I went to a Shut Up & Write session on Sunday. The Archives café, 103 North Road. Fitting, given what I was working on.
Not many people showed up, which meant the whole place was essentially full of writers. Everyone quiet, everyone somewhere else entirely. Ideal conditions for horror.
I’ve been listening to The Magnus Archives obsessively for the past few weeks. Statements read into a recorder. Fears with taxonomy. The idea that something watching you isn’t an accident – it’s a function. That it watches because watching is what it does.
I wrote a statement in that format. A woman books a train that doesn’t exist. Brighton to Newcastle, direct. No changes. Northline, or something similar. And somewhere between the South Downs and arrival, she meets something in an empty carriage.
It was moving. Just… not the way it should have been. With each blink of my eyes, it was closer. Not sliding past with the landscape, but approaching. Advancing toward the train with impossible, discontinuous movements. And it was looking at me.
The draft came out rough in places. I fixed what I could, then worked through the rest with Claude — not to rewrite it, but to find where the tension was leaking. Where the voice slipped. It’s a useful process. Like a reader who never softens the feedback.
The story exists now. That feels like enough
Daria Ryzhikova Writer