The Writing on the Wall — Excerpt from 'The Writing on the Wall'
I was lying in bed pretending to be asleep, the covers pulled up to my chin. My hands shook as they gripped the sheets, my breathing ragged, air taken in shallow sips. I heard a creaking sound as the bedroom door swung inward. My eyes fluttered open the tiniest fraction and I turned my head just a little, just enough to see. There in the doorway, her ruined face illuminated by the light from the landing, was my dead sister. I opened my eyes wide, no longer feigning sleep, and screamed, long and loud, an ear-piercing shriek that, had yesterday’s séance proved ineffective, would very likely have woken the dead. I watched in horror as her dead flesh peeled slowly away, rolling down her cheek to reveal perfect skin beneath.
‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘That’s all I bloody need.’
‘Sorry, sorry folks,’ said Ann as the rest of us dissolved into laughter. She trotted over to Beth and inspected the damage. ‘That’s a new type of glue, the prosthetic must be too heavy for it.’
‘Let’s call it a day,’ said Mickey, putting his camera down.
‘About time,’ said Ian. ‘The pubs have been open for hours.’
Half an hour later we were all in the pub, laughing and joking. Mickey was buying, since we were working on his latest student film for free and his folks were loaded. It was Friday, the start of the weekend, and we were looking forward to the evening’s entertainment, the latest horror must-see, although unusually for us, we’d left it pretty late to go and check it out. The film had been billed as ‘The most blood-chilling horror since The Ring’, a claim we didn’t reckon it could live up to. However, it gained additional voyeur points due to the fact that not one, but two of the cast members were now deceased, one decapitated in a motorbike crash before filming ended, the second dead of an apparent overdose a few days afterwards. I had read somewhere online that four of the crew had also died towards the end of filming, just days or weeks apart, but when I had tried to find the information again prior to coming to see the film, it had disappeared from the Internet.
Thankfully the star, Bruce Campbell, was still alive and kicking.
We considered ourselves connoisseurs of all things dark: vampires, werewolves, zombies — Ann’s favourite — and terror in general. Curses, hexes, spells. Blood and gore, popping eyeballs and trailing intestines, we loved them all. Our favourite night was Halloween, our favourite clothes were black. Not full-on goths, before you jump to conclusions, but … well, you get the picture.
We jostled our way into the cinema and found our seats, four in one row and three in the row behind, gathered in a gang rather than stretched out in a line, and waited with anticipation for the film to start. The adverts were almost over, the annoying Orange commercial reminding people to turn off their phones just finishing.
Finally the opening credits rolled and the title filled the screen: The Writing on the Wall, the letters rendered in classic Gothic script, dripping with blood. We watched as the plot unfolded: pretty boy student inherits large mansion from a relative he didn’t know existed, he and his friends go there for a month in the summer, they find a folded piece of paper tucked into one of the books in the library and open it out to find it contains a curse. With the inevitability of a scantily-clad blonde teenager descending into a cellar during a power cut, they decide to follow the instructions on the paper and end up cursing themselves.
The curse itself — in the film — was based on an old premise, that of the power of names. If you know someone’s true name, you can fuck with their life. And that’s exactly what this curse does. Next morning, the first victim wakes up in the four-poster bed in her room in the spooky old Gothic mansion and there’s her name, written on the wall. Just three letters: EVA. She suspects one of the others is playing a trick on her, but they all deny it and she cleans it away as best she can. Next morning just two letters are written on the wall: EV. The morning after that it’s down to E and that night — at midnight, naturally — she dies. The following day, John finds his name on his bedroom wall. And so it goes, starting with the person with the shortest name and progressing through them all in order to the one with the longest.
The film itself was good in parts, but a little disappointing overall. Some scenes were laugh-out-loud silly, missing terror and landing in unintentional slapstick territory instead. We were used to this. It didn’t necessarily spoil our enjoyment, but it wasn’t really horror, not for purists like us.
Afterwards, we all piled back to the house I shared with Ann and Beth. (The lads, Mickey, Peter, Jack and Ian, shared a house not far away.) We ordered pizza, broke out the beers and generally got our weekend off to a flying start. A little later, as we drank Jack Daniel’s and ate Maltesers, Ann said, ‘Anybody fancy giving that curse a go?’ Re-enacting bits from films was one of those things we did. With two media students in our group it seemed perfectly normal, and while it might have been a bit daft, it was always a good laugh. You’re only young once, right?
‘So we can all die? I don’t think so!’ said Beth, vehemently.
We all burst out laughing. ‘It’s not real,’ I said, giving her a look of mock pity.
‘Not like murdered sisters coming back from the grave,’ laughed Mickey, referring to his current film project and Beth’s role in it.
‘It’ll be a giggle,’ said Ann. ‘Go on!’ With that she jumped up and went to find candles, matches and salt.
