I’m not going to lie. This was a fun one to write.
What do you think the characters created by writers actually think about them? Would they like them? Would they hate them? Would they want to kill them? I’d say that this last one might be particularly true for those who write horror and thriller stories. Think about the tortures they inflict upon their characters. Think about all the people these writers have murdered had they been living, breathing human beings.
That’s just what this short story explores. And that is all that we’re going to say on the subject.
Enjoy!
…and she cried out in torment as the life slowly drained from her body.
The End
He sat back, looking at his computer screen. Another tome finished. His publisher would be pleased. They were about to get another bestseller. He couldn’t wait to see what they thought of this one. It might have been his greatest thriller yet.
Looking over at the clock he saw it was well after midnight, which meant it was even later in New York. He’d have to wait until morning to send this over. Disappointed, he saved the document as Hidden Hunter and printed it out—he always liked keeping a hard copy of the original before his editor made changes to it.
He stretched, yawned, and decided it was time for bed. He stared at his bookshelf one last time, admiring his own books in his library—24 bestsellers, and this one he’d just finished would make the 25th. It was astounding how people just ate up his words.
He walked out of his library, lay in his bed, and quickly drifted off to a fitful, peaceful sleep.
“I can’t believe it,” came a voice from his latest manuscript. A ghostly woman’s head popped up out of the pages. “What just happened? All that I just went through and that’s how it ends for me?”
She pulled herself out of the pages, getting stuck about midway from the giant knife sticking out of her abdomen. She stood for a moment, looking down at the words that marked her own death.
“Seriously, after all that, I just get stabbed and die?” She attempted to wrench the knife from her gut, but it was firmly stuck inside her. “And did you see the look on his face? He was actually happy about it! I thought he cared about me!”
“We all thought the same thing.” A portly gentleman with a large hole in his head, oozing blood and showing a bit of brain eased himself from a book titled, The Assassin’s Window.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Johnny Castle,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake hers. “And you?”
“Katie Bruno.”
“A newbie. Welcome!” Johnny looked back at his book, running his finger over the title. “You’ll get used to being dead, by the way. Three hundred pages my fans read about me, only to watch me get shot in the head. And he treated it like it was nothing.”
“At least you were the heroes in your stories.” Another woman appeared from a book called, Legacy of Death. She was naked and had bleeding cuts and gashes from head to toe. “I was just the damsel in distress who was tortured for fifty pages, whom the hero failed to save.”
“That’s just Pauline. He didn’t even bother giving her a last name,” Johnny explained.
Cries from several other books, Death’s Twilight, The Heart in the Girl, Executive Execution, among others, filled the room. Dozens of characters came to life from their respective books, complaining about their own demise.
Katie tried desperately to wrench the knife from her stomach again, but to no avail. She refused to believe he would just kill her like that. Tomorrow, he’d write another chapter, saying that everything was all right. An ambulance arrived on time and they were able to heal her wounds or something.
“It won’t come out,” Johnny explained. “Believe me. Don’t you think I’d have covered this up by now if I could?” he pointed to the hole in his head and smiled.
“How can you be so cavalier about this? Aren’t you upset that he killed you?” Katie asked.
“Of course, we’re upset?” This voice came from another woman, who was popping out of the book Bitter Obsession. She was missing an arm and half her body was badly burned. “But what can we do about it? He’s the creator? He does as he wishes.”
Katie gazed around the room, which was quickly filling up with ghosts of their creator’s deceased characters. Some had been torn in half, others stabbed or shot, yet others had been run over by some large vehicle. Each and every one of them had been killed in some horrible fashion.
“Don’t you people realize this man is just another serial killer—no better than the villains on these pages?” Katie asked them.
There were some murmurs of agreement from around the room, but none of them were overly vocal. Katie had to get them to see reason. They couldn’t allow this to continue. If they didn’t stop this psychopath now, this room would be full of hundreds more apparitions, all with some horrific trauma heaped upon them.
“What should we do?” Johnny asked her. “We are nothing to him.”
She eyed him. “It’s because you people do nothing that you are nothing to him. We outnumber him. If we banded together, we could teach him a lesson.”
“Like what?” Pauline asked, laying across his desk as if it were a bed.
“Give him a taste of what he’s done to us. Hurt him like he’s hurt us.”
She glanced around the room, seeing for the first time a little girl who appeared to have been drowned. She felt a pang of sympathy for her—so young, yet still among the dead.
A man wearing green, with several nails sticking out of his head, and a screwdriver wedged between his ribs spoke up, “Tom O’Shaunessy here, Miss Bruno.” It figured he would have an Irish accent. “We’ve had this conversation before. We cannot do anything to him. He is the creator.”
Johnny agreed. “That’s right. He creates, and we just have to follow the path he’s set for us.”
“I refuse to believe that,” insisted Katie. “I won’t just stand here, and wait for him to torture some other girl, or murder some other guy. He needs to be stopped before he can harm anyone else.”
