I was speaking to a classmate of mine during lunch the other day and she told me about a nightmare she had that she said scared her a lot, I thought about it and since I'm wanting to get back into writing asked if she would mind letting me use the idea for a short story. She said fine as long as the real names were not used.
This is just a short little 'horror' story. Based off this classmates nightmare but I changed it to make it sound more like a story, and the names as she requested.
Anyway, onward shall we?
~
I sighed and blew a stray strand of hair out of my face, then rolled over and peered over the top of the bunk.
Jodie lay on the bed below me, reading some crappy book about romance, and when she noticed me staring at her she glanced up. "Why are you staring at me?"
"This is boring, Jodie. I know that you were excited to come to this holiday park for your birthday, but there's nothing to do. Plus, Sam won't stop talking to 'The Mystery Guy', so that wrecks the fun for all three of us," I replied, drawing out and emphasizing the 'boring' part.
Jodie smirked when I said 'The Mystery Guy.' It was the name that we had given to the boy that Sam wouldn't stop talking to. When she did stop talking to him and decided to chat with us (now that was a rare occurrence) she acted like he didn't exist, and when we asked her about him she refused to talk. The only words about him that we had managed to get out of her was that we must never ring him. Ha! As if we know his number anyway!
"Don't worry, we'll be going home soon," Jodie said, and looked down at the bright pink watch on her wrist. "Hey... Sam's said that she's going to be out for a while on her daily walk... what do you think about ringing 'The Mystery Guy'? Sam'll never know."
I sat bolt upright, smacking my head on the roof and cursing along the way. Damn, the cabin roof in this stupid holiday park was the lowest frikin' roof I've ever seen. "Didn't you listen to Sam yesterday? She said we must never ring him. Anyway, we don't know his number."
"When we first came here I saw Sam looking at a piece of paper and typing into her phone. I bet that if we find that piece of paper, we'll find his number. I think I saw her put it in her bag. And stop being so paranoid - Sam probably just thinks that we'll steal him from her."
I climbed down the bunk ladder just as Jodie rolled out of her bed. "Well..."
"Come on," Jodie said impatiently, pausing in the room's doorway. "She'll be back in about an hour."
We walked into Sam's room - just across the narrow cabin hallway - and Jodie started to search her bag while I checked the bedside drawers. After a few minutes of searching, Jodie drew her hand out of the bag an held up a small, crumpled slip of paper. "Bingo!"
I came over to her and read the writing underneath a phone number; 'DO NOT DIAL UNLESS YOU ARE SAM BROWN."
I shivered, and my eyes widened as I noticed that the middle part of the phone number contained the numbers '666'. That was way too creepy to be incidental.
"Jodie..." I started, meaning to tell her that I thought it was a bad idea and that we should just leave it, but she had already whipped out her phone and had typed the number in.
She turned the phone to loudspeaker, and we listened as the phone rang. Once... twice... three times... and on the fourth ring, a man answered the phone.
His voice was deep and contained a faint Russian accent - it made him sound like how I imagined Count Dracula to sound.
"Hello?" he said, "who is this and why have you called?"
Jodie plunged straight into it. "Hiya. I'm Jodie, a friend of Sam's. I wanted to know who you are - Sam is always speaking to you, but she never tells us about you. Sorry if your relationship with
Sam is private, I really can be nosy sometimes-"
"You shouldn't have called," the man interrupted, and hung up.
Jodie grunted and switched off her phone. "Rude!"
I released my breath - I hadn't realized that I had been holding it - then gasped as I saw Jodie punching his number in again. "No, come on, he doesn't want to talk. Let's not make him angry, he could tell Sam. Then she would never forgive us."
Jodie sighed moodily and threw her phone onto Sam's bed, picking it up a moment later. "Sometimes I wonder why I'm friends with Sam. She doesn't tell me anything."
The next day we returned home, and you can't imagine how relieved I felt. Finally! My own bed, good food, and entertaining things to do.
As soon as we walked into our apartment (Jodie and I shared one) I flopped down onto a blue bean bag in front of our flat screen TV, and felt around the carpet with my hands until I found the remote. As I clicked on the TV, I noticed that the cute rabbit statue that Jodie had put on top of the cabinet where the TV lay was missing. Frowning, I called out to Jodie. "Hey, where's the rabbit statue that you put on the cabinet? Did you move it before we went to that holiday park?"
I heard Jodie dump her suitcase onto her bed, and then the thud thud thud of footsteps coming down the hallway. "No, I don't remember moving it. Are you sure you didn't?"
