Just Your Average Night

“Ok, time for bed” … is what I said to the empty living-room. It was getting late, and the internet no longer amused me. I picked up my cell phone, rooted through the couch cushions until I located the remote, and turned off the television that had been nothing but background noise for the last few hours.

I made sure the front and back doors were securely locked, walked around the back of the couch, and turned off the only light. A tap on the screen of my phone created just enough light to keep from busting a toe on an errant table leg.

Because my cats have an evil tendency to lie in the middle of the hallway, I aimed the small amount of light from my phone directly in front of my tired and shuffling feet. I’d only covered a small distance before I knew, from many nights of this same regimen, that I was getting close to the bedroom door. At this point my arm started the slow upward arc that would eventually illuminate the now pitch-black opening to the comfort of my room.

The light emanating from my cell was quite dim, and this action had become quite rote, so my arc was about waist level before I noticed a slight variation of the familiar black of the open doorway. At that point, and in a disturbingly short amount of time, five things happened nearly simultaneously:

My arm, the arm carrying the phone, continued to rise in its predetermined arc, having been an object in motion which would stay in motion.

I released a small gasp and exclaimed to my husband that his sudden appearance in the dark had startled the breath from me.

I remembered that my husband was at work.

The light arc reached its apex on a face of protruding nail-like teeth. A face suspiciously bereft of eyes, with a gaping, oozing, bloody pit where a nose should have been.

The light went out.

Credit To – Julie Oliver – Grand Pubaa of Shaddow Domain