@@DESCRIPT="Your Dead by The Stranger"                      
                      
        A short and quick silly tale I wrote about 3 years ago.


                                Your Dead
                                By
                                The Stranger

     Jack was asleep when the phone rang.  He heard the ringing but
insisted it was part of a dream.  He would have stayed asleep and
lived his normal life out had it not been for his wife waking him
up.  She was awaken by the phone.  She poked her right shoulder
into the meat of his stomach.  "Honey, wake up" she said to him.
     "Alright, stop hitting me.  What?"  He still couldn't hear the
phone ringing in his head.
     "Phone" she said as it rang again.
     He reached over to the night table and picked up the receiver. 
He brought it over to his head and spoke in what was almost a
whisper.  "Hello."  Their was no sound on the other end.  He looked
over at the clock which read two-thirty-four a.m.  "Hello" he said
again. 
     A low voice spoke slowly "I'm watching you right now.  You and
your wife are dead."  And then the phone clicked at the other end. 
     "Hello" he yelled into the phone "Who the hell is this?"  He
felt her arm grab hold of him and at first it scared him.  He hung
the phone back up and pulled the covers off him, throwing his legs
over the side at the same time.
     "What is it? Who was that?"  She said.  She was scared now, he
could tell.  
     "Go back to sleep, just a prankster I think"  he said as he
pulled on his slippers.  He stood up and walked over to the bedroom
window.  He pulled back the curtains and stared out into the night. 
Eye's were watching him, he could sense it.  He couldn't see anyone
out there but he knew there was someone.  He shut the curtains
quickly and went back towards the bed.  
     "What did he say?"  She asked.  His face looked scared and she
knew he wasn't going to tell her anything.  
     "Heavy breather, that's all" he said.  She knew her husband. 
Twenty-five years they were married and still he didn't understand
that she knew when he was lying.  She didn't have a hunch about it,
she knew when he was lying.  
     He called the police that night and reported it.  Nothing ever
happened that night expect for one thing.  A paranoid fear was
implanted into Jack Thorps mind that would haunt him every day till
the day he died.  Fortunately for him that was only two weeks
later. 
     The call had gotten to him.  He told himself over and over
again that it was just some neighborhood kid playing a trick.  But
the voice didn't sound like a kid.  It sounded more like a lunatic,
a crazed lunatic of maybe forty years old, who stood somewhere
outside their windows waiting for the right moment to show himself. 
Waiting for Jack to feel vulnerable and then he would strike,
killing not only Jack but his wife.
     Night after night he awoke in a cold sweat.  Late in the
evenings he found himself afraid to even go to bed, thinking that 
that would be the time for the killer to strike.  Everynight he
stood looking out the window watching for movement but never seeing
anything more than a passing car.  He took vacation time off from
work, he knew work was something he just couldn't handle anymore. 
His wife had set up a doctors appointment that he would never live
to attend. 
     Two weeks after the original phone call his wife was welcomed
home from a shopping trip with a friend with her husbands dead
corpse lying in their bedroom.  The curtains were fully drawn back
and he lied on the floor next to that window.  His lips were pulled
back in a look of horror, his dark black hair was now gray and his
soft skin was now wrinkled and frail.  His eyes bulged out of the
socket looking straight forward.  
     His wife screamed and cried and screamed some more until and
after the police and ambulance got there.  He was dead when they
arrived and had been for longer than half an hour.  Standing at the
window he had seen something, something that scared him to death. 
What it was no body would ever find out.  Not the police, not his
wife, not you, nor me.
