Ever since I was a little kid, me and my sister have enjoyed horror. Ever since we were old enough to sit up on our own, my parents have had us watching horror movies with them. It didn’t matter how gory or how violent it was, we always joyfully watched everything they put on for us.
By the time we had hit high school, my sister was dead set on writing her own horror movie. Thus, on her fifteenth birthday, my parents suprised her with her very own 1938 Underwood Champion typewriter. To say she loved that thing would be a complete understatement. Hell, she practically lived in front of it, spending half of her time just sitting in front of it typing away.
By seventeen, she had produced about six short horror scripts, four of which would win awards from writing contests. This spurred her inspiration further until she finally began writing her self proclaimed “Magnum Opus”.
Once she began writing this, the ammount of time she spent in front of that typewriter almost tripled. It got to the point where I barely saw her anymore, only really seeing her when she was hurryng to the bathroom or when my parents forced her out of her room to eat dinner with us.
As time went on, my sister would get more and more protective of this story. We had no idea what this movie would be about, and she would get violently defensive of its contents. If i ever saw her room empty, i would notice her typewriter was covered in a black cloth to deter anyone who may have snuck in.
I remember being caught in her room once during this time. My intentions were innocent enough, with me merely wanting to bring my sister a drink I bought for her from the store. But from how she reacted, I might have well have just told her I planned to set fire to her screenplay. The fury from which she decended upon me almost amazed me. She began screaming how I was “selfish” and was “planning on taking her work for myself”. She stopped when my father came in and dragged me out, closing the door behind him.
We stopped trying to help my sister after that. I don’t think I even saw my sister for at least a few months.
Then, one night, I awoke to a screetch from my sister’s room. I got up, ran down the hall and threw open the door to find my sister and her typewriter gone. My mother was standing there, holding some sort of note my sister left behind.
In the note, my sister violently accused us of stealing her work. She went on and on about how she was finally happy and that we were trying to take that from her. This horrified my family, who up to this point didn’t even know what she was writing about, let alone planned on taking it from her.
We then spent about three weeks trying to find my sister. After a few red herrings she intentionally left behind to throw us off her trail, we eventually found her hiding out in an abandoned cabin that was left to rot in the woods just outside my childhood home.
She had set up a camp in it, with a makeshift fire in the middle. The fire was surrounded by empty food wrappers and dead bugs and rats. She had huddled herself in the corner of the room, crouched in front of her precious typewriter.
When I approached her to attempt to convince her to come home, she let out an almost unhuman screech, lunging forward and tackling me to the ground. She began to strike me over and over, screaming about how I was a “dirty little thief”. Luckily, my parents managed to drag her off of me pulling her out of the cabin.
Shortly afterwards, my parents had my sister admitted to an asylum. We put her typewritter in storage, with us agreeing it would be best to not read what she was writing. As we went through her stuff, I found her laptop. For some reason, I decided to go through it to see if I could find any clues about my sister’s descent into madness.
After a bit of searching, i found myself on a writing forum my sister frequented. To my shock, I found a ton of blogs my sister wrote, writing in detail about her horrible delusions about how her family was trying to plagarise her work and take it for themselves. The comments of these blogs were full of people encouraging these delusions, along with people pushing her to take action and run away.
I decided to write a blog post on my sister’s account, updating people on my sister’s state and scolding them for how they treated my sister. To this day, there doesn’t appear to be any comments except for one, from a moderator of the forum. They actually appeared sympathetic to my sister’s plight, apologing on behalf of the others in the forum for how poorly they treated my sister.
I told my parents about what I found, with them contacting my sister’s psychiatrist to tell them about my findings. They contacted us a few days later with a concrete diagnosis for my sister.
Their official diagnosis was chronic paranoia, which the psychiatrist hypothesising that my sister could’ve had Schizoaffective disorder as a result of some form of trauma from her childhood.
I haven’t seen my sister since, besides one time where I grew the courage to visit my sister. She seemed significantly calmer, even apologizing for how she accused me. I apologized on behalf of the writing forum she was apart of, with her agreeing on how unhealthy it was for her to be apart of it.
I keep having urges to read what her screenplay was about. What was so precious that she had to hide it from us?
I guess I’ll never know.