters” shown to you today. They suspect this may be a dangerous group of individuals linked to other disappearances around the country, and that, yes, the disappearance of [unintelligible audio] and this footage is, indeed, genuine. Despite the appearances of the attackers and the events leading up to [unintelligible audio]’s disappearance.

[Relevant news segment ends]

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Another creepy thing I finally thought of to go alongside my L o n g Howdy sketch. Now more refined!

Unedited version underneath

Edit: Barnaby closeup

[spiked-mall-goth]

the two genders

[koszmarnybudyn]

They were right this would make a pretty sick cover.

[garou-art]

🔪✌️ when your bf disappears into the mountains but he's totally fine now

[zoe-oneesama]

since were on the topic of animes tonight, what do you reccomend to someone (me) who isn't an anime watcher?

Huh, see, that's a hard ask because anime is at it's core just a Type of Media. There's anime for kids, there's anime for horror fans, there's anime for action movie junkies, there's anime for comedy lovers, there's anime for romance suckers, fantasy enjoyers, sci-fi nerds, murder mystery, animal lovers, people who like a bunch of pervy fan service, people who love it when the characters are doomed by the narrative, love it when The Power of Love and Friendship saves the day, love it when The Power of Love and Friendship ain't worth shit.

I can't really tell you what anime is good for you because I don't know you. But if you know what you like in things like books or movies or video games, there's definitely an anime for you to enjoy.

[strawberryscare]

i genuinely think this is one of the best episodes of fantasy high across the three seasons!!! such perfect storytelling rolls and the mechanics of the mystery cards were so exciting to me and you could tell the players had fun with it too :-) it was pretty short comparatively to other d20 episodes but it really packed a punch i just loved it so much

[stil-lindigo]

patchwork canary.

a comic about two girls, fate, and a powerful man who felt entitled to something that wasn’t his to own.

support me on patreon (if you’d like to see more comics like this one)