Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Since you've taken a look at this story, I'm guessing it's safe to assume you enjoy spooky stories. The creatures lurking in these chapters, lurk also in the shadows along a deserted street, or are glimpsed in a lightning flash outside your window on a stormy night, or have just put a claw on the knob of the door to your home. Before you go any further, you might want to turn up the lights a bit or hang a clove of garlic on the wall........................................................................ ........................................................................... . ............................................................................ ........................................................................... . .....................................just in case..........
Welcome to the night.
*****
Chapter 2: The "True" Story:
Tala tossed the branch he had been playing with onto the fire. "All right," he said to the other students,"I've got one."
Tala and his classmates were on their annual school's spring trip. This year the class had elected to go camping in the forested mountains around their town. They had piled into a school bus early one Saturday morning and had driven most of the day to reach the campground, now dotted with several multicolored tent domes.
Although there were two teachers along for supervision, the boys who had been lucky enough to come were mostly left on their own. The teachers' tents were a good fifty feet yards away-far enough from the students to give them a feeling of independence.
Now, Tala and his buddies were taking advantage of their freedom. They were staying up long after the teachers had hit their sleeping bags and were sitting around the campfire, trying to terrify each other with the scariest stories they could think of.
Michael and Kenny had already told some pretty petrifying ones, but Tala felt sure his would really rattle their wits. "I wont tell you how I heard this," he began, his face eerily lit up by the dancing flames of the fire, "but I will promise you that what I'm about to tell you is a true story."
Michael snorted, but was promptly hushed by the others. They had a 'golden rule,' which stated that each storyteller had to be given a fair chance, so Tala just ignored Michael and began.
"There was this kid," he said in a hushed tone. "We'll call him Mike. He lived alone with his dad at the edge of town, real close to the forest where his dad was working as a lumberjack. Sometimes Mike's dad would be gone for a few days when he was working deep in the forest, so Mike learned to take care of himself. He wasn't afraid of the woods like a lot of other kids. In fact, he was always goofing around among the huge trees, setting traps and fishing and stuff. Pretty soon, he knew his way around the woods better then most anyone else." For a moment, Tala looked over his shoulder at the woods behind him for dramatic effect. Then he continued in an eerie tone.
"Anyway, one night while his dad was gone, Mike was sitting out on his front porch. He was staring up at the sky through his telescope when all of a sudden he saw a falling star. He watched it shoot across the sky, and then he could track it with his telescope. He was following the fiery blaze, watching it fall closer and closer to earth, when it actually got close enough that he didn't need his scope anymore to see it. In fact, it was getting so near to him he could feel the heat.especially since it was coming right at him!"
"BAM!" yelled Michael, clapping his hands together sharply.
The boy sitting next to him jumped, and everyone else laughed and poked the poor guy in the ribs. The Kenny, the class science nerd, had to step in and ruin the mood by opening his big mouth.
"You know that's really not possible," Kenny said, "Actually I happen to know a lot about shooting stars. Did you know that according to-"
"Kee-nnyy!" the other boys shouted him down. "Nobody wants a science lecture now!"
"Are you guys through?" Tala said, pretending to be the adult in the group. He rolled his eyes and tapped his foot impatiently. Then, only after everybody had settled down, did he finally resume his story.
"When Mike saw this thing flaming down out of the sky, he jumped for cover- and just in time. The meteor slammed into the ground about a hundred yards away. There was a flash of light and the sound of hundreds of trees snapping like pencils. Then everything was silent.
"Well Mike didn't wait a single second. He took off running toward where he had seen the thing come down. But it was weird-there was no flames in sight. Still, it wasn't hard for Mike to locate. All he had to do was follow the disgusting smell-not of fire, but of something, kind of like burning rubber.
Within minutes, he reached the crash site. It was awesome. The trees were a smashed up like twigs, and in the middle of the clearing was a huge pile of dirt that had been pushed up like a wave. Smoke was coming from the dirt, and Mike decided to get closer for a better look at what he was sure was a meteor.
