Horror Story

"Life Support"

Analyzed

A horror story cannot be exactly that without suspense.

Some of the tips for writing a story in this genre are:

Without suspense, the horror aspect falls flat.

Suspense should present itself as a feeling of dread.

The villain need not be one of the foremost figures in the action.

The villain need not be human.

In a horror story, an element of shock should be present.

The plot is not necessarily out of this world. It can be something that could happen in the here and now without being paranormal.

When writing your horror story, add the element of fright, perhaps caused by something thought of as improbable of happening.

Middle of Story - Final Tips

Tracy and Burton rushed to the hospital immediately after receiving the call that said paramedics and firemen had just extracted their son, Richie, from the wreckage of his car.

After an excruciating wait, the gurney carrying Richie’s mangled body exploded forcefully through the Emergency Room doorway. As medics ran with him, the stench of blood and alcohol putrefied the air in their wake.

Crouched on top of the gurney above a limp form covered by a blood-soaked sheet, one medic hammered Richie’s sternum as the procession slammed through inner doorways.

Tracy and Burton ran after them but were stopped short. Neither witnessed the frantic effort to save their son. The immediacy of doctors, nurses and technicians running back and forth in frenzy told the urgency of the situation, yet they were asked to wait.

Numbed, they stood without knowing how long, clutching one another and shaking.

Finally, the ER physician came looking for them. “You can see him now,” he said as he approached. “After that, we’ll take him off life support, as you requested earlier.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Tracy said, mumbling. She and Burton had to face the horrific truth.

Burton’s face was thick with stubble. He still wore his pajama tops, having slipped only into trousers and grabbed a jacket as they ran out the door in the middle of the night. His lips were blue. He stared bug-eyed at the man who could not save their son.

Tracy ran fingers through her hair. She had not combed it in since bounding out of bed and jumping into her clothes.

“Let me remind you,” the doctor said. “He’s going to look quite different. In addition to his injuries, he’s got tubes going in and out—”

“I understand, Doc,” Burton said. “Just let me see my boy.”

With eyes unable to focus, Tracy followed her husband into the trauma bay where Richie lay covered with a fresh white sheet. Blood began to soak through that one as well, oozing from the sopping sheet underneath. Life support mechanisms kept the blood flowing in a body long dead.

Blood puddled on the floor. Crimson footprints and discarded life-saving paraphernalia lay everywhere. A nurse threw paper mats over the blood on the floor, in case Tracy and Burton wanted to step close to the bed.

Only Richie’s face and feet were left uncovered. One foot was turned completely opposite of the direction it should normally lay. His face was mangled and swollen. He looked more like Frankenstein’s monster in the making. Tubes and lines stuck out everywhere. Tracy convulsed at the sight.

The doctor left and jerked the curtains closed behind them.

Tracy glanced at her husband. His heart was probably not strong enough to endure the horrors of this night. Earlier, while they waited for Richie’s arrival, a doctor checked Burton’s heart but would not stop him from spending this last bit of time with his son. Burton would never leave, not even if his life depended on it.

Burton prayed and then looked up. “Tracy, honey,” he said. “Talk to our Richie, in case he can still hear—before they disconnect….”

Tracy spoke softly, lovingly until her voice cracked and she began to cry silently. She couldn’t touch her son or his coverings without getting blood on her hands. All she could do was stand there and stare with her hands tightly clasped.

The smell of Richie’s blood, the alcohol and the hospital odor created a hideous perfume. It would have felt good to faint and get away from it all, like waking safely from a nightmare, only in reverse.

Burton began to shake violently. Tracy ran for a chair and dragged it over to the bedside just as his knees gave out.

“I told that boy he was playing with the devil when he drank,” Burton said.

“Sh-h,” Tracy said as she stroked the back of Burton’s hand. “It’s over now.” She dabbed at her eyes.

“He’s been like the devil himself ever since he started in with the booze. It changed him. Sometimes I didn’t even know his voice.”

“Sh-h,” Tracy said again. “It wasn’t only the booze. He was a hell-raiser, that one.” She wrapped an arm around Burton’s shoulder. “Let’s have good thoughts in these last minutes with our son,” she said. She blew her nose into a handful of tissues.

