There was a story on tape I listened to as a wee kid. About 8 years old. About a little girl who loved looking at the clouds.

Then, one day, she looked up and noticed a face in the clouds. She thought it was just the shape but noticed that the longer she looked at it, the more real of a shape it seemed to get.

When she was going to school, she glanced up out of nervousness and noticed that the cloud was bad and now it was watching her. It had nestled between two other clouds, and she could see the stormy gray eyes watching her every movement, and worse of all, it had a very defined face now...

As the week went on, the sky grew darker and cloudier until one day she was at school and saw the face, no longer hiding partially, staring hungrily at her. She paniced and screamed and screamed. Her teachers could not calm her down, so her parents were called to pick her up.

As they drove home, a thick fog rolled through the town. She kept begging for her parents to stop driving and get inside, anywhere, but they thought she was being hysterical...

Then, out of the fog came the face. Its cloudy teeth parting as the car drove closer. She screamed as the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass defeaning her...

She woke up two days later in the hospital. She had been pulled out of the wreakage of their car, which was found wrapped around a tree. Doctors blamed the fog but were puzzled... puzzled by the fact her parents were nowhere to be found...

But she knew the truth...

The episode on this cassette ends with her looking outside to see a single cloud in the blue sky...and she could see that face, ill defined...staring at her... and licking its lips...

That made me terrified of clouds.

The short story Cloud Cover from the book The Walking Trees and Other Scary Stories by Roberta Simpson. It is on audio for digital download now.