: Except it wasn't a meteor. It was something silvery that kind of glowed in the dark." Tala paused for a moment, and then said practically in a whisper, "It was a spaceship."
Kenny guffawed. "Yeah right. And you said this was a *true* story!"
Once again everyone chorused, " Kee-nnyy!" until the bespectacled future scientist gave up and let Tala go on.
"Well, needless to say, Mike couldn't believe what he saw," Tala began again. "So he slid down the pile of dirt until he was actually standing on the ship itself. The surface was shiny, smooth, and warm to the touch. Mike figured a lot of it was buried underground since it didn't look very big.
"Anyway, he was standing there, wondering what to do, when suddenly he heard a faint knocking sound. At first he thought it was the sound of the surface of the ship cooling, but then he realized that it was coming from *inside*. The knocking grew louder, and then-CRACK!- a big gash opened up in the metal hull!"
Everybody flinched and the guy that Michael had scared earlier gave a tiny yelp. The others teased him unmercifully, but Tala knew they were just trying to laugh off their own fright. He jumped up and started to walk around as he continued telling his story.
"The crack grew wider and wider until it made a circular hole. Then a horrible smell rolled out of the opening-it reminded Mike of the time he had found a rotting rabbit in a forgotten trap. It stunk so bad, Mike's legs went all rubbery, and he was shaking so much he could barely stand. Finally the crack stopped getting wider, so Mike inched his way closer to what was obviously some kind of doorway. His heart pounded so hard it practically made his shirt jump up and down, and the night seemed very quiet all of a sudden. He reached the edge of the opening and slowly leaned forward. Inch by inch, his head poked over the edge. He licked his lips, now dry with fear and excitement. He was going to be famous. He was going to be the first human ever to meet an alien!"
Tala looked around at his audience. He really had them, but he knew he'd better get to the scary part pretty soon. He went on, trying to make his voice sound ominous and spooky.
"First Mike saw some blinking lights on the inside wall. Next, he saw something that looked like a tunnel into the center of the ship. He leaned a little farther...and there it was-a dark shape in the middle of the tunnel. Suddenly a tentacle shot out! Before Mike could scream, it wrapped around his throat. He tried to get away, but the slimy thing was too strong for him. Gasping for air, he felt himself being pulled over the edge of the hole and into the ship. The thing-a hideous cross between a spider and an octopus-had him..and it was pulling him closer to its mouth!"
Tala held up his hands about a foot apart. "Mike was this close to going down the gross thing's ugly, slimy throat. In fact, he was so close he almost passed out from the stench of the thing's breath. Then its tongue- with millions of tiny teeth on it-snaked out. It swirled across Mike's face like sandpaper, tearing into his cheeks and practically ripping off his nose. Then, just before he blacked out, Mike saw small tentacles ooze out of the aliens head. Although he tried, he couldn't fight off the alien as it sank one of its tentacles right into his skull and bored through it like it was a coconut, heading right for his brain."
Tala paused while his audience made appropriate sounds of disgust. Then, before they had time to speak, he held up his hand.
"Wait a minute. There's more. You see, some time later Mike woke up. But he wasn't exactly *Mike* anymore. The alien had taken over, or assimilated his body...and his life."
"What?" one of the boys gasped.
"That's right. Once it was comfortable in its new body, the alien set its ship to self-destruct. Then it followed Mike's memories back to the house where he had grown up. There it waited for its new human parent-Mike's dad- to return. And the worst part of the whole story is that poor Mike, even though he didn't have a body anymore, still had enough consciousness to know what was happening. He figured out that the alien would take over his dad too; and that the more humans it assimilated, the more capable it was of reproducing itself over and over again. In time it would control the planet. And all Mike could do was watch in silent horror, knowing that he had brought about the doom of the human race."
Tala's voice dropped to a whisper as he finished, and stood still in the flickering shadows cast by the waning campfire. The stunned silence was everything he could have hoped for. He waited as his classmates slowly began breathing again.
A boy named Ian sighed heavily. "It's like that movie where the scientists are at the south pole and they find an alien that takes people over and makes copies of them." The boy shivered. "Afterward, the scientists couldn't tell who was real and who was a copy."
