Spooky Short Stories Collection

The Snatcher

She stood in the dark, ominous doorway. Silent. Staring. Her expression, impassive. Hair swaying slightly at her shoulders. Inky black eyes like death itself, ready to engulf me if I stepped too close. Her dark blue dress hung at her knees, a black bow tied around her waist. As I looked to the floor, I realised her shadow was streaked across the worn and faded carpet. Empty and sinister-looking. I leapt back, breathing in a sharp intake of breath, as if her shadow would grab me and drag me to no-where. As I moved my eyes back to stare at her, I saw a slight twitch at the edge of her mouth. A smile. As if she enjoyed watching my fear grow and savoured the feeling of taunting me with the idea of death.

I wanted to pull my eyes away from her, leave and never return. But I couldn't. It was like she was holding me there. Like she was puppeteering me, with strings tied around my wrists and ankles, forced to dance for her entertainment. She was a black hole, pulling me closer, stronger as I crossed the event horizon. There was no escape.

She began to glitch. Flickering in and out of existence. Shaking and shifting. Then it happened. She appeared inches from my face, a wide grin on her lips, stretching beyond the boundaries of her cheeks. Her eyes glowed, piercing. Her whole body shook feverishly, as if in a seizure.

Suddenly, a cold sensation exploded in my chest, spreading through my body and making me freeze. She took a step back from me and my breath weakened. As she lifted her hand, I saw what looked like a ball held tightly in her grasp. Then I realised that it wasn't a ball. It was a heart. My heart. It was pulsating and blood dripped onto the floor. As my vision began to fade, she crushed it. That's when everything stopped and I knew it was over.

But not before I saw her rush towards me one last time. At the moment she should have hit me, she vanished, leaving a small cloud of smoke in her place. All of a sudden my arms and legs were moving. But I wasn't in control of them. I moved awkwardly over to an oval mirror that hung on the wall. My hand rose, clenched into a fist and smashed into it, shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. I was forced to stare at the dozen copies of my face in the jagged shards that remained in the frame. But something was different. Something familiar and yet so disturbing. Those piercing eyes. And that wide grin…