Horror Stories (Not For the Faint of Heart)

"Tell us a story," one of the little kids sitting with his legs crossed said. "We want to hear a story."

Jennifer smiled at the group of children seated in front of her. She was in the library's children section, entertaining the kids before their parents came to pick them up. She had already lead the group through their coloring activity, but most of the them complained that it was too boring, and that they wanted something more stimulating.

Stimulating. That was a word Jennifer would never have believed would come out of a seven-year-old's mouth. Now, faced with the task of telling these young ones a story that would captivate their attentions, at least until their parents came, Jennifer tried to think of all the stories she had heard as a little girl.

"Once upon a time," she began, "there were three little pigs—"

"Two of whom got eaten by the big bad wolf?" A girl in a polka-dotted dress asked. "We've heard that story so many times, it makes me sick. It makes no sense anyway."

"Yeah, tell us something new. Something interesting."

Jennifer stared helplessly at the children. When she had first taken up the job, she had thought she would be dealing with a group of angels, ones who would attentively listen to everything she said and find everything fascinating. Not jaded little boys and girls such as these.

"You want something interesting?" Jennifer's friend, Cynthia, asked. She had been wandering through the library aisles aimlessly when she spotted Jennifer and her dilemma. "I'll tell you an interesting story, if you'll listen."

Jennifer whispered to her friend, "Maybe that's not such a good idea." The head librarian did not like Cynthia, especially around the little kids. He thought she was a "corrupting force," not to be placed "constantly around young minds."

"Oh, don't worry," Cynthia said. "So, do you want to hear it or not?"

"Make it good," the cross-legged boy said.

"Okay, but if anything happens afterwards, you're the wimp, and you're not to come running to me whatsoever, because I won't give a damn about you."

"Deal."

Cynthia sat down on the edge of the carpet and began, "You know the sound, that rustling sound of leaves and wind, in your backyard in the middle of the night? Well, one out of several hundred times, that's a wannabe-serial killer right there."

"Yeah right," one of the boys said. "Stop trying to scare us. We're not stupid."

"I'm not trying to scare you. Just laying out the setting so we can be clear with each other. Now, you think that it's nothing, and you're right, most of the time. I mean, you've got nearly an 100% chance that it's nothing, it was just the leaves and wind and whatnot. But that one time out of several hundred, I don't know, four hundred? Well, someone is really there, and they're undecided between whether to just call it a day and go home and sleep and cry in the morning that they're a coward, or to be brave, make those hundred yards or so, and break open your door or shoot at your shadow."

Another boy rolled his eyes. "This is boring."

"Marie-Anne thought that too when I told her."

The room suddenly filled with hushed voices. Everyone had heard of Marie-Anne, the eight-year-old girl two towns away who had disappeared a year ago. They never did find her body, and rumor had it that her ghost still hung out at the library, her favorite place when she was still around.

"You're lying," one of the girls finally said. "You're making that up to scare us."

"You really think that?" Cynthia narrowed her eyes. "Very well, whatever floats your boat. I will continue to assert that I've told her the statistics, even if you don't believe me, and she did not believe me either. So I told her, 'Even if you don't believe me, it won't hurt to stay away from the late-night noises.' She nodded, said, 'Okay, okay.' And I left it at that."

"That it? That's a boring story."

"Don't we all wish that was it? Marie-Anne came to me a year later, said she heard some noise in her backyard every night, and she remembered what I had said, and she wanted to know how those wanna-be serial killers decided whether they will become legitimate serial killers.

"Every one of them's different, I told her. Every one of them. Besides, they're all legitimate, they just kill different things. Some of them kill physical things, some of them don't."

"What do you mean?" The polka-dot dress girl asked.

"What I meant was, I had been confronted by a lot of little kids before, in other towns, all 'cross the country, and they've asked me what serial killers are, why they would want to kill someone innocent. And I've asked myself these questions a lot, and I've finally concluded that there isn't one definite reason. They all kill for different reasons.

"I told Marie-Anne that, and she asked me if her serial killer will kill her. I looked her into the eyes and I saw her fear, and I knew right there that yes, the serial killer, if there was any out there, would come after her. They could smell fear from a hundred yards away. But I lied to her face. I told her she was safe, because what could you do in such a situation? She'd be petrified, and she'd tell her parents, but then they'd say that I was just planting fear in her mind, and they would dismiss it as trivial until it was too late.

"She went home that night, happy, feeling safe, and the next day she wasn't there anymore. Gone. No one ever found any trace of her, anywhere. Huge procession. But you remember that, don't you?"

"You're telling me," the cross-legged boy said, "that a serial killer killed her? Why not any other kidnapper?"

"Some things you won't understand until you've seen things," Cynthia said. "The moral of the story is, don't ever show your fear, but don't go about doing reckless things either, because you never know."

The children were shaken, but not too frightened; not as a group, anyway. They found the story disturbing, because it was about someone they knew rather well, if not completely, but there was nothing that made it too real. It still held onto the mysterious aura of a fictional story. Jennifer excused herself and found another librarian to keep an eye on the children while she caught up with Cynthia, who had left once she finished her story.

"Cyn," Jennifer said. "That was—that was quite—did you find anyone?"

"Yeah, I did," Cynthia said. "That boy, sitting cross-legged. He's scared. I can tell."

"Are you going to try tonight?"

"Oh, yes. He's not going to tell anyone. They'll call him a scaredy-cat, even though they would all be scared themselves. He won't tell anyone until it's much, much too late."


*I don't mean to offend anyone or to overgeneralize or in any other way make anyone feel too uncomfortable with this story. I just felt that it needed to be told.


**I should also be doing homework, or talking about more interesting things, such as my calc test today, but it was fine, I'll talk about it a lot in class tomorrow (and maybe on here), and honestly, I'm just rather bored. So there.