Michael rolled his eyes. Of course *he* had to be the one to try to knock Tala's story down. Michael was always the first to have something negative to say.
"I thought you said it was a true story," he accused. "That story was no more true then a fairy tale."
Tala looked at him innocently. "It *is* true."
Michael shook his head, "Uh, uh. No way."
Tala tried not to smile. Someone just had to figure it out. In fact, he had been betting on it. "Okay, smart guy," he challenged Michael,"why is there no way it can be true?"
"There's no way because there was nobody around when the kid went into the spaceship," Michael said, pouncing on what he was sure was a flaw in Tala's logic. "And if the kid never came out, and the alien blew up the ship, then there's nobody to tell the story and no evidence that the ship or alien ever existed."
"That's true," Tala admitted. "But you missed one important point."
Everyone listened closely to see how he would defend himself.
"There *is* one person who knows the whole story" Tala said nearly whispering," But his name isn't Mike."
Suddenly Tala opened his shirt. "IT"S ME!" he yelled as thick black tentacles shot out from his chest.
Everyone screamed. It looked like a grenade had exploded in the middle of the circle as the boys jumped, crawled, or rolled backward away from the monster that had once been Tala.
"WHAT IS IT?" yelled the teachers as they came racing from their tents.
Tala knelt in front of the fire, nearly breathless with laughter. Tears streamed down his face as he propped himself with his hands to keep from falling over. The tentacles now bounced and swayed gently at his side, looking suspiciously like black nylons stuffed with something springy.
"What's going one?" demanded Mr. Dickinson, the English teacher.
Tala managed to catch his breath and tried to answer, but the sight of his classmates slowly picking themselves up made him break out laughing once again.
"Ah, nothing, Mr. Dickinson," said Tala's best friend Kai, who had kept quiet, like his nature demanded, through out Tala's story.
"Nothing?" repeated Mr. Tate, a volunteer parent supervisor, "You were all screaming like it was the end of the world!"
Tala finally recovered enough to explain. "You see, we were telling scary stories, and I guess mine was a little too scary."
The supervisors- hands on hips- studied the group of kids. Everyone was trying to look as if it had been somebody else screaming and not them.
Finally Mr. Dickinson pronounced that it was late and everyone was to be in their tents-asleep-within the next fifteen minutes.
Most of the kids still too embarrassed to do anything but agree. Some of them shot Tala dirty looks, but others grinned or gave him the thumbs-up sign, wishing they had been as clever as he was.
True to Mr. Dickinson's wishes, fifteen minutes later they were all in their tents, although not exactly asleep. The sound of whispered conversations and muffled laughter could be heard from every tent.
"Whew," Kai said in a low voice from his side of the tent he and Tala were shared, you nailed us all with that one."
Tala smiled. "You know, I think Eddy almost had a heart attack."
Kai clutched his chest and fell backward. The two boys burst into laughter and spent the next few minutes making jokes about who had been the most scared of the group.
After their laughing fit had passed, Kai leaned over close to Tala. "Where did you get that story from, anyway?" he asked in a whisper.
"Why?" Tala whispered back.
"I mean, did you get it from that movie Ian was talking about?"
"What makes you think I made it up?" Tala asked suddenly serious.
Kai was silent for a moment. Then he said in an almost angry tone, "Come on, Tala. I really want to know where you got the story. Stop goofing around."
Tala didn't answer right away. The silence in the tent seemed to take on a life of its own. Finally the breath Tala had been holding in exploded out of his mouth in a bark of laughter. "Of course I made it up! What do you think-it really happened?"
There was a strange sound from Kai, as if his sleeping bag was being torn open. "Good," he sneered as he clamped a hand tightly over Tala's mouth. "I was worried for a moment that I'd been discovered."
*****
~ End ~
*****
And if you think you hear something scratching at the window or a footstep in the empty room overhead, just remember it's only your imagination ............................................................................ ............................. ............................................................................ ........................................................................... . ............................................................................ probably.
Good Luck and Good Night.
Pleasant Dreams.
