FEARFUL: Scary Stories of the Evil App

2

If sneakers got their name from the word 'sneak,' why are they so loud? I wondered as our every step echoed weirdly.

The empty stores on both sides of the hallway stretched off into the darkness, and looking at them, through the green night vision mode of Dad's camcorder, gave me goosebumps.

"Here we are," my brother said. "In the spooky Town Center. What's next?"

No idea. It turned out that breaking in hadn't been hard. A narrow gap between the wall and the glass door was all it took. Nothing epic.

"Dunno," I replied.

"Shocker!"

"Hey! Don't bring dorky Spider-Man villains into this."

"Can we go now?"

I panned the camera around the gloomy hall. There had to be something I could do here that was a ten-out-of-ten. "Not yet."

"You already proved to your girlfriend that—"

My cheeks felt redder than red. "This is not about Kara!"

"Aha!" Jake pointed his finger at me. "How did you know I was talking about her?"

I inched backward. "Well—this still has nothing to do with her."

"No?"

"No!"

"Liar."

"Shut up."

As we made it all the way to the back of the mall, I noticed there was something eerie about deserted places that should be full of people. It didn't have to do with the dark storefronts covered by dust, or the handrails the spiders had claimed as their turf; it was the echoes. One step sounded like two. A single word became whispers.

"Anything?" I asked Jake.

He tried the door to the old bookstore, but it was closed. "Mom said it's strange the owners of these stores just packed up and left."

What am I doing? I sighed, realizing my first video would suck. The people in charge of the mini-mall had chained and locked up everything. Kara didn't even join us; she said "Ew" at the first sight of a bug and stayed outside.

"Pathetic," I said, staring at my blurry reflection in the dim drugstore window. "Let's bounce." I turned off the camera and spun around. The hallway flanked by lifeless store signs seemed to stretch before me. "Jake?"

He had vanished.