The Animator - moving one frame at a time

What if you were trapped in a world of stop-motion animation asks Adam Millard in our latest dark fantasy flash fiction story The Animator. Adam Millard is the author of 26 novels, 12 novellas, and several hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections, magazines, and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic and comedy-horror fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children, as well as bizarro fiction for several publishers. His work has recently been translated for the German market. You can find him at http://www.adammillard.co.uk and on Twitter at http://twitter.com@adammillard


The Animator
by Adam Millard

He wakens to the sound of screaming and, before he knows it, he is joining in. After a while it becomes clear that the screaming has stopped; it is now only he who is screaming, though he forgets why. Then it occurs to him that the scream which had unceremoniously stirred him was his own, and it all comes flooding back in technicolour terror. 

A terrible dream. That’s all it was. A dream in which he was chased by giant hands. Hands covered in clay and water and paint, pursuing him through shadowy, monochromatic corridors, crawling after him on clay-caked fingertips like horrible pentapedal beasts, growling as they hunted him down. 

The dark corridors had all at once given way to a moonlit forest, and he had hurtled through the trees, leaping logs and roots, occasionally tripping and falling into the undergrowth. The hands continued their relentless pursuit. He had stopped to catch his breath, his body wrapped around a giant oak as he sucked fruitlessly at the air around him, but the hands were in no mood to stop, for they came through the trees, careening through the glade, grunting and howling like wild animals, stopping only to sniff at the air. An incongruous act, he’d thought at the time, but he’d started running once again. What did he know of these creatures or what they were capable of? 

​Nothing.

It had started to rain then, the ground turning to mulch beneath his feet as he hurried away from the beasts on five legs. Dreams have a strange way of providing for you when you least expect it, and this had been no exception, for at the edge of the forest stood a dilapidated church. One section of the church had been destroyed by fire, but the main body of the building had seemingly survived.

He had hurried towards it, the huge wooden door flying inwards as he barrelled into it. He’d thrown the door shut behind him and slid the wooden draw bar across. A moment later, the hands had crashed into the door on the other side with an almighty thump, and he’d fallen into the aisle, scrambling away on reverse all-fours.

“May I help you?”

A priest, surrounded by flickering candles, stood at the altar. He looked kindly, if a little disconcerted.

“Hands!” he had screamed as he crawled toward the priest. “Hands… after me!”

That was when the windows had exploded inward, and the church door had become so much splintered wood, and he had screamed –

And he had wakened to find it had all been a terrible nightmare, and how foolish he feels now. Oh! How very foolish!

He brings his hands up and places them behind his head. Slowly, frame by frame, he animates himself into a sitting position. Once there, 1/24th of a second at a time, he makes his way into the kitchen, to where he will, for the next six hours, prepare breakfast. It is an arduous process – some days he just lies in bed, stomach rumbling and mouth dry, fitfully sleeping as his bladder screams for release –but he is the animator, and this is how he has been cursed to exist.

One.

Frame.

At.

A.

Time.