Spin the Casket

It started from a dare.

My friends and I were playing a game of spin the bottle. You know Truth or Dare, the game horny 17-year-olds play just to get to see each others' underwear and, sometimes, something more. We'd played this game since we were 11 - I, Sidney, Lola, and Terence.

Except for today, we had a new friend. Terence's cousin, Nina, was with us. She was one of these goth girls - dark lipstick, piercings under her lips, and black, drizzled hair. She was the type of girl you couldn't take home to mama'.

We all did our best to accommodate her while trying not to look freaked out. At least, we were all doing a better job than Terence. His parents were Catholics, and I was pretty sure Nina was the textbook painting of the antiChrist.

Jeez, they wouldn't even carry her to church.

So there we were on my porch, playing spin the bottle. Sidney was always trying to dare me to take off my bar, so I had to sit at an angle where the bottle couldn't link us. Then I had to sit opposite Lola, who would never fail to ask me to do something stupid and embarrassing just for laughs.

The game went on for an hour, Sidney as usual making up the most perverted dares - he even asked Nina to take off her shirt. But she wasn't wearing a bra - and there were tattoos all over her upper body, just stopping below her deltoids on her arms.

The fateful moment came when the bottle linked Nina and me. She looked at me with a little smirk and asked me to chant some incantation of some sort. She said it was an initiation into the 'Goth Lifestyle'. I was freaked out when I was done with the chant, but she laughed out loud and said she was joking.

We all had a good laugh after that, and soon, night came, and our group disbanded.

That night, as I slept, I dreamt when I and Nina gathered at my porch, and she dropped a bottle on the ground and asked me to spin it.

Except it was a little casket.

"I'm not going to play this weird game!"

"Oh, you will. You can't back out of a contract you signed," she said, handing me a parchment containing... the incantation! And there was my signature.

"What is this?"

"It is a contract with death. You are going to be the emissary of death to your friends, family, and everyone you have a connection with," she said, smiling. "You have to spin that casket, and whatever name appears inside it after you spin must die tonight."

"Just tonight?"

"No, forever. Until you find someone else to play. I'm not really here for the holidays. My parents, friends, and... anyone I have ever cared about is dead. If I didn't find a new 'ambassador', I would be killed."

"You little!"

"Spin. Or death will come after you instead."

My hands quivering, I placed my palm on the casket. It was cold to the touch, et it radiated an inner heat I couldn't explain. I turned it once and it gave three spins before popping open.

That name! It couldn't be! No! This had to be a dream...

The next morning, Lola was dead.