I stared at the spot where the rabbit had been four days previously. "No... maybe one of us moved it without realizing. I'm sure we'll find it later."
I wasn't as confident as I tried to sound, though. How could it just disappear?
We didn't notice it at first. It just started with the small, insignificant things that we barely used. But over a few days we noticed that more noticeable items were disappearing. For instance, I woke up one morning and flopped into the bean bag, holding up the TV remote to flick on the TV - only to realize that there was no TV.
After that morning we called in the cops, and explained what had been happening. Everything in the house was disappearing, one by one. But the cops couldn't do much - there was no fingerprints anywhere in the house, and regular passer-bys of the building had never seen anyone enter or leave out apartment except us.
The police said they would put a watch on this house, and I guess that was something. The only problem was it didn't work.
Things continued to disappear from the house, and it got to the point where if you so much as took your eyes off an object for a split second, it would be gone.
On the fourth day of being home I walked up to where Jodie (who was sitting in an old vintage chair that her dad had given her) was staring at an empty space in the cabinet where the TV used to be.
"Jodie," I started, "this can't be incidental. The days after we ring 'The Mystery Guy', all these things disappear. And the note had said the we shouldn't ring unless we were Sam. I think that whoever was on the other end of the line is the one who's causing all this."
Jodie laughed a bit, but I could detect a touch of nervousness in it. "But he couldn't steal all of this stuff. Some of it's disappearing right from under our noses. And how could we not hear someone open the door to our apartment, walk in, and walk back out while carrying a TV? It's just not possible."
"Maybe... maybe he's not what we think he is. Maybe he's something else." My eyes widened and my heart stopped. I had just remembered something. "Jodie, where the hell is that bombshell that your grandfather gave you?"
Jodie's eyes widened as well, and we dashed to her room.
Scrabbling frantically around the mess in there, I pushed myself to the ground and flipped up the bed sheet that was hiding the underneath of the bed from view. "Phew! Jodie - it's here!"
Helping each other, we managed to drag the bombshell out. It was old and faded, and Jodie's grandfather had left it to Jodie when he passed away. He had managed to obtain it for some old war, and had kept it as a 'souvenir'. I still don't know why he was allowed to keep it if he knew how to make it work again.
"Jodie, we can't let this out of our sight. What if he really is something else, and he figures out a way to reload this bomb? He could use it against us, or other people in the city," I said.
Jodie nodded. "We'll take turns keeping watch. You can't look away from it. You take first watch - you're less tired than me. Call me when an hour's up, and I'll come and take over."
I grimaced and shook my head slightly. "But how long will this go on for? We could have to watch this thing for years."
"I'll called the cops in the morning," Jodie replied, "and then they can keep watch of it. It's too late now - I'm pretty much falling asleep."
Jodie moved out of the room, and I kept my gaze fastened on the bomb shell.
Fifteen minutes passed. Then thirty. Then forty. Somewhere around the forty-five minute mark, my eyelids started to droop, and no matter how much I tried I just couldn't keep my eyes open.
I swear I only fell asleep for a second - but then again, that was all the time that he needed to take the shell. When I opened my eyes again, the bomb was gone.
"Jodie!" I screamed, leaping to my feet and glancing hectically around me,"the bomb's gone!"
After a moment Jodie came stumbling into her room - she had been sleeping on the couch - and gasped. "Oh no."
A high pitched whistling sound suddenly started, and we both clapped our hands over our ears in a vain attempt to block it out. It seemed like an eternity passed, but it was only a few seconds until a sound as loud as thunder crashed over our heads, and fire sprang up and danced around us.
I kept blacking out, but each time I woke it was different snippets of time; the sound of wood crashing down outside the room; Jodie frantically trying to open her bedroom door; flame engulfing most of the room; Jodie on fire, her skin bubbling, clothes turning to ash and her screams; Jodie laying on the floor, her figure almost unrecognizable as she slowly died a painful death.
I felt the flames charring my skin, and my blood felt like it was on fire. I could feel my life ebbing away.
This is it. This is the end, a voice in my head whispered. And then a very real, deep, Russian-accented voice filled the room.
"Don't Dial The Devil."
~
Like I said this was based on a nightmare, but being insane as I am took it to a whole new level of insanity.
And with that said, I never write horror or hardly even read it so this was a small attempt at it.
Wrote this over the weekend, pretty happy with it but then again what do I know about writing.
