Book of Horror Stories

Skulls

Before we get to the heart of the matter I should probably tell you a little bit about myself. I am the oldest son of a large family and I had spent my entire life in the same town in the North East United States. Forgive me for being evasive, but I have to be rather discreet about certain locations that feature in my story. I have also changed the names of the people involved so as to protect the innocent and avoid libel suits from the families of the not-so-innocent. We lived in a very small house on the edge of a forest and across the street from an abandoned rock quarry. I was also very active in the Boy Scouts. The isolation of my home and the various strange places my Boy Scout troop traveled, resulted in more than one unsettling run-in with dangerous animals, whether they walked on four legs or two, so over the years I had developed a bit of a Danger Sense. Whenever I detected that something about a situation was a little bit off, all of the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck would spring to attention. Most of the time this Danger Sense was a false alarm, I soon came to hate deer, but every once in a while it gave me good advice and kept me from blundering into bears, rabid coyotes, pot farmers, and what I suspect to have been a serial killer. There were also a few stranger incidents but those are best left for another time. In short, I learned to be grateful for my subconscious. As I got to the end of my high school career I became eager to get out of the house and go to college. I loved my family dearly, but I was more than ready to be known as an individual rather than as a small part of a collective. I was also very socially awkward, particularly when it came to girls. I was looking forward to the blank slate that going away to college would provide.

As my senior year drew to a close I came across the campus that features into my story. Once again I am going to have to fudge the geography a bit, so I will limit myself to saying that it was a relatively small school somewhere in Ohio. From the moment I set foot on campus, the cheerfulness of the students infected me like nothing else had in a long time. The other students enthusiasm for life in general was the main reason that I chose to go here rather than to a more inexpensive state school. I know some would say it was a waste of money to pick which college to attend on such details, but I still hold that there is more to attending college than academics. I decided to be an English major and off I went. My number of friends multiplied unbelievably fast it those first few weeks, and the three that became my best friends were Nick, Topher, and Robin. Robin was very emotional and was all heart with very little head. Nick and Topher were more logical, like me, although with Topher this made him rather eccentric and not that good with relating to other people. He was more happy blowing up stuff in the woods and hunting deer than talking to people. Nick was also an English major, and we spent many nights staying up late discussing The Lord of the Rings or classical mythology. During those first few weeks, I also met Emily. She was, in my opinion, the most beautiful young woman God had put on this Earth. She had eyes as blue as the sky on a cloudless day, and her light brown, wavy hair brought back fond memories of the forests in early spring finally coming to life again after a long winter. Her smile could light up the room and her laugh was better than sunshine after a rainstorm. Not only was she beautiful, she was also one of the smartest and kindest people that I have ever known. Our philosophical discussions inside and outside the classroom usually left me with my head spinning, and yet she displayed an optimistic view about human nature that made it impossible for anyone to be pessimistic around her. I also had less of a problem with my social awkwardness around her. I may have had a hard time talking to girls, but Emily talked more than enough for the both of us. I wish I could say that I immediately swept her off her feet and we eloped the following summer, but that was sadly not the case. I was still awkward around women, and for the longest time, I had to settle for the position of being just a friend. But I digress, you all came to this pasta looking for a scary story and it is high time that I started to deliver.

As I mentioned, the students on our campus were perpetually cheerful. As time went on my fellow freshmen and I began to hear stories that suggested there was a karmic price for this happiness. Most of the time, when the sun was shining, life was good. But once the warm days of late summer went away, and the shadows began to grow longer and take on sinister appearances, we began to see a different side of campus. There were stories. At the time I was pretty sure that the stories were just attempts by the upperclassmen to scare the gullible freshmen, but during my years living on campus, I have seen enough weird stuff to begin to wonder. There were the shadow-men who walked the hallways of the dorms on stormy nights and stood at the foot of students beds. There were the mysterious crying sounds of a baby in the student center in the dead of night. There was the wolf-creature that sometimes roamed the classroom buildings and was reputed to have chased one of our campus security guards through the stacks in the library before vanishing into thin air. Finally, there were the skulls.