Your Face in the Darkness by Sylvie Fletcher

Creepiest Kids Story Winner

I stepped out past the door, and submerged myself into total darkness. Unlike the darkness you find in your room late at night, this darkness is complete. No street lamp, no moon, no stars, they had all been erased into nothingness.

As I waited fixed to the spot my eyes adjusted and I thought I'd seen something, or rather failed to see something. Maybe just a shadow within the darkness that surrounded me. Because in that dark was another dark, a darker dark. The dark that hides in its own dark, shadows not just waiting for something or someone to walk past but expecting it, almost knowing that someone would walk right into its dark mouth.

I went to take another step; still pointlessly trying to escape, but my brain couldn’t compute moving forward.

I want to make my own breaths, sound calm and normal despite the deep fluttering in my chest. Instead my heart wanted to run away ready to leave me alone, too scared of what the dark could do to us. My breath comes out in uneven white clouds. I think then that I can be jailed in darkness, but then I don't think I can do that very well either. I think of him for the first time, and even though I try not to, I find myself thinking of him in hospital, the tubes melting and the tubes becoming him. It almost kills me to think of him like that when- I stop thinking and turn, these dark clamps lifting off me as I turn and walk.

Two steps in the other direction that's all it takes for me to see him, two steps in this direction and I see him. His golden curls are so like mine but so forgotten. Green eyes that pierce the dark, those eyes that hold secret smiles meant just for me. Lips that form laughs without jokes, lips that whisper comfort in the dark. His face in the dark. His face in the dark, when it should be in a coffin. As if he knows it he leaves, I scream his name but there's no point he's left me alone again.

I wonder if I should tell someone that I saw him, but they'll just think I'm mad, maybe I am. Because if someone asks me when I last saw him I would say 'earlier this morning.' I don't want to go outside again, what if I see him? I turn the light out, the clock reads 12:09. It's almost instant in the dark, he smiles but then his beautiful face changes and twists in pain screaming silently and he says "It's your own fault I'm dead, you killed me". I hear him and what he says is true, I did. I killed both of us, him his body and me my soul. But he found me; "You will die alone like me." And I hear him.