THE STRANGER IN MY FOOTSTEPS

For our Ambient Print Board: Horror Story Competition, here's one of the best entries we received!

THE STRANGER IN MY FOOTSTEPS

By: Amirah

The street lights were blinking as I was walking back home from my part-time cleaning job in a local café. It was certainly not profitable, but at least my parents wouldn’t hassle about paying for my clothes. The lights suddenly went off and I froze, heart beating fast. I felt a drop of sweat flow from my hairline to my jaw, even though it was a quite chilly night. One thing you needed to know about me was that I was a scaredy-cat. One would ask, ‘then, why do you work at night, wise guy?’ I had classes from 9 to 6, which meant I could only start working after 7 pm and no place else would accept a student as their employee. Sucks, right?

‘This is not good. This is so not good’, I thought as I clenched my fists and continued walking on the sidewalk. At a time like this, most were already in their beds, so it was so quiet that you could hear the wind blow. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down. I was about 10 minutes away from my family home when I heard footsteps behind me. ‘This person is not following me, right? I’m just imagining things. It’s all in your head, Jane. Stop it.’ I tried to speed up, but I heard the person was quickening his pace too.

After a while trying to power-walk, I started running. Then, I heard the person was running too. I glanced back to see the person who was following me: a clown. Having a clown run after you at midnight was a nightmare you wished you wouldn’t have. It was wearing a red curly wig with a red and yellow clown suit, not to mention the weird makeup on its face. Looking at the size of the clown, I would say the person was a man - an angry man. I sped up with all my might as I could see my house about 80 meters away.

“Keep on running. You don’t want me to catch you!” The clown sang his words and laughed when he saw me trip on the uneven pathway.

“Shoot!” I cursed, trying to get up, and I couldn’t be more bothered by the pain from my bleeding knees. In a split second, he caught my elbow before I could sprint off again.

He held my elbow so tight that I felt like my bones would dislocate if I tried to pull away from him. He muffled my scream with another hand. He laughed with his deep, raspy voice as he inched closer to my face. “Gotcha!” The clown smirked and dragged me to an abandoned house, three houses away from mine.

The house was clearly not abandoned. He had the key to it. He pushed me forward through the door before locking it behind him. He then dragged me to a room which seemed to have been a living room. There was a chair, some rope and a roll of duct tape in the middle of the room. I panicked at the thought of getting tied up in a room with the psychopath. I opened my mouth and bit his left hand that was covering my mouth.

“Stop it, darling. You can’t hurt me. I can’t feel any pain,” he whispered into my ear. My whole body was shivering and my knees were getting weak. Tears started to form at the corner of my eyes when he shoved me towards the chair and tied me up with the rope. After he sealed my mouth with the duct tape, he stood in front of me, looking proud at his ‘work of art’.  

“Little girl, do you know whose house this is?” He circled around me while eyeing the area as if he already knew the answer. “Well? Do you know or not?” I jumped in the chair as he slammed his hands on my shoulders from behind. I shook my head.

He laughed again. I could feel him moving closer beside me to whisper into my right ear, “It was my house, until your loving father got my family into trouble. He threw my parents into prison and me into an orphanage. It was not pretty, sweetheart. The place was horrible and full of horrible monsters. I counted every single day to when I would finally be free of the hell and hunt down the people who caused me this pain,” he said as he released his hands from my shoulders. He walked to the front and reached something from his pocket. I cried and tried to escape from the tight rope when I saw him draw a knife.

“So, why don’t we start with you?”