Halloween Tale:- Lucy and the bear.

A note from the story teller, Dave Summers:

So for this Halloween I am going to tell you this tale of a girl that I knew a long time ago I shall call her Lucy, she was about 20 years of age She has long brown hair and two properly beautiful blue eyes, well she did back then at least I’m unsure of her now as we lost contact a long time ago. But that was enough about her physical attributes I think, her character was shy, kind and very Christian, but only the good parts which are attributed to Christians, she wasn't one of those Christians that believed every single word of scripture, even if she said she did. Else-wise she'd have been on a conversion mission to get the whole of out school to become part of her religion, to save us all from the fate, which is really gruesome as it is known as Hell; you may have heard of it.

Lucy and the bear

Lucy found a Japanese game on the net, Hitori Kakurenbo, which is translated as Hide and Seek Alone, Lucy thought that it sounded interesting, but she didn't believe any of the tales about it but she  to give it a go. Lucy had many teddies and she had a sentimental attachment to all of them so she didn't feel right dissecting one of her beloved bears but she had a brother Rob she knew he had a couple of teddies in his room of which he never played with.

'So I'll just use one of those teddies I'm sure he won't miss one' she thought to herself.

So she waltzed into his room and picked up his Ice hockey bear out of the cupboard, then she proceeded to walk to the kitchen where she took a knife off of the kitchen side, 

She was carrying the bear and the knife at this point she had already made a mental checklist of the things that she'd need to do this properly, which were;

1 A stuffed animal that has both arms and legs

2 A knife, shard of glass, or some sharp instrument

3 Rice 

4 A cup of salt water or Japanese saké   

5 A needle with a long piece of red thread 

6 Fingernail clippers  

7 A bath full of water

As previously stated she already had the first two, while she was still in the kitchen she took a bag of rice from within a food storage cupboard and she retrieved a cup to put water in, of which she put some salt in the cup and then she stirred it around to make salt water, so that was the first four items from the list gathered. She put the four things down on the kitchen table, the kitchen table wasn't the sturdiest of tables within the house.

Next up a needle and thread, where can I find one of those' she was thinking while she stood there almost motionless, well she was motionless except one of her fingers, her index finger of her right hand was tapping the side of her face as she was thinking, she always did that every time a question was put to her,  even if one was put to her by herself.

Just as she was doing every-time I asked her to come out with me to the pictures (an old term for the cinema/movies), which always ended in her denial, but I realise that I am getting sidetracked.
Now where was I... oh yes with Lucy tapping the side of her face, thank you. 
She was just wondering where there was a needle and thread when the thought came to her 'it should be in my mothers sewing kit, now where is that?' She quickly darted into the room that her mother used as a study, she couldn't find it in there not even under the mountains of paperwork, but she had to find it soon as it was going to be 3AM soon and she couldn't do it the next night as her family would be home by this time the next night and that would spoil the whole alone part of it, plus from other accounts it could be dangerous for them.
She looked in her parents room for her mothers sewing box she couldn't find it anywhere, at least not until she looked in the top of the wardrobe, which perplexed her, 'why is it up there, my mothers shorter than me and I struggled to reach it even with a chair.'
She rummaged around in the sewing box until she found both a spindle of red thread and a needle.

She put her mothers sewing kit away and dropped the needle and the thread in the bathroom before going downstairs to pick up the items that she'd placed on the kitchen table earlier,

Just to cart all of the stuff that she'd put on the table, into the bathroom, where she knew that there was some fingernail clippers just inside the bathroom mirrored cabinet, which was on the wall opposite the bath, but the bath wasn't on the wall it was on the floor. She ran the water for a bath as if she was running the bath for herself but she left out the bubble bath. 

Then she took hold of Rob's bear and began to perform an incision along the stitching on the teddy's back, as soon as the incision was cut she removed all of the stuffing and replaced it with rice and some finger nail clippings freshly off of her finger tips.
Now all that was left to create the bear was to sew it back up with the red thread, making sure that the bear had enough red thread left over to be wrapped around the bear tightly,
She had no idea of what the true reasons for wrapping the bear up with the red thread after sewing it back together, but she'd guessed that it was to stop it from exploding with the wet rice expanding and all of that, not to make it look more sinister.
By this time she knew that she had to think up a name for the bear,
"Charlie... Charlie bear, yes that'll do" She spoke aloud with a new found pride in her handiwork.
‘Now what do I have to do to make it come alive again?’ she thought for a second then she remembered.

The time was 3am she held Charlie and said, 
“for the first game I, Lucy, am going to be oni” she said oni as oni is the Japanese word for it, or tag, she said the aforementioned phrase three times and then dropped Charlie in the bath.

Next she ran around the house turning off all of the lights then she counted to ten aloud and stated “Charlie, I’m coming to find you ready or not.“

She scampered back up the stairs, into the bathroom and she grabbed Charlie and the knife, then stabbed Charlie with the knife.

