Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

“Four: Corruption of the Innocent. That’s you guys.” This drew a laugh. He replaced the cap on the marker, set it on the ledge that ran along the bottom of the board, and returned to the lectern. “This is perhaps the most important element of any good Gothic horror story. Without it, what do you have? A shitty old dump with a dark history no one remembers or cares about. You need that one person who ensures that the evil lives on.”

“Sometimes stories have too much power. They change who people think you are.”

“Funny thing about rumors,” Sebastian said softly. “It doesn’t matter if they’re true or false, only that people believe them.”

He was not above calling a book unreadable. But their literary merit wasn’t important at this moment. They were words strung together to represent the firing of neurons and the transferring of information through synapses. They were human minds set into paper, and Sebastian loved every single one of them, even the ones he found disposable.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

“Horror no longer goes bump in the night. Horror stuffs the bodies of dead hookers in his crawl space and then pulls a twelve-hour nursing shift taking care of your sick mother. Horror sits in his cubicle and fantasizes about sucking the toes of the high school cheerleader he plans to strangle after work. Horror stays awake at night dreaming up ways to hurt you and your family and your pets and everything you hold dear. Horror is perversion.”

That’s the root of all fear: the loss of control. Not being able to stop the evil.”

“This is the key to true horror,” Sebastian said with a confidence none of them could dispute. “If you believe it’s real, then it’s real.”