A Spooky Collection of Stories
The House On the End of the Street by Reese Welch
You should avoid the house on the end of the street.
The light blue one, with the large windows. Yes, I know it seems like a harmless house, but trust me, it’s not. The bright flowers at the front, in all their different shades of pink, orange, purple aren’t there for the aesthetics, they’re used as ingredients. The soft orange glow that comes from the backyard at night are not string lights, those are candles. The fragrant herbs you smell coming from the open kitchen window aren’t being used for cooking, they’re being used for cleansing.
The woman who lives there doesn’t seem all that imposing either, I’m aware. She looks young, with her short platinum hair, her bright blue eyes, and her short stature. But looks can be deceiving. Trust me, my mother told me.
They say she’s a witch. That she performs rituals in the dead of night, worshipping the moon and giving herself to sin. It’s why she has other women over so often, they meet up to perform dark rituals that no civilized person should ever attempt.
The people she targets most are other girls. She invites normal girls into her house with her honey-coated words and rose-tinted smile, and they leave as one of her. She teaches them about her forbidden magic, and encourages the girls to practice it on their own. Once this happens there is no going back for the girl.
She is lost forever to the life of the witch.
The Itch by Matthew Gustafson
I happen to have very sensitive skin. Since I was a child, I would get nasty rashes under my clothes. No matter what detergent my parents used, they wouldn’t go away. I’ve applied a medicated ointment daily for a while now. The rashes burn less, but the itching sensation persists.
I was told that scratching the itch would make it worse. I didn’t listen; the relief of scratching was intoxicating. I would go into the bathroom multiple times to scratch every inch of my body undisturbed.
Something’s different today. The rashes aren’t any bigger, but the itching has gotten stronger. It has for the past few days now. I’ve grown out my fingernails to scratch my skin better, but even that won’t suffice now. I dig my nails into my skin, desperate for relief.
Instead, the itching grows. The burning grows, despite the ointment. I feel like I’m on fire. I have to soothe this. I take a pen from my desk and drag the tip deeply across my forearms. A temporary respite, but it won’t last. I need something more.
I rush to the garage, to my dad’s toolbox. First I try the screwdriver. No good. The nails? No good? The saw? No good. No good. No good. The blood pouring out is only making the rash itch and burn more. I need something more. No good. No good. No good.
What Once Was Only Imagined by Yorge Gimenez
The room was so silent I could hear the blood rushing in the capillaries of my ears.
The smallest of movements would cause such a loud disturbance that would propagate between the wooden walls near endlessly. Thus, I sat and breathed as quietly as I could while I took such delicate care in this calligraphic writing that the scratching of the pen against the paper was all I heard.
Scratch, Scratch, Scratch.
The sounds filled my mind as if one filled a bucket with water and continued to pour.
This novel had only just begun, as I had dreamt of it the night before. A hellish nightmare, with an emaciated, white, humanoid creature of completely disproportionate limbs, body, and head that crawled on all fours: its hands and feet turned outward. Teeth with the appearance of 3 inch long razors hung out of its unhinged mouth that never stopped smiling.
I had been thinking about it all day and was so immersed in my own mind that I didn’t realize it; my story’s sounds began to come to life.
A new noise had pierced my bubble: the sound of cutting air, as if something just flew past.
Except that the shutters were locked.
Just after this, a nail tapped once against the wooden wall. A concise click, almost a taunt. Then I hear it again.
Scratch Scratch Scratch.
I had stopped writing by this point. I turn towards the noise, the chair now as soundless as my unmoving lungs. On the wall opposite from me, and by the front door, rested the creature that I had seen in my premonition. Dilapidated rags hung from its joints, and it looked at me without pupils, eyes wider than a human can pull.
It poised, then leaped.
Smiling.
Dimensionality by Sejal Spicely
It’s so late on Halloween night that November has arrived, and I am in bed, drowsing. The play of shadows on the wall catches my eye. I lift a hand and marvel at the stark outline of my fingers against muted gray paint, though my arm quickly grows tired and drops. My eyes slip shut. My arm dangles off the bed.
And a large, cold, leathery hand creeps from the darkness under my bed and grabs my wrist in a bruising grip.
I let out a strangled gasp and flail so wildly that I fall off the bed and land with a thud! on the hardwood. The thing underneath my bed lets out a rumbling laugh and peers at me with eyes like hellish embers, glowing red and arcane.
“Emmett,” I say long-sufferingly. “We’ve talked about this.”
The creature lets out a little whine, and I sigh. I can never stay mad at it for long.
“Oh, all right,” I say, and Emmet gurgles happily and lets go of me. Its eyes wink out like candles, and I can’t quite hold back a smile as I roll into the darkness under my bed and am swallowed up by its depths.
Untitled by N. Sowers
My cat, Ghoul, has always been a nuisance. He was always the kind of nasty little creature that would find his way into locked rooms, closed drawers, and nest in my socks until he got stuck and would yowl until someone released him from the socky prison. He had the bad habit of knocking all of my books out on my backpack so he could take a nap in there. I once made it to first period before I realized that he was with me.
After he died, I missed his little paws stepping on my windpipe in the middle of the night, and his panicked meows from behind my closed closet doors. My house was weirdly empty without him. Until the haunting started.
It was as if Ghoul was protecting us from the demons in the walls. Now the banging and howling in the night is inscecent. I haven’t slept in days and I’m ready to burn sage or burn my house down at this point. Fed up, I went rifling in the basement until I found a path into the space between rooms in our house.
Crouched in the corner like the horrible little creature he was in life, the horrible little Ghoul’s ghostly spectre seemed embarrassed by his new level of somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.
The Shroud Over Us All by Jackson McGlasson
Night falls over this empty town. It’s always the same here. The fog rolls in and everything comes to a halt. As if it wasn’t halted enough already. This town just saps everyone’s energy. Those out in the day hate their jobs, and those at night hate something else.
For the night brings something worse than stress and depression. The mist becomes a manifestation of the darkest thoughts of the inhabitants. To venture through is to risk insanity or worse. The voices of past dead echo throughout the solemn streets. Shadows flicker in the corner of the eye. Whichever poor souls venture out into this void are doomed to misery. They will see things they can’t comprehend and feel things they can’t control. Walking down those lonely sidewalks, the shimmer of the mist locks the feeble in a labyrinth of the mind, leading them wherever it hurts.
No one knows what caused this town to be so miserable, or why we all deserve this, but one thing is certain. When that fog lifts, at the base of the old tower, lies the tortured corpse of one of those poor nightly wanderers. You can see in their eyes that they witnessed something no one ever should have seen.
