Tenth Challenge Piece
Title: Listen and Die
Author: Kateifer
Theme/Prompt: Urban Legend
Rating: T
Word content: 371
Start time: 10:30pm
Finish time: 10:50pm
Author's Comments: I tried to come up with an urban legend story that hasn’t been done before, and it was tough. I’m sure that this has probably been done too, but I couldn’t find one like it.
Late one Saturday night, Diana was up late checking her emails. Around midnight, after browsing through some message boards, she heard the familiar beeping noise announcing an email. She went to her inbox and saw an email from an unidentified sender, and all there was an attached MP3 file. The email itself just said, “Dare you to listen.” She Googled the subject of the email, and saw an entry on a message board saying not to listen to it, that it was a file that had been sent to a lot of people before they mysteriously went missing. Diana giggled at how silly it seemed, but just to be safe, she scanned the email and the file for a virus. When it came out clean, she downloaded the file and put it on her mp3 player.
Around 1am, Diana got tired and slipped into bed. She brought her mp3 player with her as usual and hit play. The mp3 player was on shuffle, and as she fell asleep, a song started that wasn’t familiar. Diana assumed that it was the downloaded file. It was a slow, eerie sounding song, and it was a piano accompanied by a very out-of-tune acoustic guitar. Partway through the song, the music stopped and what sounded like a young girl started singing.
Listening to this song,
Will be the last thing you do.
Downloading this file was wrong,
And now I’m watching you.
After the voice started, the mp3 player shut off and Diana heard a strange scratching noise. Her eyes snapped open, and she felt a cold tingle running down her spine. She tried to ignore the sensation, but the tingling sensation just kept coming back. A moment later, she rolled over and saw a shadowy figure at the side of her bed, and the familiar metallic shine of a knife held above the shadow’s head.
The last thing anyone nearby heard from Diana was a blood curdling scream. Her parents rushed downstairs and found her body in her bed, and blood spatters covering her sheets and the wall behind her. There were knife marks in the wall and the blankets. The room was empty, only Diana’s body, the mp3 player, and an open window.