Follow You Down: Part One - A Li'l Writing Experiment
Busted Spec -> Reddit NoSleep
There will eventually come a time in your creative career where you get so tired of gatekeepers and roadblocks and delays and excuses that you will drop to your knees and scream to the heavens that you just need to have control over one goddamn thing and get that thing in front of people’s faces. (I’m paraphrasing).
The journey to how we got to this Substack post right here started with this video. If you are scared of structures looming in deep, dark water, be warned.
I immediately started researching drowned towns, and hit up my writing partner to tell him I’d found a gem of an idea for our next horror spec.
We wanted something in the vein of WHAT LIES BENEATH. Bigger budget, slow burn paranormal mystery. A return to early 2000’s studio horror. Real fuckin’ classy, you know.
We came up with the bones of a solid ghost story (no pun intended), and polished it up while we were querying for a new rep with a different script. When the opportunity to sign with someone presented itself, they asked for a second writing sample.*** So we sent along what we were calling FOLLOW YOU DOWN.
***Always have a second writing sample. Reps want to know you’re not a one-hit wonder, or someone who can’t move past your 10-years-in-the-making opus.
Logline: When Alison Letchworth and her daughter move into the lake house left to them in her grandfather’s will, they enter a world of dark secrets and unquiet ghosts. Something terrible is buried at the bottom of the lake, and it won’t rest until it drags the Letchworth family down with it.
We got signed off the strength of those two scripts, and our rep sent FOLLOW YOU DOWN around town. It was met with general interest and a virtual water bottle tour. Most companies either had scripts with similar elements, or didn’t connect to it. It happens. A lot.
We hooked up with an independent producer who brought on a director and we shaped the script some more, but eventually our visions didn’t align and we were doing A LOT OF GODDAMN WRITING FOR FREE so my writing partner and I parted ways with them and had the script all to ourselves again...
Here’s the thing: no scripts are ever dead. You get hot, everyone will ask if you’ve got something. Execs change companies. New execs snag jobs all the time. There’s always a chance a “busted” spec could hit.
FOLLOW YOU DOWN, though, or THE DROWNING as it was now known, had already made the rounds around town. Even with this extensive rewrite we did, our rep couldn’t exactly send it to people who had already read the first version again.
Thing is, I hate letting good shit sit on a shelf.
So I decided to to turn it into a spooky short story and throw it up on Reddit’s NoSleep.
If you’re not familiar, it’s a place for people to tell scary stories with the expectation that they will treat them as real occurrences, and the readers will accept this as such and play along.
It required some changes to the script: namely, THE DROWNING takes place from a mother’s POV and the NoSleep is now told from the daughter’s POV, but the story is essentially the same. You also have to give it a clickbait-ier title, so the NoSleep is called I THINK MY MOM INHERITED A HAUNTED HOUSE.
Is it as cool as FOLLOW YOU DOWN? No, but sacrifices must be made.
So I’ve broken the script into about 8 episodes, and I’m going to treat it as a series, updating every few days or so. Just a fun little writing experiment to get a story I dig in front of eyeballs.
NoSleep has a LOT of rules (no info that could be doxxed, no paragraphs over 350 words, no titles in all caps, the list goes on and on) so hopefully I’ve done everything right and won’t get deleted. We’ll see.*********
If you’re a redditor, feel free to log in and check it out here: I THINK MY MOM INHERITED A HAUNTED HOUSE.
*********Remember how I said NoSleep has a a lot of rules?? Well, three hours after I posted episode one of the story it was removed for “not being a personal scary experience” because seeing something scary apparently doesn’t equate to having a scary experience.
I tweaked the ending to make the horror more explicit, and if they let it through and repost it I’ll link to it here.*********
I’m also posting below if you’d prefer to stick to Substack. I’ll probably eventually narrate it and upload it to YouTube as well.
Enjoy!
A few weeks ago, my mom got a phone call that I thought was gonna change our lives for the better. Now I think that call might have put us in terrible danger. I want to document what I’ve been experiencing in case… in case something happens to us.
The day had started like almost every day since the accident.
Our dog Max had jumped onto my bed while it was still dark out, needing a walk and a fresh bowl of food. Before I left to take him around the block I’d checked in on my mom. Her room was dark. Her breathing even. She was sleeping soundly. Good.
She was still asleep when I returned. She slept while I cooked breakfast. While I did the dishes. While I showered and got ready for school. While I packed a lunch for myself, and for her, which I’d leave in the ‘fridge for later.
I was shoving clothes into a woven laundry bag to drag to the basement machines when I got home from school later when I heard her scream.
“Mom??”
I ran to her room, Max on my heels, and pushed open the door to find her sitting up in bed, arms wrapped around her legs, her head resting on her knees, sobbing. “He.. was… here,” she said between hiccuped breaths.
She didn’t say who, but she didn’t have to. I knew who he was. My dad, Ben. The thing is, he couldn’t have been here. A year ago, he’d been driving mom and my little brother Davey into the city when he’d hit a patch of ice and they’d skidded off the road and into a freezing river.
Mom had been the only one to make it out of the car. But she hadn’t, really. Mentally, she was still stuck there, frozen under the ice, trapped in her grief.
