Short horror stories

Story 17. This is why you should never let anyone know where your spare key is

I was seventeen, still living in my parents' house. Everyone was away on a Friday night so I had a few friends over. We smoked a little, and were chilling in the basement playing video games. Two of my friends ran upstairs to get some snacks out of the pantry. After a few seconds they came running down the steps yelling my name. They say somebody just pulled into my driveway. I hear the dog start freaking out. I panic, thinking my parents are home, and I scramble to hide the weed and pipe we had sitting next to the back door.

I walked up the steps and looked out the window. There was no car in the driveway but my dog was still freaking out. I went outside to see if anyone was out there. It was late, almost midnight, and cold. I was barefoot and poorly dressed. I walked around my house, shivering and nervous, and found nothing. I went back inside, took my dog down to the basement with me and tried to relax.

Maybe twenty minutes later, we hear a huge crashing sound. It sounded like something had exploded right in front of the house. We ran outside through the back door and saw a car wrapped around a tree right by the road in my neighbor's front yard. My dog starts freaking out again. It was my brother's car. My brother had gone with my parents to my aunt's and left his car in the garage. I ran to look inside and there was nobody in it.

I immediately called my brother, freaking out. When he answered the phone I was both relieved and confused. He instructed me to call the police. He came home. The police came and looked around. They took statements from everybody (we hid the fact that we were high pretty well). As the tow truck was pulling my brother's care out of the front yard, the police received a call about a break in down the street. They left an officer with us and the rest left to respond to the call.

It turns out that a group of people were going through my neighborhood, breaking into houses and stealing cars out of garages. I was in the house when the burglar stole my brother's car. I may have even walked right past him at one point. When they caught the group, one of the guys was injured as if he had been in a car wreck. He was the one who had broken into my house. I knew him. He had graduated from my high-school when I was a freshmen. He had house-sat for us. He knew where we kept the spare keys, he knew that if one of us was home that the doors would be unlocked and he waited until it was just me, alone in the house.

It wasn't paranormal, but it still creeps me out to this day that the guy had waited for myself, or any of my other family members, to be alone in the house and had broken in. It scares me that I was so completely unaware of my surroundings back then that I would have let that guy get the drop on me if he had hostile intentions. It makes me sick that somebody we had trusted to stay in our house while we were gone would come back a couple years later and do something like that.