A place where I would never go

It haunts me like my own shadow

And steals my breath away

It keeps me locked inside my head

With things that live beneath my bed

And in the closet, something said

Please come inside and play

At night I hear the scratching walls

And laughter trailing by footfalls

As in my ear the darkness calls

You damn well better pray

And if I make it through the night

I’d be a sheet of ghostly white

And never slip into the dark

Or there, I’d have to stay

And Dark Dispelled The Void

A Universe So Deep Inside

Where Light Can’t Be Employed

I Stood Upon The Brink Of Time

A Fragile Humanoid

As Gears Sung In Their Pantomime

The Rise Of The Android

In separate lives do loom

Sealed by the eternal fate

Of tragic lover’s doom

And love that is but only lost

Hangs upon the moon

It waits for time that never comes

In desolate cocoon

And if it were to breathe

It would be dead by now

But love lurks underneath

Because it dreams somehow

The sound of the great machine

As it marches up and down the sands

Onto lands t’were never seen

The endless blaring of the wind

The sound of the great turbine

As it blows across the ocean

Weaving in and out of line

The endless thunder of the land

As it crashes b’neath our feet

Pulling upwards into mountains

What was buried under street

Generally, when things can still happen that aren’t actually, this is known better as alluding or implying something, which is done all the time in horror movies where they set the precedent for something scary to happen and you know that it’s going to, but they cut away from the scene before it can. All it takes is belief by the audience, or the total suspension thereof.

When I deleted those words, it was like cutting away from the scene, but she survived – so things do not always have the expected outcome. Sometimes hitting the backspace takes us down a more interesting, better fitting path.

who strive for beauty in its deepest form

they cling to the shores of islands

in a fate of their own forlorn

They guard their essence with a labyrinth

which hath no open gate

There they wilt as time stands timeless

To their scorching grasping fate

Lie the evil and the good

Standing there in perfect rows

Like an audience repose

And oh, its endless endless rows

And at the end the endless

For there I see no heaven

And all the dark is bendless

Though I never saw your face

It haunts me in my dreams

The image I’ll never know

The lost world we lived inside

The darkness so hollow

The only thing worth anything

There inside, was you

But the dream burned in the daylight

Blackening my view

I recommend Tim Waggoner’s book Writing In The Dark for anyone delving into horror fiction. It just came out last year and covers a lot of great information specific to the genre as well as writing in general. Here is my full review on Horror Oasis: https://horroroasis.com/writing-in-the-dark-by-tim-waggoner/

Update: At the time of my review Tim’s book was on the preliminary ballot for The Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction, but he is now a Finalist for Award. He also has an article that is a finalist for The Bram Stoker for Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction, which was featured in November 2020 issue of The Writer, and you can read it on their website: https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/fiction/beginner-horror-writer/

There’s a workbook under development for Writing In The Dark, so look for that in the future.

Tim also just published a novel with Flame Tree Press, Your Turn To Suffer. Here’s the blurb for that: “Lorelai Palumbo is harassed by a sinister group calling themselves The Cabal. They accuse her of having committed unspeakable crimes in the past, and now she must pay. The Cabal begins taking her life apart one piece at a time – her job, her health, the people she loves – and she must try to figure out what The Cabal thinks she’s done if she’s to have any hope of answering their charges and salvaging her life.”

Also: There is a 3-day writer’s symposium this weekend (March 26-28, 2021).

The link and all of the information to register for the symposium is: https://hopin.com/events/writing-in-the-dark-spring-edition?fbclid=IwAR3R0jVQIUJ11k6HWAYoxAWzk__1JPbPHgmYbW6xa-QcLRphx7pAL33kZ78

Tim Waggoner has a great blog which you should also check out, and consider subscribing to: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/

The family decided to throw a party to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend and we rented a house with a swimming pool near the coast. My parents came and so did my brother and sister with their families. The house was very boxy and modern in design with 2 stories. The lower floor met a patio out back inlaid with large smooth square pavers, encasing an inground swimming pool that was 18 feet by 36 feet. The shorter end ran parallel to the back of the house, with the longer end jutting out into the backyard. The patio along the longer side was wedged between the pool and the house which continued onward. Inside the house, this was the den area.

On the second story of the house there was a deck that overlooked the pool, it protruded out over the patio along the lengthier side, not quite meeting the end of the pool. It was on this second deck that a propane barbecue grill had been placed sort of midway along the side nearest the pool. When the family arrived, this deck became a lot busier with coolers and other outdoor items. A small cooler got left next to a chair, and my brother Xavier, who was quite the daredevil, decided that he would jump off the chair into the pool below. The pool was not directly beneath the deck, so he would have to jump out a distance of at least 6 feet to make it into the water. Xavier was 6’4” and around two hundred pounds. He landed in a cannonball, and water shot up in every direction. The children shrieked with amusement while everyone else just stood there assessing how damp they had gotten in the aftermath.

