For my SciFi, Fantasy and Horror Writing class, I have to email my instructor 350 words of "daily fiction" every day until the end of the seminar. He said it can be anything we want, a fiction piece, a good rant, whatever.

So I started idea # 2, a novel tentatively titled "The Dwarf who Heard Voices".

It's a first draft without editing or corrections, just whatever is in my head. So beware!

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At night I hear the voices; always they speak. Not loud enough to hear very well, and yet not soft enough to be ignored. But enough to where I hear their murmurings on the edge of my consciousness and I see their grotesque images chanting evil words in my dreams.

When I first heard the sounds, I thought it was a radio or a television turned on too loud in one of the other houses. They built the houses here so close together with shoddy thin walls that you know when dinner is over at night because burping noises echo like bells through the neighborhood. But the sounds came late at night and we had a strictly enforced noise rule starting at 10 pm, so I knew it wasn’t one of my neighbors. And even if it were, I knew someone else would complain about it first and the noise would stop. But it didn’t.

I tried not to listen, tried not hear, even going so far as to walk around with earplugs or stereo headphones. But still I heard the sounds. So I had to listen to them, I was forced. And the more I listened, the more I became aware that the sounds were voices and that they were not dwarf made, or human made, or any other creature for that matter. No creature of this world could have spoken with those voices. And then the dreams started.

Those horrible dreams of misshapen dwarves who looked like they’d been wadded up like a piece of paper and then half straightened out again, always standing in a circle and chanting, droning on and on night after night. Standing in the middle of the circle was an outline of a human male figure with no distinguishable features, looking like a shadow but with bulk and form. He stood there waving his black arms and at least once every dream; one of the deformed dwarves would step into the inner circle and disappear. But not without a flash of the malformed dwarf’s life replayed in the dream. It was the flashes of life that I came to fear the most.
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