Next Door

• Robert Oner, Grade 3
• Short Story
• 2016

Jack was an average boy with an average life, nothing unusual or particularly fun ever happened to him. Jack lived on Lucknow Street. There was one house next door that was weird. Jake had heard stories that the person living there was an old man who ate children for breakfast, but Jake was 12 years old now, so he was starting to grow a disbelief that any of this was true.
In front of his friends, he acted brave and courageous saying that it was just an old abandoned house…but was it? Over the next few months his curiosity grew…and grew…and grew until, finally, it was too much to take. So one windy day, without anyone knowing, he snuck past the rusty old gates. Once inside, he saw something he had never seen before: he could see thick, oozy, red blood everywhere! A shiver ran down his spine, but he didn’t dare scream in fear that someone would walk outside and take his life as they must have done to the children before him. Once he had regained a little confidence, he ventured forward into the hallway where he saw a lit fireplace. It didn’t look so abandoned after all. The room was so full of cobwebs and dust that Jack coughed. Was that the last noise he would ever make? Jack’s heart skipped a beat when he heard the creak of an old door slowly opening. “Who goes there?” he heard a crackly voice bellow as his body quivered in the darkness. Jack racked his brain for something to say back, but he had nothing. He ran as fast as he could to where he had thought the front door had been, but it wasn’t there. He thought and thought but he came up with the exact same thing every time, ‘RUN’! He ran through door on door until the house started feeling more like a labyrinth than a humble abode.
Somehow, Jack found a staircase and ran as fast as he could up it until he realised that no-one was actually chasing him. He must have thought he had just scared Jack away. Jack was scared now: one wrong move and he was going to be eaten for breakfast next morning! But he wasn’t going to let that happen, he was going to live to tell his friends about this day! Jack was suddenly filled with self-confidence. It was then he saw him, an old man with bloodshot eyes and zombie-like flesh, standing at the bottom of the staircase. “You thief!” shouted the old man with rage as he hobbled up the staircase. Jack thought for dear life for a solution to this. When the old man was almost upon him, Jack realised that he had run right past an open window getting there. Jack ran down the staircase pushing the old man out of the way. He sprinted to the open window and jumped through it and he was safe! Or was he?