Since you've taken a look at this story, I'm guessing it's safe to assume you enjoy spooky stories. The creatures lurking in these chapters, lurk also in the shadows along a deserted street, or are glimpsed in a lightning flash outside your window on a stormy night, or have just put a claw on the knob of the door to your home. Before you go any further, you might want to turn up the lights a bit or hang a clove of garlic on the wall........................................................................ ........................................................................... . ............................................................................ ........................................................................... . .....................................just in case..........
Welcome to the night.
*****
Chapter 2: The "True" Story:
Tala tossed the branch he had been playing with onto the fire. "All right," he said to the other students,"I've got one."
Tala and his classmates were on their annual school's spring trip. This year the class had elected to go camping in the forested mountains around their town. They had piled into a school bus early one Saturday morning and had driven most of the day to reach the campground, now dotted with several multicolored tent domes.
Although there were two teachers along for supervision, the boys who had been lucky enough to come were mostly left on their own. The teachers' tents were a good fifty feet yards away-far enough from the students to give them a feeling of independence.
Now, Tala and his buddies were taking advantage of their freedom. They were staying up long after the teachers had hit their sleeping bags and were sitting around the campfire, trying to terrify each other with the scariest stories they could think of.
Michael and Kenny had already told some pretty petrifying ones, but Tala felt sure his would really rattle their wits. "I wont tell you how I heard this," he began, his face eerily lit up by the dancing flames of the fire, "but I will promise you that what I'm about to tell you is a true story."
Michael snorted, but was promptly hushed by the others. They had a 'golden rule,' which stated that each storyteller had to be given a fair chance, so Tala just ignored Michael and began.
"There was this kid," he said in a hushed tone. "We'll call him Mike. He lived alone with his dad at the edge of town, real close to the forest where his dad was working as a lumberjack. Sometimes Mike's dad would be gone for a few days when he was working deep in the forest, so Mike learned to take care of himself. He wasn't afraid of the woods like a lot of other kids. In fact, he was always goofing around among the huge trees, setting traps and fishing and stuff. Pretty soon, he knew his way around the woods better then most anyone else." For a moment, Tala looked over his shoulder at the woods behind him for dramatic effect. Then he continued in an eerie tone.
"Anyway, one night while his dad was gone, Mike was sitting out on his front porch. He was staring up at the sky through his telescope when all of a sudden he saw a falling star. He watched it shoot across the sky, and then he could track it with his telescope. He was following the fiery blaze, watching it fall closer and closer to earth, when it actually got close enough that he didn't need his scope anymore to see it. In fact, it was getting so near to him he could feel the heat.especially since it was coming right at him!"
"BAM!" yelled Michael, clapping his hands together sharply.
The boy sitting next to him jumped, and everyone else laughed and poked the poor guy in the ribs. The Kenny, the class science nerd, had to step in and ruin the mood by opening his big mouth.
"You know that's really not possible," Kenny said, "Actually I happen to know a lot about shooting stars. Did you know that according to-"
"Kee-nnyy!" the other boys shouted him down. "Nobody wants a science lecture now!"
"Are you guys through?" Tala said, pretending to be the adult in the group. He rolled his eyes and tapped his foot impatiently. Then, only after everybody had settled down, did he finally resume his story.
"When Mike saw this thing flaming down out of the sky, he jumped for cover- and just in time. The meteor slammed into the ground about a hundred yards away. There was a flash of light and the sound of hundreds of trees snapping like pencils. Then everything was silent.
"Well Mike didn't wait a single second. He took off running toward where he had seen the thing come down. But it was weird-there was no flames in sight. Still, it wasn't hard for Mike to locate. All he had to do was follow the disgusting smell-not of fire, but of something, kind of like burning rubber.
Within minutes, he reached the crash site. It was awesome. The trees were a smashed up like twigs, and in the middle of the clearing was a huge pile of dirt that had been pushed up like a wave. Smoke was coming from the dirt, and Mike decided to get closer for a better look at what he was sure was a meteor.
