A Short Story by Nicola Rakuljic, year 10
“Come on Charlie! It’s not really haunted!”
Charlie stood in front of the house, not moving towards it, watching her friends walk up the path to the door. Annabeth grinned back at her as she put her hand on the doorknob.
“Look, I’m opening the door now. Nothing is jumping out at me, nobody is coming to kill me.”
Then Annabeth was standing in the doorway, her back to the dark interior of the supposedly haunted house, James was leaning on the outside of the house, and Robin was standing there, an unimpressed look on his face.
“Come on, Charlie. It’s fine. Really, it is.” Robin called out to her, holding his hand out, basically inviting her to come with them into the dark house.
“Why do you have to go in it though? What’s the point?” Charlie replied, kicking a rock that was close to her foot.
Before any one of her friends could reply, there was a creepy voice that came from behind Annabeth. It said,
“Hello little children. Have you come to play?”
James shrieked like a banshee and ran down the path towards Charlie, who stood impassively, as if there wasn’t a voice. Annabeth froze up, and could feel a hand on her shoulder, pulling her into the house. She was broken out of the trance when Robin grabbed her arm and ran, pulling her along with him away from the house rather than into it.
Once they had all reached Charlie, they cowered behind her, unable to look at the house without whimpering.
Charlie took a look at each other them and then said,
“Told you it was haunted. Told you there was no point. And what do you do anyway? Try to go into the haunted house and get killed. Really, I thought you would all be smarter than that. You are, after all, my friends, and my friends aren’t as dumb as horror movie characters.”
With that, she turned and walked away, having no problem with putting the house, now proven to be haunted, behind her back. She walked down the footpath until she reached the corner, and only then did she look back.
Her friends were still standing there, scared out of their wits. She sighed, and yelled out to them,
“Are you guys coming?”
They scampered down the path to huddle closely to Charlie and none of them said a word.
A few weeks later, when a dead body was found in the front yard of the house with a letter that said, “This is what happens to those who come into my house”, still none of Charlie’s friends talked about the incident.
And it was a good thing too. If they had asked, then she would have to explain how she knew it was haunted, and that was never a good conversation, with anyone.