For the 13 days leading up to Halloween, I am trying an experiment by rewriting the same story in 13 different styles, reflecting the various horror subgenres as part of my Thirteen For Halloween series. You can find the original version HERE. So, feel free to come back and weigh in with your opinion of which style worked the best!

The corpse of Anaïs was strewn across a divan within an ancient chamber that was shrouded in darkness and filled with an oppressive smell of decay. Shadows danced on the walls, their haunting movements etching an eldritch ritual into her carcass. She had lived a life of mundane events and aching solitude, but a whisper—a prophecy from the cryptic Codex of Umbral Lore—had promised her transformation at the stroke of midnight.

A grandfather clock atop a crumbling mantel struck midnight and a palpable change tore through the room as if the very walls were gasping. Anaïs’ eyes snapped open, glowing with an otherworldly luminescence. “So, it begins,” she muttered, her voice tinged with a mixture of awe and dread. She rose, feeling an alien force coursing through her, compelling her upright.

“Is this liberation or damnation?” she wondered aloud. A cold mist emanated from her body, freezing the air and transforming the rotting walls into grotesque artworks of horror. Her humanity, once her anchor, now felt like a distant memory.

“The Codex was right,” she hissed, a malicious grin replacing her previous expression of wonder. Her voice was now tinged with malevolence, any vestige of her former self seemingly eradicated.

As the grandfather clock struck its final bell, a shiver down Anaïs’ spine. She realized the celestial alignment that empowered her was transient; it would dissipate at dawn. Time was of the essence.

Moving toward an altar built from crumbling stones, she studied an ancient map of Earth. “Now, where shall I begin?” Her fingers danced in the frozen air, inscribing runes only she—and the forbidden gods—could see. Her eyes fixed on a small, isolated town. “Ah, the perfect testing ground for my newfound powers.”

Her face twisted into an unholy snarl as she grabbed a dark, jeweled dagger from the altar. With swift strokes, she carved an arcane symbol into the map, right over the unsuspecting town. “Tonight, they will know fear; they will know me,” she vowed.

In that moment, a bone-chilling howl erupted from the depths of the chamber, answering her in a cacophony of voices that sounded suspiciously human. The shadows on the wall quivered, then stretched out as if reaching toward the small town on the map.

Anaïs’ eyes widened with a mixture of triumph and horror. What had she unleashed? Had she become the harbinger of doom the prophecy foretold, or a pawn in a cosmic game she barely understood?

As she exited her sanctum, even the shadows seemed to bow before her, whispering her name with a mix of reverence and existential dread. The world remained ignorant of the doom that was about to befall it—doom that now had a name.

Anaïs.