Another Day
A radical moment of irrationality and fear – it woke her up with a start, her heart pumped drum messages and her eyes were so wide, so afraid. Even after she had leapt out of bed, switched on all the lights in the house, she could feel it – something, someone was there, watching.
It wasn’t the first time; she was attuned to the sense of it now, and the sensor alarms hadn’t been tripped, but the camera was recording – so she sat in the corner chair and clicked the remote, watched what was there.
The big tree, the one at the back fence of her long garden, moved and swayed in the wind. It looked like an old-fashioned photo in tones of sepia and pewter. Except for the darkness beneath its shadow. The blackness that was deeper than black, that was an emptiness, a void. No light, no reflection. A stillness that was at odds with the wind, with the movements of the branches and leaves above it.
The only piece that moved was the coal-red eye – the single eye in the centre of the void. No eyelashes, no sclera, no pupil – just the red-black burn of a single eye; intelligent, far-seeing, seeking.
It was back. And it would keep coming back. She knew that. But she wasn’t going to just wait for it to act. There were things she could do to stop it – there had to be, right? Other people had survived this thing, survived its attention. Surely. Otherwise . . .
No, she couldn’t think that. Would not doom herself to those words. Once uttered, they would become real, and real is power, and power is capable of . . . of course!
***
The tree, so beautiful, such wonderful shade in the long summer days, now gone. Nothing left but the pile of timber – some to go for furniture and products, but most would be carted away for firewood. It was sad, but now there was nowhere for it to hide. No bushes, no shrubs, and now, no tree. Just a flat expanse of lawn and a timber fence that surrounded her territory.
Three nights she slept, three nights of no fear, no sweat of irrational emotional outburst – the sense of it faded, dissipated like fertiliser in the rain.
On the fourth night, the windows rattled, the sensor alarms sounded the klaxon horn, the camera recorded.
She leapt out of bed, a cold sweat, groggy, unprepared – wobbly with shock and that horrible moment when her heart stopped. She waited for it to start again, to thump or bang or drum. It didn’t. The heart stayed silent.
The only sounds: bangs on the door, the medical alarm, the whirr and skirr of the record function. Flashing red and white lights on the ambulance cut the darkness of the garden – one place remained, a void of darkness with no reflection and no enlightenment.
Copyright CS Dunn 2016
If you like scary stories, here is the link to the book that’s free this week (the above story isn’t in it): Speculations of a Dark Nature, Vol II – Alone in the Dark. [One week only!]
