User blog comment:HumboldtLycanthrope/The 666 word pasta write off!/@comment-26475800-20160408162135

Okay, so here is my thirty minute version of a story. I haven't really submitted anything on this site for a while so I figured I'll give this exercise a shot. I didn't do any editing on this, so please excuse any rough spots. I just have too much stuff going on to really devote a lot of time to a story that I don't really plan on publishing. It's titled:

Bryan Spends a Night in the Flemmington Barn.

When Bryan walked into the house he had a feeling something wasn’t right. An ominous feeling was thick in the air, almost as thick as the dust. But if he didn’t finish the dare his friends gave him, he would be ridiculed for the rest of his high school life. It was easy in theory, spend the night in the old Flemmington barn.

The Flemmingtons were known for their strange practices they used to slaughter their cattle. Most people would do so in a slaughterhouse, or send it off to someone to do it. But they would use their barn. The same barn in which they kept their food, tools and even their youngest son.

This son, William, was said to be terribly disfigured. His head was large and lumpy, his arms were disproportionately large, and he was said to be covered in course black hair. There were only a few of the elderly people in the town who have ever claimed to see this strange boy, but they all their stories coalesced.

After years some of the stories had become a little more gruesome. William would eat the raw meat of the cattle and drink the spilt blood. Later he was said to have killed and eaten his own family, who did mysteriously vanished in the summer of ’68. The police were sent to the farm to see what had happened to the family, but they found nothing more than some blood stains and a few teeth.

It became a dare, almost a hazing, to spend the night in the barn. Over the years some people had vanished just like the Flemmingtons, or at least that was the rumors. Bryan consoled himself by thinking of how unlikely it would have been for people to go missing and not have it become headline news.

Bryan had been there for the four hours, and he hadn’t seen anything unusual. There had been a few creeks in the loft he couldn’t explain, but he brushed it off as an old building settling, or collapsing. Of all the things he was afraid of, the structure collapsing on him was paramount.

He thought the night was going to be uneventful, which didn’t really bother him. But just as he was dozing off, he heard something that sounded like whispering. At first, he tried to explain it way as the wind, but as time went on he heard distinct words.

“I’ll get him,” the whispers said intermittently. “I need some food.” Among other things.

Bryan sat up and looked around. There weren’t many places for someone to hide in the barn, but for his own safety, Bryan decided he wouldn’t go in the loft. He could see how rotten the wood was, some places didn’t even have many floorboards left, so he didn’t want to risk getting hurt by himself. That didn’t mean he was quite as comfortable to get so close to sleep again.

He sat upright, listening to the wind outside, broken by the garbled whispers that seemed to be coming from every section of the barn. It wasn’t until two in the morning when the owner of the voice became more aggressive. A shadow started to move, a large shadow, much larger than Bryan’s. It was coming from the loft, he could tell that much from how it was projected, but he couldn’t see anything when he looked.

The whisper had become a full voice now, and it was telling Bryan how it would filet him, and eat each piece once he cut if from the boy’s body. Bryan got to his feet and walked to the door, his eyes darting around in the gloom. It was then that he saw a misshapen silhouette clambering down from the loft.

Its movement was awkward and clumsy, but Bryan was able to make out the shape of a large knife. Bryan started to run, and he could hear the heavy foot falls behind him, as he ran into the night.