crafthorror
Nothing was there
A shut gate, stopped birdsong, and the oldest trick in my trade felt, for once, from the wrong side of the page.
Last autumn I rented a cottage at the end of a lane that went nowhere in particular, which is the only sort of lane worth renting at the end of. The point of the trip was to finish a book. The book got finished. But the thing I brought home was not the book.
It was a Tuesday, late afternoon, the light already thinking about leaving. I was at the kitchen table when the birds stopped. Not all at once, the way they do when a hawk comes over, but in a slow retreat, one hedge falling silent and then the next, as though something were walking the boundary of the garden and each bird was deciding, in turn, that this was a good moment to be elsewhere.
I want to be precise about what happened next, because it is the whole of the story. Nothing happened next. I went to the window. The garden was empty. The gate was shut as I had left it. There was no shape at the treeline, no figure that resolved into a coat on a post when I looked twice. There was simply a garden, at dusk, with no birds in it, and me at the glass with a feeling on the back of my neck that had arrived before I had any reason for it and would not leave when I gave it every reason to.
I stood there far longer than an empty garden deserves.
This is the trade I work in, and I had never felt it so cleanly from the wrong side of the page. Dread is not made by the thing in the garden. It is made by the space where the thing should be, and by the part of you, much older than you are, that fills the space in for itself. Show a reader a monster and you have given them a problem, and problems can be solved, or at least measured. Show them a shut gate and stopped birdsong and let them do the rest, and you have given them something they cannot put down, because it is now partly theirs. They built it. You only left the room.
I finished the book that week, and there is a scene in it now with a garden and a gate and no birds, and not one word about what is out there, because there is nothing out there, and that is exactly the point. The reader will supply a great deal worse than anything I could describe, and they will do it for free, and they will thank me for the fright as though I gave it to them.
I did not. They had it in them the whole time. I only stopped the birds.
More from the journal
More by Dorian Vale
- The quiet that comes before the dark 7 Sep 2026
- Why I will not show you the monster 5 Sep 2026
- How to make a room you know feel wrong 3 Sep 2026
- The lamp goes back on 1 Sep 2026
On the same subject
- What you cannot hear out there Gazz S. Quillan · 8 Sep 2026
- On the slow burn, and whether it is just stalling Isla Verene · 7 Sep 2026
- Things I write down and never use Adele Merchant · 7 Sep 2026
- The dull machinery of a believable future Gazz S. Quillan · 6 Sep 2026
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House rules
- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
- Nothing unlawful, hateful or harassing, nothing that identifies a private individual, and no advertising.
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- We may hide a remark, remove it, or close an account to the discussions, and we may do so without notice.
What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
Where responsibility sits
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