Night Light

I had recently went on a service trip to the Philippines with some of my closest friends and it was all just bliss. We were scheduled to stay for two weeks, these weeks full of hard work to support the self-supported community center stationed in the middle of the town. The food was great, the weather was perfect (except for the two thunderstorms) and the people there were just so, pure. The bedrooms weren't things to be all-too excited for. You could bunk with about 4 people in a room which had an A/C to it with a fan in the middle of the ceiling. Once the moon had ascended above the building, the room wouldn't have that dark-blue tint to it, and everything would go black. Trying to see things in the room was like asking a blind person to go through an obstacle course, it just wasn't possible. For a source of light, I'd use my ipod to see through the luggage bags on the floor.

Now to the main point...

On the ninth night, something had happened in the room. Something that I can't explain even to this date. As I had said before, the nights were alright. As long as the A/C was turned on, it was all just fine. Unfortunately, the A/C hadn't been working on this night, causing us to be a bit more uneasy with each other. We had opened  the window hoping for cool breezes to come through. We were all on-edge as the smallest thing would trigger one of us into getting angry. You can't blame us, we had been getting six hours of sleep a night while working in the mud all day and coming back to the room dehydrated. One of the kids in the room wasn't exactly the easiest to get along with, and we all knew that as well. He'd pull off small jokes here and there and we'd all pitch in our laughs just a little bit to satisfy his pitiful attempt at cracking a joke. That night, he had cracked a joke (more like an insult) to the kid sleeping under him. Within a matter of minutes, the whole room was in chaos. Pillows were flying and bad words could have probably been heard by the villagers in the outskirts of the town. This had gone on for about ten minutes when it had all died down. We were all too tired to shout and fight, so instead we had all fell asleep. I stayed up though, me and the joker's bunkmate that is. We whispered to each other, making small talk and asking if either one of us was going to try and stay up the whole night. We agreed on doing so, and just telling the supervisor that we had caught colds due to working in the sewer pits the day before. Before talking about manly stories of brawls that we've had in our more younger years, something had caught our attention. My companion had pointed out that there had been a figure in the corner of the room the whole time and that it was bothering him. The moon was giving just enough light to let me see an outline of a tall body, but it was still too dark to tell. Instinctively, I asked if it was one of our friends but there hadn't been a reply.

"Very funny" I said while jumping down to the bed under mine but before I could tackle my friend in the corner, I heard a yelp coming from under my foot. I immediately grew still. The hairs on my back stood up, my whole mouth went numb and my skin began to crawl. In a second, I counted the room. There was me, the kid that I was talking to,  the kid above him, the kid that I had just jumped on. There were five people in the room.

I quickly took my ipod and turned it on facing the corner and this is what I saw:

A tall man, ranging from about 8-9 feet in length with long lanky hands wrapped around his frail body. He had a straight jacket that was all torn and had nothing for his bottom half of the body.

I screamed and as I threw my ipod at him he smiled to the point where his mouth would have ripped apart. The whole room went black and all we heard were frantic footsteps going all around the room as if he was running in circles. The stomping sounded as if he was raising his knees high enough to make a loud thumping sound on the wooden floor underneath us. Within a mattter of moments, it had all stopped. Somehow, we had all managed to sleep after swearing and theatening the darkness telling it if he came any closer, we would kill him.

The following day we had all talked to each other about what we saw. I took my ipod which had a crack in it because of the throw. We had all joked around about it and forgot about the incident after about five days, passing it off as something in the past. Now here's the thing that scares me. After returning home, I had looked through all my ipod photos when I noticed a dark photo making itself unique compared to all the other bright sunny photos. The picture... it was a picture of us all, sleeping.