It was dark when Alana reached the house. Nobody was there as she had guessed, not this late, not on a stormy night like this. No lights shone anywhere along the straight path that lead to the road, twenty minutes walk away, where her car had hissed then shuddered then stopped, at precisely that spot. At least the rain had ceased.

Water dripped from the rusted guttering onto the broken porch. It was the only sound she coud hear aside from the insects that made their particular sorts of low creaks and chirrups.

The invitation was from a friend of a friend. It said the party would be at nine-thirty, but now it was ten-fifteen and no sign of a party. Not only that, there was no sign of there having been any people there at all. As she looked back the way she had come the moon’s glow showed only one set of footprints in the dirt turned to mud.

Did they all cancel? It didn’t seem likely. With no mobile phone service and no apparent chance of anyone else arriving Alana slipped her soaked-through bag over her shoulder and leaned forward to stand.

Then she felt a hand on her back, soft, almost not there, but certainly a hand. She turned but no one was there.

~ ^-^ ~

While in the depths of a fever with this summer cold, this beginning – I think – of a story with a young woman in an eerie situation came, as these things do, into my mind as my fingers typed. Sometimes I ponder on an idea before writing it. This just came from my fingertips, straight onto the page. Maybe it was the fever. Don’t you love it when things just happen from nowhere? It’s the best feeling, even if this story-ette is a bit disturbing.