What Waits In The Dark

She doesn’t notice them at first, doesn’t hear them, and never sees them. They weren’t there before, she’s sure of it, but she doesn’t know when they got there. Nor does she know how they got there.

It’s late one evening in spring, when the night air has finally sweetened from its old, bitter winter self that she first becomes aware of “them”. The girl wanders through her dark home, holding a glass of water ready to call it a day. She walks slowly out of the kitchen, sipping at her drink and flicking the lights off, and she’s only a few feet from the stair case when something slides past her legs. She looks down, expecting to see the retreating shadow of her cat somewhere, but he’s nowhere to be seen. She ignores it, shrugs it off as nothing and goes up to her room. When she’s finally settled down in bed, covered in her blankets and warm and comfortable, she feels the small delicate feet of her cat tiptoeing over her bed. She doesn’t think much of it, until her door creaks open and in the dim light she sees her cat come in. This makes her chest tighten and fingers twitch with anxieties she dismisses as being childish.
It’s just in her head.
Surely, it’s only her imagination.

When a week later she hears scuffling out in the hall just outside her bedroom door, and knows it isn’t her cat, because he’s sitting right next to her, she feels the anxieties return. It’s late, very late and she’s been up reading. No one else is awake aside from her cat, who is now bristling and staring at the door. The girl hops off her bed in a burst of courage and swings her door open. There’s nothing there aside from the tiny scratches all along the bottom of her door. This only makes her angry and convinced they have a pest problem. Her parents call exterminators, but they never find any traces of anything living in the house. No feces, no other damages to the house, no holes and no nests. So the girl tries to forget, tries to brush it off.

For two weeks she lives in peace, and never again. The next incident convinces her that there’s something there.
She’s on the couch, watching a movie quietly late Saturday night when she hears it. The scuffling, the sounds of tiny feet on the tiles and wood floor. She hears too many feet, it doesn’t sound like her cat at all. She sees one, only briefly and in the shadows across the room. She can’t even make out what it is, but it darts from one dark corner to the next along with a few others which are harder to see. So she screams. She screams and cries out to her parents in fear and confusion. But when they come, the things have gone, and they’re nowhere to be found.

“It was just your imagination darling,”

“It’s so late, why don’t you just go to sleep.”

Her parents tell her this, and they tell her the same thing every night after, when she thinks she sees something from the corner of her eye. She knows it’s not in her imagination though, because she never sees the shadows anywhere else, except her own home. Things don’t get any better for the girl. She can’t sleep as well as she could before, and nothing puts her at ease. She’s stopped trying to tell her parents because she’s afraid. She doesn’t tell her friends, and eventually everyone is back to their normal lives. Everyone but the girl.

The “things” have multiplied. At first there were only a few, but now there are so many. They sit in her room, just dark lumps among the shadows, watching her. She tries not to look, but she’s afraid that if she isn’t watching them, they’ll come for her. She’s right. Slowly, they move closer. She can make out the pale reflections of their ugly little eyes in her darkened room. They’re hideous, and gutsier now. She’ll see them earlier in the day, but never when the sun is up. They look gray and dirty, their tiny figures are deformed and not all of them look the same. Some have four legs, others less or more. Some crawl, some climb, but they all disgust her. And yet she can’t make them go away, because when she approaches them, they disappear, behind closed doors or walls and she doesn’t know where they go. The girl thinks, for a while, that maybe if she hurt them or frightened them they’d leave. She knows they’re not friendly, because she hears them hiss and even speak. She can’t understand their whispered words though and she doesn’t want to. She tries scaring the creatures with a flash light in her room one night, and they sneer and hiss and bare their teeth. She never wanted a good look at them in the first place, so maybe the light wasn’t such a good idea. The fact that one attacks her, physically scratches and tears at her leg before another takes off with her flash light only further proves her plan was a failure to begin with. Still, she tells no one because it’s not that bad.  

But it is that bad, they follow her at night when she roams the house, grabbing at her heals and hissing at her when she passes by. Her cat has also disappeared, nothing but a few bloody paw prints staining the hallways floor broads left in his wake. No one sees them, no one else hears them and she doesn’t understand why. She takes a picture of one with her phone one night as she sits on the couch. She puts it on Facebook without an explanation and the photo only receives one comment.

