Ben, a childhood-buddy of my boyfriend, Phil, turned twenty-one, and threw a party in the rural part of Wales where they’d both lived until Phil moved away to attend university. I’d never met most of the guests before, but everyone seemed nice. Except, perhaps, for an older bloke named Andy.
We played a fun game named “Two Lies, One Truth”, where people reveal a shocking true secret, along with two lies, and everyone else has to guess which of the three tales isn't fictional.
It’s usually pretty obvious when someone is lying; One guy claimed to have played the baby in the movie ‘Labyrinth’, but the fibbing idiot was far too young.
Andy’s three stories all sounded true. Maybe he was just a great storyteller. Maybe not. He told his stories calmly, with a straight face:
“As a young boy I climbed a steep, rocky path from a secluded beach, when I met a lady in a wheelchair struggling along. So I started pushing her, but her wheelchair was stubborn, like an overloaded shopping-cart. She clipped a rock, spun around and hurtled back down to the beach. There she fell out, onto the small spit of sand, screaming about the incoming tide. I panicked and ran home, scared I’d get into trouble if I told anyone.”
“Not long afterwards, I was playing in some sand-dunes when I found a beautiful green snake. I’d never seen one before, so I took it home, though it tried to writhe from my grasp all the way. It was too slippery though, and eventually escaped, slithering off onto a neighbor’s lawn. I was too stupid to know that it was a deadly adder.”
“Another day, I was playing on an old abandoned farm, full of rusty machinery and random junk. Some kids arrived and started playing hide-and-seek, but wouldn’t let me join in. One girl asked me if I’d spotted anywhere good to hide. I suggested that she climb inside an ancient refrigerator, where no-one would ever find her. I even helped firmly close the door. I wandered off, too young to appreciate that old refrigerators are death-traps.”
“I’m forty now. These three things happened during my idyllic childhood here in Wales, where I later met my colleague, and buddy, Ben.”
Though there were gasps of shock, everyone loved Andy’s stories, apart from Phil who gripped my hand throughout. He’d gone deathly pale, and his voice trembled when he guessed that the second tale was true. Andy clapped and laughed, and there were several sighs of relief that no-one had been abandoned on a beach or in a refrigerator. “How did you know?” Andy asked.
“Because my mom used a wheelchair until she drowned on a beach when I left to fetch ice-cream,” Said Phil, coldly. “And my sister suffocated in a refrigerator on an abandoned farm. But not when you were a small boy. That's the lie. And you remind me of a creepy man who was hanging around on both days."
Submitted January 20, 2018 at 12:43AM by Hack_Shuck http://ift.tt/2rmuJyp shortscarystories
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