Through the Fog

A few days after Halloween, I came to school with a jacked-up face. The story is I did something stupid because I was dared to, but I'm gonna tell you what really happened. My friends and I were trick-or-treating when we heard some older kids talking about this freaky haunted house on the next street.

Of course, we all knew about it already, but we'd never been allowed to go. Something about our parents not wanting us to be scarred for life or whatever. This was the first year they let us go out on our own, so we thought, what better way to celebrate than finally getting to see that haunted house?

We followed the other group to the next street, which was pretty tame, for the most part. Plastic skeletons, fake tombstones, cheap stickers on the windows, you get the idea. We thought we'd gotten our hopes up to high until we hit the cul-de-sac, which was about as creepy as it could get. It was suddenly freezing and covered in thick fog.

Flashing red, black and orange lights. Slimy, bleeding monsters popping out of nowhere. Distorted horror movie soundtracks blaring from all directions. Whoever set it all up, they did a hell of a job. The house itself tilted to one side, looking a lot smaller on the outside than it did on the inside. Blood dripped from the walls, the way through lined with black, bubbling cauldrons. It smelled like something died, the smallest whispers and creaks echoing back at us.

We thought about turning back, and that moment there was a flash of freaky blue light. It blinded us, the eerie near-silance shattered by screaming. I thought it was all part of the game, but then something big hit me in the face. That was when I knew the game was over. Before the screaming stopped, my cheek had been sliced open, my eye swollen shut. My chin hurt, too, almost like someone was trying to crush it.

I was knocked off my feet, almost relieved when I felt the rough floorboards under my fingers. The cauldrons had gone out when the light faded, I just hoped I was going the right way when I started crawling. The fog had rolled in somehow, making it even harder to see. Before I knew it, I was outside again, except everything had changed.

The house and the fog were gone. I was lying alone in the middle of an empty street. A second before I passed out, a pair of men ran toward me, telling me to stay where I was. Yeah, like that would be a problem. When I came to, I was in the hospital. The cuts on my face had been stitched up and I could kind of see out of my eye again.

A cop was sitting at the foot of my bed, looking more than a little freaked. He asked me what happened, though the tone of his voice made it sound like he already knew. I told him anyway, the poor guy close to fainting when I finished. He gulped, then said there had been a house in that spot at one point, that it had been the scene of a mass murder in the mid-ninties.

The day after, it had vanished, the still-warm bodies of the victims scattered in the empty street. It showed up in that same spot every three years, and there was never anything they could do to keep people away from it. I was the only one who had ever survived.

So, there you have it, the real reason I came to school with a jacked-up face. It's almost Christmas now, and all I can think about is that house. Will it be even worse when it shows up again, since even more souls are trapped there? Would I survive it a second time? Guess there's only one way to find out.