The Diary - A Look at My New Short Story

The cover art for my story done by Odd-Oblivion.

Read my new short story above or click here to read it on Wattpad.


***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Hey Barrel-Riders.  Danny here.  I wanted to share with all of you some insight into my newest short story, "The Diary."  I published it on Wattpad a while ago, but I decided I would post it on my blog as well (and take the time to offer some of my thoughts on it at the same time, perhaps explaining my thought process throughout).

The first paragraph of my short story.

The idea for this story came about rather quickly, as my sister had challenged me to write a short story with a twist that started with the following sentence: "they found a diary under his bed."  I knew immediately that I wanted to take it in a different direction from what most people would probably do.  It seemed to be a sentence that was ready for a crime thriller or ghost story, but you know me by now.  I had to take it to Cosmic Horror Land.  I couldn't just do that, though.  I needed a good twist.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  Let's start with the first paragraph.  Obviously, I started with the given sentence.  In most stories, setting the scene (or at least setting the reader up to successfully and reliably imagine the setting themselves) comes first.  Like in a movie, the first thing many people will notice (or try to notice) is where the characters are.  It would be tempting, after a sentence like "they found a diary under his bed," to continue talking about who "they" are.  However, I decided I would set the scene a little bit first, appealing to the senses by describing general things (like light levels) and very specific details (like the dust in the air) in ways that help the reader feel those things in a very raw way.  Mentioning the pines immediately puts the reader in a very specific place and perhaps hints at certain smells or feelings.  Most people will immediately conjure an image of a forest, but the mention of a bed in the first sentence gets one thinking about where one might find a bed in said forest.  A cabin.  That's a natural first thought.

At this point, we sneak in an introduction to our first character: the Sheriff.  The mention of a Sheriff once again adjusts the reader's mindset.  A sheriff, a forest, a cabin.  This must be a crime thriller of some kind.  We've already established, though, that this is in fact NOT a crime thriller.  In any case, the reader can now proceed with the (misleading) knowledge that what they're reading will involve a dead body and the hero cop trying to fight for justice.  The Sheriff is a bold man and a bit of a funny character.  He fancies himself a wealthy pool of wisdom and a man of experience, but he's really just  a sheriff from a small town (an admirable title, yes, but nothing like what he thinks of himself). 

The re-introduction of the diary reminds our reader why we're here.  This diary is, for some reason, rather important.  The diary is described in detail to reflect that fact.  It's described as being old (a fact which seems to be fairly contradictory to the first entry, which we will get to later) and having seen a bit of wear and certain manly, outdoorsman-type activities.  This diary seems to belong to a man.  Our next character takes notice of that.

Although the Sheriff may initially seem to be the star of our show, the real star is actually the Deputy.  Young, inexperienced, yet full of her own wisdom and worldliness that contrasts with the Sheriff's ingenuine wisdom,  our Deputy offers a youthful outlook to our situation.  She provides the perfect naivete needed to navigate our story and produce the fear I was looking to instill, yet also provides just enough courage to see us through to the end.  A rather amusing exchange follows that disarms our reader, then quickly turns at the description of the victims, leaving our reader in an emotionally strange place as our story really begins.

The first diary entry from "the Man" or "H.L." (which is a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, naturally).

We mentioned earlier that the diary seemed old, worn, and like it had seen a lot of use over the course of many years.  However, seeing as this story is set in 2019, the very first entry reveals that this diary is not old at all.  Rather, it's practically brand new.  Certain readers may write it off as the diary-owner simply purchasing a blank diary from an antique store of some kind, or that he perhaps had it in his possession for a long period of time and had only decided to write in it on that day, but as the reader will soon find out, not everything is as it seems with this diary.  Our Sheriff gives our Deputy the task of looking through the diary to see if it would offer any clues as to who or what was responsible for the dead teenagers on the road.

Here, we get temporarily lost in the world of this strange diary-holder, who we will refer to from here on out as the Man or H.L.  For a moment, we dive deep into the mysterious entries within and forget about where we are or what's going on around our characters.  The first entry mentions that H.L. is headed for the forest to face his destiny.  At this point that could mean anything. 

In the second entry, we begin to see the Lovecraftian horror aspect of the story take root as H.L. describes the existence of great beings from another world, as well as the infrequent nature of their appearance in our world.  For some reason, though these beings seem powerful and frightening, H.L. is desperate for them to return.  He is clearly going mad, and he seems to know this.  His desire for the beings to come back seems almost like a plea for mercy, like one who asks to be put out of their misery.  His inability to comprehend these beings or their desires or wants or even their existence drives him mad.  He feels that the return of these beings will be both inevitable and fatal to the known world. 

Part of the second entry and the Deputy's response to it.

H.L. ends that entry by referring to the beings' eyes and legs in a horrified manner.  At this point, the deputy (and indeed, the reader) is nearly clueless as to what these beings look like, and she likely thinks that H.L. is a mad-man, raving about nothing of consequence.  Though all people are afraid of different things, the genre of body horror is rooted deep in our evolution and instincts.  Something that has more eyes or legs than it should or that has grotesque pustules or growths is immediately alarming to our brains.  They act almost as warnings of a diseased or otherwise mutated creature that is to be avoided.  It makes evolutionary sense to want to be attracted only to that which is healthy, and to avoid that which is not, so reading a diary entry from someone referring to eyes and legs in horror is bound to create an unsettling feeling for many.  What's wrong with these eyes and legs?  How many are there?  Why is he afraid?  Should I be afraid too?  

