It's October, there's 28 days until Halloween, and I wanted to write a body-snatcher type story. Anyway, enjoy! Since it is a horror story, there's blood and such.
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There was always something a little off about Maggie Gibson.
She was gap-toothed, snarky, and a bit of an asshole. She stole your favorite gel pen in middle school. That’s how you both had met each other—scowling at each other at the same desk in second-period English. She wasn’t too bad, you decided eventually. Maybe she was worth giving friendship a try.
Maggie stopped being gap-toothed after she had braces for a few years. Her snark disappeared once she realized that teasing you wouldn’t work as well as it did when you were twelve. She was still an asshole, though—a somewhat more tolerable asshole. You liked that about her. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her, sometimes to a fault. She cut her own hair with scissors and tried to give you a haircut, too, and then buzzed all your hair off until you looked like a thumb.
But it wasn’t so bad. It was something the two of you laughed about, now that it was the last semester of senior year. Your hair had grown back, and hers had grown longer, and suddenly you felt the time that had passed. You remembered when you’d seen her with new eyes, when she’d tripped on her untied shoelaces playing basketball in your driveway. What an idiot, you remembered thinking. She still needs me to tie her shoes. Maggie didn’t look to you like she used to—like an angry twelve-year-old with pen-stealing habits and a gleam in her eye. She looked seventeen, newly blonde. She smelled like soap and a bit of rose. There was a new lump in your throat, but you pushed it down. What was the point? You were both going to different universities now, anyway.
That’s why now, when you sat staring at your melting popsicle in the Texan summer sun, sitting together on the front porch, you felt that something, somehow, had gone wrong. That lump in your throat felt even more uncomfortable, but not in a nice, fluttery feeling. It felt as if you’d eaten something bad. You felt uneasy. The humidity felt like acrid soup against your skin, mixing awfully with the anxious sweat sliding down your neck.
Maggie was prattling on about that new Transformers movie that just came out, but you weren’t listening. She was still smiling at you, that same crooked smile from second-period English.
She hadn’t blinked, not once.
Whatever was sitting next to you wasn’t Maggie Gibson.
You knew that because you saw her dead body, her face broken open and mangled in the woods behind Lakewood High, two months ago.
It was a rainy day, not unusual for April. Your fingers were slippery around the hard plastic of your flashlight, your raincoat hood pulled up against the downpour. Your eyelashes stuck together, but you weren’t sure if it was from tears or the rain. She had texted you two days ago to tell you she was dropping by the bakery, asking if you wanted anything. You said no, teasing her about her sweet tooth. She sent a rolling-eyes emoji in response.
She hadn’t been seen since. The entire town of Swanton started a search effort, combing over all the spots she frequented—that you both frequented, together. Every hour that passed that Maggie didn’t come home felt like a nail in your heart. You couldn’t sleep. Everyone told you she probably got lost on the way back, that Swanton had virtually no crime. She’ll turn up eventually, they said.
But that restless worry brought you to the woods in the middle of the night, stepping over splintered, rotting logs. The smell of wet oak leaves filled your nose like a thick, noxious gas. It was hard to see anything with the rain coming down this hard, scattering the light through the trees. It hadn’t been long since you’d gotten here, wondering if she’d decided to sit and eat a warm cookie where the two of you used to play, like she liked to do sometimes. You’d searched it yesterday but felt a stubborn pull to go back there, like maybe this time, you’d find her.
You took another step forward, but you felt your Converse slip a little extra. You looked down, following your gaze with the flashlight. The leaves here weren’t glistening with rain, but instead with something different—something reddish-brown. You felt the warmth drain from your face. Surely not, right? Maggie always was a messy eater. It’s chocolate. It had to be.
You lifted your head slowly, like if you took longer to look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much. Slumped against a tree, her blonde hair was unmistakable. Blood covered her chest, spilling down her neck. It was hard to tell if it had dried at one point, the blood now mixing with the rain to create a terrifying, sobering, horrific sight. Red was slithering down her arms in rivulets. Her skin was pale, like the flesh under a mushroom, thin and delicate.
You couldn’t help it. You fell to your knees and threw up, your stomach convulsing in on itself. It was hard even to recognize her face. Someone had taken an axe or something to it, swinging multiple times, hacking away at her. Only one blue eye remained, glassy, staring lifelessly out at the world.
Her mouth was split in half. You threw up again, wheezing into the air.
Fuck. Fuck.
Snap.
You blinked, feeling the popsicle break off in your hand. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said in the last five minutes, goober?” It asked, punching lightly at your shoulder. “I swear, Tyler, you have the attention span of a fucking goldfish.”
You had to stop thinking about it. Needed to stop remembering how Maggie looked, dead and butchered, in the woods that night. Not while her imitation was looking at you. Or whatever it was.
“Yeah, sorry,” you said, watching the red popsicle juice slide down your finger. “Got distracted.”