I wasn’t doing much better. Sometimes I could barely drag myself out of bed. Sometimes I swear I could hear my dad calling me from the other room, or Davey giggling as he played with Max. But someone had to take care of us, so I’d taken over doing most everything around the house, because if I didn’t, nobody would. Mom just… couldn’t. Not yet. I’d been clinging to a tiny sliver of hope that she was starting to come back. She hadn’t had a nightmare in three days. But now…
“Emma, I saw him and he was…” she looked up at me, her eyes red-rimmed and brimming with tears, “he opened his mouth and, and… water spilled out…”
She buried her head again and I sank down onto the bed next to her, stroking her hair. “It’s okay, mom. You’re safe.” I repeated it over and over, the words like a chant, until I felt her shoulders sag and her breathing even out. “You’re safe.”
I’d tucked her back in when she refused to get up and have something to eat. She was so tired, she said, insisting that she just needed some rest. So I quietly shooed Max out of the room and closed the door behind us just as the phone rang.
I mentally prepared myself to get an earful from Barb about how mom hadn’t shown up for her breakfast shift this morning at the diner. Barb was understanding, but only to a point. She still had a business to run, she’d tell me, and if mom was gonna keep no-showing, she was gonna have to replace her.
I moved into the living room, where Max playfully bounced around, excited at the ringing coming from underneath a pile of papers on the coffee table.
No, not papers. Bills. All of them long overdue.
I sank to the couch, dug out the cell phone, took a deep breath, and answered, certain I could find a way to buy us some more time before Barb cut mom loose. “Hey Barb, I’m so sorry but mom…”
“Hello, is this Alison Letchworth?”
Letchworth was mom’s maiden name, but still… “...This is her daughter, Emma. I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now, can I take a message?”
“My name is Valerie, and I’m calling regarding her grandfather, Hugh. Your great-grandfather, I suppose.”
I’d never met Hugh, and I’d only found out about him when I had to do a genealogy project for school. Even then it hadn’t been much. We didn’t really speak to that side of the family back then, and mom was the only one left living now. And either way, this woman was going to be out of luck because…
“I’m sorry, Hugh passed away years ago,” I said, “so I’m not sure how she could help…”
“I’m afraid that’s incorrect... And I'm sorry to tell you this, but Hugh died last week. He’s left your mother a rather substantial inheritance. Do you know when she’ll be available to speak?”
Needless to say, I got my mom out of bed. I sat next to her on the couch as she took the call from Valerie, bleary-eyed and half-asleep. As Valerie gave her the details, I watched the fog she’d been existing in start to dissipate. By the time she hung up, she was clear in a way I hadn’t seen in months.
“Tell me,” I’d urged.
I could practically see her mind working to process what she’d just been told. “Hugh didn’t die of cancer when you were little. Grandma lied to me.”
My grandma. Her mother. “Why would she do that?”
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know why Grandma did a lot of things. There’s a reason you never met her,” she said bitterly. “Hugh left us a small sum of money…”
“I thought the lady said substantial…”
“He also left us his house. His estate, she’d called it. Valerie is the estate agent.”
Estate. “That sounds… bigger than a normal house,” I said.
Mom nodded. “Quite a bit.” She looked around our cramped apartment as if seeing it for the first time.
My mind raced. “If we sold it, we could get out of here. We could pay these bills and move back home.”
Home, where we’d lived with dad and Davey as a family. Back to the house we’d had to sell after the accident, because there was no way mom could pay the mortgage on her own. It was still vacant, waiting for a buyer. With the money we’d make from selling an estate, it could be ours again. We could go back to the place where we’d lived with them.
I’d started to well up. “Mom…”
“Valerie warned me that the place isn’t in the best shape. Hugh was in his nineties. He couldn’t keep up with it.” Her eyes landed on the pile of past-due bills on the coffee table in front of her. “I can use the money he left us to pay these off. Get out of our lease early. We can move into the estate and…”
“We can fix it up, mom. Get it ready to sell. I’ll help. We can do this…” Hope blossomed in my chest. Just the tiniest spark, but it was there, and I clung to it.
The corners of my mom’s lips twisted up just the slightest bit. It was the closest I’d seen to a smile in months. I’d take it.
***
A week later, we left that tiny apartment for good and headed for our new, temporary home. Hugh lived across the state line, on the shores of Lake Desolation, a very popular tourist destination.
Mom had handled the drive okay. When we’d hit a pothole I could see her white-knuckling the wheel in a way she didn’t used to before the accident, but her mood stayed even and she even sang along to a couple of songs on the radio. It felt almost normal.
After six hours on the road and a couple of stops for Max to stretch his legs, we pulled onto the road that circled the massive lake. As we drove by, I got a chance to see just how popular this place was. Huge resorts and dozens of cabins dotted the lake’s shores, and hundreds of tourists were laying out on beaches, or driving boats, or tubing on the waters.
“This is it,” mom said, pointing to a small mailbox next to a secluded driveway lined with thick trees. We rumbled down what had to be a mile of asphalt and emerged into a circular drive that brought us right up to Hugh’s front door.
