Scary Short Stories †

forty seven

My hand fumbled for the door-handle as I glanced at the rearview mirror just in time to see the masked man spring up behind me and say, "Well this is awkward..."

I was too stunned to react as the masked man grabbed me by my hair and clamped a damp foul-smelling rag over my nose and mouth. So this is what chloroform smelled like?

I held my breath and fought against the initial wave of wooziness long enough to reach a hand back and yank off his mask. The last thing I saw before my vision became one big blur was the reflection of a familiar face in my rearview mirror.

Jay smiled at me and said, "Shh, it's okay... There's no such thing as ghosts."

And then darkness...

The first thing that came back was my sense of smell. My sinuses were still lined with the stink of chloroform. It was awful. Hollywood made getting 'formed look so glamorous. Like it was all just...

"A rag on my face? Oh no, I'm asleep! Oh no, where am I?"

I didn't give a FUCK where I was. The first five minutes of consciousness felt like an hour. I could barely keep my eyes open. No response from my limbs. All I could smell or taste or feel or see or think was the god-awful scent of chloroform. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I realized Jay was saying something...

"...Probably a bit too liberal of a dousing and I apologize. But let's both try and be adults here. You wouldn't have come without a fight and I'd hate to have to taze a bro."

I forced my eyes open out of sheer spite. I wanted to look this sick bastard in his face when I told him to go fuck himself. Everything was still blurry but I got the gist: I was tied to a chair. There was a laptop on a desk in front of me and Jay's stupid face was on the laptop.

After a few moments of concentration, I was able to focus my eyes enough to glare at Jay. I told my mouth to open and my tongue to form the words 'go fuck yourself.'

My jaw fell slack and a stream of drool poured from the corner of my mouth.

"I forgot you have awful sinuses, don't you? Maybe chloroform wasn't the best solution after all. Oh well, as they say... Hindsight is a bitch."

"Your mom... bitch..." was the eventual reply that I managed to force out through the corner of my partially open mouth.

Jay turned and beamed at someone I couldn't see. "Three coherent words, fellas! He's coming around."

"Hey-ewe-you-talk..." I started to ask but then furrowed my brow as a more pressing question suddenly came to mind. I gave Jay what I hoped was an incredulous glare as I shouted, "Didn't I SHOOT?!"

He had a nice laugh at this before finally replying, "Yes, you did shoot. Unfortunately for you, what you shot were blanks."

"BLANGS?!"

"I switched out the rounds in the gun-case you kept under your bed with blanks. You were so excited about shooting me that night; you failed to notice that my 'bullet wounds' were actually just prop-squibs."

"When?!"

"When did I switch the rounds? The night I came over to 'help' you try to save Enid's corrupted video-file. The same night I installed all that stuff on your laptop that let me create time-and-space defying illusions..." Jay looked up and batted his eyes, pantomiming naivety as he continued in a falsetto tone, "How am I watching a video on a thumb-drive of me receiving the thumb-drive with the video on it? It's not like anyone I know is able to remotely access computers or make them look like they're doing one thing when they're really doing another."