Hauntingly Lovely

Chapter 1

Charlie's P.O.V.

I wake up to another autumn day in what most people would probably think is paradise. I would love to trade those people my life for theirs, but I can't. Most people would think that being a prince living in a castle would be awesome but as that prince living in that castle I can tell you that its not, its just boring. I do the same thing nearly every day, there are strict rules in place for me, I don't get choices in my life. I can't hangout with other people my age either because they all know who I am and let me win any sport or game they're playing. The only person I have to hangout with is a princess named Alice who is destined to be my future wife, though neither of us want this to happen. I get up and look at the calendar hanging on my wall. The date is October 30th, Halloween is tomorrow and it's the one night a year that nobody knows me, it's the one night a year that I can be a normal teenager. I get dressed in the only clothes I have, fancy prince clothes, and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I look in the mirror at my reflection and the prince in the mirror stares back at me with deep blue eyes and messy black hair that swoops to one side. I decide not to brush it and go back to my room while I wait for the special tutor to come get me to start my daily lessons.
When my lessons are finally over its about 2:30 so I decide to go hangout with Alice until dinner time comes around. she's a good friend being that she's my only friend and she doesn't like the strict rules much either, she never liked wearing dresses and having long perfectly brushed hair or doing princess things. We go to the basket ball court and she wears a faded old baseball cap that she shoves her hair into, she got it at a park nearby where it was lying on the ground. We play basketball for a while, I'm shorter than her so I'm not so good at it but she's also wearing a dress so she can't run perfectly either. She ends up winning as always, and then we decide to go shopping for costumes, we aren't supposed to go out on Halloween because "people might not recognize you" is our parents words but we sneak out anyway because that's the whole point. We always go shopping for costumes the day before because our parents always throw out our costumes as soon as they find them, which is usually the day after. We end up looking around for a while and I decide to get a vampire costume with red contacts and Alice gets a mummy outfit and we go upfront to check out. Of course we get the usual bow and "your highnesses" as we pay. We start walking back to my castle since mine is closer than hers and we decide to take a shortcut through a bike trail in the woods, suddenly a cat leaps out of a low hanging branch in a tree just above us and lands right in front of us. It watches us as we approach.
"Hey there buddy." I say, reaching down to pet it.
"Are you sure you should be petting that thing? What if it's got some disease or something?" Alice asks.
"Its probably fine" I reassure her, "it isn't even wild, it's got a collar on it." It did have a collar on but there wasn't a tag attached to it. It looked at her and back to me like it was trying to figure out what we were saying or something, then it looked at the bag in my hand and quickly turned around, starting to walk away before looking back at us expectantly.
"Maybe we should follow him?" Alice asks.
"Really? Three seconds ago you thought he had rabies and now you want to follow him." I replied mockingly.
"Like you said it's got a collar, plus we've got nothing better to do." She says.
She's right, there's still an hour til dinner at 6:00 so I give in. As we start following the cat it veers off the path and into the woods and as we follow we eventually come out of the woods to a suburb and we walk down the road with the cat just ahead of us. Eventually we get to the end of the road to a house that's much bigger than all the others on that street although not nearly as big as the castle I live in on the outside, though I don't get to see many of the rooms in my castle so I'm sure if I explored this whole place it would seem bigger inside than my home. The place looks abandoned but when the cat stops and jumps onto the gate we see a poster taped to the corner of the gate, it reads: "Halloween Party! October 31st Starting At Sundown! Come One Come All And Be Anyone But Yourself!"
"Good kitty." Alice says as she reads it.
I don't think we're trick or treating this year.