An aspiring eighteen-year-old author realizes she is a character in an unwritten horror novel and must use her storytelling knowledge to survive.
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Eighteen-year-old romance writer, I...
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Atem did as I had done and rolled on the pine covered ground of the darkened forest, as if spat out of the dilapidated cabin and forced to recover from the sudden fall.
I looked back at where the cabin should have been, but nothing but swaying trees and dense fog was in its space. I knew what was missing. "Where's the camera?"
Atem crawled a few feet toward the blinking red light amongst the brush until he grabbed the battered camera and lifted it to look at its screen. "There's nothing. I don't see anything there. What the hell...?"
"This is crazy." I shook my head and stood, dusting the debris and dirt from my knees. We both had been running through the dark and narrow halls of an old cabin. "I don't understand what this means. What are we supposed to do now?"
"This is crazy shit." Atem's disheveled silhouette stood before me, twigs and pine needles protruded from his curly hair. "And if you're the author if this story, you have a lot of crazy shit to work out."
"As do you," I reminded him. "Who or what was that back there? Those mangled creatures, were they your parents?"
He nodded slowly, as we both relived the moment in our minds. "My grandma had mentioned that my mom and papa were looking to divorce when I was a toddler. She was taking care of me when they vacationed in Japan to work on their relationship. They were supposed to be there for a few weeks to figure out what they wanted to do, and which direction they wanted the relationship to take. It took even longer before I realized they weren't coming back. A tsunami hit the building they were at and crushed them to death."
"Sorry," I shook my head. "I had thought you were exaggerating when you told us about your parents' death. You never went into detail about it and rarely talked about them. I thought you just made up a fantastical story about them because you didn't really know how they died."
"Can you blame me? It's depressing." He scoffed.
"It still affects you to this day?"
"No. I was too young to even understand it?" he insisted. "I mean, I didn't even know them. When it happened, I was five."
"I'm sure it still affects you somehow." I cocked my head and tried to make out his facial expression through the dark and fog.
His shoulders broadened. "What are you saying?" Was he getting defensive?
"There's a reason we saw that stuff," I pointed out. "Authors don't place things in novels for no reason. We just gotta figure out the reason and work with it. Let it work for us and not against us."
"What about that hanging body?" Atem asked. "Was that who I think it was?"
I dropped my head. "The letter on his back. That was the letter Clay left for me. I need to get that letter back. It's important. I can feel it."
"You've been trying to get that letter forever and you're not getting any closer," Atem pointed out. "Maybe we're not looking at this the right way."
"What do you mean?" I shrugged in disappointment. "We're writers. We need to look at this from a writer's perspective. What is the author trying to convey? What's the message?"
