Page 44 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

"They missed you."

"I know."

"They've been sulking."

"I would too if someone ignored me for three days."

"You ignored them for four."

"Let's not be technical."

She giggled. Ceramic giggles are surprisingly cheerful. Well, if they could’ve giggled. I crouched beside the nearest rose bush, gently lifting one of the fading blooms between my fingers.

"Sorry, sweetheart."

Snip. It dropped neatly into the wicker basket. The bush looked happier already. Gardens teach patience, not immediately. No, nothing worthwhile ever grows immediately. You plant something. You water it. You wait and then one morning... There it is. Life has a funny way of rewarding the people willing to wait. I suppose stories work the same way. People think writing begins with inspiration.

It doesn't. It begins with showing up. Even when nothing comes or every sentence feels wrong and you'd rather reorganise your spice rack than stare at another blinking cursor. You show up anyway.

Gardens don't care whether you're inspired. Neither do deadlines.

Snip. Another faded bloom disappeared into the basket.

You know...

Readers ask strange questions.

Not all of them. Most. They want to know where ideas come from. Whether Joey is based on a real person. That one always makes me smile. I usually tell them every character is made up of tiny pieces borrowed from real life. A conversation overheard in a café. A woman who laughed too loudly. The man who always bought lilies every Thursday. Someone's habit of tapping their fingers when they're nervous.

Writers are magpies. We steal shiny little things. Not wallets.

Relax. Moments. Expressions. Secrets people accidentally leave behind. Those are far more interesting.

I trimmed another rose. Flowers don't argue when you cut them. They simply bloom again. People could learn something from that.

The truth is...

Writing horror isn't nearly as glamorous as everyone imagines. There's no haunted attic. No mysterious typewriter. No raven perched dramatically outside my window judging my word count. Although... That would be rather on brand. Mostly it's coffee. Deleting twelve pages because one sentence sounds wrong. Then writing another twelve. Over. And over. And over again

It’s also lots and lots of research…

Fun Fact: do you know burying a body isn’t so easy… That where you bury a body must be calculated, yes, you probably know about the “dig 10 feet, body in 5 feet dirt then a dead animal above it so that if sniffers come then they won’t notice…” Hilarious actually. Did you know they started digging deeper if that was the case so don’t go do that… But where were we…

Oh yes,

Burying Bodies…

Different places give different human decompositions or in other words how fast the body disappears. It's quite fascinating. For instance, the earth does not merely hide secrets; it slowly, hungrily digests them, adapting its cruelty to the specific patch of ground where a body is buried .

If you bury a body in the damp shadows of a forest, the moist leaf litter acts as a welcoming bed for immediate, aggressive colonization, where blowflies and flesh flies track the scent to feast on exposed flesh while crawling root systems slowly encase the bare bones in an eternal embrace.

Awesome right?

Shift that body to the sandy wastelands, and the coarse grains will thirstily drain away the moisture, starving the usual rot and leaving a hollow, dried shell behind, whereas fine, suffocating clay packs tightly around the remains to choke out oxygen and create a stagnant, slow-brewing pit of unique microbial decay.

Now Peat bogs are fascinating little places. Cold. Waterlogged. Starved of oxygen. Most people think nature is always trying to erase the evidence, but peat bogs occasionally decide to do the exact opposite. Instead of allowing the body to disappear, they preserve it. Skin darkens into something almost leather-like. Hair can remain. Even facial expressions sometimes linger, frozen for centuries as though the person simply closed their eyes for a nap and forgot to wake up. Archaeologists adore them. I imagine detectives would have rather mixed feelings. Nature has a peculiar sense of humour. Sometimes it hides your secrets and sometimes it keeps them forever. .

Every variable acts as an invisible puppeteer, where shifting temperatures either breathe furious life into the decay or paralyze it entirely, soil chemistry quietly melts away bone structure, and the vegetation above flares with sudden, unnatural growth, fuelled entirely by the rotting tragedy hidden just beneath the surface.