Today’s prompt: “Your most memorable experience in the back of a car”
Hnarqu, one of Cthulhu’s little brothers, is described in Wikipedia as “a gigantic mouth surrounded by countless tentacles, similar to a titanic sea anemone.”
Sure, yeah, you met your death in a back seat with him, but a makeout session with a mouth that big? Outstanding.
Today’s prompt: “Where do you go to escape?”
An angry mob hard on your heels, that empty cave seemed like a good idea. Too bad it was actually the gaping mouth of a giant monster.
Today’s prompt: “What you think about that always brings you to tears”
You approach the crying woman. “Are you okay? Can I do anything to help?”
“Y-y-y-you ca-aa-aan be a sna-aa-aa-ack,” the woman says, still sobbing as she begins her transformation into the spiderlike demon goblin Jorogumo.
Jorogumo still sobs as she nibbles your toes like popcorn, and wails as she picks her chelicerae with the bone of your little finger. She long ago learned that she catches more victims as a crying woman, and she can easily make herself cry by remembering the episode of SpongeBob Squarepants where SpongeBob loses his pet snail, Gary. But turning off the waterworks is a harder thing.
Today’s prompt: “Wisdom you learned from your child”
You make a circuit of the house, making sure all the doors and windows are locked, and closing the blinds. You settle down onto the couch with a drink and a good book.
A small voice clears its throat. With hesitation, you lower your book.
Standing before you is a drowned girl. Her long, wet hair is plastered to her shoulders and the sides of her face, and her dress sticks to her legs.
“There is no escape,” she says.
You hear a knock at your front door. You aren’t expecting anyone at this time of night. You peek through the peephole and see a large crowd of men and women in dark hooded robes. They’re chanting. Something something Cthulhu something something fhtagn. Great.
You steal as quietly as possible to the back door and peer through the blinds. More people in robes. This can’t be good.
The knock comes more insistently now. You run into the cellar and bolt the door from inside. You hear loud thuds against the front door, like a battering ram.
You turn on the cellar light, a bare light bulb, and give a sharp little cry when you see a hanged boy. Part of the noose still dangles from his neck, though you can still see around it the red line where it bit into his throat.
“There is no escape,” he says.
The battering ram thuds and thuds and is soon accompanied by splintering sounds. And if the front door won’t hold, this one won’t either.
You grab the edge of a shelf full of old paint, pesticides, and cleaning supplies that look like they would only make the surface you were cleaning more dirty while giving off hella toxic fumes. You pull the shelf away from the wall, and fumble among your keys for the one that will open the door that was hidden behind the shelf. You turn on your flashlight phone and follow the tunnel.
The tunnel opens out into a boarded up structure. Between your flashlight and a patch of streetlight let in by a broken window only partially covered by boards, you can see the motorcycle. Right next to it are a shotgun and an aluminum frame backpack. You know without checking that the backpack is filled with MREs, shotgun shells, and several bottles of water. Your grandfather prepared you for this day.
He did not prepare you for the charred corpse of a burned child to be standing next to the bike, its blackened skin puffed and flaking.
“There is no escape,” the child says.
You cautiously approach the bike and pick up the backpack. The burned child does not move. You cinch the shotgun to the backpack with straps and put the backpack on. The child still does not move. Unnerved, you move the motorcycle away from the child.
There are tons of figures in hooded robes, and there are probably more around this building, but they were all on foot. Outrun them on the motorcycle, then ambush them with the gun if you have to – that’s your best bet.
This structure has double doors held shut by a two-by-four slotted into two brackets. You pull out the two-by-four and the door swing ever so slightly out. You hold your breath, but you don’t hear anything. Good. You peek through the gap between the doors. There are figures in robes milling about out there, but they don’t seem to be paying much attention.
You hop onto the motorcycle and start it. Against all probability, it starts like a dream despite its age and the layer of dust on it. You hear a hubbub of voices outside and drive the motorcycle straight for the doors.
You burst out of the building every bit as dramatically as you could have hoped. You’re afraid the motorcycle will tip over when you hit the doors, but they swing wide when the tire brushes against one and your arm strikes out against the other. You speed between the arrayed cultists and out into the night air.
You drive and drive and drive until you hit a well-lit intersection filled with dead children, each with bite marks. “There is no escape,” the children say.
And then, the ground quaking with his every step, behind them arrives Dread Cthulhu himself.
Today’s prompt: “A road trip with your sister”
It started as an ordinary road trip to visit some friends in the town where you grew up. You and your sister packed snacks, bottled water and plenty of audiobooks, but there was never any question of who would do the driving. Your sister is an incredible driver, and it’s only because of her that you made it as far as you did.
