Writing Prompt / Story Starter 40

The boy looked about six or seven but the grime encrusting his hands and face made it impossible to be sure. Between pinched finger and thumb he held one end of a length of green string. The other end was tethered to the ankle of a wailing infant, equally grimy, that floated a few feet above the boy’s head.

The boy smiled at me with brilliant-white teeth.

“I won him at the funfair,” he said, his voice old and gravelly. “You wanna come to the funfair? You can win all kinds of stuff.”

The infant stopped wailing.

“Don’t listen,” it said. Its voice, neither male nor female, was soft and chiming and I felt myself go a little weak at the sound of it. “Don’t listen to a word this lying little toe-rag says. He’s filth and dirt through and through. Don’t listen.”

“All kinds of stuff,” said the boy.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 39

Robert looked out of his bedroom window, hoping for impassable snow drifts. He really couldn’t face another day of filing and photocopying and pretending to take telephone messages. All thought of frozen precipitation fled his mind, however, when he was greeted by the sight of two Edwardian-looking gentlemen digging a hole in his front lawn.

The taller of the two gentlemen had his back to Robert, but the shorter of the two (by a considerable margin) was staring right up at Robert, lips pulled back from blackened teeth in a vicious grin that told Robert everything he needed to know about the purpose of that deep, dark hole.

It started to snow.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 38

He taped a key to the back of each hand, filled his pockets with ash and placed a penny under his tongue.

When the coin began to taste like blood in his mouth, began to taste like a bitten tongue, he stepped out into the snow and set off in search of his dead daughters.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 37

“You can’t believe everything you hear,” said Sally. “Especially from the dead.”

“I didn’t say I believed him,” Ben replied. “I just think it’s worth looking into, that’s all.”

Sally looked a little disgusted.

“Him?” She said. “They aren’t hims or hers, they’re its. Do you even know what ghosts are? I mean what they really are?”

“Of course, they’re people who’ve died and can’t move on. They’ve got – “

“Wrong. They’re all the nasty and spiteful bits of the soul that can’t get into Heaven. They’re just so much slighted ectoplasm with a long memory and a complete inability to forgive. Next time one of the wretched things starts shooting its mouth off, do yourself a favour: stick your fingers in your ears and start whistling the theme tune from Laurel and Hardy. They hate that.”

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 35

"It's my favourite toy," Miranda whispered. "At night, it sings to me."

"What does it sing, Miranda? What songs does it sing?"

"Oh, they're not really songs. They sound all wobbly and sort of, I don't know, backwardy?"

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 34

At first, Jack had been convinced the thing was some twisted little urchin’s idea of a toy. But then he'd cut open its belly and something like semi-liquified worms had glistened through the skewed slit of his inexpert incision.

Some small part of him was relieved. If it had proved to be a toy, what little faith he'd had in today's baffling youth would have evaporated in a moment. What kind of child would take pleasure in such a thing? Other than the fact that it was only eight inches long, from lank-haired head to what toes remained, it looked like something exhumed from a mass grave: emaciated, almost skeletal, flesh like filthy wet linen, drawn tight over disproportionate bone. The thought of a child playing with the thing, dressing it, positioning its limbs just so, turning its head this way and that...

(From my short story Nails Without Pictures published in Nocturne)

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 33

At first, I thought it was a dead chick: one of those barely feathered near-foetuses you stumble across every now and then while out walking in the woods. I wondered how it had got there: in the attic, on top of a pile of newspaper clippings, themselves stacked upon a small tower of battered suitcases containing my wife’s favourite clothes.

Scrutinising the thing (squinting, as if this would somehow make up for the naked 60-watt bulb’s lack of generosity), I was proved wrong. It wasn’t a chick at all. And it wasn’t dead. It was a foetus of sorts, however; I’d got that much right. It was vaguely simian, with the consistency and colouring of regurgitated liquorice. It pulsed and twitched, its tiny, gluey mouth opening and closing, its grimy eyes rolling.

(From my short story Undressed Wounds published in Fusing Horizons.)

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 32

Nobody knew his real name. Everyone just called him the Tattooed Man. It seemed like something of a misnomer to Stephen, though. He wasn’t so much tattooed as vandalised, defaced. The images scrawled onto his body looked like the work of a demented child. Only the demented child was the Tattooed Man himself, or so the story went.

Each of the images etched into his flesh was a portrait of one of his victims. He was no draftsman, so the faces staring out from his hide were variously bloated, palsied, cross-eyed or otherwise deformed. Lack of artistic merit was exacerbated by the fact that the Tattooed Man didn’t employ the tools of the professional tattoo artist; instead, he used broken glass, razor blades and ink bought from a stationery shop. His portraits were raw, swollen and angry with the threat of infection.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 31

So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.

Numbers chapter 13, verses 32–33

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 30

"Is this it?" asked Paul.