Lucy said "Now Charlie is oni, come and get me if you can".

Then she dropped Charlie back into the bath with the knife still inside of it, and rushed out of the bathroom. She rushed to her hiding place with the cup of salt water in hand she found the wardrobe that she was going to hide in it was one that had got the christian crosses along and within the door handle it had the name of her Lord Jesus Christ engraved on it, as if there was a malevolent spirit how better to save herself than with the name of the Christ?
At least that was what a YouTube Christian had said.
It was dark in the cupboard but she knew that she mustn't fall asleep, but even if she did how could a malevolent spirit harm her? She had JC on her side.

She heard a knocking on the front door of her home, she thought 'who's that knocking on the door this late at night maybe if I ignore them they'll go away.'
The knocking intensified. 'Screw this game I'm going to open the front door, if nought else to tell whoever it is that is making the racket, to stop' thought Lucy. 
It’s not as if that little bear is going to be waiting for her, now is it?
She thought  'Unless this is a dream that I'm experiencing that teddy will still be in the bath soaking the water up with it's rice stuffing. 

Lucy then found herself walking down the stairs, as she reached the door she at the door handle and pulled it down.
"Geeze do you know what time it..."

She spoke as she was opening the door she said, in exasperation, but she stopped as soon as she had noticed that nobody was out there.

There was nobody outside of the door, Lucy would have been gobsmacked if only she had the energy to be so. 

But then Charlie appeared behind of her with the knife in hand, or paw to be more anatomically correct, while Lucy was looking out of the door then Charlie thrust the knife between her base two vertebra, which caused Lucy to scream aloud in the sheer excruciating agony.


The next thing that Lucy felt was her head banging onto the side of her hiding place as she awoke from a realistic dream. 
But just as with almost every other dream that she'd ever had she promptly forgot about it, as she did with practically all that she was left with was the memory that she'd had a dream but none of the details of said dream, no matter how good, bad or ugly it was and that dream was a particularly ugly dream.
She heard crashes and bumps from outside of the cupboard she thought they were some of the neighbours getting up to some late night action, but then she remembered the time was 3AM the last time she checked they shouldn't be having any action at this time and she thought back  to other nights and her neighbours were usually quiet especially at this time,
So she opened the cupboard door just a crack to see what was going on.
She saw naught but black, she picked up her mobile telephone, from her trouser pocket, to use as a torch,
She lit the room from the crack in the cupboard door,
Then she peered out she took a step out of the cupboard, illuminating the floor, with her phone.
As Lucy was turning the corner just outside of her room she felt something bash into her foot and she went sprawling down the stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom of the stairs she was wondering what the object could be; could it have been Charlie, 'nah, that bear isn't that solid even if it could have got there.
 Then she heard a thumping sound coming down the stair towards her.
Lucy gulped, before she felt ten stabs with a knife each of them going into a different finger tip, she was trying her hardest not to cry out in pain, with the ten sharp pains each strike was in a different finger.
Until all ten fingers had been slit and her blood was rushing out of there ends did Charlie decide to end this nightmare for her, by slitting her throat.


The next time she awoke a shiver jolted down her spine as she awoke she knew that something bad had happened in that dream but she couldn't remember what it was, she could have been having a nightmare that had her as the recipient of a kiss from me for all we know (the effect would probably be the same).
Lucy heard the sound of her parents talking outside,
'they are early' she thought as the sound of the key in the lock resounded, throughout the still air of the house.
Her parents were moving gingerly through the downstairs of the house until they arrived at the kitchen when they both had they're knees taken out by that maniacal bear,
Then Lucy heard the sound of the blade tearing into the flesh and bone of their legs, it was the squelching noise of a blade through the ligaments and muscles that were there followed by the stomach churning crunch of the blade striking the bone.
which was accompanied by the screams of the victims of charlie's latest attack.
Now she was worried for her parents safety so Lucy hurried down the stairs to the kitchen she arrived outside of the kitchen door just in time to see her mum's head get shawn off of her neck by a new piece of equipment that the bear was welding, was the bear supposed to do that?
Her dad had been brought to tears by the fore-mentioned event so Lucy marched forward to stop the bear, yet.
She hadn't worked out how she would stop the bear, she just figured 'I'll improvise, it's just a stuffed animal how hard can it be'.
then as she marched forward her feet were getting stuck to the floor by her parents blood on the floor.
The bear stamped on a tile that was loose and pointed upwards, Lucy looked to the ceiling to see what the bear was pointing to.
She looked up and from the moment that she did she felt a terrible feeling of metal digging into her eyeball, her right eyeball, soon enough the blade was through her eyeball and it was pushing into her brain.


