I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — Doppelgangers

TITLE:  Mitosis

PREMISE:  Street pharmacist Xylofon finds Dr. Jekyll’s original formula and comes up with her own variant for a designer drug.  When she tests it on herself, she starts undergoing a horrible transformation whenever she has a darksided urge.  She hustles into a hiding place and her body divides into two identical versions of itself.  The one most like original Xylo passes out from pain, while the other – whose most overwhelming desire is the sinful motive du jour – runs free into an unsuspecting world.

She has to hunt down the extra Xylos to prevent them from doing crimes.  But not all urges are created equal.  Some are unlimited in scope – like hurting everyone in the world – and others are one-off deals.  She gets an urge to kill one specific annoying dog, while genuinely not feeling animosity toward any other dog in the world.  Clone Xylo gets away with the act – and then calms down.

Original flavor Xylo rolls up to kill her.  Calmed dogkiller Xylo cries no, she’s reformed, she’ll never kill a dog again, but original Xylo can’t stop herself.  Was her clone killing about covering her tracks, or was it an uncontrollable evil urge of her own?

HORROR ELEMENT:  She attacks, but dogkiller Xylo kills her in self-defense.  She takes over original flavor’s life and considers the circumstances.  As a clone, will she have the same affliction as original Xylo?  Will she also sprout darksided clones?  Will she have an overpowering urge to kill them?  She doesn’t know.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #14 — Cryptids

TITLE:  Barrens

PREMISE:  Nobody else took the Jersey Devil, OK it’s me.  There’s a theory that the sighting that inspired the Jersey Devil legend was of a sandhill crane.  I’m running with that.  In the tradition of The Bear, the story follows a main character that is an animal.  Our crane loses track of its kind, finds itself alone in an environment where it would normally never dare to tread.  A creature of open land, it is confused by the tree cover, and feels too scared and stressed out to fly away.  It wanders the woods suffering, subsisting on small rodents and becoming increasingly ill.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Life’s pretty freaky when you don’t understand anything, and you hit a bad patch of luck.  Weird monkeys spot the crane and spread rumors of a devil.  Adventurers stalk the woods.  At the end, one kills our hero for food, and says to a friend, “good snack for our day out.  Hope we find that devil.”

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