Chills & Thrills Anthology

A Daring Halloween | The Lemniscate

The following is a top entry from our A Daring Halloween contest in conjunction with Ghost and Paranormal. Congratulations to our winner!

The full list of winning entries can be found here.

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PROMPT

It's All Hallows' Eve, and you're gearing up for the most eventful night of your life. While young children are out trick-or-treating, you've made your way to the one house people always skip. It's the abandoned mansion, rumoured to be haunted.

Dared by your friends to spend a night in the haunted house, will you survive the night, or will you uncover the truth behind the rumours?

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The Lemniscate

ToriKage

The glimmering moon shines bright and center like a beacon. Little monsters frolic freely in the raw night in search for treats, yet I succumb to tricks.

It's safe for children within the boundaries of my hometown during All Hallows' Eve. However, I'm being pulled farther from the festivities and closer to the Cantor Mansion on the outskirts of town. My stomach is upset as if moths flutter within yet I haven't had a single piece of candy.

This idea, this foolish bet concocted by my intoxicated companions, will become my undoing. My chest is pressed by the fear of farfetched possibilities that my horrid imagination creates just by the thought of the abandoned mansion. The building is the last remaining structure of a village that stood on the land about two hundred years ago, and perhaps the cause for the construction of the town I reside in now. The gossip became stronger throughout the years and is now a local legend.

The only records of the Cantor name referred to a wealthy couple, a man and a woman who bore no children of their own. In the dead of night, villagers awoke to an eerie echo - a disturbing mixture of shrieks and sobs coming from the mansion. They grew suspicions and declared an attack against the wicked secrecy of the Cantor couple, but could not find the source of the desperate pleads.

It is believed that whoever was held prisoner in the mansion never escaped, even from death, and still wakes the villagers to this day. I've had no such experience. However, that may change after tonight, for another rumor states that those who enter the Cantor Mansion will be trapped along with the disembodied vocals of the tortured soul.

That is my dare - to wait until dawn.

The dark pines open like a stage curtain. The cobble road leads my friends and me to a black-iron and raw stone fence containing multiple acres of wilted grass on barren soil, the mansion planted in the center. My friends, a passionate and careless couple, drop me off at the gate before necking one another. I collect my satchel and watch the pine trees consume the automobile's headlights. There they go to continue their night of trickery.