Ten minutes later we’d rolled up the rug and pushed the furniture back and we were all sitting in a circle on the floor, a lit candle in the centre, a circle of salt on the laminate flooring around the outside. The salt was Ann’s addition, one we often used in our little re-enactments or Ouija sessions. It was supposed to keep us safe.
‘Salt that protects,’ she said, ‘seal the circle and protect all within it.’
Her face witchy in the candlelight, Ann grinned, then went on to recite the words of the curse from the film. She’d been top of the class all the way through school, courtesy of her amazing memory. Mickey always gave her the parts with the most lines in his short films. It seemed to me that she only needed to hear something once and she knew it for life and so far as I could remember, she was word perfect that night.
‘Lord of Death, in dark of night,
I swear this curse by candlelight.
Those whose names are to you known,
Take them, make them, all your own,
Bind them to your soul and will,
Take them slowly, do them ill.’
There was more, but that’s enough, I’m sure you get the general idea. I’m not putting it all down here in case you’re tempted to try anything silly yourself.
We just thought we were having a bit of drunken fun. As I say, it wasn’t the first time we’d acted out a bit of some film we’d enjoyed. But it was the first time something strange happened. The candle smoke seemed to take on a life of its own. It curled and snaked around the shadows of the room, insubstantial fingers that touched each of us in turn, caressed our faces, probed our hearts, and learned who we were.
‘There must be a draught,’ Jack said, even though we all knew no draught could make smoke behave like that. When we’d seen that same effect in the film, we had assumed CGI.
‘It’s only blowing around us,’ said Mickey, ‘not round the whole room. How is that possible?’
‘Oh, God,’ said Ann. ‘It’s trapped inside the circle with us!’ She spun round on her knees and scattered the salt, the smoke from the candle snaking around her head the whole time. Then the candle went out and I screamed. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been ridiculed for weeks for showing such girlie weakness.
Seconds later the room was flooded with light and we all sat blinking at Jack, the only one of us who’d had the presence of mind to get up and flick the switch. We looked at each other, the smoky pall still hanging in the air, the salt scattered all over the floor, and a nervous giggle escaped Beth. Mickey joined in and within seconds we were all laughing hysterically, our minds working on the events that had just unfolded and finding logical reasons for the weirdness. Obviously a draught had wafted the candle smoke around the room then snuffed the flame. We were drunk and tired, susceptible to creepy happenings, clearly we had imagined half of what we thought we’d seen and then panicked, set each other off.
We swept the floor, put the rug and the furniture back and called it a night. Ann and Mickey, then Beth and Jack, headed off upstairs to bed, and I waved goodnight to Peter and Ian before turning in myself.
Next morning, Ann’s name was written on her bedroom wall.
‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘That’s all I bloody need.’
‘Sorry, sorry folks,’ said Ann as the rest of us dissolved into laughter. She trotted over to Beth and inspected the damage. ‘That’s a new type of glue, the prosthetic must be too heavy for it.’
‘Let’s call it a day,’ said Mickey, putting his camera down.
‘About time,’ said Ian. ‘The pubs have been open for hours.’
Half an hour later we were all in the pub, laughing and joking. Mickey was buying, since we were working on his latest student film for free and his folks were loaded. It was Friday, the start of the weekend, and we were looking forward to the evening’s entertainment, the latest horror must-see, although unusually for us, we’d left it pretty late to go and check it out. The film had been billed as ‘The most blood-chilling horror since The Ring’, a claim we didn’t reckon it could live up to. However, it gained additional voyeur points due to the fact that not one, but two of the cast members were now deceased, one decapitated in a motorbike crash before filming ended, the second dead of an apparent overdose a few days afterwards. I had read somewhere online that four of the crew had also died towards the end of filming, just days or weeks apart, but when I had tried to find the information again prior to coming to see the film, it had disappeared from the Internet.
Thankfully the star, Bruce Campbell, was still alive and kicking.
We considered ourselves connoisseurs of all things dark: vampires, werewolves, zombies — Ann’s favourite — and terror in general. Curses, hexes, spells. Blood and gore, popping eyeballs and trailing intestines, we loved them all. Our favourite night was Halloween, our favourite clothes were black. Not full-on goths, before you jump to conclusions, but … well, you get the picture.
We jostled our way into the cinema and found our seats, four in one row and three in the row behind, gathered in a gang rather than stretched out in a line, and waited with anticipation for the film to start. The adverts were almost over, the annoying Orange commercial reminding people to turn off their phones just finishing.