: Except it wasn't a meteor. It was something silvery that kind of glowed in the dark." Tala paused for a moment, and then said practically in a whisper, "It was a spaceship."
Kenny guffawed. "Yeah right. And you said this was a *true* story!"
Once again everyone chorused, " Kee-nnyy!" until the bespectacled future scientist gave up and let Tala go on.
"Well, needless to say, Mike couldn't believe what he saw," Tala began again. "So he slid down the pile of dirt until he was actually standing on the ship itself. The surface was shiny, smooth, and warm to the touch. Mike figured a lot of it was buried underground since it didn't look very big.
"Anyway, he was standing there, wondering what to do, when suddenly he heard a faint knocking sound. At first he thought it was the sound of the surface of the ship cooling, but then he realized that it was coming from *inside*. The knocking grew louder, and then-CRACK!- a big gash opened up in the metal hull!"
Everybody flinched and the guy that Michael had scared earlier gave a tiny yelp. The others teased him unmercifully, but Tala knew they were just trying to laugh off their own fright. He jumped up and started to walk around as he continued telling his story.
"The crack grew wider and wider until it made a circular hole. Then a horrible smell rolled out of the opening-it reminded Mike of the time he had found a rotting rabbit in a forgotten trap. It stunk so bad, Mike's legs went all rubbery, and he was shaking so much he could barely stand. Finally the crack stopped getting wider, so Mike inched his way closer to what was obviously some kind of doorway. His heart pounded so hard it practically made his shirt jump up and down, and the night seemed very quiet all of a sudden. He reached the edge of the opening and slowly leaned forward. Inch by inch, his head poked over the edge. He licked his lips, now dry with fear and excitement. He was going to be famous. He was going to be the first human ever to meet an alien!"
Tala looked around at his audience. He really had them, but he knew he'd better get to the scary part pretty soon. He went on, trying to make his voice sound ominous and spooky.
"First Mike saw some blinking lights on the inside wall. Next, he saw something that looked like a tunnel into the center of the ship. He leaned a little farther...and there it was-a dark shape in the middle of the tunnel. Suddenly a tentacle shot out! Before Mike could scream, it wrapped around his throat. He tried to get away, but the slimy thing was too strong for him. Gasping for air, he felt himself being pulled over the edge of the hole and into the ship. The thing-a hideous cross between a spider and an octopus-had him..and it was pulling him closer to its mouth!"
Tala held up his hands about a foot apart. "Mike was this close to going down the gross thing's ugly, slimy throat. In fact, he was so close he almost passed out from the stench of the thing's breath. Then its tongue- with millions of tiny teeth on it-snaked out. It swirled across Mike's face like sandpaper, tearing into his cheeks and practically ripping off his nose. Then, just before he blacked out, Mike saw small tentacles ooze out of the aliens head. Although he tried, he couldn't fight off the alien as it sank one of its tentacles right into his skull and bored through it like it was a coconut, heading right for his brain."
Tala paused while his audience made appropriate sounds of disgust. Then, before they had time to speak, he held up his hand.
"Wait a minute. There's more. You see, some time later Mike woke up. But he wasn't exactly *Mike* anymore. The alien had taken over, or assimilated his body...and his life."
"What?" one of the boys gasped.
"That's right. Once it was comfortable in its new body, the alien set its ship to self-destruct. Then it followed Mike's memories back to the house where he had grown up. There it waited for its new human parent-Mike's dad- to return. And the worst part of the whole story is that poor Mike, even though he didn't have a body anymore, still had enough consciousness to know what was happening. He figured out that the alien would take over his dad too; and that the more humans it assimilated, the more capable it was of reproducing itself over and over again. In time it would control the planet. And all Mike could do was watch in silent horror, knowing that he had brought about the doom of the human race."
Tala's voice dropped to a whisper as he finished, and stood still in the flickering shadows cast by the waning campfire. The stunned silence was everything he could have hoped for. He waited as his classmates slowly began breathing again.
A boy named Ian sighed heavily. "It's like that movie where the scientists are at the south pole and they find an alien that takes people over and makes copies of them." The boy shivered. "Afterward, the scientists couldn't tell who was real and who was a copy."
