"My French teacher asked for a story involving 'le fantastique' (the fantastic/supernatural). This is what I wrote. I'd love to know what you think—especially about the atmosphere and the ending. (Translated from my original French.)"
It has been exactly ten nights now. Ten nights, like the ten long years I have spent here, in the silence of this house the world seems to have forgotten. Something is wrong. Every night, a boy dressed in black comes to stand outside my window. This boy terrifies me with his appearance. He is filthy; his hair is matted with dirt and insects. His clothes are stained with a red substance resembling blood. He wears no shoes, and his feet are dirty and swollen. His nails are rotten.
The young boy’s body is covered in wounds. He wears a bandage around his head, but I can see blood seeping through. He has multiple gashes on his arms, crawling with larvae. He has a wound on his foot so deep I can see the bone. He is also missing a finger, torn clean off.
But as I was watching him, he turned his head and met my gaze. For a moment, he said nothing. Then, suddenly, he let out a piercing shriek. I fell to the floor in terror and crawled to my bedroom. Suddenly, someone knocked at my door. I didn’t dare move, and for long minutes, all I heard was bang, bang, bang. Then the sound stopped.
I got up to check, but there in the living room stood a small child dressed in white. He was clean, seemed serene, and had one of the most innocent faces I had ever seen. He smiled at me, then opened his mouth. And that’s when I saw the horror.
His mouth hung open, dangling all the way to the floor. It was enormous, and inside it was a portal. From this portal emerged a tall man, entirely black, with no face. He wore a hat. The man approached me, touched me, and… I fainted.
When I came to, I found myself in a cemetery. Panicked, I began to run. But one grave caught my attention. On it was written: LOUISE BARNAME – 1968-1984. I stood there, dumbstruck before the grave, because Louise… that’s my name. And then, in a flash of cold pain, I remembered. The gravel of the road. The headlights. My last thought, stubborn, absolute: “I don’t want to go.” Then, nothing. Nothing but this house, and this time that no longer moved forward. The child in white watched me from the other side of the headstones, and his smile was no longer innocent. It was patient. He had waited ten years.
I like the line, but it's too poetic. What does it mean for a house to be forgotten by the world? And what does it mean for the narrator to see his house like this? The rest is about some ordinary guy being haunted by a ghost.
Descriptions are too stilted. The guy say he's scared, then he lists the physical descriptions like he's looking at a picture. Not at all scary. Try this: focus on one singular description and let that be the thing that rule his mind. If you have arachnophobia, literally nothing else matters but the spider in the room. There's the size and shape of a spider, but fear also comes from projecting what it might do. Knowing that a spider is in the room, but you can't find it at night is 100x more scarier than what it might look like. What if it crawls in your ear at night? What if it jumps on your head when you sleep? What if there's more that you haven't seen?
I don't know if the tall man is necessary. A ghost already fits your teacher's criteria by being fantastical. The tall man didn't add anything to what I read.
well the narrator is dead but she forgot about it and the house is her self made purgatory
Sure, but she doesn't know she's dead until the end.
yeah you rigth thank you for the advice