She made it through the freak snowstorm with nary a skid. When the semi truck carrying a manufactured home jackknifed in front of her in the middle of the highway, she managed to maneuver into the ditch alongside the highway and back out on the other side. She gunned it up the ramp away from the crowd of screaming, hatchet-wielding cannibals and over the deep canal to the other side. But when a plane full of livestock accidentally dropped an entire herd of cattle over the roadway, even she couldn’t prevent a fatal collision with a cow.
Today’s prompt: “A physical description of an eccentric relative”
Aunt Mary. Always with her tight, frizzy curls, her dangling earrings, round cheeks, thick eyebrows, Coke-bottle glasses and heavy bangles. And always with those delicious funeral potatoes she brought to family gatherings. Fuzzy Aunt Mary – that’s what everyone in the family called her. It started with some of the young kids, but it caught on until everyone in the family was calling her Fuzzy Aunt Mary.
That is, until the day her Coke-bottle glasses were so fogged up with steam that she didn’t even notice when her chunky bracelets knocked over an open bottle with a “Mr. Yuck” symbol right into the potatoes and the resulting casserole killed off half the extended family, including you. Now the survivors call her Poison Aunt Mary.
Today’s prompt: “Write about two characters who have known each other for a long time, and give one of them a secret.”
You notice your friend Jen at the park. She’s sitting on the ground, leaning back against a tree, her eyes closed. There’s a book resting on her lap. Her face has that ever-present sense of focus, but she seems more relaxed than you’ve ever seen her.
Jen has always had this certain intensity about her. At first she seems standoffish – when you were introduced to her and stuck out your hand, she shrank back. “I don’t like to be touched,” she said. Her shyness around crowds, her nervousness in enclosed spaces – you once caught her rushing out of a packed house party and hyperventilating in the back yard. But when she’s more composed, she brings a different kind of intensity. Her laugh is infectious and her smile is warm. People gravitate toward her, drawn to her. And even just the way she interacts with the world – there’s a certain zen to it. The way she pauses just before pushing a door open or picking up a cup. It’s almost like she’s saying to herself, “This is a door” or “This is a cup,” reassuring herself of the world before she engages with it.
She seems so peaceful now. You almost don’t want to disturb her. So you say it very softly at first: “Jen.”
Jen doesn’t seem to notice. She doesn’t even open her eyes. So you say it a little louder: “Hey, Jen.”
Still no reaction. You know she’s said she doesn’t like it when people touch her, but at this point you’re kind of worried. Just a tap on the shoulder wouldn’t hurt, right?
You’ve just made contact with Jen’s skin when she jolts up, shouting “No wait don’t–”
The world goes black. You’re in a pitch-black nothing. You’ve never been in darkness this absolute. There’s a chill in the air, a biting wind, and nothing.
“Jen?” you call out. The name echoes.
“I’m sorry,” her voice echoes back plaintively. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
“What is this place?” you say. Is this place Is this place Is this place echoes over and over.
“I call it the anteroom,” Jennifer replies. “Listen. There’s something I have to tell you.” Her voice seems very far away.
“What is it?”
“I’m part black hole.”
“What? That’s not possible.”
“Maybe not, but it’s what I am.”
“How does that even work?”
“The me that you see walking around? I think of that as my shell. It’s a barrier that keeps me from absorbing all of the light, all of the air, all of the ground, everything. But anything that touches me gets pulled into me, unless I’m able to acclimate to it in time. I have to kind of rearrange my molecules so I can pick up my car keys or sit down on a couch.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It takes an immense amount of focus just to exist in the world.”
“Wait, is that why – you’re not really afraid of dogs, are you?”
“I’ve had a German shepherd and two terriers disappear inside me because I couldn’t get away in time. People should teach their dogs not to jump on people. You never know what can happen.”
“Oh my god, when Tony disappeared, was that because….”
“Yes. He was trying so hard to be what I needed in a boyfriend. He let me take the lead whenever we kissed. He let me guide his hand when we were, uh, intimate. But one day I was frying some eggs and he came up behind me and put his arms around me and poof.”
“We thought he’d left you. We thought he’d skipped town.”
“It was easier to let you think that.” She pauses. There’s a fluttering sound. “Listen. I’m really sorry, but I can’t keep this up forever. To keep you in the anteroom, I have to focus. And that’s focus I need to not pull in the rest of the world.”
The sound – it’s like the pages of a book being flipped by the wind. The book she was reading in the park.
“Goodbye,” Jen says. “I’m sorry. I’ll miss you.”
The sounds of the book disappear. There’s a few more skittering noises. Bark, maybe, from the tree? And then there is void.