When an author reaches 666 followers, his new story starts to take on a life of its own…
I usually discuss the thinking behind a story prior to you reading it. This time I’m going to keep it short and sweet at the start with some post-reading discussion this time, lest I spoil the story, because I’ve gone all-out meta in this one!
All I will say here is that this story is the result of my Instagram page reaching 666 followers and me celebrating by giving those 666 the chance to submit a story idea. The winner, who submitted the simple sentence that you see italicised above, was my horror friend beware.the.moon, who posts some epic stuff about all things horror – so go and give him a follow!
666
By Keelan Berry
It’s getting worse.
My words are becoming more powerful; they’re having more impact, and not on my readers… on the real world.
I’ve noticed the correlation now, but I didn’t see it before it was too late. With the short time I may have left I’ll tell you about what happened, about how my books came to life.
I’ve never been very active on social media, I kept just enough of a presence to make sure people knew that I – and more importantly my books – existed. It’s only a hobby really, on the side of my ‘real’ job, but I do publish what I write.
I write horror, by the way, which sort of makes this story all the more fitting.
By the time I started writing my first book – Full Moon Prom – I only had around a hundred followers on Instagram. At the start of that book, a wolf escapes from captivity, kicking off the events of the whole story. In truth, it was an idea that came out of necessity that I just plucked from nowhere and threw into the book; I knew where the book needed to go, and that the protagonist needed to become a werewolf, but I had no way of actually integrating the mythical creature. The ‘escape’ storyline helped with that.
Except… something else happened.
As a writer I’m always keeping up-to-date with the news; it’s where to get some of the best ideas. Sometimes real life can be a horror story in itself, so my job is made easy for me; it’s like plucking fruit from a tree.
After two weeks of writing Full Moon Prom, just as I’d finished the escape section of the plot, I was taking one of my news breaks when I came across a headline that should have hit me across the face like a slap (a line I’ve written so many times), and yet instead I just stared in bewilderment, unable to comprehend what I was seeing.
Zoo Escape Alert: Wolf Goes Missing From Enclosure
It couldn’t be real… but it was, it was right there in front of me. After a few moments of processing it I laughed to myself and sent the article to my friends and family. As a horror author – or just a horror fanatic in general – your mind overthinks everything and is always searching for hidden meanings. This was just a freakish coincidence that I could use to promote my work and laugh about with family, friends and followers (however small the gathering was).
So, I thought nothing of it, moved on and finished the book inside another two months. I got some help formatting it and uploading it from some more tech-savvy friends and released it into the world, where I made a bit of pocket money from the friends and family who did buy it.
However, I must have become a little more interesting in the world of social media, because my followers went up massively in the space of a few weeks to 300.
I hadn’t got a base yet, but I’d made some money and a following seemed to be slowly but surely growing.
Excited, I moved quickly onto the next book.
This time, I wanted to go for a more straightforward slasher, something more real (using that term lightly, I suppose… although… well, I won’t spoil the story just yet). Inspired by my own friend’s coulrophobia, I decided to play on what appeared to be a widely shared fear of clowns and write about a killer clown. Not original, by any means, but I was going to put my own spin on it.
I wrote Clown Craze in a frenzy of my own; I was creating a whole world, a whole cast of characters, and I was killing them brutally, one by one. The book’s climax took place in the same forest that served as much of the setting for Full Moon Prom, a link that any fans I was gaining would surely go crazy over!
Up to 400 followers when I finished writing it, right in time for October, I published it quickly without taking it through the proper editing stages: there was no time for that if I was going to take full advantage of the calendar!
A day later, the reporter on the news channel started to talk about a sudden and shocking phenomenon that was sweeping the country: a “killer clown craze” was how the reporter described it. People were donning clown masks or whole costumes, going outside with knives or axes or whatever they could get their hands on, and stalking people in the streets and chasing cars.
There were no actual murders, of course, but people were rightly shit up. Same as last time, I talked to my friends and family about it, and as weirded out as I was (and I think they were starting to feel it too), we just carried on joking about it, this time saying that my writing was cursed: whatever I wrote, in some fashion, came true.
I took a break between my second and third books. The killer clown craze continued through the month of October, and although it quickly fizzled out after Halloween, it still spooked me.
As the month went by, as well as family and friends I was also gaining a couple of unknown fans from Instagram who were also buying my books and reviewing them for me. My followers had crept past 500.
After the New Year, I started to write again, taking a whole new direction once more. I’d had this idea for a while, it was the ‘big one’, the one that I believed was going to make the breakthrough for me.
When I started writing Spawn of Satan, and letting my followers have some impact on the story through polls on social media (gender of the protagonist, what choice they made when faced with a particular situation and so on), and suddenly my followers rocketed to 600 in a couple of days.
