Stories Not Quite Scary Enough To Tell In The Dark, But Still Nearly Chilling

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Matilda pulled her coat up over her head, using its large wool felt collar as a bonnet to keep the storm from ravaging her new hairdo. She had to get home, had to get home safe. Had to keep the wind and the rain from killing it!

People joked about fashion being life and death, but for Matilda, surprising her friends with her new look was literally literal life and death to her high school dating career. Why did her mother's car have to break down today! Any time but now! If she'd known her mother wouldn't be able to give her a ride home from the salon she wouldn't have spent four hours sending video chats with the pinky-pie face back and forth with Donna. If any of the blue haired ladies in the salon had carried a charger that fit her phone, or even had the decency to offer to take her picture! All of them sitting under the curler dryers with their magazines, who read paper magazines anymore, had looked at her like something from another planet when she'd tried to explain her predicament. She had to get a picture, had to post it, had to show everyone how amazing she looked and she had to do it before Suzy Jenkins posted the same look this afternoon or her life would be over!

The storm danced across the sky with bright spidery legs, almost instantly the thunder shook the ground followed by a gust of hot wind that nearly tore her coat from her fingers. Mati squeezed her collar till her new nails began to separate. She cursed the storm, cursed the sky, cursed the heavens for cursing her. It wasn't every day you happened to be using the bathroom at the same time as the most popular girl in school, or happened to hear her describe her plans for her next haircut to her stylist on the phone when she thought no one else was around: the next look that would set the trend for an entire school semester. Matilda had the chance to cut in line on Bovis High's world wide runway, and she wasn't about to let Mother Nature hold her back.

Just a few more blocks and she would be home. She would run upstairs, put on her new pajamas, mess her futon perfectly, set up her lighting ring, and take the perfect selfie that was sure to take Bovis by storm when everyone noticed she had posted before Suzy by a good half a hour at least.

The sound of a bus rumbling around the corner, splashing in every pothole and gutter froze the blood in her veins. She had to hide and quick. Like Superman at a phone booth, she ducked into a dumpling shop and slammed the door just in time to see the windows drenched in the muddy spray from the street. The ladies stuffing dumplings in the dark room behind the counter blinked up at her as if she were a fish that had just walked out of the sea. Obviously they weren't up with the new fashions. She thought about asking for a phone charger... No, her apartment was only a block away now. She would make it if it killed her!

Braving the wind she plunged back into the storm. Her feet and legs drenched, her coat dripping, her fingers failing. There was her building, there were the stairs, the doors, she was inside. She had made it! Throwing off her coat she stomped into the elevator. It's warm humm pulling her upward. Now in her hall, now at her door, now inside, now in her room! Closer, closer, so close to victory now she could feel the laurels tickling the tips of her temples, almost hear the endless phone-calls from all the hottest boys.

An icy chill ran down Mati's spine as she looked over the side of her nightstand only to find the electrical outlet, where her charger usually lived, bare. No. No no no no! Nooooo!!!!! This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening!

Where was her charger? Everything went red! Like a bull in a china shop, inside a tornado, inside Godzilla crushing Time Square, during an earthquake, Matilda destroyed piles of un-laundered jeans. Stuffed bears, old barbies and books flew round the room like ants in a tsunami. Dirty socks, bras and underwear that hadn't seen the light of day for years were all caught up in a perfect, desperate storm as Matilda rampaged. Where was it? Where was it? WHERE WAS IT? Who stole it? Who could have taken it? WHERE WAS HER PHONE CHARGER! SHE hadn't moved it. She didn't remember moving it...

Suddenly Matilda looks up from her floor, nostrils flaming, eyes burning she reaches past the pages of this book, past the words. Grabbing you by the collar she squeezes now at your throat with the desperate strength of a teenager whose very popularity hangs in the fray. You flail, gasping for breath you grab at her icy grip, but it's no use, she has you. She yanks you close, you feel the fire on her breath as she ruptures your eardrums with a piercing scream!

"YOU'VE GOT IT!"