While out reading posts and looking for great content to curate for @c-squared and @curie I came across a new theme from @lyon89. The theme is titled GHOST (the lament of lost souls). I put my headphones in and started to listen. About a quarter of the way through it I closed my eyes and realized that it would make a great horror movie theme. With it's title of GHOST, my first thought was a scene in some paranormal movie where the researchers are now running in terror.

After the first time through it, I played it again. This time with my eyes closed the entire time. Something that I found amazing began to happen. The framework for the following story just started running through my head. (A little more on the basis for the story at the end of this post so I don't give away parts of the story before you get a chance to read it!)

I then sat here for a good amount of time playing lyon's theme on loop as I wrote the story.

Please listen to the theme before reading the story, or as you read it. Although I am pretty certain the theme won't last for the whole reading of the story, unless you read much faster than I do.

Listen to @lyon89's theme on DSound

Now, onto my short horror story:

NOTE: THIS HORROR STORY GETS A BIT GRAPHIC, I ALSO INCLUDED SOME GRAPHIC (BLOODY) PHOTOS. SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! IF YOU CONTINUE READING DON'T GET MAD AT ME FOR THE GRAPHIC BITS.

Source: Pexels

ESCAPE

by @randomwanderings

You begin to wake up. You cannot remember what had happened. All you know is your head is throbbing, you are in the dark, and you appear to be tied into some sort of cart. Unfortunately since you are in the dark your sense of smell is a bit heightened. What is that wretched smell?

The cart begins to move slowly as you hear the track beneath you creaking. It sparks your memory, things are coming back to you now. You were at the amusement park with your friends. You got separated when you had to use the restroom and they continued on to the funnel cake stand. That was the last thing you remember.

That familiar creaking though, that you remember from when you were younger. You are in the Spook House. Back then it was filled with some lame props targeted at harmlessly scaring everyone from age 10 and up.

You call out, "Is anyone there? Please help me. I really don't like this."

Suddenly you feel something brush your face, but you remember it was just the fake cobwebs and yarn hanging from the ceiling to freak you out. Then you feel something wet on your hand. This is new. In the ever so faint light you can see your strapped down hand now has what looks like blood trickling down it. Not your own, but you wonder if it is just fake blood to take your fear to the next level.

Your cart gets whipped around a curve and behind one of the cages in the wall you begin to see a slightly more lit scene. You see what a gruesome scene it is as your cart stops in front of it. There is a man who has both his arms cut off with bloody bandages at the ends of his stumps to stop the bleeding. He too is strapped down sitting on an inclined table. The floor is covered in puddles of blood. A woman dressed as a nurse begins sawing through his one leg. The man's screams are nearly drowning out the grinding of the electric bone saw.

The cart backs away from the horrific scene. You begin to move forward on the track again. While you can still see a little bit from the glow of the lighting from that last scare you can make out the outline of what looks like arms hanging down from the ceiling among the cobwebs and strings. You can see them dripping. As you get nearer to them and the hands bump your face as you go by your cheeks, eyes, and forehead are now smeared in blood. As it slowly trickles down your face and drips from your jaw it makes you cringe harder than you ever have before.

Source: Pexels

It has become apparent that this isn't just all being staged to scare you. It isn't some dumb prank your friends paid to have set up. This is all real! The blood, the soon to be limbless tortured soul, all of it, terribly real. You struggle to break your hands free, but it is no use. There is no escape.

Your cart slowly passes between a few more cages in the walls and stops. The cell door openings are just big enough for the men and women, each in their own state of despair, to reach out for you. You are just out of their grasp though. Even so, your terror grows. One man is missing an eye, another has no hands, yet still reaches out for you. A woman's clothes are torn and you can see the welt marks from repeated whippings. Your heart and your mind are racing, trying to figure somehow to escape from this hell.

That wretched smell, you now know is the stench of rotting human flesh all around you.

You begin to ask yourself, "What is happening here? Why would someone ever do these things to another human being?"

