You immediately turn around and start the trek home. You don’t need to follow any strange, creepy, nightmarish skeletons today, no thank you. You want to go home, take shower, read a book, and sleep off the day’s troubles. 

So you do exactly that. You make it home without any problems, put your bicycle in your garage, eat a quick snack, and jump in the shower. The warm water eases your tense muscles, allowing your heart to return to its normal pace. As water and soap rushes down the drain, you slowly relax. 

You dry yourself off and dress in pajamas, the fabric soft on your skin. You go through your house closing windows and turning off lights before making your way to your bedroom to settle in for the night. 

When you open your closet to grab your book, a chill worms its way down your body and you look up. A rotting skeleton stares back at you, propped in the doorway of your closet and reaching for you. It looks exactly like the one you saw earlier. 

You slam the closet door closed and back away, the back of your knees hitting the edge of the bed and making you fall over. You watch the door intently, waiting for any sign of movement. Your heart thumps so loudly you think your neighbors can hear it. 

Nothing happens for five minutes. Gathering your courage, you grab a poker from your fireplace and brandish it in front of you as you prepare to open the closet door again. Your hand closes around the doorknob, and it’s cold to the touch. 

You wrench the door open, hefting the poker behind your head in case you need to swing it, but there is nothing there. The closet is just a closet, filled with clothes, shoes, books, and childhood memories. But no skeletons. 

Keeping a tight grip on your weapon, you gingerly close the door. Your heart is still beating a mile a minute as you try to think about what to do. 

You can either believe you imagined the skeleton and try to sleep, or you can ask to stay at a friend’s house for the night. 

Despite your insistence that every skeleton you’ve seen tonight has only been a figment of your imagination, it still takes two sleeping pills for you to finally get some shut eye. Even then, your sleep is haunted by skeletons chasing you endlessly. 

When you wake up in the middle of the night and see that it is 3:34am according to your clock, it takes you a moment to realize why you are awake. But then you feel them. 

Icy, bony hands creep across your body, feeling like a thousand spider crawling on your skin. You want to scream, but your body won’t obey your brain’s commands. You lie there in your bed, paralyzed with fear. 

A few of the hands disappear, replaced by a skeletal face staring down at you from the side of your bed. Flesh hangs from its skull and jaw, red splotches of dried blood decorating its bones. The paralytic terror eases enough for you to form coherent thoughts that allow to form a plan. 

Do you run or do you speak? 

You decide to call your friend Chelsea, an actress/waitress from Pizza Hut who dresses in nothing but black. She happily agrees to let you stay at her house for the night, so you pack a bag and head over. 

Chelsea greets you cheerfully when you arrive, shows you to a guest room, and prepares a snack for the two of you to enjoy. It’s almost midnight at this point, but she is still dressed in an elaborate lacy black dress matched with heavy dark eyeliner. You always joke that she took the method acting too far for a role a few years ago and never went back. 

Just as you’re preparing to turn in for the night again, after Chelsea has already done so, you hear a strange noise upstairs, like the static of a TV. 

“Chelsea?” You call out. No answer. 

Do you investigate or not?

I had a lot of fun working on this Collaborative Composition project. As a writer, I jumped at the chance to submit something more creative for this assignment rather than a simple analysis of work we had already produced, such as the discussion board. When I finalized my idea to write a Choose Your Own Adventure story incorporating conscious, contributory, and unwitting participation, I immediately got to work. 

Before even beginning to write the story, I collected different forms of participation. First, I looked online for written and photographed short story prompts to generate an idea for the story—unwitting participation. The pictures used throughout the story are also forms of unwitting participation. I eventually settled on the below photo of a skeleton riding a bike and used that to fuel a short horror story (plus, it’s Halloween). 

Once I had the general idea for the story, I consulted my roommates and friends for the various directions the story would go. I gave them limited information about the story and asked them to give me character names, locations, events, decisions, and endings to the story. None of them knew exactly how their suggestions would be used, but most of them were used in some way. Hence, contributory participation. 

Throughout the entire process, I provided the conscious participation. I knew exactly how each element would be used, I wrote the short story, I came up with some of the events, I came up with a few of the endings. I knew how the story would be presented and who the audience would be. I knew everything that was going on the whole time. 

