Brick

:D Once, there was a 14 year old girl named Zoe.

She lived in an average sized house with her two parents and her pet fish. Nothing interesting; she was just your average girl. She went to school, she hung out with friends; all the normal things that a girl her age would usually do. But, her story… Her story is not average at all; not in the slightest.

She was a little bit of a geek, spending a lot of time on the computer playing video games and had a bit of a soft spot for scary stories and pictures that she could find on the internet. Yet she was never afraid of them, ever. She lived in your typical one-story house, and she had a bedroom which was on the other side of the house to her parents'.

Enough about Zoe; now for her story.

May 24th, 2008

It was about 10:30pm. She was getting a little tired, but she stayed up ‘till about 11:00pm to chat with friends on her iPhone until she drifted off to sleep after saying ‘goodnight’ to everyone.

She woke up at exactly 12:00am to an unfamiliar noise; a strange scratching sound coming from the roof above her. It sounded like somebody was scratching on the roof with a brick or tile. She sat up in bed to be able to listen to the sound without the muffling of her hair against her pillow.

She listened to it for 3 more minutes. The scraping was following a rhythm and it was therapeutic… hypnotic even.

She snapped out of it, got up and headed to her parents' bedroom to tell them about it. Now, according to most internet stereotypes, most people are quite scared of walking around their dark house at night while strange noises are heard, but as I said, she wasn’t scared of anything. She just strolled her way peacefully to her parents' room. When she got there and told them, they were obviously tired and a little mad that their daughter had woken them up at such an hour.

“Mum, Dad! There’s a weird noise coming from the roof! It’s kinda creepy…”

“Zoe, go back to bed," said her dad. "You have school tomorrow.”

“But… but… Mum! The noise is really weird.”

“It’s probably just a branch from that tree hanging over the house,” replied her mom.

“But it didn’t sound like a tree branch, besides, we don’t even have any trees hanging over our---“

Her parents gave her a stare.

“Just listen to us," said her dad. "Go to bed and let us sleep, or we’ll take away your phone.”

She stopped talking and headed back to her room. When she got back, the noise was still there. She looked at the clock; 12:08, so she hopped into bed and tried to sleep.

She just couldn’t get back to sleep with that noise still being emitted, so she lay there, waiting for the noise to stop.

After what seemed like hours later, the noise faded away, stopping at exactly 12:30pm. “What strange timing,” she had thought.

May 25th, 2008

It was again about 10:45pm. She was getting tired, but after last night, she decided that she would go to bed earlier so that she fell into a deeper sleep and might not be woken from the noise. This seemed logical to her, so she went to sleep. It had only felt like a moment that she was asleep for, but once again, she woke at 12:00pm exactly to a noise. This time, the noise was different and felt closer to her. It sounded like a tile or brick ripping through felt or some other material similar. She was sure that whatever was causing the noise was ripping through the insulation which was inside her roof. This night, she decided against going to tell her parents because of the cold welcome they gave her after waking them very late at night. She figured that she’d just tell them at the breakfast table the next day.

Same as the previous night, she waited until her clock flipped from 12:29pm to 12:30pm, at that moment, the noise faded away. “Scary accurate timing…” she thought before drifting off to sleep.

May 26th, 2008

At the breakfast table at approximately 7:07am, she told them about the strange noise she had heard again last night.

They simply shook it off like it was no big deal at all and told her, “We did have a rat problem up there last month, remember?”

This calmed her, slightly. By slightly, I mean not at all. She knew it wasn't rats. The scraping had a rhythm to it; no rat could keep that up for half an hour.

…

It was once again time for bed. She went to sleep even earlier than the previous nights, at 10:30. She was trying to prove that her theory of falling into a deeper sleep may help her block out the noise and enjoy a peaceful night of sleep.

Her theory was unproven at 12:00pm, as she woke up to the noise once again. By this time, she was actually getting quite aggravated; she just wanted a decent night of sleep. She listened in closer to it. It felt nearer to her than ever now, for it was scratching against the ceiling. She could hear the echoes of the noise reverberating around the walls of her room.

She knew it now; there was something that was after her, getting closer to her every night. For once in her life, she felt scared; scared that whatever was making the noise was going to do something terrible to her. If she were to know about what would happen the next night, she would be sleeping in her parents' bed by now.

She now had no desire of moving anywhere away from her bed until the noise had stopped and the night was over.

May 27th, 2008

She told her parents about the noise again at breakfast. They seemed a little concerned this time, as Zoe seemed quite unnerved and snappy, but of course, they ignored her complaints about the noise and told her to “Braven up.” That’s not even a word, but to her it basically meant; “Deal with it.”

At school that day, she came off as edgy and anxious to her friends. They thought nothing of it and thought that it was probably just because she didn’t get much sleep.

You’re damn right she wasn’t getting much sleep, and the sleep she did get wasn’t that relaxing either. She kept having terrible dreams of what might be up there, what might be after her.

They decided to throw her a bit of a surprise party to hopefully calm her nerves and put her in a happier mood. Two of her friends had a double class of food studies that day and asked the teacher if they could bake some cupcakes and bake a cake while her two other friends decided to sneak into the drama room and find what decorations they could there. Of course they would give back everything they ‘borrowed’. One of the girls spontaneously decided to wear a mask she found in the costumes box to the party and give her a friendly scare.

