**Sometimes my dreams deliver awesome, twisted, stories for me to enjoy. This is one I had this morning**
The old heavy rusted iron door unexpectedly slammed shut behind.
Whirling around, lump of fear rising in her throat, she reached out for the handle in the darkness consuming her vision and tugged.
But the door refused to move.
“Michael,” she called out shakily, hoping he had heard the door close from where he had been just meters down the hall.
“Michael,” she called again, louder, her tone growing frantic.
How could he have not heard it?
She called his name a third time, shouting it as she banged her palm on the door, the sound echoing around her.
As the cacophony faded though, she was met with only silence.
Shit!
This had been a stupid idea. A very, very stupid idea.
‘Let’s go check out the abandoned haunted attraction on old man Miller’s farm’, Michael had said. ‘My dad’ll take us, even chill in the truck outside in case anybody else comes around’, he had reasoned when she had protested the foolishness of going alone.
All because of those missing girls.
Over a dozen, in the past year, had started disappearing from the neighboring towns. One or two here or there you could dismiss as runaways. Even three you could argue had run into drug trouble and were likely selling themselves off in the nearest city to keep their habit going. But after the fourth and fifth girls were reported, things started looking decidedly more grim.
Then sightings of old man Miller began popping up.
Alone that was odd itself, especially considering the old geezer had been dead for years. But factor in the missing girls, and you had to wonder what the hell was going on.
Was he back from the grave to continue his sick habit of abducting women?
A copycat?
Or was it someone new?
It wasn’t like the police didn’t have suspects.
But none were panning out.
They had heard the rumors about Miller floating around town, had even stopped in and checked this very old attraction out, but swore it was all a false lead, and crossed it off on their list of possibilities.
Yet Michael had been convinced they were wrong
Lifelong childhood friends. What fun were they if you couldn’t get into idiotically dangerous situations every once in awhile?
Shaking off the paranoia crawling under her skin, she turned away from the door and faced off into the darkness. Alright. It wasn’t pitch black dark, so that was a bonus. There were faint beams of moonlight streaming in from busted cracks in the ceiling here and there so...that was good. Right?
Plus, she could make out enough shapes to see that she was in an old pumpkin maze that she faintly recalled visiting in her youth when Miller’s farm had been up and running. There were pumpkin headed scarecrows crucified on polls, and pumpkin headed ghouls bent over as if hiding by bales of hay. There were even pumpkin headed corpses scattered about, their twisted and bound limbs jutting up from the dusty floor.
But nothing else.
Ok.
Good.
So all she had to do was find her way out of this maze without stepping on, or tripping over something, that could likely give her tetanus.
Right.
She could do this.
Stepping a few feet forward, letting her eyes adjust to the bleakness, she shuffled along the path, reaching out here and there with her hands to keep herself steady. Rounding the first bend in the winding trail, she suddenly stumbled on a broken board, and flailed out to catch her balance. Grasping onto a pumpkin scarecrow nearby, her startled cry was met with another, and she violently yanked herself back--terror striking through her.
She heard a muffled sound, like a whimper almost, and she whipped her head around, mouth dropping wide and eyes brimming with mind shattering fear as the goblin like pumpkin creatures closet to her thrashed in agitation.
Scrambling backwards, she stumbled over the same damn board again, crashing onto her back, knocking the wind right out of her while banging her head hard off the ground.
Concussed, a high pitched ring drowning out everything around her, she winced as lights exploded on around her, illuminating the old pumpkin patch.
Groaning, rolling onto her side, she rubbed at her eyes, trying to shake the blurriness from her vision, before she turned her head slightly and looked off down the path.
Her entire body stilled in horror.
Girls.
From varying ages and heights, lay bound, broken or hung throughout the old warehouse structure--their heads all covered by distorted, twisted, hand-carved pumpkins. Another whimper catching her attention, she glanced to her right and recoiled as a woman tied to a pole beside her shifted with fright at her bindings--tanned skin bleeding and scratching raw where the rope dug in.
Covering her mouth to keep from crying out, she heard a bang off in the distance and saw a door open to the left.
Relief swept through her as she spotted a familiar figure, but the feeling was short lived as the young man kept his back to her while he slipped a mask over his face.
She watched, disturbed, as the man then moved across the attraction, his distorted--grotesque--mask keeping her from seeing his face.
Her jumbled mind began to race.
Michael had been right. The girls were being kept here, some thankfully still alive. But how had the police missed them? If they had been wrong about this place, were they also wrong about old man Miller? Michael had claimed he thought it was two people kidnapping the girls.
‘No way one person was doing that’, he had argued. ‘It’s gotta be a team, a duo working together.’ She had countered that serial killers working in pairs was rare, no matter what fiction shows on tv liked to fantasy about them.
Now, she wondered as the man came to a stop meters away, if he had been right all along.
“Michael,” she called out hesitantly while they faced one another
**What do you think? Does Michael kill her next? Is he working with his dad? Why are they doing it? If only my dream had not ended there...
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