Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Chapter one Part five

He was used to getting up at odd times in the night, but this new time was weird. The phone was ringing. He lumbered out of his sheets and reached for the phone, his hand flailed around the desk knocking over a few pens and pads but at last he had it.
"Hello, Karl Gremlin."
"Mr. Gremlin? I love the name, always have, tried to make it my name once."
Karl took the phone away from his ear for a moment, the voice at the other end was weird. It was cold and creepy, the kind of voice that stops a car, or kills a bunny when it speaks. The kind nature holds its breath for.
"Mr. Gremlin, do you know how Mussolini died?"
"Who am I speaking to..." Karl reached over and tried to find the button to record.
"Oh, I wouldn't do that if were you, I wouldn't record this conversation."
"Why?"
"Because, dear Karl, if you do this little talk is over."
Karl looked out the window, it was still dark outside, and a look at the clock confirmed.
"What do you want to talk about then?"
"Do you like the look on a dead mans face? I know I do, its kind of blank and when you wait a little while it turns grey, but the mouth is slightly ajar so you know you've scarred them... I guess I like scarring people, don't you? Course you do! You write horror books and don't tell me its for the money..."
"Seriously, who are you." Karl was wide awake now, his eyes instinctivly looked behind him.
"Now now, my dear fellow, I can't tell you. But what I can tell you is very important. Do you remeber where your summer cottage is?"
"Yeah, I should be there right now."
"Well, if you do go there, look to your neighbors on the left and you find something very wrong with them... you see, they're all dead!"
"What kind of messed up prank call is this? I'm gonna find whose calling and when I do..."
"No, friend, you're not going to find whose calling, see, the police can't even find whose calling, because I, in my might and prowess, I the Red Composer, killed them."
With that the phone line went dead.
The wind whistled in the window, and he heard some crickets chirping, and the ever ticking of the clock kept steadily on.
Karl lingered for a moment, looking into the receiver and began to shudder. A psycho, was all he could come up with when he thought about it, a psycho, the problem was if he was telling the truth. Karl didn't think of most prank callers who called him, saying they were the monsters from his books, that they were comming back to haunt him.
But this one sound sincere.
He stood out of his bed and headed for the shower, his mind now fully ocupied. He remeber the first time he recieved one of those calls, how he got scared out of his mind by a man saying that he was "The Slime" from his book "Redemption." But the second time didn't even phase him, and they hadn't since then...
He turned on the hot water in the shower.
But this was so different, the man sounded positivly crazy. Could he have escaped from a hospital? Could he have be born nuts?
Whatever the case, he told himself, he was going to head down to his very own summer home.

Karl Gremlin had been born to a fairly rich family. He made a few friends in school and love to ride bikes and play baseball, just like most kids. But one Saturday night, while sleeping over at a friends he had a life changing expeirience. They had been talking about scary things, while eating stolen candy, and he had talked for a full ten minutes of his fear of ghosts. Ghosts, Karl had whispered, could come out of your closet, they could come out of your shower, they could come out from under your bed, they always were watching you waiting for they're time to strike.
He knew.
But his friend, Jimmy, had shaken his head. Ghosts were not real, they would go away at a prayer or sign of the cross or silver (or was that vampires, Jimmy wasn't sure) but in any case they could harm you.
The real scary things, he said, were crazy people.
Somethings are better left untouched, somethings are better left unsaid, but not psychos. They kill people for fun, they do things that they don't even understand.
Karl believed this and from then on he stayed wide awake at Grammas.
See, his Uncle Jim was very crazy. His uncle Jim talked to people that weren't there and sometimes would go into "fits" that made him talk funny and waves his arms and legs.
And thinking about it later, he was always scared of uncle Jim.
In fact, Uncle Jim inspired his first and Bestsellling Novel...

The wheels of the car came to a slow stop a as he arrived at his house. Things would be alright, he told himself.
But just in case they weren't he had brought his camera.
"I like looking at dead people," he remebered.

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