In creating this project, I used all three forms of participation discussed in the “All Together Now” article, and it was a very enjoyable experience. I really liked surfing the Internet to find inspiration for a story (I came up with so many other story ideas in the process), and my friends and I had a lot of fun coming up with different events and endings for the story. It was really cool to give them a simple prompt like, “Give me a character” or “What happens next?” and see what their imaginations came up with. There were so many ideas that it was hard to incorporate them all, and I did have to make some executive decisions and cut some of them. Still, the bulk of the story is made up of other people’s ideas. They provided the story pieces, I just had to put the puzzle together. By letting other people decide the content, I learned a lot about the writing process and when to accept and when to reject suggestions. 

Exploring these forms of participation was really interesting. It taught me that you can use unwitting participation without plagiarizing, something that can be hard to do. I was able to take something someone else had created and use it as inspiration for my own work, which is nice to remember when it comes to writer’s block. The contributory participation was engaging as well because sometimes it can be tiring to answer all the questions yourself. This is not the first time I have asked other people for characters or locations while writing a story, but this was the first where that help was the backbone of the story. It was very enjoyable, and it took some of the pressure off me since all I had to do was connect the dots. Even with all of that, though, I liked maintaining control over the project as a whole when it came to deciding the prompt, the premise, and the presentation of the story. 

This project was overall a really great experience. I learned a lot by exploring different ways of writing a story, writing in a different genre, and incorporating the reader’s choices into the outcome of the story, while still touching on multi-modality. I used hyperlinks for the reader to make their decisions, and also added pictures within the story to help the reader visualize the scene, as if the story were a print text accompanied by illustrations. I would have liked to add some sound effects to contribute to the horror tone and further embrace multi-modality, but unfortunately WordPress was not very accommodating in that area, and I did not have enough time to move the composition to a different website. I could have linked to YouTube videos or other videos containing sound effects, but I felt that that would be too disruptive for the reader, and only take away from the experience rather than enrich it. 

Even with those drawbacks, I still think this project was able to embody multi-modality and new media aspects. The entire project is presented as blog posts, which is very new media, and it includes hyperlinks and photos drawn from the Internet, also very new media and multi-modal. The composition was definitely more than just a product, it was also an instructive event that left me with a lot of insights I can use in future works. 

You’ve had enough of a horror movie for tonight and feel no urge to investigate the strange sound upstairs. You go into the guest room and close and lock the door behind you. Just as you sit down to get ready for bed, your phone rings. 

Wondering who might be calling, you pick it up. The number is blocked. Curious, you press answer and hold the phone to your ear. 

“Hello?” 

No one responds. Instead, hollow breathing slithers through the phone. In the background, you can just make out the sound of running water. 

Your heart in your throat, you go into the bathroom attached to the guest room. The sink faucet is running, but you know you turned it off. There is nothing else there, but the trickling of water on the phone stops when you turn off your own faucet. 

You are still holding the phone to your ear when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and gasp. Before your eyes, you are aging—there is no other way to describe it. Your skin darkens and wrinkles, your eyes are losing their shine, your hair grows long, limp, and white. Your teeth rot and fall out of your mouth, and you realize that this isn’t just happening in the mirror. Your body is aging, and then, disappearing. The phone drops from your hand. 

Your flesh sags from your bones before it rots off completely. You watch as your eyes disappear, but even when your skull is left with empty eye sockets, you can still see yourself in the mirror. You can see what you have become in the span of a few seconds. 

A skeleton. 

THE END

You’re feeling brave, and decide you will investigate. You carefully climb the stairs, listening for the noise. It hasn’t gone away, and now that you are closer you are almost certain it is TV static. You come upon a hall with three doors, and after checking the first two, discover that the sound is coming from the third. 

You go enter the third room and immediately regret the action when the door swings closed behind you and you hear the unmistakable click of the lock. You fiddle with the doorknob, but it won’t budge. You call for Chelsea, but she doesn’t seem to hear you. With no other choice, you look around the room. 

The only light source in the room is very faint since it comes from an old TV showing only black-and-white checkered static. The sound is very loud, almost louder than comfortable. In the corner of the room there is a figure hidden by shadows. 