That’s when it started.
The morning after, I woke up to a luminous, red ‘6’ scratched into my ceiling. The colour of it, the way it glowed, the placement of it… everything about it… was just the way I’d described the portal to hell in Spawn of Satan.
I stopped writing, and I cut myself off from the world for a few days, but my followers were impatient, and they were spreading the word.
Within 24 hours I’d reached 660 followers, and another ‘6’ appeared on the ceiling.
661.
662.
663.
At 664, a yellow eye peered through the first ‘6’. The eye of the werewolf from Full Moon Prom.
At 665, the bright red smile of a clown placed itself against the second, crimson ‘6’. The smile of the killer from Clown Craze.
I knew what was going to come through that third 6. I’m sure you do too… Spawn of Satan isn’t exactly subtle and open to interpretation.
Acting quickly, I deleted everything I’d written from my computer. I got in touch with friends and family and pleaded with them to unfollow me on Instagram straight away. That got the following list down somewhat, but other, unknown people were cropping up out of nowhere and following me, filling in the hole left by the others.
The yellow eye was swirling around inside that 6, hungry for flesh.
The red smile was growing wider, and I swear to you it was laughing, eager to kill.
Against the white paint, the third 6 was beginning to etch itself into the ceiling, as though a poltergeist was smearing an invisible severed limb across the wall, soaking it with the bloody end.
Right now I’m sat at my computer, typing out this just in case it all goes wrong.
I’ve tried to delete my account: I’ve tried on my phone, on the computer, it just blocks the action. Something is feeding off my work, off my followers, and it’s almost into the world now. It’s not going to let me stop it that easily. And I’m running out of time.
So… I know what I have to do… it will ruin my career, end the thing I love to do the most, but it’s necessary to save my own life, and probably dozens of others. The worst thing is that I can never explain this to anyone, how could they ever believe me?
That means I might lose friends and family, too… but I’ll get to keep my life.
As a history teacher I have access to a lot of historical writings, and a lot of history is unsavoury, one part of it in particular. I post one excerpt, and that’s all it will take, people will think I hold those views too.
And the unfollowing will begin.
Down below 660 to get rid of the clown.
Below 600 to get rid of the werewolf.
No friends, no family, probably no job…
But my life.
And that’s enough.
June, 2020
Denver’s (aka beware.the.moon) idea gave me a chance to share something pretty spooky with you all, because the story you’ve just read has a lot of truth to it.
I started writing my debut novel, BITE, in June 2016. It does include a wolf escaping from a zoo, and something similar did happen in real life, just a few weeks after I’d started writing in July: a lynx escaped from a zoo. Coincidence, of course… unless there is a teenage boy somewhere in Devon who is now a were-lynx. We’ll wait and see, eh?
The other novel I reference in ‘666’ is Ghost Train, which worked in reverse this time: it’s true that I’ll often pluck real life horrors from the news as though fruit from a tree, and this one was brought to life by the real-life killer clown craze in October 2016. Linked here is just one article of many, please do go and read about it for yourself, it was frighteningly fascinating. (Oh and, by the way, the lynx mentioned earlier was returned safely to the zoo after only 2 weeks!).
More recently, as I’ve started writing another novel, this story popped up in the news. I’ll keep it brief because of how nasty the case is, and I wouldn’t want to use it to promote myself – and I’m not. I don’t want to spoil what I’m currently writing for the few of you fans I do have, but all I’ll say is that you’re aware of Wald Forest being the setting for many of the horrors I create, and in the most recent something similar happens to what is detailed in that news article. It’s a bit scary, and it’s surely coincidence, but it seems to be coming closer to home.
Of course, I’m not the only author who believes their writing has had an impact on the real world (it appears we all have a bit of a God complex, but when you’re constantly creating your own worlds day in and day out, how can you avoid that?!) or who reads too much into situations: recently, Guy N Smith wrote about how the current coronavirus pandemic is similar to his 1978 novel Bats out of Hell, and in the introduction to Richard Laymon’s Amara Dean Koontz writes about an eerie real-life episode he and Laymon had and how “for novelists reality [is] is not only stranger than fiction but generally funnier and more deeply disturbing”. Even my favourite author, Stephen King, in On Writing talks about how most of his ideas stem from perfectly ordinary real-life situations but with a “what if” attached: such as going to the shop the day after a bad storm and thinking “what if a dinosaur-like creature attacked the store with all these people inside?” (The Mist). And, again, you can’t ignore the similarities between today’s pandemic and Captain Trips from The Stand, or even King’s own hand in the killer clown craze of 2016. I could go on forever, but you get the picture, and it’s a frightening one… or are we just made paranoid by our own monstrous creations?
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