The Haunted House

• Barbara Zdunek, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2022

Terror flowed through Mia’s veins. Normal haunted houses on Halloween were fine, but not this one. This one was actually haunted. There were doors slamming shut of their own accord, whistling in the corridors, and empty coffins that smelt revolting and were warm to the touch. Coffins that had probably belonged to vampires.

Mia Blake was 12 years old and had gone into the haunted house as a dare from her friends. She would never have done it, but her enemy, Sarah Williams was there and if Mia hadn’t gone in, she would be ridiculed for the rest of her life, which was something she wasn’t ready for. At least not yet.

As soon as she stepped over the scrubbed pine threshold, she had regretted it. The entire house smelled of onions marinated for a year in pickle juice, which smelt bad. Even worse, there were footprints in the centimetre of dust that coated the rickety stairs that lead to the basement. And they only went up. Someone, or something, was in that house with her. After a few moments of just standing there in pure horror, she had sucked up enough courage to proceed down the stairs at an agonisingly slow pace.

The moment she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was engulfed in sickening darkness. Not the normal kind, but a nauseating, suffocating blackness. She longed to go back up the stairs, out the door and across the road back to her friends. She longed to scream. But her voice and her strength were nowhere to be found.

Mia took one step, then another, and kept going until she had walked for some time and could no longer feel the draft of cold air that came from the ground floor of the ghostly manor. She could no longer hear the jeering, unearthly voices that had pierced her mind the moment she had entered the eerie villa.

Fear beginning to gnaw at her mind, Mia continued to advance into the gloom. Moving forward, forward, until she tripped over a large article on the floor. Mia fumbled in her purse for her torch and turned it on, gasping as soon as her finger hit the button. Gasping in disgust at what lay on the ground before her. Gasping because it was a human body, white as a sheet and deathly still.

That was the moment Mia’s friends heard a piercing, blood curdling scream echo across the street. That was the moment she collapsed, her torch falling to the ground and flickering off at her feet. That was the moment in which her friends decided to find her in that terrible house. Several minutes later, there was where her friends found her no less dead than the body next to her.