Burton vented anger in the quiet way he had learned to handle rage ever since his heart began to act up. “I blamed you, Richie,” he said, “for bringing the devil into our lives and bringing on my heart condition. I was perfectly healthy till you began to get into all that trouble. Something got into you.” His voice cracked. “But I still loved you.”

They lingered over their goodbyes until the doctor returned.

“It’s time,” he said.

Tracy helped Burton out of the chair. They huddled together beside the bed. The doctor switched off the machines. Simple as that, lights stopped flashing, monitors stopped beeping. Screens went dark. They were left alone again. The silence was harrowing.

Just as they reached the doorway to leave, the sound of rustling bed sheets came from behind. They whirled about. Richie moved! His eyes shot open. He gasped for air. A bloody mangled arm jerked up. The hand grasped the tube sticking out of his trachea, gave it a yank and sent it flying. He lay gurgling in his own fluids.

Tracy’s eardrums vibrated from her stupefying scream. Burton made it to another chair and collapsed. Doctors and nurses rushed in. Everyone froze in place, staring at the revived mass of shredded flesh that had come uncovered as Richie jerked and spasmed his way back to life. Tracy and Burton were shoved aside as chaos took over.

Richie began recovering in a strange and frightening way. Doctors and nurses said he wouldn’t eat. One day, his father whispered in desperation, “Eat to make your body grow strong and healthy. Let’s get you outa this hospital.”

From then on Richie sucked up the food like a mad dog drooling. He ate enough to feed six people. His wounds finally began to heal but his body was stiff, as if not knowing how to manipulate his limbs. He would have to relearn all his autonomous functions. He had not begun to speak again, emanating only a wild penetrating glare as if looking into people’s souls.

“So this is the price Richie has to pay,” Burton would say over and over.

A month later, they took Richie to the rickety house they called home. Their shack had already been mortgaged to its aged and sagging rafters to pay for Richie’s college years. Nothing was left for doctor bills and long term care. They would have to nurse him back to health on their own.

Richie stopped eating again. In a debilitated condition, he might starve to death. His weakened body would not support life for long. He jerked and twitched constantly. Once, when Tracy washed his face, a strange and menacing voice whispered, “Too small…this body….” She dropped the cloth and fled.

Richie’s wounds stopped healing, opened again and festered. Pus oozed. His complexion took on a greenish cast. When his strength seemed gone. When they thought he might die, his legs began to jerk. Both of them easily turned backwards where they weren’t supposed to go. He made hideous guttural sounds and pulled at his skin like someone trying to fit into clothing much too small. The stench of his infections worsened. His bedroom became odoriferous. Still, he would not eat.

Tracy watched the boy she knew become something else before her eyes. Doctors continued to caution that the road back to health would be difficult. But Tracy no longer saw any part of her son in this monster, Frankenstein’s cousin, who finally graduated to a wheelchair.

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Tracy lost patience but Burton was always by her side. Finally, Richie began to utter noises that sounded more like speech. His vocalizations were scratchy and forced. The joy of continued recovery was short lived.

One day Richie went through his wriggling and squirming as if he was about to pop out of his skin. His face got real red, especially around the hideous lesions and sores. His eyes went bloodshot and bulged in their sockets. Again, he puked a stream of bilge.

“Richie?” Tracy asked, disbelieving her own eyes.

“Too small…this…body…,” the voice said in that gurgled, monotone string.

Tracy backed away quickly. Richie stretched out, grotesquely lengthening his body. It seemed an act of desperation to get out of his skin. His neck elongated, his eyes bulged, unseeing. He finally stood, got his balance, and then kicked the wheelchair against the wall.

“Son?” Burton asked, wide-eyed.

Standing unaided, Richie wriggled like a molting snake. His arms flailed like useless appendages. He walked stiff-legged like a sightless mummy and bumped the nearby table and almost fell. Tracy rushed to him only to be knocked across the room when he howled in agony and his forceful, putrid breath blew her backwards.

“Richie!” Tracy said. “I want to help you!”

The creature that used to be her son croaked, “Wrong…body.”

Burton jumped to his feet and rushed to his son’s aid. The monster’s arms came to life like balloons being inflated and knocked Burton aside as well.

“Out…of…this…body…,” the creature said. His foul breath filled the room and thickened the air. “Wrong…body!” He toppled heavy furniture with a flick of a hand as he struggled to reach the front doorway. He hurled a heavy desk into the air. It broke through the floorboards when it landed. Every time he flicked a hand or threw an arm, pus flew from his open wounds. “This…body…,” he said.

