My CreepyPasta Stories

The Crimson Grin

Amy felt as though she could float forever. The water was warm and soothing; she stretched out her arms and allowed it to embrace her fully, drifting serenely on the surface like a toned, bikini-clad starfish. Her hair, shoulder length and darker than the Halloween night which peeked in through the skylight like an inquisitive child, billowed out behind her; she closed her eyes, letting her head sink back into the gently roiling water.

After what could have been hours, but was more like minutes, a monotonous voice announced via the poolside speakers that the pools would be closing in thirty minutes, please exit the pools. To Amy the voice sounded muffled and distorted, but she knew the announcement by heart; she swam two, maybe three times a week at the minimum.

Five minutes later, Amy was padding along the corridor leading to the ladies changing area, the tiles icy cold against the warmth of her feet. There had been other people in the pools earlier in the evening, but the last of them, a teenage couple who had frolicked in the shallow end, had left at least forty minutes before her. She passed the on-duty lifeguard, Roger or Steve or whatever his name was, at a junction in the corridors. He was heading right, towards the main entrance; she left, towards the changing area. He smiled at her as their paths crossed, but made no attempt to conceal the way his eyes ran appraisingly over her, lingering on her breasts – smaller than most, but this didn’t bother Amy – before sliding down to her flat stomach and toned legs. She turned her face away, focusing on the floor-length poster to her left – an advertisement for a circus that would be stopping in town over the weekend, its glossy surface flush with figures garbed in all manner of vibrant colours – until the sound of his footsteps had diminished, and the echoes had faded away into nothingness. With a rueful shake of her head, Amy slipped around the corner into the changing area.

The room was a large rectangle, with a bank of lockers running down the centre and the individual cubicles on either side of them. Amy headed to the right – she’d read somewhere that when lost, you subconsciously picked the direction of your dominant hand, and wondered if the same could be said for picking lockers – and unclipped a stubby looking key with a fat square head from where it hung around her neck. Number thirteen; unlucky for some, lucky for others. Amy belonged to the latter group; born on the thirteenth of August, it had always been her lucky number. She opened her locker, picking up the neatly folded stack of clothes with one hand, grabbing the straps of her rucksack with the other. This done, she headed to the closest cubicle, which happened to be the family sized one.

She had done no more than step through the door when she felt the floor slip from beneath her feet, and her last image was of the washed-out orange fluorescent above rising away from her, before something cracked the back of her head and everything turned to blackness.

Amy is sitting at a long wooden table, over which is draped a tatty red and white check cloth. The table is pine, the cloth a thrift store purchase; this table is where she spent the hours when afternoon turns to evening every weekday for the first sixteen years of her life. It is her mother’s. The kitchen, too, is as she remembers: yellow and red checkerboard-style tiling on the walls, drab green drapes at the window and a sparkling white work surface. Before she has time to take in any further details – not that she needs to, every inch of this room is etched into her memory, and she could build a perfect replica given the time and materials – a subtle movement off to her left in the phone alcove catches her eye.

Amy whips her head around and there, sat on the cheap plastic stool, the one that tilts to one side because the legs are uneven, is a little girl in a black dress, with ringlets the colour of late harvest wheat dangling down to the small of her back. Because it is her back that Amy can see; the girl is facing the wall, assuming the position of her mother, who would spend hours at a time yattering away on the phone to Amy’s aunts. But the girl is too short to reach the phone, so the cherry red handset hangs on the wall above her head like an unreachable plastic bauble.