Night Of Mystery!

• Aja McRae, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2010

I was sitting on the edge of a nicely built rock wall, when my friends called me down to play a game of ‘slime ball’ (we got balls of river slime and threw them at each other). While we were playing we slowly got tired, sweaty and hungry.

Me, Tom, Jack, Tom’s sister Lucy and Tim (an old friend from my old block) decided to go for a swim in the river. Our parents had told us not to go there, but we decided to see what was so ‘bad’ about it. We had seen the murky grey river from our houses, but it didn’t look very bad. In fact it didn’t look bad at all. But now that we were close, we could see why our parents said never go there.

The river was grey, but not the grey we had seen from our houses up on the hill, it was a dark, brown, sewer colour. It had lots of dead bodies, trees and lots of other stinking stuff.

We decided we’d go home, but first we went to Jack’s house. He wanted to stay the night at my house. As we walked along the darkening street I felt like someone was silently watching me. I turned. I knew Zack, my little brother, was sent down to get me. I said, “Zack come out of the street, I know you’re there!” Tom and Lucy asked “How do you know?” I just muffled a surprised laugh and turned around to see a freaked-out Zack running faster than an Olympic runner. He ran into my arms and pointed to the street he had just leaped out of he said, “I saw a scary monster in that road!” He yelled it so loud I’m surprised no one woke up.

We all turned and started to walk towards the “monster”. We turned the corner and then to our astonishment we saw ‘THE MONSTER.’ Luckily it was just Millie, Jack’s eldest sister. She’s 18, the same age as me and Tom. “What are you doing here?” I asked. She said, “I came to see what you guys were doing.” “We’re just coming back from the ‘Forbidden River’” I said. “Anyway, why’d you have to frighten my brother?” “I wanted your attention”, she said in her weird croaky voice.

We walked on in silence for a few minutes, then we started off towards the hill, where we could see the lights of the village huts. There was something strange about it tonight - it had a kind of red glow. We got to the foot of the hill and realised that the red glow was actually the villagers dressed in sacrificial cloaks standing around a blazing fire. I asked,” Does that person resemble my father?”

To be continued…