As the day went on, his two oldest children attempted the jump when no one was paying much attention, getting a running start and launching themselves first onto the small cooler then off the chair and over into the pool, splashing as they went. I cringed every single time, remembering a similar game I played with my sister when we were children where we jumped off our bunkbed onto our feather duvets and one time I missed, shattering the bone in my arm in several places. They were all fearless. What would happen if they accidentally hooked their foot on the way over or they didn’t quite make the six-foot gap? The ground below wasn’t exactly soft.

Around dinner time, they were pulling food off the barbecue as I walked out toward the deck. I wasn’t even acknowledged by his wife, who just floated past me without even meeting my eyes in the hallway as if I was the wind. There on the deck was their youngest child, who everyone in the family called Eight, because she was the eighth grandchild. She was just over two years old. I called her Eightball.

I had only seen my niece at one other family get-together before this one and my brother was very distant from the family otherwise, so I wasn’t very close with Eight, where I had some history with my other nieces and nephews.

She stood at the end of the deck. She still had very fine, short dark hair for a two-year-old and big round brown doll-like eyes. Her head was slightly too big for her body. She was light tan, except for her chubby sun-kissed cheeks.

Eight was wearing a dress the color of poppies. I could see her as I was walking past her mother out toward the deck, not quite outside. I turned around to see if anyone was coming because no one was out there with her. They had left her out there alone. And when I turned back, she was bolting toward the small cooler. She stepped onto the chair and swung over the railing of the deck. I couldn’t yet see if she had made the jump, as I wasn’t outside. I could only see her flying off the balcony in a strange trajectory. My heart sank beneath me, and all the blood rushed out of my face. I heard a small splash. I stepped outside onto the deck and looked into the pool. I could see her, swimming in a dive below the surface, and then she turned and stared directly at me. She had stopped swimming, and was just staring at me. It was then that I realized she wasn’t even holding her breath. The thought also occurred to me that if she had stopped then she didn’t yet know how to swim to the surface. She was just doing what she saw up to a point, and copying her siblings. She stared at me with her big round doll-like eyes in the water as she began to move her limbs around in an uncoordinated distressed motion.

I looked back into the house, but no one was there. I let out a scream, “Xavier!” but I heard no reply. The second floor was quiet. Oh God, I’m going to have to make the jump myself, I thought. I wasn’t sure about making the six-foot gap to the pool, or even making it safely over the railing, but if I didn’t jump it would take much longer to go through the house to the stairs and make it down to the pool. Every second seemed to matter. In my mind, I could already hear my skull cracking on the edge of the pool as I stepped up onto the chair and jumped. I fell into the air and attempted to steer my body into a landing over the water, which ended in a sloppy cannonball. It took a moment to orient myself. I hadn’t gone swimming in ages and I was never a very strong swimmer. The weight of my clothes as they became saturated with water only added to my problems. I thrashed around in a doggy paddle looking for the red dress that Eight was wearing, or anything. There was nothing except water all around me. I kept swimming and searching for her, checking below the surface. I was sure I had landed close to her, but my jump must have pushed her off somewhere.

Just then, her mother Hazel walked back out onto the second deck to retrieve her, and discovered me in the pool. She was shouting and pointing at the far end of the pool, but I could only hear her muffled voice under the water. I swam up to the surface.

“She’s over there in the corner!” she pointed at the deep end of the pool. I swam toward it as fast as I could, my heart banging like a drum. She had been underwater for some time now. I dove down and she was there, in her dress, laying at the bottom of the pool, her big doll eyes still open. Hazel had already called for 9-1-1 on her cell. I collected Eight in my arms and then kicked my way to the surface pulling her up through the water. I laid her gently on the pavers, then attempted to climb out of the pool, forcing myself up with my arms along the edge in my waterlogged clothes. Once I was out, I checked for her breathing but there wasn’t any sign of it, so I began performing CPR on her as the others came from the house. My brother pushed me out of the way to take over. Eventually paramedics arrived with an ambulance and took her away.

I stood there, drenched, by the pool for a while, just thinking about what had caused this and if I had done anything differently, would it be different. I couldn’t stop shaking at the thought. My whole body vibrated with unanswered disappointment. I glimpsed over at the glass window on the first floor that looked out onto the pool. The blinds were closed as the sun was beaming down on it, but in its reflection, I could see a girl with a poppy-colored dress and giant doll-like eyes staring at me from the yard beyond the pool, and then she ran out of the window’s view. I turned to look, but the yard was silent now. The water from where we had exited the pool was already evaporating off the pavers. I stood there watching the window until the sun dipped down, not sure what else I was hoping to see. I still can’t get the image of her out of my mind of her big doll eyes staring back up at me from below the surface of the pool. How did she know I was even there?