Her first two dreams may have gone by unnoticed by what seemed to be her awakened state, but the trauma of the third dream stayed with her, it may have been her mothers decapitated head or it may have been the fact that she had never actually seen her father cry before, but either way she knew that she had to get out of this game that was haunting her.
So she picked up the cup of salt water and she emptied it into her mouth, then she stormed out of the cupboard and into the bathroom which was through the room that the cupboard was inside and out into the hall before passing three doors to get to the bathroom,
But when she had got to the bathroom door she opened it she looked for the Charlie she saw him where she had left him in the bath tub but she knew that all she had to do was to go over to the bear and spit the salt water on top of it and then recite the incantation,
But as she stepped into the room her bear feet slipped on the wet floor, the floor wasn't that slippy the time that I left this room, she would have been thinking.
That is if the fall wasn't so intense that it forced her to swallow the salt water,
Which tasted disgusting.
Charlie then got up from it's resting place in the bath and then it clambered out of the bath and it dragged it's rice filled body onto Lucy's belly until finally pulling the knife up so it hovered with the point of the blade facing down towards her heart.
then Charlie struck downwards with the knife piercing her heart with the one quick blow the agony that she faced must have been unbearable for her.


So much so she woke up in a cold sweat but she was back in the cupboard and the sun was coming up  outside of her window, she could see the sun through the crack in the cupboard door,
"So what does this mean that I've won?" she said out loud and then she found a book settled against her left foot She brought her phone out of her trouser pocket again.and she brought it up as a torch to read what it said on the notebook.
The notebook smelt like dried blood and on it's cover it said *The Five Deaths of Lucy Monroe*. in text that that was deep red, or carmine red.
'But that's my name, and I'm still alive' thought Lucy 'how can I die five times.'
but she was intrigued by the mysterious book that had appeared so she read a bit further into it.


Page 1;
So the first page of the book it had text that was similar to Lucy's first death as detailed by me previously but she couldn't remember it, at least not until she had read to the part which said about  the knife stabbing her between two of her vertebra, then the shear unadulterated agony struck her, directly in the vertebra,


Page 2;
On the second page it told her about a different death to the first one but if you had read it earlier there is no need to of back to it now but she couldn't remember this death either until she felt the sharp pin like pricks in the ends of her fingers just before she fell breathless and she was gasping for breath by the end of her read. 


But she was perplexed how reading some stuff in a notebook could be effecting her so badly it's not as if any of this stuff ever happened to her, she's alive at the moment, isn't she?


Page 3;
For her third death she remembered as she read the notebook both of her Mum's decapitated head and her life less body before remembering the shrill noise that she made when the sharp point of the knife first pierced her eyeball and the pain was unbearable for the few seconds that she had experienced it, she just thanked  her god that it was only in a dream.


Page 4;
As soon as she started reading this note of her supposed demise she remembered that realistic dream that she had just had and she realised what this book could be, well it was one possibility at least it didn't quite explain why she had wrote in in a blood like colour, as she recognised the knife traveling through her breast and getting lodged into her heart. Stopping her heart dead in a slow and drawn out fashion, the style of the psychotic bear, it still hurt as much as the others, if not more, with the dream being fresh in her memory.

Now Lucy was thinking that all of the text that was on the page was only dreams some from further away, in time, than others but they were all her dreams as she had been doing with her dreams, as she cannot remember them for very long after having them she'd write them down on a notepad as soon as she could but this note book didn't seem familiar to her at all and what was with the very blood like ink that she was using to make it? 

Page 5;

Now the page for her fifth death had the number five written upon it in the top left hand corner of the page but then the rest of the page was blank,

"Why did it say five on the front cover and then only detail four?"
Then Lucy must have cut herself on the edge of the page as a stream of her own blood gathered in a pool on the pageLucy picked up her finger that the blood had come out of and she jammed it into her mouth to stop the blood loss and she tossed the book away.
But book stayed open on the blank page and the blood from her finger started writing as if it was possessed, but by what? The spirit of Charlie? How did the spirit even get inside of the cupboard, I thought that it had the cross of Jesus on it and his name?
Lucy gulped as her blood wrote,

Lucy peered out of her hiding place, to the surprise of seeing me, Charlie, standing outside armed with the knife that started this hell for Lucy,

Lucy looked at her finger tips and examined her neck her spine her right eye that Charlie touched with the knife and found that she’’d been sewed up like a rag-doll with red thread, even her right eye was now no more than a button,

‘I must still be dreaming as the deaths all must be happening within dreams, or preferably nightmares, as I had no reco;ection of any of these supposed incidents happening outside of the dream.' she continued with this little piece of Christian gold 'yes that must be the case otherwise how could he get through this wardrobe it's guarded by Christ Jesus.'
Charlie then opened the doors to Lucy touching the name of Jesus just as anything would/without bursting into flames or turning to ash.
Her eye met the eyes of the menacing Charlie bear...