Short Scary Stories

Love M

When I was in high school, one of my friends was into playing with ouija boards. She was living with her grandparents because of her family situation, and I was living alone because of mine. I really liked going over to her house, because I was very lonely a lot of the time, and her grandmother always had a full pantry. My friend and I used to hang out in her room for hours, trying to contact dead celebrities. And the board worked. The planchette moved, we had conversations with whoever (although never Marilyn Monroe as we both hoped secretly would happen) 

We did talk to someone who's name started with M- actually that was the only name they ever gave. The planchette would start to move in a really fast aggressive triangle when M showed up, and M was bad news. M's defining feature was that s/he did not like me . At all. M would always spell out terrible things about me, about his and when I die, that kind of thing. I know, the ouija is subconscious, (or not-so subconscious) movement right? But it seemed very... purposefully an real, somehow. Even if we invited other people over to play, M would always show up. It was creepy. Eventually we moved onto some other pasttime, and I stopped thinking about it. 

A few months into our senior year,  my freind and I had a falling and we stopped speaking. I didn't have a lot of other friends at the time. Hard to believe that a manic-depressive poetry nerd with an ouija enemy wasn't very popular, but it's true. After school I used to go back to my little apartment where I lived alone and listen to music and read and tried to get the one channel I could get on my ancient tv. 

I was bored. I wanted someone to talk to. Guess where this is going. I made myself a makeshift ouija board all by myself. And it worked. Or I made it work. Or whatever. Eventually M showed up again with triangles and nasty words with messages of doom. Even though I was pretty sure M was  some kind of creation of my self-hating subconscious. I decided not to play anymore. Things started to get a bit weird. First it was the dishes clattering in the kitchen. Not constant, just occasionally. The first few times, I went to go check it out, but I didn't see anything. After a while I stopped getting up to look, but the noises kept happening. I started to get uncomfortable in the apartment. Have you ever had a bad feeling about a place? Like serious bad vibes? I felt like that in my own apartment, particularly in the bathroom. But I told myself I was just being silly, lonely, and over imaginative. 

One night I was doing some drawing in my sketchbook.  I did some paintings too, because I was painting some props for a play that I was the crew for at school, and I was waiting for them to dry. I went to bed with everything laid out to dry on the living room floor. The next morning, when I woke up, I went out into the living room. I didn't have my glasses on,so everything was blurry. I saw the finished paintings and props and I thought, "Oh good those are dry." And I was about to go get dressed when I noticed something else on the floor.

It looked like another painting. I went closer. It was a page torn out of my sketchbook, and turned over so the image was on the back. It was a message. It looked like it had been written by a finger dipped in red paint. And all it said was DIE in bold letters. In the bottom right hand corner was the letter M. And the paper... The paper was scorched. Burnt around the edges, with three big brown singes in the middle of the page. That was the worst part. Because for a second I thought, "well maybe I was sleepwalking and legibly wrote a message to myself on this piece of paper and cleaned everything up when I was done." But he scorching made it REAL. 

I stood there, feeling like someone had dropped a cold stone down in to my stomach for quite a while, holding this terrible thing. My choices were really that I had done it, and couldn't remember, that someone else had broken in and done this very specific thing and left without me hearing anything, or that no one had done it. All of the choices were too unsettling. That's when I decided to get out of my apartment. But I brought the paper with me, because I wanted to tell someone about it, and I knew that no one would believe me without that proof. I went to school, but I didnt go to class. I told a couple of friends about this and they agreed that the message should be destroyed, so we toot it out in the field behind the school and burned it. I hung out at the core shop as long as I could after school, so I wouldn't have to go home. But of course I eventually had to.

There was something that looked like purple lipstick on the wall next to the door in my apartment. When I got closer, I could see it was an M. I left the apartment a couple of weeks later. I haven't heard from M since. It's been 20 years and my apartment building burned down.