Making repairs, Karina found a narrow, unlocked door under the wallpaper, behind which there was a niche. It was a small room with no windows, about a meter by a meter in size. Inside were some newspapers, rags, dishes, perhaps something valuable because the house was built many years ago! Karina stepped into a niche; something crunched under her feet; looking down, the girl found that the entire floor was littered with small salt crystals. Although this surprised the girl, she did not attach much importance to this but simply swept the floor and took out everything she found. Her interest was hooked on a personal diary, which apparently belonged to a teenage girl. Karina immediately put it aside and decided to read it later to avoid being distracted.
At the end of the day, the tired girl looked around her room: bare walls, several bags of garbage, all the furniture covered with a film, from which she freed only a bed and a chair. Karina did not notice how she fell asleep while reading the previously found diary with the desk lamp on.
However, in her sleep, the girl heard the switch click.
Opening her eyes, Karina realized that the light, which she had definitely not turned off, had disappeared. Perhaps a problem with the switch? The girl sat up on the bed, not fully understanding what to do now. Her eyes fell on the dress she threw on the chair. In the darkness, the outlines of a light thing were clearly visible. It suddenly seemed to the girl that someone wore the dress. Perhaps she is still sleeping? Through the darkness, the outlines of the figure, and the curves of the real body, were very clearly visible.
Karina peered hard into the darkness, afraid to turn on the light.
She was sure that the dress was not just lying in a shapeless rag. Someone or something put it on and sat on a chair in front of Karina.
The girl gathered her courage and turned on the light abruptly. The dress lay the way Karina put it before going to bed. She suddenly remembered that the girl from the diary had seen an eerie dark figure. Perhaps Karina’s imagination played a trick on her? In the morning, she told her landlady, Mrs. Feed, about her find and read the extract from her diary that impressed her the most.
***
July 20.
Tonight was the worst night of my life. I woke up with my bed shaking. I saw a dark figure at my feet when I opened my eyes. She shook the bed and, more and more with every second. I screamed out loud. The figure was gone when my mother ran into the room and turned on the light.
Mom did not believe me; she said that it was a nightmare. However, she stayed overnight in my room. We are almost asleep. Suddenly, my mother says, “Darling, do not shake my legs. I will not be able to sleep like that.” And really quietly, so that no one could hear us, I answered: “It is not me!”.
Mom grabbed my hand, and we quickly ran out of the room. Unfortunately, all the neighbors have gone to their dachas and sanatoriums. Mom and I are alone in the apartment. Now we are sitting on the balcony and waiting for the morning. And I’m writing everything down in my diary.
21 July.
Mom called her friend in the morning and took from her the address of a woman who could help us. My mother did not take me with her, and I played in the yard with my girlfriends. By lunchtime, she returned and brought some kind of spell with her. She said that it must be read, and all the terrible will disappear.
Mom went home alone and read the spell. I’m dreading the night.
22 July.
The night passed quietly. So the spell worked! I wrote it down in my diary just in case. Maybe it will still be useful.
***
Mrs. Feed was the first witch of her kind to complete the ritual.
The essence that was supposed to bring the demon to this world was enclosed in a niche in the diary itself. Additionally, it was restrained by the salt that Mrs. Feed had spilled on the floor. While the diary is closed, the entity is asleep.
Karina broke the protection of salt and, opening the diary and reading the spell, let the entity into the room.
The Entity is a short fictional story in the genre of thriller and fantasy. The target audience for the story is people of all ages; even though the genre feature tends to create tension, the story is short enough to scare children a lot but can also cause a feeling of excitement in an adult. Despite the variety of subgenres, the thriller as a genre is easily identified based on its inherent features:
- the composition of the work is closely connected with the chronotope: as the plot develops, references to the future occur, due to which a tense expectation of future events is created;
- inability to predict the course of events;
- the personal qualities of the protagonist facilitate the development of the plot;
- the theme determines the choice of artistic means;
- a combination of elements of various genres in work (Chase, 2022).
The main purpose of a story, as a thriller, is to create a sense of excitement in the reader; and share the topic of the randomness of fate and coincidence. It is important to understand that anyone could be in place of Karina, the main character. If this story had been published professionally, it would have appeared on the bookshelves next to Edgar Allan Poe and Neil Gaiman since these authors usually write short stories and novellas with a dark, terrifying atmosphere. It is worth noting that the main source of inspiration for the story was the work of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.
The narrative in a story represents the sequential development of events at the beginning of the story when the actions occur in chronological order. Although the story is interrupted by a diary entry, the structure of sequential development is preserved in each passage of the text. However, the story contains disruptions to the standard narrative. In the first part of the story, the reader is presented with a traditional story about a girl. The action is described in chronological order and demonstrates the hook. The author then switches to first-person narration so the reader can better feel the tension as if trying on the role of the girl who wrote these notes. In the final part of the story, the omniscient author moves from the subjective, that is, untrustworthy, to the objective point of view, fully revealing the riddle they created at the beginning and middle of the story.
The above story explores the idea of an old house, typical of thrillers, and a hidden entrance to another world, which can be found in Gaiman’s Coraline. The main difference from the plot lies in its further development. In terms of style, instead of using various metaphors to convey the setting, I use the description itself so that the reader can imagine an empty, uninhabited room with a creepy creature in it. For example, in the episode when Coraline looks out the window at rainy weather, the author describes the garden located in the courtyard of the house as a ‘dirty, wet mess’: “It was the rain that meant business, and currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup” (Gaiman, 2002, p. 3). Such a comparison helps to imagine how terrible the weather was that the main character decides to stay at home and not experience the “happiness” of walking through the garden, in which, judging by the description, everything that was on the ground was mixed up. In my story, there is a simple description of the setting, such as “bare walls, several bags of garbage, all the furniture covered with a film.”
Although the work uses simple vocabulary, it helps to easily immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the ordinary situation and take the place of the main character. There is also a deliberate use of paragraphs in the story to emphasize the sentence, that is, the action, as there will be a long pause during the reading. It allows adding tension to the story as if the main character and the reader are left alone with fear. In addition, alliterative rhetorical questions are in italics and answered at the story’s end. Even though the narration is conducted on behalf of the author, I do not abstract from the main character but prescribe her emotions and sometimes even thoughts. For example, “maybe there was even something valuable because the house was built many years ago!”; the exclamatory sentence, in this case, allows one to convey Karina’s excitement. Thus, the chosen techniques focus more on feelings than on the plot.
References
Chase, J. (2022). Elements of story: How genre impacts the importance of five story elements. The Write Practice. Web.
Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. Harper Trophy.