The static grows louder and you blink and plug your eyes, but in that split second of darkness the figure vanishes. Your heart races. The television gets even louder, and you are suddenly aware that something is directly behind you. 

You don’t dare turn around, even as you begin hyperventilating. The temperature in the room drops and you can see your breath in front of you. You feel the creature lean closer. 

A sudden creaky laugh sounds right in your ear and you gather air to scream. As you do, skeletal hands clasp your shoulders and shake you—hard. You hear and feel a snap in your neck and when the skeleton lets go of you, you fall to the ground. 

The laughing and static continue, and then you are gone. 

THE END 

A burst of adrenaline allows you to break free of the skeletons’ grasps and run out of your bedroom. You grab your phone on the way and hastily call 911, making up some story about an intruder in your house because you know they will not listen if you tell them the truth. You wait outside your house, shivering in the cold, and watch for the skeletons that are surely still there. 

The police arrive quickly, bursting into your house to see if the intruder is still there. An ambulance follows them, and an officer takes you to the paramedics who give you a clean bill of health but wrap you in a blanket and urge you to get some sleep as soon as you can. 

Sleep will have to wait, though, because the police want to take your statement at the station as soon as possible. A few stay behind to watch the house and check for any evidence left behind while the rest go back to the station. You are escorted to the backseat of one of the last police cruisers to leave. 

You buckle in and pull the blanket around you tighter, but it does little to ease your nerves. For a few minutes, you sit in the backseat until nearly all the police officers have left, and finally one of them sits in the driver’s seat. He turns to check that you are ready to go, and your heart jumps to your throat. 

The police officer isn’t a police officer. What sits there instead is another skeleton, its mouth twisted into a creepy grin under the blue police cap. 

You fumble with the door handles, but they are meant to keep criminals from getting out without the driver’s consent. You are separated from the skeleton by a window, but that provides little comfort as it starts driving away with you captive. 

You are not surprised when the car goes in the opposite direction of the police station, and your mind races as you try to figure out a way to survive. Surely, whatever the skeleton wants from you is nothing good. 

The car finally rolls to a stop after ten terror-inducing minutes, and the doors finally unlock. That doesn’t help you much, because when you stumble out of the car you find yourself in a graveyard, nothing familiar in sight. 

The skeleton gets out of the car and you see more emerge from the woods beside the graveyard. They creep towards you and your body reacts on instinct—you run. 

You run and run and run as fast as you can, but the graveyard feels endless. The skeletons are close behind you, and you are tiring. Your feet are bare, you’re still wearing pajamas, and the ground is covered in twigs and rocky mounds. 

You turn around to check on the skeleton’s progress and find one directly behind you. You scream and try to run faster, but your foot catches on a gravestone and you go tumbling to the ground—down, down, and stopping with a thump. 

Your entire body aches, your leg feels broken, and as you look up to try to catch your bearings, a handful of dirt showers over you. You spit soil out of your mouth and raise your head, a scream ripping through your chest as you realize that you have fallen into a grave. 

Dirt falls on top of you in handfuls and you can just make out the skeletons above you. The one that abducted you, the one in your closet, the one that you saw on the bicycle, is glowing. As you watch, it shimmers and begins growing skin. Clothes appear on top of the skin, and you realize that the skeleton is becoming you. 

You try to fight, but it is too late. You are being buried alive, and there is nothing you can do to stop the imposter about to take your place in the world. 

THE END 

You can only find the strength to speak. In a croaking voice, you ask, “What do you want?” 

The skeleton leans closer, sending shivers down your spine. The bed feels rough beneath you, and the smell of dirt fills your nose. The skeleton’s face is right by yours when it says in a voice like ice, “I want you to remember.” 

You squeeze your eyes shut in the hopes it will protect you from whatever horror the skeleton is about to bestow upon you, but nothing comes. The scent of soil grows stronger and so does the cold temperature, but the skeletal hands on your body have disappeared. 

You slowly open your eyes and find yourself staring at the night sky, a full moon shining down upon you. You tremble from the cold and when you look around, you notice that you are no longer safe in your bed but are instead laying in the dirt, six-foot walls surrounding you on all sides. You turn your head and see a skeleton beside you, its mouth open in a scream but unmoving. The skeleton holds your hand, and you notice that your hand is missing all of its flesh and muscle too. 

