Scratch

Here is my story:

October 24, 1965


The girl shivered as she stared into the forest behind her mansion. The forest was one she had always been warned about as she grew up, and she had never gone in, not even as a small child. It looked like it had something wrong with it, an eerie quality. If you looked at it, a strange crawling feeling would start at the back of your neck, and work its way down to your back -- assuming you hadn’t already run away. That same crawling feeling was on the girl as she looked, and eventually she walked -- or rather sprinted -- away to the safety of home.
Just like everybody else.

October 24, 2004

    Dana McWhofriggincares giggled as she ran to her mom’s old mansion. Her house towered over the rest of the neighborhood and it was the best house for holding parties! She pounded up the stairs to call her friends on her new cellular telephone. It was her 14th birthday and she was just so excited. Her mom had promised her a huge party, and, heck, she was going to have one! She started to dial the numbers in her phonebook. Soon she had a list - Denni, Kate, Rita, etc. She was going to have so much fun!
    When the party started, all went well. They gossiped and laughed like teenagers, which they were. But one of them suggested going into the forest behind her house as a Halloween trick. They giggled and agreed.
“It’s in, like, a week!”
“What are you going as?”
“I dunno, maybe, like, a cat? My mom usually gets it for me.”
They all snuck out the back and went all the way to the edge, snickering under their breath. Suddenly, they were silent. The forest had the same effect on all of them, but they didn’t know that. They were scared, but one girl gathered up the courage to speak.
“Come on! Betcha I’ll get there first!”
“Will not!”
They raced into the forest, ignoring the blindingly obvious increasing chill of the air and the creeping feeling that something was very, very wrong.
The headline in the news the next day?
“5 Girls Disappear Into Forest, Police are Investigating”

October 24, 2028

Allie McWhofriggincares ran with her sorority to the creepy old mansion. She had just come out of freshman year at Schooly School University and that meant she got to join the same sorority the girls in her family had joined for 4 generations. The traditional Halloween prank of teepeeing the nearby frat house had gotten old, and they wanted to do something special tonight. There was an old abandoned mansion on the hill, just a few minutes’ run from the edge of the campus. They had decided to spend the night, because why not? The old front double door creaked as it opened. She shivered as she walked up to the scary house. She wrote it off as the biting cold, but something in her felt something was wrong. Of course, that just added to the fun. They tiptoed through the dusty halls and set down their sleeping bags along with a generator and a few lamps. Allie heard a whispering. It sounded vaguely human, with an odd grinding to it, like it was being stuffed in a meat grinder. She shrieked. She was never seen again.

It' a little boring, to be honest, but, hey, any port in a storm.