Mentality ~Short Niall Horan Horror Story~

Chapter One: The Start

The lights flicker again, causing her eyes to dart back and forth nervously. Her eyes slowly shift from her laptop to the living room window. She lets her eyes adjust from the bright screen to the blackness of the night, though she can't see anything beyond the circle of light that her neighbor's porch provides.

Megan has been sitting silently in her living room for the past hour as the storm raged on outside during another warm summer night. She checks the time on her laptop and realizes that what she thought was an hour's time was actually three. Nervously chuckling to herself, she comes to the realization that her house-mate should have been home by now.

Kelsey had left to get something from a friend's house over two hours ago. She had driven there and ten minutes back. Megan knows that Kelsey wouldn't stay there without telling Megan first due to Megan's worrison tendencies.

"I'll give her a bit longer... Maybe she decided to stay the night... Yeah, that's probably it. I bet she called me to say that, too." Mumbling to herself, Megan sits her laptop aside and gets up to find her phone. I could have sworn that I had brought it downstairs with me earlier...

She walks around the couch and out of the living room, going towards the stairs. Megan freezes on the fourth step up. Something had moved upstairs, she was sure of it; she heard the noise it made. She stood still for a full minute, trying to reassure herself that it was nothing. It's storming outside, it was probably just a branch falling off of the tree and onto the roof.

She slowly continues her way up the stairs, taking them one at a time, getting both feet planted on each step before moving onto the next one. She wants to be sure that the noise isn't actually upstairs. If she's quiet and there really is something up there, maybe it will think she went away and mistakenly make another noise. But then what would she do?

Upon reaching the top of the stairs, Megan quickly turns the hall light on and peers down the hall cautiously. There's nothing there, and each of the four doors in the hall is closed. A sigh of relief escapes her lips as she runs her left hand through her hair and takes a step into the hall. She goes into her room and turns the light on as quickly as she can, still a bit wary of something being upstairs with her. She stands in the doorway and searches the room with her eyes, seeing no signs of anyone being here since the last time she was.

She crosses her room and goes to her bed. Megan takes a seat on the edge of it, proceeding to slide her hand beneath her pillow in search of her phone. Her eyebrows knit together in confusion. It's always under the pillow if it's not downstairs with her, and she already looked downstairs. Therefore it has to be here, but it isn't. She moves the pillows out of their original places and still doesn't see her phone. Standing, she hears a noise; a slight creak of the floor boards. Nervously dismissing it as herself that made the noise, she walks around the bed to the other side of her room to where her phone charger is plugged into the wall. Her phone is not plugged into it, and it's not siiting on the desk near it, either.

"Where in the hell is my phone?" She says aloud, aggravated that it's not where she had left it. She walks back to her bed and lays on her stomach on the ground, looking under the bed for her phone. It isn't under there, leaving even fewer places for it to be. Getting back up, she hears the familiar ring-tone of her phone playing. It was slightly muffled, but still in this room. Desperately, she searched aroung the room for it. She walks to her closet door and opens it, revealing her phone lying on a shelf. Well, that's odd... She hadn't even been in her closet since the last time that she saw her phone. Quickly she picks up the phone and answers it.

"Hello?" There was no reply on the other line. She could hear that someone was there, but they weren't saying anything. "Hello? Kelsey?" She starts to think that no one was on the other line, but then she hears it.

"..." A deep, sinister chuckle comes out almost silently from the other end of the call, and then she hears a click indicating that the other person had hung up. She pulls the phone away from her ear and ends the call from her end as well, then shoves her phone down in her pocket, putting what she needed to do on hold for a moment.

Turning to leave the room, she could have sworn to something else; seeing a shadow pass by the crack under her door. Her breathing hitches in her throat as she tries to reassure herself that her mind is only playing tricks on her. She takes small steps towards the door, keeping silent in case there really is something out there. She attempts to dismiss the figure as her own shadow moving from in the room, not outside of it. Somewhere in her mind, she knows that it's not true, but she's telling herself what she wants to hear.

She returns to the living room and retakes her seat on the sofa, pulling her laptop into her lap. As she sees the time, she remembers why she needed her phone. She pulls her phone out of her pocket and doesn't see any messages from Kelsey: not a call, not a text, not an email. There was absolutely nothing. She tries to call her several times, but Megan doesn't get a response. The next time Megan calls Kelsey, she leaves a voice message for her.

"Hey, you've been gone for a while. Are you staying at your friend's house tonight? I'm just a bit worried, is all... Call me back when you get this, yeah?" Megan then waits for a call back from Kelsey, but doesn't get anything. Nearly an hour passes before she realizes that something must have happened to her, because Kelsey usually always calls back quickly.

A few minutes later, thinking that she heard something, Megan gets off of the sofa and peers out the window into the darkness of the night. Nothing moves from beyond her window, and so she sits back down and waits for her house-mate to come back. The time is now nearly two am Kelsey is still not back. Safe to say, Megan is very worried about what could have happened to her.