In the next entry, H.L.'s horror seems to be assuaged by a feeling of relief or comfort because of the return of the beings, or rather, their juveniles.  Dubbed "the Harbingers" by H.L., these creatures are sent forth into our world to act as scouts.  H.L. describes them further as "giants" and "hungry" and "world-eaters" that stand in the forest, not moving, observing.  For most of human history, stories have been passed down about strange things seen in the woods.  They'll spot something, standing still, then suddenly it turns and runs away.  I play into that trope here with these Harbingers.  They seem to go in and out of our world, looking for something.  The only way you'll see one is if you're chosen to.  It would seem that our friend H.L. has developed something of a relationship with these beings.  The exact nature of the "annexing" that H.L. refers to in this entry is still unknown to the reader and to the Deputy at this point.

Before getting to the next entry, the Deputy realizes something strange.  This is where my twist comes into play.  This story takes place on November 21, 2019 (the day on which I finished this story) and the next entry is dated November 21, 2019.  That in and of itself is not strange, as the Man could have filled out an entry for that day already, but the strange part is that there are more entries dated past that.  Sure, there's nothing stopping him from writing a bunch of non-sense and using the wrong dates, but that combined with the old age of the diary, despite having been bought just recently, seems suspicious.  However, that's not the main twist.  That comes next.  The entry for that day is but one line:

The "twist."

I liked the idea of a "living document" or some normal artifact that somehow existed both in and out of normal time and space constraints.  I wanted to make this diary, upon which the entire story and challenge were based, something that had "lived" its entire "lifespan" already and existed as a complete story in and of itself, as if it had been plucked from the future, at the end of its usefulness, and made accessible across all of time.  Indeed, the entries themselves seemed to be written outside the boundaries of time.  How could H.L. know that the Deputy would be there to read his dairy?  The truth is that this world where the beings live, which H.L. has visited at this point, exists in that ambiguous plane between time and space as we know it and something much stranger and far more fluid and abstract.  H.L., upon glimpsing and having visited their world, had become disturbed by the strangeness of it all and went mad.  He ended up facing something of an extreme existential crisis.  The realization that you may not be much of anything in the grand scheme of things is a terrifying prospect.

This is the point where the Deputy realizes that she had been so engrossed by the diary that she did not realize that her surroundings had changed.  Although it was morning when the story started, just minutes later, it was nighttime.  The Deputy has crossed over into the other plane. 

The description of the world of the beings and Harbingers.

I wanted this world to feel familiar, but off at the same time.  The key to that, for me, was appealing to the senses again.  Going back to the lighting, instead of the pure, morning light from the beginning, we have an immense darkness that saturates the forest.  There is also a light grey-ish ambience all around, as if a large white light was being bounced off a giant, white ceiling, depositing a soft, unnatural glow across the ground and sky.  

In the distance, our Deputy spots the bodies of the teenagers and the Sheriff (rest in peace, officer), but something is off about them.  Covered in holes and wounds, they are clearly dead, yet there they stand, unassisted, not moving.  What I tried to show here was what happens to a body once it has been eaten by a Harbinger.  The bodies are seemingly sorted into rows, but they're not exactly the bodies themselves.  Once a Harbinger consumes something, its body or matter is replicated in the Harbinger world, acting like a bridge between the two worlds.  The more bodies there are, the stronger the bridge.  This is what H.L. meant by "annexing."  They mean to consume our world until their world takes over ours and ours ceases to exist.  Whereas they used to coexist with us as two separate dimensions, the Harbingers are somehow able to fold other dimensions into their own and make theirs the dominant one.

This is when our poor, scared Deputy encounters the Harbinger itself.  In classic Lovecraftian style, I started off by describing its tentacles, which come together to form its arms.  Gotta have those tentacles, am I right?  Next we describe another cosmic horror staple, a terrible amalgamation of eyes that have no business looking the way they do, like optic meatballs in a fleshy soup.  This was all standard Lovecraft-creature fare at this point, so I needed something a little different to...mix things up a bit.  I gave the Harbinger a thick coat of "fur".

It's not a coat of fur, I repeat, it's not a coat of fur--

Yeah, it's not fur.

Its fur coat was instead comprised of millions of small, bug-like legs that undulated slowly, moving like waves across the creature's skin.  As for the purpose of these legs, I'm going to be completely honest with you: I never really came up with one.  I'm ashamed to say that I included them mainly for shock value, something I try not to do if I can help it, but I do have a theory.  This creature is built for eating, so it would make sense that these legs can help "walk" small remnants (or "crumbs," if you will) of food from the ground to its chest where it would be easier for one of its many mouths to grab it.  Of course, it's just a theory.  Given the time constraint of the writing challenge, I thought I could get away with it.  Besides, the whole point of cosmic horror is to be faced with something so difficult to understand that it drives you mad, right?  Right. 

Anyway, brave though our Deputy is, she eventually is consumed by the Harbinger and she quickly dies as her main body returns to her home dimension, where the Man (H.L.) is there to greet her.  It was a trap (a trap that will likely catch many more).  In a strange gesture, the man smiles at her, touches her heart, then raises the diary to her face.  What's his intention there?  Is this a smile of menace?  Is he trying to reassure her in his own psychotic way?  Is he teasing her with the diary or is he simply showing her her destiny (destiny being something he cared a great deal about)?  Well that, I'll leave up to you, the reader, to decide.  He IS a mad-man after all.  Who knows what he's thinking.

This story, since it came from a simple writing challenge, is not that complex in terms of theme (or maybe I'm just not that good at being deep; jury's out on that).  However, if I had to say what themes it DID have, if any, I'd say it was about facing your fears and what it means to be human.  What about you?  What themes do you think this story covers?

Thank you all for reading, and if you end up reading my story, please let me know what you thought!  Till next time, Barrel-Riders.

Artistic interpretation of the Harbinger, by Odd-Oblivion.

~ Danny (DarylOnABarrel)