Jenny nodded. "This is it."

Paul took the small wooden cigar box from the table.

"Heavier than it looks," he said. "Can I open it?"

Jenny shrugged. "Up to you, really. But why waste it?"

"True."

Paul put the box back down on the table.

He grinned. "I can't believe you actually got it, Jenny. I mean, you were in Los Angeles for, what, two days?"

"Some things are easier to find if you don't try too hard."

"What should we use it for first?"

"I don't know. Maybe we should test it on something small to start with. A spider or something."

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 29

"I dreamt it," said Alex. "Last night."

"Dreamt it?" said Wiley.

"Yeah. I know. Crazy. But there you go."

"It looks like--"

"I know what it looks like."

"I don't mean 'what'. I mean who. It looks like her."

"Her?"

Wiley looked away from the tree, looked away from Alex, concentrated on the cars trundling by with their oblivious drivers and passengers.

"Yeah, her. Suzanne."

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 28

The house was full of birds.

I mean full of birds. Not lots of birds flying and hopping around and turning everything into one big monochrome Jackson Pollock.

No, not that all.

The house was full of birds.

As soon as we broke one window, they came spilling out.

Thousands of them. Dead, of course. Most of them. The front yard was awash with them in seconds.

Detective Banks started laughing. Not because it was funny, but because, well, what else are you going to do?

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 27

"You're telling me that this is the bus?" said Detective Ackerman, jabbing a finger at the half-submerged wreck. "This is the bus we've been looking for? This is the bus that went missing just twenty-four hours ago?" He laughed, cold and flat, humorless, then took a final drag on his cigarette before dropping it into the sand and scuffing it out with his heel, violently, as if it was the source of all his woes. "What the hell happened here?"

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 26

As tree stumps went, it was relatively small and Carl had anticipated it would take an hour to shift, two at most. But here he was, a full four hours later, hands raw, back screaming and with more dirt in his mouth and up his nose than he cared to think about.

He was on the verge of giving up entirely and calling in the professionals when it started to shift, courtesy of the garden fork he'd managed to wedge beneath the thing. He could hear roots tearing, tendrils snapping. And just as he was thinking how like a dentist he was, a dentist to ogres, he was surrounded by green-grey smog and a smell like every abscess in the world bursting at once.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 25

He was in a cathedral of sorts, the distant, vaulted ceiling barely visible through a swirling veil of rusty cloud. There were things up there, between clouds and ceiling: winged; serpentine; vast.

It was too much. Brodie had to look away. He focused his attention on the distant walls, but there was no comfort to be found there. The great blocks out of which the building was made were somehow both solid and fleshy; muscular. They seemed to expand and contract, as if the place were breathing the slow, deep breaths of a slumbering animal.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 24

Panic.

It drew the walls in close. It brought the ceiling down within an inch of his scalp. There was brick dust under his fingernails, amassing, it seemed, by the second.

He could taste the damp of the wooden stairs, as if thousands of spores of mould were settling on his tongue, fungi taking root in his taste buds.

He had to close his eyes against the darkness to fend off the notion that it wasn't merely an absence of light but a living black fluid, seeping into his eyeballs, pulsing up his optic nerves toward the centres of his brain.

He couldn't stand it.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 23

The door slammed shut and Joey was alone in the cellar, the damp wood of the stairs beneath him; the cold, crumbling brick against his back; the darkness seemed to coat his eyes in thick, black ink.

He stopped crying; instantly. Once the door was shut, it wasn't wise to cry. It wasn't wise to make any noise at all, because, as always, something had arrived with the darkness. Joey could hear it, panting, growling, pacing, somewhere at the bottom of the stairs

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 22

It didn't look like a key.

For one thing, it was spherical. Who'd ever heard of a spherical key? Certainly not Turner, and he knew keys. It was silver, this sphere, small enough to be concealed in a closed hand, and its entire surface was inscribed with delicate characters (Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and something that was somehow all and none of the above).

It was beautiful, it was intriguing, but it was no key.

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 21

It was just the driving rain and the liquidity of the mud that made them look like a child's footprints.

Robert had no idea how long he had been following them, or even why. He wondered if he was simply keeping himself busy, distracting himself from the squealing in his ears, the festering wound in his thigh, the cold numbing his face and fingers, the knowledge that everyone was dead, that he was alone and lost in this cemetery, this sewer, this labyrinth. These trenches.

(From my short story And Everything but Wretchedness Forgotten published in the From the Trenches anthology from Carnifex Press)

Writing Prompt / Story Starter 20

You've been here before. You remember the way each warped and worn step creaked beneath your feet, each producing a slightly different note. A sort of musical instrument. A splintering melody. The distorted, threatening soundtrack that accompanied your escape.

But this time, you're going up, going back, going mad. The awful music plays backwards.