Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5952769-20170125115538

Meredith isn't the same girl she used to be.

If you knew her before that fateful night, you would've described her as a confident, outgoing young lady. Or maybe a stuck-up rich girl. There are always differing viewpoints. But you'd definitely know her if you went to Dahlia West High School for any length of time. She had many friends, many enemies, and many admirers.

It was no surprise that she found a flirty message written on a page from a memo pad stuck to her locker one morning. As in most strange sequences of events, the first event was barely noteworthy.

"My friend told me to make sure you know you're cute.  Sit at the same table tomorrow and we'll have a nice view." A caret was wedged in between the words "table" and "tomorrow," interpolating the words "at lunch."

It was silly. Not just the part about taping an anonymous love letter to a girl's locker like some cartoon character, or the part about not bothering to rewrite it when words were left out, or even the part where the letter-writer wasn't the one with the crush. No, the silliest part was that Meredith always ate lunch at the same table (weather permitting).

There was a moderately-sized courtyard half-engulfed by the motley assortment of additions and annexes that surrounded the school building. It was poorly maintained, a much-detested junk sculpture stood in the center, and the vista wasn't exactly the stuff of landscape paintings. But, on a nice day, it had all the bright and uplifting qualities that the rest of the school lacked.

There were tables in the courtyard, and students could eat their lunches outside. But that luxury belonged only to the ones who got there at the very beginning of the lunch hour, and to those whose ownership of certain tables was universally understood. The students in Lunch Group B all knew that the table with the best view belonged to Meredith and her friends. The people responsible for the note must've been new, or not very observant, or just trying to call attention to where they sat at lunch.

Meredith didn't put too much thought into this trifling mystery. She just rolled her eyes, crumpled the note up, and threw it in the next wastebasket she passed. But it did affect her just a little bit.

That day at lunch, she made a point to sit out of sight of her secret admirer. Instead of her usual table in the courtyard, she ate lunch at one of the tables inside the cafeteria, far from the windows. Her friends followed suit. She wasn't missing much anyway. An ugly sculpture, some bushes that needed trimming, and the view of a boring town.

The next morning there was another letter. It was longer than the first one, and a little weirder. It annoying her a bit more.

"You didn't sit at the right table.  My friend was mad but he got over it.  I think he likes you." The final sentence was an afterthought, written in small letters squeezed into the bottom of the page and wrapping around the corner. "He can't write to girls so I have to."

Meredith asked the friends she chatted with that morning if they'd noticed who put the note there. None of them had. She brought the subject back up with her other friends at lunch. None of them knew, either.

That day she picked a seat near the north wall of the cafeteria, which was mostly glass. She found herself looking out at the courtyard, wondering from whom the messages came. The students were still afraid of offending Meredith and her friends by sitting at their table. As a result, there was a vacant table in the courtyard, an odd sight on such a nice day. It allowed her a decent view of the nearby tables.

One of them was occupied by freshman boys playing some odd-looking card game. Come to think of it, those same kids were often at that table. They were weird. She could absolutely believe one of them had a creepy crush on her and another was writing notes on his behalf.

Meredith had a lot going on in her life. She didn't spend much time ruminating on the two notes. Soon she would've forgotten all about them, if there hadn't been a third the next morning.

"My friend likes you for sure.  Watch out!"

Her annoyance was piqued. She turned the paper over, stuck it back to the locker, and wrote a message of her own.

"Who ever you are please die."

She tried to forget about her increasingly creepy admirer. She didn't say a word about him to her friends. She went about her business as if she'd never seen the notes. She ate lunch in the courtyard as if he wasn't watching.

Everything went normally during her school day and the hours of freedom that followed. But there was madness at midnight.

Meredith awoke to an unpleasant noise. Assuming it was nothing but work machinery in the neighborhood, she tried to get back to sleep. But the noise wouldn't let her. In a silent house in the middle of the night, a ticking clock can seem like a cacophony. And this was no mere ticking clock. What was worse was that the young woman had nothing to think about besides the noise. With no distractions, she was forced to contemplate what could be making it. It was the wrong time of night for a garbage truck, and the wrong time of year for a snow plow, and nothing else was coming to mind. She might have been able to suppress her curiosity and let her fatigue take over if the noise hadn't started getting closer.

The added volume and clarity revealed just how puzzling a noise it was. It was a scraping and creaking sound, like a violin in the hands of someone who had no business playing a violin. Other less regular sounds accompanied it. Clanking. Thumping. Creaking. Groaning.

Finally, it was too much for her. She tossed aside the covers, jumped out of bed, and stomped over to the window that faced the street.

By the time the curtains and blinds were out of her way, the sound had abruptly stopped. She couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. But half of her view was just of parts of the house. She needed a better vantage point.

With the return of silence, she could have just gone back to bed. But by this point she was too determined to find the cause of the noise. She now hoped that it, whatever it was, would stick around until she could see it.

She left her bedroom, turned on the hall light, and made her way toward the bay window in the living room. Her bare feet hopped a couple inches off the carpet when the shrieks of metal on metal suddenly resumed. She stopped just short of the living room, and turned to face the racket.

It was so very near, but out of sight. Right outside the south wall, it seemed. Except nothing should have been there. The only street that met the property was in the west, veering off northward. The neighbors' houses and garages were at odd angles, but none were to the south for hundreds of feet. Past the southern edge of the property there was nothing but a steep hill with a drainage area far below. The street and houses beyond that were so distant that it was hard to imagine anything happening there could come through loud and clear. The more she thought she gave it, the more disquietude she got back.

That might have been why she crept slowly and carefully through the hallway, nervously turning on lights and checking latches on windows and locks on doors as she went. Turning a corner, she came to where the noise seemed almost to be in the room with her. She peered through the glass sliding door that led to the pool. There wasn't much to see besides reflections from inside. At the moment, Meredith was more interested in the world outside than her own reflection, so she reached to turn off the closest light.

At that moment, every bulb in the household went dark, along with the glowing panel of the burglar alarm, while just as spontaneously the floodlights outside came on. There, on the patio, stood a familiar pile of junk.

A diverse collection of scrap metal sat atop six long pieces of rebar like a torso supported by three pairs of legs. The hindmost pair was the longest, and the upper parts were embellished with teardrop-shaped pieces of an aluminum canoe. The body was also furnished with a pair of wings (sheet metal). The head (a riding mower hood) sported a pair of eyes (colanders), antennae (handlebars), and mandibles (crescent wrenches). Taken all together, it was a cricket. With a spasmodic and unnatural motion, it lifted a leg and scraped it against a wing. Once more, the air was filled with hideous, rhythmic scraping sounds.

Meredith isn't the same girl she used to be. Not since the night the sculpture came to serenade her. 