Michael rolled his eyes. Of course *he* had to be the one to try to knock Tala's story down. Michael was always the first to have something negative to say.
"I thought you said it was a true story," he accused. "That story was no more true then a fairy tale."
Tala looked at him innocently. "It *is* true."
Michael shook his head, "Uh, uh. No way."
Tala tried not to smile. Someone just had to figure it out. In fact, he had been betting on it. "Okay, smart guy," he challenged Michael,"why is there no way it can be true?"
"There's no way because there was nobody around when the kid went into the spaceship," Michael said, pouncing on what he was sure was a flaw in Tala's logic. "And if the kid never came out, and the alien blew up the ship, then there's nobody to tell the story and no evidence that the ship or alien ever existed."
"That's true," Tala admitted. "But you missed one important point."
Everyone listened closely to see how he would defend himself.
"There *is* one person who knows the whole story" Tala said nearly whispering," But his name isn't Mike."
Suddenly Tala opened his shirt. "IT"S ME!" he yelled as thick black tentacles shot out from his chest.
Everyone screamed. It looked like a grenade had exploded in the middle of the circle as the boys jumped, crawled, or rolled backward away from the monster that had once been Tala.
"WHAT IS IT?" yelled the teachers as they came racing from their tents.
Tala knelt in front of the fire, nearly breathless with laughter. Tears streamed down his face as he propped himself with his hands to keep from falling over. The tentacles now bounced and swayed gently at his side, looking suspiciously like black nylons stuffed with something springy.
"What's going one?" demanded Mr. Dickinson, the English teacher.
Tala managed to catch his breath and tried to answer, but the sight of his classmates slowly picking themselves up made him break out laughing once again.
"Ah, nothing, Mr. Dickinson," said Tala's best friend Kai, who had kept quiet, like his nature demanded, through out Tala's story.
"Nothing?" repeated Mr. Tate, a volunteer parent supervisor, "You were all screaming like it was the end of the world!"
Tala finally recovered enough to explain. "You see, we were telling scary stories, and I guess mine was a little too scary."
The supervisors- hands on hips- studied the group of kids. Everyone was trying to look as if it had been somebody else screaming and not them.
Finally Mr. Dickinson pronounced that it was late and everyone was to be in their tents-asleep-within the next fifteen minutes.
Most of the kids still too embarrassed to do anything but agree. Some of them shot Tala dirty looks, but others grinned or gave him the thumbs-up sign, wishing they had been as clever as he was.
True to Mr. Dickinson's wishes, fifteen minutes later they were all in their tents, although not exactly asleep. The sound of whispered conversations and muffled laughter could be heard from every tent.
"Whew," Kai said in a low voice from his side of the tent he and Tala were shared, you nailed us all with that one."
Tala smiled. "You know, I think Eddy almost had a heart attack."
Kai clutched his chest and fell backward. The two boys burst into laughter and spent the next few minutes making jokes about who had been the most scared of the group.
After their laughing fit had passed, Kai leaned over close to Tala. "Where did you get that story from, anyway?" he asked in a whisper.
"Why?" Tala whispered back.
"I mean, did you get it from that movie Ian was talking about?"
"What makes you think I made it up?" Tala asked suddenly serious.
Kai was silent for a moment. Then he said in an almost angry tone, "Come on, Tala. I really want to know where you got the story. Stop goofing around."
Tala didn't answer right away. The silence in the tent seemed to take on a life of its own. Finally the breath Tala had been holding in exploded out of his mouth in a bark of laughter. "Of course I made it up! What do you think-it really happened?"
There was a strange sound from Kai, as if his sleeping bag was being torn open. "Good," he sneered as he clamped a hand tightly over Tala's mouth. "I was worried for a moment that I'd been discovered."
*****
~ End ~
*****
And if you think you hear something scratching at the window or a footstep in the empty room overhead, just remember it's only your imagination ............................................................................ ............................. ............................................................................ ........................................................................... . ............................................................................ probably.
Good Luck and Good Night.
Pleasant Dreams.