At lunch, her friends said they needed to finish an assignment in the library and that they were sorry for ditching her. Zoe thought that was reasonable and that she kinda wanted some alone time at lunch anyway. She said, “Sure, that’s fine.” And got out her lunchbox while her friends went to go and secretly decorate the room where they were holding the mini-party. She found a note in her lunchbox saying,

“Meet me after school in the multi-purpose room.”

This was a little weird. Nobody ever gave her a note to tell her to meet her somewhere; especially not anonymously.

Time drifted past and the final school bell rang for the day and she made her way to the party room. All the lights in the party room were off and so were the lights in the hallway that led to the room. Zoe was having paranoid thoughts of what might be in the room. “What if it was the thing making the noise?” she wondered.

She was getting closer to the entrance, and she could see that it was pitch black inside. This was really starting to creep her out when suddenly, out of nowhere, the lights turned on and a human figure with a scary, disfigured face jumped from behind the side of the door.

Zoe screamed and ran to the other side of the room and tripped over so she was sitting facing the thing that had just startled her.

“GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET ME YOU MISERABLE BASTARD!” she shouted at the thing.

Her friend took off the mask and said, “What the hell, Zoe? It’s me. It was just a mask, chill out and have some cake.”

Zoe still had a terrified facial expression and wasn’t saying anything.

She screamed, “I WON’T LET YOU GET ME!” before racing out of the hallway, grabbing her schoolbag which she had left at the entrance and running home. She didn’t stop running; she couldn’t stop running.

She got home and stayed in front of her computer, writing something in a Microsoft Word document which was recovered on the 6th of June which read;

They are after me. I know it, I saw it at school. It took my friends form and ripped its face off. I'm not gonna let it get me. It isn't gonna get me. I'm not crazy. I know it's true. Obviously, she was delusional by now. She stayed at her computer until 11:30 when her parents made her go to bed. She didn’t want to go; she didn’t want to be there that night. She didn’t want to meet the cause of the noise.

She got to her bedroom and looked up at the ceiling. There was a hole in it. It was about the same size and shape of a large-sized shoe. There was no way that this was her imagination now.

She showed her parents the hole, but they assumed that the hole was caused by Zoe and shouted “Zoe! How could you do this?! You really have to be more careful. We can fix it this weekend, but the repairs will come out of your pocket money!”

“What? But I didn't do this! It was the thing that's making the noise!” she retaliated.

“Zoe, we have no idea what you mean about these noises. We haven’t heard anything. Now go to bed and stop talking back to us," said her mother calmly.

She was withholding a massive amount of emotion. She had been locked in her room by her parents as a form of punishment and she was extremely angry yet terribly afraid of the hole in her ceiling. She didn’t know what to do. She felt like punching a way through her wall but she just couldn’t, so she just hopped onto her bed and cried deeply for about 10 minutes, then quickly got over her anger. Now she was incredibly scared of what was going to happen to her that night. She couldn’t do anything but lie in her bed, as still as a rock. She was trapped.

She felt quite tired after sobbing for a while, but it was already 11:40pm so she saw no reason to go to sleep for 20 minutes and be woken up again.

She was lying there for what felt like hours until she looked at the clock, 11:59pm. This was it. Whatever this bastard that had been causing so much discord to Zoe was going to get what it wanted.

She was staring at the hole, when suddenly, a bright white eye was visible from it. The eye was dripping with blood and it was directly above Zoe’s face. Drip. Drip. Drip. The blood was leaking from its eye. And the eye, it was astounding. It was the size of a drinking glass, with the white fleshy part of the eye surrounding a bright, soul-piercing red iris, which was in turn surrounding a deep black pupil. The pupil looked as you could fall right into its deep darkness and drown.

Zoe was panicking, but she had no other option other than to stay where she lay. She couldn’t escape out of her door and she felt as if moving may provoke the… thing to do something terrible.

The eye didn’t stop leaking blood until the beast decided to break a larger hole in the ceiling with a brick that seemed to be attached to his hand and wiped his eye. This gave her a view of both of the beast’s eyes and its arm, which was dangling from the side of the hole.

“What…” it said.

Zoe had a look of complete and utter terror plastered on her face. She had no idea it could talk.

“What did you think telling people about me would solve?” it asked her.

“I…” She couldn’t speak.

In that moment, the beast tore an even larger hole in her ceiling, big enough for it to fit through and jumped onto Zoe’s bed, revealing its terrifying stature. It was skinny, long and completely black apart from the two eyes on its head and the bricks attached to the ends of its arms.

Zoe tried to scream but it was hopeless. There was nothing she could do now that would change her fate.

The beast plunged the brick-appendages into her chest, tearing out every organ in sight. Zoe couldn’t make a sound, just weird gurgling noises as she coughed up blood. The beast tore out her heart, and at that moment, her body fell, lifeless.

The beast stopped after that. He had caused enough damage to the young girl, but he wasn’t finished in that room.

He threw the corpse onto the ground and scooped some blood out of the pool he had dug out of her lungs, and with the blood, he started to half-carve, half-write something into her ceiling.

May 28th, 2008

Her parents got up early to unlock her bedroom door and couldn’t believe their eyes.

Their daughter, body and organs mangled, was lying on the floor with a mouth filled with blood. Blood dropped on her left cheek and a large dent in her chest, also filled with blood.

Her mother fell to the ground in tears. Her father looked up at her ceiling and read;

You should’ve listened to her…

The end.

---

Credited to Ren