The Thing

• Mary Sin, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2022

“Courtney!” Screamed the brown-haired girl on the balcony below me. “Get down from there!”

“I can’t!” I yelled back as I stared down from the highest level of the hotel. I was standing right on the edge, the rain battering down like stones on me. A chill of dread shivered down my back, don’t do this don’t do this I thought, my body stayed still. What’s happening? A scream escaped from my mouth; a chorus of children being burnt alive. “She will be next.” Replied a voice, coated in the coldest ice of winter, using my voice. I tried to run down the stairs, I tried to cry for help, I tried to do something. My body never responded; it didn’t flinch nor twitch. It only breathed. I tried to blink away the tears forming in my eyes. “Too late.” Murmured the thing from earlier. Meanwhile, the girl below me had her phone out. “I’m getting help!” Then she shrieked as vines wove up from the pot plants on her balcony and wrapped themselves around her, turning her breaths into choked gasps. “I do need a little stress reliever.” The thing sneered as a vine smashed a pot plant onto her head, she immediately stopped moving and her shoulders relaxed. Her head rolled down; I could tell she had been knocked unconscious. The vines dropped her body on the ground and returned to their pot plants. Little trickles of blood were forming already, I couldn’t watch anymore and tried to focus my attention on the thing inside my head. “What are you?” I demanded, feeling slightly unconscious. “Nothing you’ll need to know.” It replied. A force rushed its way into my body, like a wind that’s strong enough to rip off a tree out of the ground, yet I stayed still. The force then turned into an army of pain, shooting daggers of pain into my cold body. Stop it! Make it stop! I thought through the tsunami of pain I was feeling. I didn’t know what was happening until I had jumped off the edge and plunged down.

I was falling, falling from the highest floor of a hotel. I watched as people who were reaching out to grab me were pulled away by poison green vines, dotted with inky black. I also saw someone run inside with their phone. I knew that around half an hour later swarms of police cars would arrive when my body was already on the ground, cold and dead. I closed my eyes and braced myself as fear and panic rose upon me. My body, not actually the body I control, smashed onto the ground. So much was happening at once, people with their phones to their ears and trying to stop any wounds, the thing inside my mind, laughing a mocking bitter laugh, then vanishing and lights, so many bright painful lights. Then I felt my eyes close after seconds of agonising pain.
Then everything went black.