His voice filled Tracy with fear and dread. She and Burton watched him rip the front door from its hinges and step outside. “Out…of…this…body…,” he kept saying.

“It’s the devil in him,” Burton said. “I told you, Tracy.”

They ran to the front stoop. Richie began to cross the street. He looked straight at the speeding truck then stepped squarely in front of it. “Out…of…this—“ The truck hit him with such force that it sent him flying past the house next door.

“Did you see that?” a woman screamed as she ran up. “It was a monster! A monster!”

People crowded around. Tracy and Burton found their boy lying dead. The greenish cast, lesions and foul odor had disappeared. He looked only like the badly mangled boy to whom they had said their goodbyes in the Emergency Room. He wore a smile as if he had just seen the Light.

Tracy’s mind reeled between believing what she knew and what she now saw. “He’s no monster,” she said, yelling for the screaming woman to hear. “That’s our son.”

Suddenly, Burton grabbed his chest and collapsed.

A siren wailed in the distance.

Burton continued to jerk and twitch and groan through the agony of his heart attack.

The ambulance arrived. One attendant bent over Richie. Tracy pulled another over to her husband.

The medic attended to Richie long enough to recognize the boy was beyond help and threw a blanket over his body. Then he jumped to his partner’s side to help tend to Burton. They applied CPR, shot his heart full of epinephrine, and poked with needles and shocked with electric paddles. Burton never responded. Finally, they stopped all resuscitation efforts and loaded his body onto a stretcher and covered it with a sheet.

Tracy turned away, put her face in her hands and wept as neighbors comforted. Then, from the direction of her husband’s body on the gurney behind her, a scratchy unnerving voice said, “I’m…all…right…now.”

People screamed and pointed. Tracy whipped around in disbelief. Burton’s arm jerked back the sheet. He lifted his head and looked straight at her in the same scorching way Richie looked at her before he busted out of the house. Burton’s eyes bulged out of blackened orbits. He forced himself to stand and one of his feet turned backwards. He smiled wickedly and then wretched as green bile jettisoned out of his mouth.

It is not necessary to carry the story further, telling how the creature was conquered, or the further damage he did. It’s a horror story, simply to evoke feelings of shock and awe in readers who like this genre of fiction.

Some points to note:

In this horror story, Richie is not the villain, even though it looks like his drinking and wild ways got out of hand. Remember, in the beginning he was a young man going to college before he suddenly changed.

The true villain in this horror story is whatever it was that possessed Richie in the first place and caused him to drink and change – and what took over Ritchie’s father’s larger sized body when Burton died.

Some tips for writing a story in the horror genre (or any genre) are:

Have a good plot. This horror story is laughable, because the plot of Life Support is ordinary or nearly predictable. Every short story in every genre needs a unique plot.

Start the story in the middle of an action scene.

Create characters so the reader can feel empathy with one or more.

Use all five senses at different times to appropriately describe at least the main character’s experiences.

Include suspense and a feeling of dread when writing a horror story. Without the elements that turn your reader’s nervous system inside out, the horror aspect falls flat.

One example of suspense in this horror story is the intense anticipation of what might happen next if this mangled body were to…. Got the picture?

Depending on the length of the story, give the reader a breather or two. The shorter the story, the fewer pauses needed.

However, never allow the pause to contain information that is boring or unnecessary. All scenes must further the story action.

Use foreshadowing all the way up till near the ending. You might also wish to read my article on Foreshadowing.

The villain need not be seen. A heroine or a villain need not be immediately present. They can exist between the lines. Usually these characters found between the lines give you an Aha! experience when you realize how they affect the story.

A heroine or villain need not be a person. I have some great tips on Heroines and others about Villains.

Just when things look like they might go right, make them go drastically wrong.

When you think your characters have had all they can take, give them more woes to sort out. It is a horror story, after all. Take the action to its nth degree.

The ending of any horror story need not be a nice one. The genre is meant to instill fright or dreaded wonder, a sense of “what if they’re still out there?”

And finally….

I hope you who read or write horror have enjoyed this horror story, and spotted its villain right off or had an Aha! experience.

I also hope you’ll add these tips for writing a horror story to your knowledge of what to include when you write your prose.

And remember to include suspense and dread in your horror story, the creepier and more thrilling, the better.

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