Monday, May 9, 2011

Nightmare: Tales Of The Amulet IV

Something was there. Right in the corner... I could almost feel it.

My breathing came in swift bursts. I consciously tried to regulate it; there wasn't much point in huffing and puffing myself into a heart attack. But the fear was in the driver's seat and if it wanted to tighten my chest in crashing agony... well, it was going to whether I liked it or not.

I don't scare easily; I've been a rabid consumer of the horror genre (TV, movies, books... et al) for nearly as long as I can recall. But damn it, when there's something in the room --right there in the corner-- the terror is as palpable as taste.

I think it moved. I start shuddering breaths again as I try --like a child in rapture at a TV show tries-- to tear my focus away from the... whatever it is... in the corner of my room but I just can not look away. It might leap if I'm not looking.

I feel and hear my throat catch and click as I try to swallow myself back into the fact that it's just a room and whatever that shadow is is not going-- shit, it moved again. Damn it. If I can move my legs a little maybe the sound will make it twist a bit so I can... It moved again.

My legs don't want to work. It seems my unnatural fear has usurped my limbs for itself and is insisting on holding me down like some kind of flailing hospital patient. I don't like that at all. I need to move... I need to jostle myself back to my room and not this gaping, shadowed tomb I find myself stuck in. Movement is the key and it always seems to knock a little non-fiction back into one's head. I gotta try that again...

With a whole lot of conscious effort I managed to shift my feet back and forth, making little, soft whisks under my sheet like a couple of anxious animals. And the corner shadow did more than move; it vibrated. I swear, it looked like it was in two places at once and it rotated between the two; back and forth, back and forth like a other-worldly pendulum. It was in the shadows, and then it wasn't... and then it was. All I could do was stare. And I began to cry! Not in the saddened, heart-felt weeping of a sorrowful situation, but out of absolute and all-encompassing fear. I was literally frightened to point of tears.

But why? I knew it couldn't be real... right? It couldn't possibly be a thing and not just a something... a something right from my room like a shirt or... it moved again. This time I'm almost sure it --what?-- slithered? It undulated and gesticulated like an eel! Oh shit, it really is a thing, isn't it? I' questioning myself at this point... myself and what I know to be sanity and insanity...

And then I heard noises. From the living room I could hear what sounded like the television: monotonous, muted gabbing the way a blocking wall can make it sound. Somehow I was only slightly more comforted...

Because I live alone...

The shadow coughed. A throaty, deep-crawed, guttural cough. And then it chuckled...

I can't lie here and write anymore... I need --