Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25730391-20141112013748

Hi guys, this is my first attempt at a creepypasta, and my second attempt at a story. I threw it together a few months ago. I think there are a lot of things I could improve on, so any pointers you guys can give me would be welcome. Thanks. It's called "Late Night Television".

It’s Friday evening. Your parents are away for the weekend, and they left you in charge of looking after your little brother while they’re gone. At age seventeen, you’re more than capable of making sure a nine-year-old doesn’t get himself killed. Even though it’s a quarter until midnight, neither of you have hit the hay yet. At the moment, you’re in your room catching up on some homework and he’s downstairs watching TV in the living room.

Your bedroom is directly above the living room, so you can always hear the TV through your thin floors. Every action movie, every reality show, every infomercial comes in loud and clear to you. You’ve grown accustomed to working with the sound in the background. It hardly ever gets so clamorous as to be distracting. If it does, you just head down your house’s only set of steps and ask whoever’s down there to lower the volume. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, you just holler your request at the floor. They can usually hear you.

Although you’re focused on your work, you’re quite aware of what your brother’s watching. You think it’s a vintage crime drama or something. Right now you can hear one character, presumably a gang boss or something like that, bragging about how his group is going to thrash their rivals in an upcoming brawl.

“We’re gonna pound them til they look like a newspaper: Black, white, and read all over!” Your brother roars with laughter at that one. Only a kid with his level of maturity could somehow milk a chuckle out of that overplayed pun.

Another character says with a timid voice, “I ain’t sure if we should go through with this. Don’t really seem right to me.” More laughter.

“Are you questioning my plan?” the leader asks. You can tell he’s ticked.

At this point, you’re beginning to lose concentration on your work. You’re curious as to what this show or movie is about.

The other answers tentatively, “No, I just—” His words are cut short by what sounds like a scuffle. There’s a shout, and then a succession of whams like someone is being hit with a baseball bat. Your brother giggles again. You have no idea what’s supposed to be humorous.

Oddly enough, both the beating and the laughter continue for a little less than a minute, growing noisier by the second. The reluctant character—whoever’s being roughed up— keeps begging for mercy, but the one hurting him does not relent. The strikes just keep coming. He lets out one final plea, but is silent after you hear something snap, like a broken bone. A sickening crunch comes immediately after, accompanied by yet another bay of laughter. The leader speaks again. “Well, glad that’s out of the way. Great, now I’m all bloody.” That line gets your brother in stitches. Somehow, he doesn’t understand what just happened, because he thinks it’s funny.

You feel a little sick to your stomach. Your older sibling instincts kick in, and you realize your brother shouldn’t be watching some freaky murder flick so late. It’ll give him nightmares. Heck, if the thing is as brutal as it sounds, it’d probably keep you awake at night, too. Yelling at him to come up go to bed yields no response. Stubborn kid. You try again. No response. Perhaps he fell asleep on the couch. You decide to go downstairs and carry him up to his bed.

You push away from your desk. The noise from the television stops abruptly as you walk down the hall towards the staircase. Downstairs, it’s dark. The TV’s not on. Your brother’s not on the couch in front of it. You call out his name. No one answers. He’s not in any of the rooms on the first floor.

Suddenly alarmed, you sprint upstairs to his room and peek in. You find him snoring soundly next to his nightlight. He must’ve gone to sleep a while ago, since he definitely could not have snuck past you from downstairs undetected. In any case, you’re relieved that he’s all right, and that he wasn’t poisoning his mind with some horrific late-night televised drivel. Positively relieved, until you realize that there’s no way he could have been watching the television a few minutes ago.

You hear laughter behind you, that same laughter that supposedly came from the TV. And now it is much, much closer. 