Suddenly, you do remember. You watch the night sky progress and hold your skeletal brother’s hand in your shared grave, as you have done for the past three hundred years. 

THE END 

You pick the shortcut, wanting to end this and get back to safety as soon as possible. You tell Honza to floor it, and he obeys. The car tears down the road, but when you look back the skeletons are still hot on your tail. You pray silently to every god you can think of, hoping to make it out of this in one piece. Honza still has no idea what really has you spooked. 

In about ten minutes, you have reached town. You almost cry in relief at the sight of familiar stores, houses, hotels, schools. There is no sign of the skeletons anywhere. 

To be safe, you take up Honza’s offer to stay at his place tonight. You haven’t seen any skeletons, but you don’t mind the company, since you would be alone if you went to your house. It takes you a few hours to fall asleep, and when you do your dreams are plagued by rotting skeletons, but you wake up safe and sound on Honza’s couch. There are still no skeletons anywhere in sight. 

You are still very cautious for the next few weeks. For the first few days, you completely abandon your nightly bike-rides, partially because you still haven’t gotten a tire and because you are still terrified. But eventually, you force yourself to go out again, but much earlier than before. You work your way back up to cycling at sunset, and it takes months before you do it. 

As the months pass, the incident falls to the back of your mind. Months turn into years, and you haven’t thought about the skeletons in a long time. You never told a soul about it. You still go on your bike rides, but you haven’t seen anything unusual since that night. 

And then one day, ten years later, on a nice night with a beautiful sunset, a skeleton rides past you. 

THE END 

You pick the long way, hoping to lose the skeletons before Honza or anyone else notices them. Once you get back to town, this nightmare will be over. 

You think. 

Honza turns down the road and after ten minutes the sight of houses in the distance eases your nerves. The road is rockier, but safer. You pass the first group of houses, entering an empty stretch of road. When you turn around, your heart lifts as you see that the skeletons are gone. 

But then your heart drops again when you hear a pop and the car wobbles. Honza curses and moves the car to the side of the road, turning on his hazard lights. Your palms start to sweat as he gets out of the car to see what happened, and your fear comes back full force when he says that the back passenger-side tire is flat. 

It’s dark, and there is no one around. The houses you passed are too far away now for you to push the car to, or even walk on foot. The next sign of life isn’t for another mile. Your phone is still dead, and Honza forgot his at home. You begin to regret taking the long way home. 

Honza looks at you from the driver’s seat. “I have a spare tire in the trunk, but . . .” 

You hang your head. Honza is hopeless when it comes to cars, so you have to be the one to change the tire. You glance outside, looking for any sign of the skeletons and are only slightly relieved to find none. You get out of the car, but you can’t shake the feeling that the terror isn’t over yet. 

The only source of light comes from the headlights and taillights of the SUV. You’ve changed tires before and have no problem this time either. You glance back every few seconds as you work, but nothing appears. Within ten minutes, the new tire is fitted onto the car and you are stuffing the damaged one in the trunk with your bike. 

You slam the trunk closed and wait, a sudden chill coming over your body. You can see your breath in the night air. Every nerve in your body is on high alert. Your senses scream a warning to your brain, but it comes too late. 

Cold, bony hands grab your shoulders and spin you around. A skeletal face presses up to yours, breathing chilly, smelly air into your face. You are locked in its embrace as the thing’s teeth knock against yours, almost kissing you. It holds you tight and you can feel yourself slipping away, every thought and memory draining from your mind. 

The skeleton lets go but you don’t notice, standing in a daze. Your body feels foreign and you don’t remember who you are or what you’re doing. Where are you? What is your purpose? What is this hunger you feel? 

Your body moves without your control, but you don’t fight it. You open the passenger side door and slide into the car. 

“Did you fix it?” The man behind the wheel asks. 

You cock your head at him. Who is this person? Why does he seem to know you? Why are you in his car? 

The man stares at you intently. “Are you okay?” 

But you don’t know the answer to his question. In fact, you don’t know anything anymore. 

THE END