“Ew, what is that??” She never answers the question.

The girl’s days turn into a horrible waiting game, where she dreads what is to come with nightfall. She’s only wasting time throughout the day until she returns home where she feels alone and trapped. They talk louder now too, they speak to her, not just around her. She still doesn’t want to understand, but she does hear bits that makes sense.

She spends a night at her friend’s house on the last day of school, and when she returns, her room has been ruined. Her belongings are all on the floor, broken or damaged, there are also things scratched into her bed frame.

“Can’t leave,” Is the only one she can read clearly, and she cries herself to sleep that night, too tired of all of it to care. The next night, the lights have gone out in her room, and she dares not go in. She sleeps on the couch that night and awakens to them tugging at her blankets and hair, hissing and chanting. An hour into the torment she cries out, begs them to stop, to leave her alone but they don’t. Only when the sun comes up do they retreat.
She’s grown weaker, she’s always tired now and she can barely function, yet no one takes notice. When the sun sets yet again, the girl sits in her dark room, eyes clouded and mind numb. She sees them appear through the door way, crawl out from behind the furniture, but she does not react. They come close to her, speaking softly.

“Ours...”

“You can’t leave…”

“Won’t you sleep with us…?” Their words are like ashes on the breeze and their eyes glow bright like tiny moons, floating around the room. The girl says nothing, does nothing, only stares. One comes near her, grabs at the end of her hair and tugs. She snaps out of her dreams and turns on the tiny creature. She grabs it in one swift motion, frightening the others. It cries out in terror and thrashes in her grip as she stares down at it. She takes its head in one hand and wraps her fingers around its neck with the other. She grips its head firmly and twists, a loud and clear crack silencing the room. She tosses the dead thing a few feet from her before crawling into bed and passing out. When she awakens, it’s late in the morning and the things have gone. The dead one is nowhere to be seen either. The girl gets out of bed and goes down to the kitchen to find some food. Food- when had she eaten last? When she finally makes it downstairs, she finds the mangled body of her father on the kitchen floor. He’s bruised and beaten and his neck is twisted out of place.

He’s dead.

Dead because of what she did. She cries out, drops to her knees and screams till her throat is raw. She punches at the wall and cries harder than she can ever remember crying.

It’s hopeless. Her life has ended.

She stays locked in her room for the rest of the day as the authorities show up to investigate and collect the body. She pays her mother no attention and speaks to no one. She stays in her room until the cold darkness of night returns.

 There are more tonight than the last, and they are all angry. Furious is more like it. They hiss and curse and circle her room as she sits cross legged on her bed.

“What do you want?” She whispers to the ocean of pale gray eyes and shadows.

“Your soul.” One answers and they all cry out- a sort of gut twisting howl. Tears well up in the girls eyes, and suddenly they’re advancing on her. She can only gasp as she’s grabbed by several of them from behind and tugged about. They throw her forward and this way and that, she covers her head with her arms and sobs as they pull at her. She shrieks in terror when they drag her up into the air and toss her into her window. She hits it hard, cracking the glass but it doesn’t break. Several of the things jump at her at once and suddenly they’re falling from the second story window.

She’s cut and bleeding, writhing breathlessly on the grass outside as the creatures spill out of the broken window above her, howling wildly. They never take her though, they just leave her there until morning for her mother to find. Wher her mother does find her, she’s heart-broken and crying,

“How did this happen? Who did this to you?! Please, please stop this!” Her mother pleads and cries. The girl gives her no answers, no comfort.

--

Three years have passed and the girl still sits in her dark room as they come to her and call her name. They still haven’t taken her, they haven’t tried to take her or kill her. But her mother is long dead, dragged down into the basement by them. Eaten perhaps. The girl doesn’t mind much anymore.  She just sits on her own, watching them with listless eyes. She understands them now, hears them and she knows. They have her soul, and they always will. They’ll always be there, they’ll never leave. They are not her friends nor her enemies- they are practically nothing. Just the things in the dark.

Nothing to be afraid of.

The end.