“So, what are you planning on doing?” the half-burned woman asked. “Kill him? Because that’s the only way you’re going to stop him from writing another story.”
She gripped the knife sticking from her belly, and nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what we should do.” She looked around the room, addressing them all. “After what he’s done to all of us, isn’t that what he deserves? Think about it, wouldn’t we do the same thing to the villain in one of our stories?”
One man in the back, dressed in black with a series of bullet wounds across his chest, raised his hand. “Ummm… what if you are the villain in your story?”
Katie glanced at him. “Well, why are you the villain?” she asked.
“Because I murdered nineteen college girls and fed them to my dogs,” he responded as if he was answering an extremely easy game-show question.
Several young women all gave him the evil-eye.
She smacked her head. Why did he have to make it difficult to sympathize with him? “No! You didn’t kill those girls.” She pointed to the door where the creator had left to go to bed. “He did! He made you kill those girls. He forced you against your will to be a murderer. Is that right?”
He shrugged. “I guess not.”
“He made Elias over there a villain, but he also made you the hero of your story,” explained Johnny.
“And caused me nothing but pain, ending in my death,” she said.
Pauline groaned. “Face it, girl. There’s nothing you can do. You can argue all you want, but you’re dead. Deal with it.”
Why were they so complacent in the fact they were dead? Why didn’t they do anything to stop him from killing more innocent people? What could she do to convince them that something could be done about him?
She looked at Johnny, who was poking his brain through the hole in his head. “When you were in your story, did you feel like you were in charge?”
He stopped playing with his wound and looked at her seriously. “Of course.”
“I did too. I’m sure we all did.”
There were murmurs of agreement throughout the room.
“Then, when we died, we were brought here, and discovered what? That we were merely the figments of some insane man’s imagination—following the story he set out for us.”
More murmurs.
“Well, who’s writing our story now?”
They paused, some of them glanced at each other. Johnny pulled his finger from his hole and stared at it.
She smiled. She had them.
“No one is. We are in control right now. No one is telling us what to do, or what to say. We control our destinies now.” She waited for objections, but none came. “We can teach him the lesson that he deserves. We can stop him from hurting other innocent people.”
She grabbed the knife once more and pulled it. It slid out of her abdomen, and she felt no pain. Now she had a weapon and she held it up for all to see. They all gazed at her in astonishment. None of them had ever been able to do what she’d accomplished.
“Now, who’s with me!”
A cheer went up among the throng of murdered characters. Katie led the charge from the library and into the creator’s bedroom, where he still lay peacefully dreaming.
“Probably dreaming up other ways to torture and murder,” Katie thought.
She raised the bloody knife she’d just pulled from herself, and raised it above her head as the others watched.
“This is how you save innocent lives,” she told them.
She brought the knife down, intent on stabbing him in the jugular, a wound he wouldn’t be able to recover from. The bastard was going to die for all the lives he had taken.
As the knife hit his skin, however, the knife shattered, and Katie was blown back into the wall. An aura of gold covered the creator for a second and quickly faded away.
Katie stood, stunned. As she recovered, she looked for the knife, intent on trying again. It was once again firmly wedged in her gut.
The brief moment of excitement faded from the group. They’d had a brief glimpse of what it would be like to be free of the shackles the creator had bound them with, but it was clear now they would never be able to change their fate.
“I told you,” Pauline said as she exited the bedroom to return to the library.
“I’m going back into my book,” Johnny added.
The rest of them followed, leaving only Katie in the room. She tried to pry the knife from her stomach again, but it was stuck, seemingly even tighter than it had been before.
She glanced down at him. “Why? Why can’t I hurt you?”
“You cannot harm who has created you.” She looked to the doorway. The drowned little girl stood, leaning against the frame. “Your story is over, but he still controls your destiny, and there is nothing you can do to change it. You just need to believe in him, and know that he is doing what is right by you.”
“But, why did he kill me? Why did he make me die?”
“We aren’t to question our creators wishes. Just know that he has a plan.”
“It’s not fair. I don’t want to die,” Katie said.
“And you never will,” the girl said, taking Katie’s hand. “Now, let’s return to your book.”
Katie went willingly, knowing there was nothing else she could do. She loathed the man sleeping soundly in the bed, and would still like to see his head on the end of a spear, but she would just have to accept that her fate was in his hands.
He had been hit by inspiration the night before. He’d already come up with another story idea. It was amazing how the mind worked—how one could be so engrossed with one story and as soon as it’s finished, it already moves on to the next.
But instead of creating a new document, he reopened Hidden Hunter. He had one little change he wanted to make to it before he sent it off to his publisher that morning. At the top of page one, he typed just a few key words.
Instead of Hidden Hunter, the title now read, Hidden Hunter: Book 1.
Then he went to the last page, and deleted the words “The End.” And he typed in something else.
To be continued…
Katie was one of the strongest characters he’d ever written, and he didn’t want her to end that way. Now, instead of her dying at the end of the book, he had one hell of a cliffhanger, and that was bound to sell even more books and make his publisher even happier.
The End
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