Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26444401-20151126034745

Growing up, I spent a lot of my summers in a small town in Utah. It was a farming community where one was more likely to see a tractor than a car on the road. There was one stop light in the entire town. My grandfather had retired from being a live stock farmer and became a crop farmer. I loved visiting the family farm, even after this incident. During this time, I was friends with a girl, let’s call her Lily.



Her summers consisted of her being alone, either actually or emotionally. Sometimes her mother and father and sister would go to Vegas weeks at time or her mother and sister would go to the spa leaving Lily to fend off her angry drunk of a father by herself. But she always came along on these summer trips. My grandfather’s house was down a dirt road.



No neighbors for miles. If you drove a few miles past his house, there was an abandoned school bus that someone was very obviously living in. Probably someone homeless by the looks of the abandoned bus. The nearest big town, St. George, was forty-two miles away, so when my parents and grandparents told us they were going there for dinner, Lily and I were stoked!



Dinner would take at least two hours and then driving there and driving back. We had the house to ourselves for two plus hours! Being left alone, we decided to watch a horror film (which we were allowed to watch) and pull out the yearbook I had brought along and we’d gossip about boys (which I was not allowed to do by my dad. Long story).



About a half an hour to our being alone, we hear what sounds like a bus pull up. Question is, why on Earth would a Gray Hound stop here? There wasn’t a single bus depot for at least 42 miles! Lily peeked from the window and saw it was the abandoned school bus. We both heard someone come onto the porch. The door bell rang and Lily fell back from the window.



“What did you see?” I asked, probably a bit too excited.



Lily only looked at me, terror filled up her eyes as she took off downstairs. My grandfather’s downstairs was built into a side of a hill. From the front of the house you see only one floor. From the back, you see both floors. “Anyone home? I’m not the big bad wolf, I won’t huff and puff and blow your house down.”



Even if he was harmless, what an odd thing to say to a house where you don’t even know if people are home or not. “Come out please? I just want to say hello.” That was even more odd! “Just unlock the door.”



<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">I didn’t. He grabbed the door knob and started to try and open the door. I really wish Lily would come back upstairs! But I grabbed my phone to call 911. “Come on out, little girl!”

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">Had he seen Lily when she looked out the window? I heard the man leave the porch and sighed a big sigh of relief. I headed downstairs to get Lily when I got a text message from her. “He saw me!” Through the window? Kinda figured that. I went to the bedroom me and her were staying in. Only my plush stuffed animal of Ebola occupied the room. I checked the room my parents were staying in and I screamed.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">My grandfather obviously wanted natural light downstairs, so he dug holes and reinforced the holes with plastic, so sun could be filtered to the underground windows. In the window, in the hole was Lily’s broken body. Was he in the house? Why would she have opened the window? I had closed the door behind me when I heard a knocking on the door.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">“Let me in?”

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">Needless to say, I escaped through the window, up the plastic and ran miles and miles to the nearest neighbor. I haven’t been back sense. I have no idea who lived in the bus or why he targeted my grandfather’s house. <ac_metadata title="The Man at the Door"> </ac_metadata>