Bad Egg

• Charlie Barker, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2016

So my friend Stephen invited me over for a sleep over, with just me and him. His parents were going on a romantic night out and then to a hotel, so we could basically do whatever we wanted. When I arrived he had gone out to by some eggs, so I climbed in through the window. We weren’t the best behaved kids back then so we did some things that we probably shouldn’t have done. Like getting Stephens drone to drop nail clippings on his elderly neighbour. The thing we did after that was egg peoples houses.

We had done most people in a five-mile radius of Stephen’s house, so we didn’t have many options. But then Stephen remembered that someone had moved in to the mansion in the middle of the woods near his house. So that’s where we went. It was an old house, obviously not been inhabited in years. There were vines all over the walls, weeds everywhere, and the grass was ankle deep. We didn’t think much of it, we had done this sort of thing hundreds of times before. How could this one be any different?

We egged the house. It was fun and all, that is until we spotted a man looking at us through the window. That had happened before, so usually that wouldn’t scare us. But this man was holding something that looked a lot like a knife. That scared the hell out of us, so we go out of there. We didn’t stop running until we reached Stephen’s house. After that we just watched movies and ate junk and stuff. I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t we call the police? Well, we were egging his house in the first place, and we didn’t want a fine.

We were beginning to fall asleep in the middle of some movie, when we heard a knocking on the door. We didn’t answer it. We thought they’d go away, but they started banging on the door, as if to break it down. That scared us. We somehow knew it was the man from before. We ran into Stephen’s room and hid under the bed.

The banging stopped and we heard him move to the window. A chill went up my spine. I had left the window open. We ran downstairs, to close the door to the lounge room so he couldn’t get out. We were seconds too late. He was through the window and striding towards us, knife in hand. We panicked, and fled the house through the front door, locking it behind us. As we ran, Stephen called the police on his mobile. The police showed up and the man was caught.

The police later told us that he was a dangerous criminal who had been intending to murder us. To this day, I still wonder what would of happened if we had just stayed under the bed instead of running. Would we have lived, or would we have been brutally murdered?