You are on the move again. Strobe lights start up making things worse. You can see things moving all over the place. To your left, half a torso hanging by a hook in its neck. To your right, another body hanging upside down from its feet. This one still barely alive with a look of terror in her eyes. One of her arms lying on the floor next to her in a growing pool of her own blood. She has been left to slowly bleed out.

Your cart begins to speed up, the creaking of the tracks grows louder. In the distance you see a large man holding what looks like an ax. You thrash in your seat struggling to break free. You look back up and you are nearing the man now. You end the struggling and give in to the reality that this is the end, there is no escape.

The sound of the ax being wielded through the air is the last thing you hear. One swift swing and your head falls to the ground behind the cart with a thud. You have now escaped this unthinkable horror, just not in the way you had hoped.

The cart pushes through the final door, opening to the outside and comes to a rest. Your friends who were still searching the park for you even though it was now dark and deserted for the night spot your headless, bloodied torso. They scream and begin to run, but are quickly surrounded by the sadistic park workers. Will they meet your same fate, or be added to the terrifying displays for the next rider to see?

Now the Background Info

Now for more background on the idea for my story. I grew up in a New Jersey Shore town (not the MTV Jersey Shore crap, but the real version of the Jersey Shore). We had one of the oldest boardwalk / amusement parks in the country. For my lifetime it was not so much a boardwalk, but that's what it was called. The actual boardwalk was all destroyed in the early 1900s by a hurricane.

It was the type of town where almost everyone's first job was at the amusement park. It was a way of life for many. I myself worked there for almost a decade I think.

One of the attractions was The Spook House. It was a ride where you rode in a cart that sat two people. The carts were propelled around a track with stops along the way. Things would jump out at you as they lit up. Skeletons, bats, other horror related scenes. There really was cobwebs and strings hanging down to brush against you in the pitch black between scares. At the end you pushed through a door and ended back where you began. Even with its level of somewhat lame scares, each time you go through it, it gets your heart rate up, and can still spook you.

The other day on a whim I pulled up the web site for the boardwalk. It has been a good 20+ years since I have been back to my home town for any amount of time. Every so often I feel reminiscent and go searching the interwebs for something from home. Once on their web site I saw how almost everything had changed. All the rides are different, they have a full blown water park now across the street.

There were three things that remained unchanged. The Tilt-A-Whirl (which can briefly be seen in the Bon Jovi music video for the song Only Lonely), the Zeppole stand (If you do not know what a Zeppole is, go find them and try them. Used to eat about 3 of them a few times a week. Luckily back then my metabolism burned them right off.), and yes, The Spook House. Right now it appears to be under renovation.

After reading that story about The Spook House renovation I guess it just stuck in my head somewhere and came pouring out when I heard this theme. Some of the sounds called my brain back to amusement park, and funhouse type sounds of my youth. Who knows what direction, if any, that this story would have taken if I hadn't, for no real reason decided to pull up the amusement park's web site the other day.

Support Writing Communities on the Blockchain!

While this story doesn't fit in any of their contests (well it does use the word horrific which was yesterday's #5minutefreewrite prompt, but this took me much longer than 5 minutes.), the reason I started writing stories on here is because of the writing communities like @bananafish and @freewritehouse. When you don't have inspiration or a topic to write about, they provide you with one. This is the first time I ventured out on my own to write a story that was not part of their contests. Of course it did take the inspiration of @lyon89's theme, but still it was not really prompted by a specific word, or had someone lay the groundwork with the beginning of a story. To me that says I might be getting better at this, but without their past prompts I wouldn't be at this point.

So, please go support them in anyway you can, or at least go try and enter a few of their contests and find your own inspiration.

Support @c-squared

• Join the C² Discord community to participate as a curator.

  ---

• Follow the @c-cubed curation trail at steemauto.com to support the curated authors: @c-cubed casts ~10 upvotes daily, all at 100% vote strength, on some of the best posts curated through C².

---

@c-squared runs a community focused witness node.
Please consider voting for us here if you would like to support out witness operations.

---

- If you would like to delegate to C² you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50 SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.

---