Untitled short story
By Cyril Lam
On a pitch-dark night with storms and rain, on an old street with a constant drip of water, Jack was running home with a lot of debt. Suddenly, he bumped into a man who was wearing a black jacket and holding a box.
Jack immediately apologized to the man, but instead, the man surprisingly asked, “Do you need money?”
And, of course, Jack answered with an immediate “Yes. But, why?”
The man then instructed him to go to the building next to the train station if he wanted money. Jack went to where the mysterious man told him to.
As he entered the building, Jack was brought to the fourth floor and saw that there were four people in there. He was asked to stay in the haunted house one night for a prize of one million dollars, and Jack quickly accepted the offer. Then they brought Jack and the other four people to the haunted house.
One hour later, Jack and the other four people arrived at the haunted house. As they stepped inside the house, which was very dark and foggy with broken walls, roof and windows all over the place, they started to introduce themselves.
The first and the second person were twins, named Tom and Tim, and the other two guys were friends. Jack called Tom and Tim to find a room to stay for the night with him and the two other guys were told to guard the ground floor. As Jack and the twins were finding a room, they could barely see anything because the house was dark, and the lights did not work, so it was very hard to see. So, Jack went and took a piece of broken wood on the floor and burned it up which made a torch to light up the part of the house; after Jack lit up the house, they started to find a room. They started to find a room to stay for the night.
Not long after, they managed to find a room, but while he was yelling, there was suddenly someone shouting for help. Almost immediately, the shouting subsided, and he ran down and saw what happened. The two guys were dead, and it looked like they got bitten.
After Jack returned to the twins, they immediately asked, “What happened to them?”
“They got killed,” Jack answered.
The twins were immediately stunned and replied, “... … let's not talk about it.”
and hesitantly went to sleep.
A few hours later, in the dead of night, the window creaked open, and a chilling gust of wind swept over Tom, stirring him from his sleep. Startled, he got up to close the window. As he made his way across the room, he tripped and fell to the floor with a thud.
The noise jolted Tim awake. "What happened?" he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
"Nothing, I just tripped," Tom replied. Tim, satisfied, turned over and drifted back to sleep.
As Tom struggled to close the window, something unseen lunged at him, pulling him into the darkness. Tim stirred again, sensing something was off. When he called out for Tom, there was no response. Rising from his bed, he walked toward the window and froze in horror.
There, he saw Tom's lifeless head peering back at him. Panic surged through him as he looked down and spotted Tom's lifeless body sprawled on the ground below. Heart racing, Tim dashed back to his room, desperate to warn Jack. But it was too late. A shadowy figure emerged, seizing Tim and dragging him away, leaving nothing but silence behind.
In the morning, when Jack woke up, the room was so quiet he could even hear the wind blow over. But at that time, he knew that there was something off, so he looked throughout the whole house and shouted at Tom and Tim, but no one answered. He realized that Tom and Tim had disappeared, and he immediately packed up and ran away. He also realized that those people who offered him money are not normal and are not to be trusted.