Horror in a Flash - a collection of prompt based live-writting

Prompt: What is your greatest childhood fear?

Ever wonder if a horror story can be created out of the prompt "The Fillpino revolt against Espana and how the US used that to gain a strategic foothold in the south China sea?"

This is a collection of flash fiction written on the fly. I asked for prompts and then wrote each piece right then, taking between 15 minutes to an hour. Some came out okay and some not so much.

Prompt:

 What is your greatest childhood fear?

John sat at his desk, scratching a circle into the soft brown wood with his fingernails. The small lamp cast shadows around the otherwise dark room, a cheap hotel with broken lights, broken windows and a sagging broken bed in the corner.

Everything John owned sat under his feet, a small bundle of clothes and toiletries, along with a battered copy of some dime store novel, missing both binding and pages, held together with tape and rubber bands.

No one ever noticed John when he was around and they never noticed when he left, a ghost in the night. He stuck to cheap hotels and out of the way diners, any place where no one would cast a second glance at one more lone drifter.

This suited John perfectly. He could swoop in and out of town after town, like a badger sneaking into a henhouse, grabbing what he needed in the dead of night. His survival depended on not being noticed, on the element of surprise.

John came from nowhere, something not quite right but close enough to man to pass for one in small doses. He was crafted out of humanity’s fears, his very essence drawn from the terror of other’s minds. John’s very existence relied on refilling himself with fears, drinking them like water.

He stood up from the desk and stepped over to the hotel room’s door, where several people were hurrying down the road, to whatever late night escapes awaited them. John ignored them and took a sniff of the air. A scent caught his nose and he started to walk, following the trail of bitter fear that floated serenely through the crisp night breeze.

After several minutes, he came to a house, a quaint white box with light blue trim. John scaled the wall like a spider, his body turning the same colors as shadow and moonlight, as he quietly lifted a window and slipped silently inside.

The room looked cheery even in the dark, with walls painted with clouds and a small pink bed in the corner. John raised a shadowy hand pointed at a young girl, causing her to rise from the bed, blank eyes staring out, waiting to be commanded.

John raised his hand and she stood up, then marched behind her out into the hall and over to another room, where two adults cuddled together on a bed, holding each other in their sleep. The girl walked over to them and shook them awake, while John stood back and watched.

“What?” the first adult said, a female with the same fawn colored hair as the child. The other adult, a stocky male with a thick black beard opened his eyes and turned towards the little girl.

They both stared at the girl with love, about to ask comforting questions about nightmares she might have had. John smiled as their soft, sleepy smiles fell away, as the girl transformed in front of their eyes into something else, a beast wearing their daughter’s skin.

The girl growled as they sat up, long claws erupting from her fingertips as she leapt onto the bed and lunged at the two adults. They scrambled away, screaming in pain as their own blood soaked their clothes from the beast that no longer looked like their daughter, but some walking corpse, with the head of a disfigured wolf.

The male finally managed to through the creature from the bed, in a burst of adrenaline that sent it flying into dresser, hard enough to fracture the wood and send it toppling over. The two adults stood up and cautiously walked over to the beast, but found nothing but a small girl, her neck wrapped around the shattered wood of their bedside dresser.

The blood on their clothing had disappeared, as if it had never been there to begin with, leaving them whole and their daughter motionless. John closed his eyes and breathed in the terror, then opened them in time to see two parents kneeling by the body of their child, stunned tears flowing down their faces and the first hints of terrified screams welling up in their throats.

John drew in more of the fear, letting it wrap around his body and stick to his ribs. He then turned and walked back to the little girl’s room and climbed back out the window, getting to his disguise of shadow and moonlight until he was far enough away from the scene of the tragic event.

He walked back to his hotel room and grabbed the small bundle of his belongings, then stepped out into the night, ready to leave this town behind and find another, where he would search once again for the perfect fear and make it come true, so he could feast and replenish himself with the resulting terror.

The end.