When I tell you the house is big, I mean… huge is an understatement. Three stories. A carriage house. A separate garage that could hold at least four cars. And grounds in the back that must stretch a hundred yards to the water. It’s sprawling. At first glance I was actually stunned.
Then I took a closer look, and saw the weeds poking up through the cracks in the drive. The dust on the windows. The peeling paint and missing shingles. All that wealth, and Hugh had just let it start to rot.
Max was excited for our new adventure. He practically jumped out the open window of the truck the moment we’d stopped and got to work sniffing everything he could get his nose on. He ran around the side of the house just as a woman emerged from the front door.
“Alison? I’m Valerie. We spoke on the phone regarding your grandfather’s estate.”
She carried a clipboard and wore a tailored jacket and skirt. Her professional smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she held out a set of keys. “Welcome home.”
Mom took the keys, weighing them in her hand, as if not quite believing they, or this house, were real.
“Why don’t I show you the back before we head inside?” Valerie said. “Give you a lay of the very substantial land.”
We followed her around the side of the estate and onto a lawn that hadn’t been cut in months. “That’s a private beach,” Valerie said, pointing to the sand in the distance. A dock stretched out into the dark blue water, and a sailboat was tied to a post at its end. “And the property stretches for twenty acres on either side of those tree lines.”
I stepped onto the wood slats of the dock and gazed out at the vacationers partying on the lake. I couldn’t believe that this was currently my life. When I turned back, I saw that mom hadn’t followed me out. She hadn’t gone near the water since the accident.
And then she turned to Valerie and dropped a bomb: “You said they found Hugh’s body in the water?”
What. I scrambled off the dock and back onto solid land.
Looking mildly uncomfortable, Valerie nodded.
“Did he drown?”
“...I believe so, yes.” Valerie answered. “I can’t speak to the details, but…”
“But you must know something,” I pushed, continuing to put distance between myself and the water lapping at the beach. “If you’re handling this place. I mean, we don’t know anything about him…”
“It’s all speculation, of course, but… rumor was that Hugh wouldn’t go near the water. Ever.”
“But somehow he ended up out there?” I asked, pointing to the waves. “And not just that, but he decided to live next to a lake for decades?”
Valerie seemed to catch herself. As if she was embarrassed that she’d even speak about these rumors. “All idle gossip. You know how small town people talk. How about we go inside?”
And that was the end of that.
We followed her in. There was the foyer, with soaring ceilings and dark hardwood floors. A massive living room off to one side with thick, plush rugs and overstuffed leather furniture. Just those two rooms alone were bigger than the apartment we’d just left.
But the wood was scuffed. The paint was chipped. The wallpaper was peeling. Valerie saw us take notice and said, “As I mentioned on the phone, Hugh was unable to fully deal with the upkeep of this place given his advanced age. It’ll need to undergo renovations if you plan to sell. Some windows are cracked and will need to be weather-sealed. The kitchen appliances will need updating…”
It went on and on like that through what had to be dozens of rooms, and then we finally ended up at a set of stairs off the kitchen that led down to the basement. “Last but not least, the cellar,” Valerie said, and descended.
It ran the entire length of the estate. Bare lightbulbs dangled from the ceiling on thin chains, the walls seemed carved out of rock, and dozens of pieces of what was most likely furniture were draped in dingy sheets, covered with dust and cobwebs.
“And top to bottom, that’s it!” Valerie crowed. Mom followed her to the stairs, their chatter growing faint as they headed back up to the kitchen, but I was frozen and my voice was caught in my throat.
Something was staring at me from one of the darkest corners of the basement.
I grabbed my cell phone with a shaking hand and flipped on the flashlight. Swept it over stone walls once. Twice. There.
A glassy pair of golden eyes glowed in the darkness. I opened my mouth to scream… and then let out a shaky laugh as adrenaline crashed through my system. It was a teddy bear. Stuffed into a pile of Hugh’s things and forgotten about for what looked like a century.
“Emma?” Mom called from upstairs.
I turned to the stairs to go, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that the small, stuffed bear watched me as I pulled the chain on the lightbulb and left it in the darkness.
***
That was it. We were done with the walkthrough, and mom and Valerie stood in the foyer hashing out the boring details.
I found myself wandering through one of the estate’s many hallways. Halfway down, there was an old, yellowed sheet hanging over what looked like a mounted frame. There was nothing on any of the other walls. Just this one, large piece.
Curious, I reached out to lift the sheet when I heard the front door shut and my mom call out for me to help unload the truck. Valerie must have left.
So I let my hand drop and turned away. I got three steps before I heard the swoosh of fabric behind me.
Slowly, I turned back to find that the sheet had fallen from what I now saw was a large oil painting of a beautiful African-American woman in a long white dress. Lace sleeves covered the arms, and the neck was high. Old-fashioned, but probably of the time when the painting was done. It would’ve been a stunning portrait…
…If not for the slashing cuts in the canvas, right across the woman’s body. It was like someone attacked it with a butcher knife.
I moved back toward the painting, drawn to it, my feet feeling like they were moving of their own accord. There was something about the woman. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
I studied her face, feeling like the world was falling away…
And she blinked.