Short Horror Stories

The Orb

*Unedited and autocorrect hates me*

~Note~  This is true. Seriously. This actually happened to me. I hope you don't read this at night.

When I was in fourth grade, my grandparents took my brother and me up to the Smokies. It was beautiful and I loved it. One day of our trip was dedicated to visiting the old houses from two hundred years ago. One of them you could go inside the attic. There was a rickety, old, decaying, skinny, little staircase to the attic. It was strangely cool, being about ninety degrees outside. I felt slight chills every since I had seen the wood shed out front (I even wrote twenty pages of a horror story that took place there, when I was in fifth grade). When I got in the attic, I knew something wasn't right. I soon started to think about the house's past and what it may hold. A shiver went down my spine. As my brother and I crossed the threshold, we wandered to the center of the room. It was barren and grey. The wood was rotting and unsteady under our weight. The room was oddly dark, as there were so many holes to let light shine through. As the planks shifted with my movement, I shivered involuntarily again. Even the soft buzz or light touch of a mosquito frightened me. Then I noticed this odd orb of light on the ground. It looked different than the other beams peeking through the holes in the walls and the roof. It seemed more round and perfect. It seemed... Almost spherical. It was slightly discolored from the rest of the lights around. I was intrigued and I stepped towards it. My brother noticed it too. As I eased closer, the room seemed to dim even more to where it was extremely unnatural. Yet, while everything else darkened, this orb thing and a three inch radius of it stayed the same. I stopped about two feet from it. As I frantically searched for the hole that could possibly filter this ray, my heart quickened to an Olympic sprint. I soon came to the realization that there was nothing there at the right angle, size, or shape to have let that light in. I gazed back down at the orb, sure it was an orb now. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stick up and a tremendous shiver ran down my spine. I could sense my brother was watching as well. The orb twitched. My heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I felt a weird sensation in the back far left and right sides of my head and I had the sudden, slight, yet short urge to jump out of the second story window. Let me just say that I ran out of there to my grandparents quickly.

My first thought once I got safely outside was that it was one of those ghosts that take the form of balls of light. I've had experiences with these before the previous year, in my backyard, my room, my friend's backyard, his room, and his living room (might I add that he lived in the house behind mine, so our backyards were only separated by a fence) He believed the ball(s) we saw around our homes was his late grandfather who just wanted to talk to him and meet me (we were best friends at the time) he was always oddly calm and his eyes were almost glazed over when he talked about this. He said that they talked in his dreams sometimes and he's heard him when he played the piano before. My friend played the piano a lot. He was self taught and only by sound. He never looked up the notes to a song, though he knew them well. He said sometimes his late grandfather helped him with his music. That boy and I are no longer friends because one day he flipped out and started yelling at me for no reason. He said he hated me and never wanted to see me again. He got his wish. We were best friends. He was one of my three friends and I was one of his only friends. I don't know why he'd do that

Anyway, so the night after the encounter in the attic, I had these weird, vague dreams. I dreamt of what that attic looked like when it was new. I dreamt of what it looked like when it was in use. I dreamt of what went on in that house. I dreamt of weird writing and markings in an odd, out of place brick square in the wall. It looked fresh. I dreamt of weird stains on a wall and a plaque that told of many children and a mother that was very harsh and went crazy time after time (the next morning, my grandfather described that wall that he saw at the house that I had missed somehow) I dreamt of muffled screams of agony and a rotting corpse. I dreamt of a young boy laying freshly dead and bleeding on the wood stack in the very shed that was right outside the house. The very shed that gave me the first chills. The very shed that gave me the warning. The very shed with odd dark stains on inside of the door. Stains of blood.

The next morning, after my grandfather perfectly described the wall from my dream, I tried to talk to my brother about the orb. He denied it all. He told me I'm crazy. He said that didn't happen. He said he didn't see anything, and neither did I. He said that the attic entrance was caved in and you couldn't get access to it. He said it had been like that for a century.

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So? Do you believe me? I know what I saw, heard, and dreamt, but it's up to you to make the final decision on what the reality is for you.

What do you think of this? It's my second horror short story. The first was for a class project in fifth grade. It was twenty pages with half of my story line cut out and it was based on this trip.

Give me your review, as this is my first thing posted.