I'm super duper proud of myself. I have been named the runner-up in a short story competition. Yes okay, it's a super minor competition run in the newsletter for our parish council (yes, I live in one of those kind of places) - but I saw the ad over Christmas and thought why not?
I've inserted the advert below and very badly cropped out the information that tells you where I live...
I listen to enough true crime podcasts and watch enough horror films that I thought I could give it a go, and I was satisfied that there was a category I fitted in. So I just wrote the first short narrative that came into my head. Unfortunately, it was far too long, so I cut out the proceeding events, and left it with the very first ghostly encounter.
I reread it a couple of times, edited it a little bit to make it fit more into the subject of "a winter ghost story", read it to my parents and submitted it.
When I hadn't heard anything back by the beginning of March, I figured I either had lost or the competition had been cancelled due to lack of entries.
However, the doorbell rang this morning and I was in for a pleasant surprise! A member of the Parish Council dropped off an envelope and some kind words about my story. She told me the council was really impressed with my story and it will be published in the next council newsletter along with the winning story.
I decided that if I did win, I would publish my story on my blog, so since I am a runner up and my story will be published in the newsletter, I will publish my story here. So here goes, my little story of something sinister:
Something Sinister by Amy Harrison-Smith
A single drop of sweat rolled down her back. She suddenly became aware of how tense her whole body was. It was nothing, she thought to herself, trying to convince herself the noise she heard was in her head, or the house settling, or maybe the neighbour’s cat. She tried not to think about the fact that she had woken up at exactly 3:23 every morning this week. She tried not to think about the feeling someone was in her room watching her. It was just a feeling.
She had got out of bed thinking it was better than just sitting there trying not to think all these things, but she was still apprehensive about leaving the room. It was the middle of January, and the temperature outside was below freezing, but that did not explain why there were some very cold spots in her house that were so much colder than the rest of the house, no matter how high she set the thermostat.
She tried to relax her body – tried mindful breathing like that wellbeing app had taught her, tried relaxing her shoulders which felt like they were hunched up under her ears, tried visualising daylight thinking about how silly this would all feel in the morning.
None of it was working. She pulled out her laptop, which she’d propped up against the nightstand, sat on her bed and picked her favourite comedy show. Thank goodness for Netflix, she thought. Four episodes in, she’d forgotten all about the weird feeling and the noise she thought she heard. In fact, she had slipped off into a deep sleep sometime after the second episode started. What she didn’t see, was her laptop switching itself off, being closed as though an invisible person was putting it away, tucking it back where she’d pulled it out from.
In the morning, she figured she must have woken up and put it away herself – it never occurred to her that there was something else at play. Why would it? Even if she had seen it happen, would she really have believed what she had seen?