Chatting

It was a regular Friday night and I was up late chatting to my friend Bradley on this virtual chat room we had found online. He told me and the other guys who we had just met, that he was able to stay up as late as he wanted, because his parents were away until the weekend and he had the house to himself. We stayed on there for a few hours having fun with these random people, and I noticed Bradley had taken a liking to one girl in particular. Soon enough, my mum began calling out for me to go to sleep. As I was about to log off, I asked Bradley what he was doing tomorrow, thinking he might want to stop by my place. He didn’t reply for a while, until:

“Bradley is typing a message.”

Then it went blank.

“Bradley is typing a message.”

Nothing again.

“Whatever man, I’m going to bed we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” I said. It was strange for him to just stop replying like that.

I didn’t hear from him again until the next day when I logged on to the chat site and he was on. He apologised for not replying last night and said he had just been busy. We had a brief exchange, and he said he would come over soon, saying it was urgent. That was fine, but queried him why he didn’t want to wait to see his parents first, who would be home any minute. He insisted there was no time because he had something really important to show me, and then logged straight off. I thought that was out of character for him, as he usually put his family before anything, and I grew curious at what he wanted to show me so badly.

I expected him to be over soon, as he only lived about twenty minutes away, when I received a disturbing phone call. It was Bradley’s parents, who had just come home and were sounding extremely worried. They asked if I knew anything on Bradley’s whereabouts, to which I told them not to worry, because he was in fact on his way over. The phone fell silent for a moment until I heard a deathly scream from the mother in the background on the other end of the line. The father drew a deep breath, and bravely strung together a sentence that I’ll never forget. “Get out of the house now. Bradley’s here… He’s dead.” They had found Bradley’s lifeless body hung up like a coat in the wardrobe. I ended the call in shock, as it became apparent why he had asked if I would be home alone, when suddenly I heard the back door creak open.

Instinctively, I did the first thing I could think of and quickly crawled under my bed to hide. I heard the sound of footsteps coming closer, ever so slowly. I dared not to open my eyes, but when I dreadfully peaked through my fingers, I saw these pale white, cold, bare feet coming in to my room, almost in slow motion. I would hate to see the person such feet belonged to. As they slowly approached the bed, you could hear the dampness of the footsteps peeling away from the floorboards; my heart was pounding in my mouth and I held my breath. Just when I couldn’t possibly get any more scared, my phone let off a loud beep to notify me that I had received a message. It was from Bradley’s phone and read: “Where are you?” as the feet stopped abruptly, dead in their tracks…