Finally the opening credits rolled and the title filled the screen: The Writing on the Wall, the letters rendered in classic Gothic script, dripping with blood. We watched as the plot unfolded: pretty boy student inherits large mansion from a relative he didn’t know existed, he and his friends go there for a month in the summer, they find a folded piece of paper tucked into one of the books in the library and open it out to find it contains a curse. With the inevitability of a scantily-clad blonde teenager descending into a cellar during a power cut, they decide to follow the instructions on the paper and end up cursing themselves.
The curse itself — in the film — was based on an old premise, that of the power of names. If you know someone’s true name, you can fuck with their life. And that’s exactly what this curse does. Next morning, the first victim wakes up in the four-poster bed in her room in the spooky old Gothic mansion and there’s her name, written on the wall. Just three letters: EVA. She suspects one of the others is playing a trick on her, but they all deny it and she cleans it away as best she can. Next morning just two letters are written on the wall: EV. The morning after that it’s down to E and that night — at midnight, naturally — she dies. The following day, John finds his name on his bedroom wall. And so it goes, starting with the person with the shortest name and progressing through them all in order to the one with the longest.
The film itself was good in parts, but a little disappointing overall. Some scenes were laugh-out-loud silly, missing terror and landing in unintentional slapstick territory instead. We were used to this. It didn’t necessarily spoil our enjoyment, but it wasn’t really horror, not for purists like us.
Afterwards, we all piled back to the house I shared with Ann and Beth. (The lads, Mickey, Peter, Jack and Ian, shared a house not far away.) We ordered pizza, broke out the beers and generally got our weekend off to a flying start. A little later, as we drank Jack Daniel’s and ate Maltesers, Ann said, ‘Anybody fancy giving that curse a go?’ Re-enacting bits from films was one of those things we did. With two media students in our group it seemed perfectly normal, and while it might have been a bit daft, it was always a good laugh. You’re only young once, right?
‘So we can all die? I don’t think so!’ said Beth, vehemently.
We all burst out laughing. ‘It’s not real,’ I said, giving her a look of mock pity.
‘Not like murdered sisters coming back from the grave,’ laughed Mickey, referring to his current film project and Beth’s role in it.
‘It’ll be a giggle,’ said Ann. ‘Go on!’ With that she jumped up and went to find candles, matches and salt.
Ten minutes later we’d rolled up the rug and pushed the furniture back and we were all sitting in a circle on the floor, a lit candle in the centre, a circle of salt on the laminate flooring around the outside. The salt was Ann’s addition, one we often used in our little re-enactments or Ouija sessions. It was supposed to keep us safe.
‘Salt that protects,’ she said, ‘seal the circle and protect all within it.’
Her face witchy in the candlelight, Ann grinned, then went on to recite the words of the curse from the film. She’d been top of the class all the way through school, courtesy of her amazing memory. Mickey always gave her the parts with the most lines in his short films. It seemed to me that she only needed to hear something once and she knew it for life and so far as I could remember, she was word perfect that night.
‘Lord of Death, in dark of night,
I swear this curse by candlelight.
Those whose names are to you known,
Take them, make them, all your own,
Bind them to your soul and will,
Take them slowly, do them ill.’
There was more, but that’s enough, I’m sure you get the general idea. I’m not putting it all down here in case you’re tempted to try anything silly yourself.
We just thought we were having a bit of drunken fun. As I say, it wasn’t the first time we’d acted out a bit of some film we’d enjoyed. But it was the first time something strange happened. The candle smoke seemed to take on a life of its own. It curled and snaked around the shadows of the room, insubstantial fingers that touched each of us in turn, caressed our faces, probed our hearts, and learned who we were.
‘There must be a draught,’ Jack said, even though we all knew no draught could make smoke behave like that. When we’d seen that same effect in the film, we had assumed CGI.
‘It’s only blowing around us,’ said Mickey, ‘not round the whole room. How is that possible?’
‘Oh, God,’ said Ann. ‘It’s trapped inside the circle with us!’ She spun round on her knees and scattered the salt, the smoke from the candle snaking around her head the whole time. Then the candle went out and I screamed. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been ridiculed for weeks for showing such girlie weakness.
Seconds later the room was flooded with light and we all sat blinking at Jack, the only one of us who’d had the presence of mind to get up and flick the switch. We looked at each other, the smoky pall still hanging in the air, the salt scattered all over the floor, and a nervous giggle escaped Beth. Mickey joined in and within seconds we were all laughing hysterically, our minds working on the events that had just unfolded and finding logical reasons for the weirdness. Obviously a draught had wafted the candle smoke around the room then snuffed the flame. We were drunk and tired, susceptible to creepy happenings, clearly we had imagined half of what we thought we’d seen and then panicked, set each other off.
We swept the floor, put the rug and the furniture back and called it a night. Ann and Mickey, then Beth and Jack, headed off upstairs to bed, and I waved goodnight to Peter and Ian before turning in myself.
Next morning, Ann’s name was written on her bedroom wall.
