Twilight zone

She knew she had it bad when she got up from the bed and felt disoriented. Stumbling towards her bedroom door, she opened it and peered out. The landing outside her bedroom was dark except for what was illuminated by the light from her room. The dark body of the bookcase towered to her left and she could see the shadows cast by the banister on the wall. The sun had set while she had been reading and no one had turned the lights on. She was alone upstairs.

For a moment she hesitated. Half-formed nightmares and a sense of impending doom gripped her before she realised she was being silly. Switch on the light, she told herself. She took a step away from the doorway and pressed the light switch. The light flickered for a couple of seconds before its white fluorescence steadied and illuminated the landing. There were no shadows anymore. No demonic creatures bent on torture and murder, no homicidal bogeymen with claws dripping with blood. Letting out the breath she did not realise she had been holding, she chuckled to herself. Silly girl, she thought, that’s what comes from reading too much Peter Straub and Dean Koontz in quick succession. You get too absorbed then you get strange ideas in your head.

She remembered the time when she woke up one morning and the first thing that crossed her mind was whether the lawyer was okay, whether he was still safe and alive. Then she got confused and thought, hang on, I’m fifteen – I don’t have any lawyer friends. She remembered having to sit on her bed for a few moments and sort out in her head what was real and what was not. Silly girl, she told herself again, if you can’t read horror, then don’t read it.

She made her way downstairs, noticing as she did, that the house was unusually quiet. Normally at this time, her parents would have been home from work, dinner would be boiling on the stove. She stopped at the small window halfway down the stairs. It was very black outside, the yellow street lamps seeming to struggle to against the dark of the evening. Funny, she thought, if it was this late in the evening, mum would have been yelling at her to come down for dinner already.

The lights were on in the living room and the dining room – in fact the whole ground floor was lighted, but no one seemed to be there. She stood in the middle of the kitchen looking at the empty stove. She turned and went back to the living room and looked outside the front window. Both her parents’ cars were parked in the driveway. She went out the living room and walked back upstairs to her parents’ bedroom. First she listened at the door. It was quiet inside. Maybe they’re asleep, she thought. She tapped quietly at the door at first, then knocked louder. There was no answer. She turned the door knob and pushed the door open. It was dark inside but she did not need to switch the lights on to see that her parents were not there. Their bed was messed up, which meant that they both must have come home from work since her father always made the bed without fail in the mornings.

She searched all the bedrooms, then went downstairs and searched there again. Their garden was small but she still walked to the edge of the garden and back, even though she could see all of it from their porch. They hadn't gone jogging by the looks of it because their sport shoes were still by the door.

Where were they?

She looked up at the sky, not so much for inspiration or to cry to some All-Seeing Being but because that was the only place she hadn't looked, ridiculous as it seemed to her.


Note: This blogger let her imagination run away with her one day and made up a little story so as not to scare herself anymore. She also advises against reading too many horror novels in isolation, then falling asleep.