Creeping Caliginosity

It was 12:51 in the morning when I was plucked from my bed. My eldest sister hastily picked me up from my restful position and carried me towards the bathroom. I could barely see her expression through the dark, but I could tell it was fear that gripped her. Gun shots rang through the air. The shots came directly below our feet, accompanied by harsh screaming. My sister immediately stopped at that sound. She sorrowfully whispered our Mother’s name, took a moment to silently grieve, then continued trudging towards our predestinated location. I continued to plead with my sister, begging her to tell me what was going on. Silence ensued from her lips, answering my questions with uncertainty.

Once we were inside the bathroom, my sister enabled the lock immediately. I now realized she must have picked this room specifically because it was one of the few rooms that had a locking capability. She set me down on the ground, and began weeping for our Mother. I still could not grasp what sort of situation we were in as I perplexed over the gun shots, the screaming, and my sister’s tears. I inquired as to what was happening at the present time, but received only more tears in response. We sat in the darkened bathroom, listening to our father scream and curse. Gun shots and heavy footsteps occurred every once and a while, but soon died out, much like the groans of agony from our Mother.

Eventually all was silent. My elder sister grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that some horrible thing had broken into the house. She said that it had invaded the houses of neighbors, and that their screams had disrupted the sleep of our parents. She also stated that she was ordered to protect me from any danger, by command of our parents. I was absolutely mortified by my sister’s tales. A grotesque sense of dread washed over me as I stared into the dim confines of our bathroom. Absolute silence only added tension and paranoia to the miles of questions running through-out my head. What did this intruder want? Why did it attack our family and neighbors? Moreover, what WAS it that had descended so viciously upon our heads? All of these things and more wanted to explode from my lips. I wanted more then anything in the world to interrogate my sister, but she put her hand over my mouth, not wanting me to speak and give away our position to whatever lurked beyond the thin, bathroom walls.

Off in the distant end of the hallway outside, we heard the stairway groan. The boards didn’t make a short moan, but more of a prolonged noise, as if they were on the verge of snapping. Whatever was outside, it must have been gigantic, or otherwise very heavy. My sister looked at me with eyes of great desperation and horror. The giant monstrosity took heavy stomps down the hallway; steps befitting that of a giant sloth or another sluggish creature. Soon enough, it was right in front of the bathroom door, just feet away from where we were sitting.

Time seemed to stand still. The monster didn’t move, and neither did we. It was only a few minutes – or what seemed like hours – afterward when we heard scratching on the door, like a lost puppy wanting to come inside a former masters’ house. As we slowly backed away from the door and inched towards a corner in the bathroom, the scratching intensified, as if it was now aware of our presence, and was desperate to get in.

It wasn’t long before the demonic scratching stopped. Instead, now the being began sniffing and jiggling the locked doorknob, like it was some breed of feral hunter. It was right then when we noticed some sort of ooze creeping underneath the doorway. We both cringed as it flowed into the room from between the cracks of the door. As our eyes focused to the window moonlight coming into the room, we realized that the crimson ooze was thickened blood. This time it was I who had to calm down my sister, and tell her that everything was going to be fine in the end. Tears began flowing down her face again, and gathered on my hand which covered any remnant of her voice.

A series of pounds rattled down on the door along with disturbing sounds of deep sighing, regurgitation, and high pitched whistling. It was a symphony of sounds only Satan himself could compose, and which few could describe its fiendish ways with any accuracy. My sister and I tried our hardest to calm our sickened stomachs once we saw a pool of the beast’s vomit crawl under the door and mingle with the already present lake of blood. Through strained gags, I saw a glimmer in the pool. I signaled to my sister to stay where she was as I nervously crawled towards the object.

Dad’s wedding ring.

Other objects lay in the pool as well. Scraps of flesh, slivers of bone, and an accessory here and there, like Dad’s wedding ring. I didn’t dare touch anything, but quietly added my teardrops to the collection of remains as I remembered my parents and how good they had been to both me and my older sister.

Minutes passed by us at a considerable pace. I could only see the time from my sister’s glow-in-the-dark watch, as well as the bathroom clock, which remained lit by moonlight. The monster outside stopped doing anything to the door, and had slinked back down the hallway from whence it came. We were once again thrown into eerie silence. My sister really started shivering and whimpering now. The utter suspense and not knowing what was in the hallway had crushed her nervous system. I crawled back over and delivered a hug to her, but that didn’t seem to make a difference in any way. I began pacing back and forth in the small area of the bathroom that wasn’t covered in the bloody pool. I glanced at the clock every now and then, and finally decided that we should try to make a run for it. I hoisted my sister to her feet and told her that we should make a dash toward the downstairs door. If we made it down there, I figured we’d be out in the open, and able to run somewhere else, away from the abomination that slithered around within the domain of our household.

My sister sat there still shaking. She had recovered from her initial shock, but her voice still quaked when she disapproved of my idea. Apparently, she was just fine with sitting in the corner of the upstairs bathroom, merely waiting for the monster to break in.

The silence was broken by a heavy, exasperated, blood curdling sigh above us. It was the kind of sigh that a dying human being would make if they were in extreme pain and had some sort of lung disorder. Following the banshee-like sigh was a low, throaty series of coughs. I looked up and realized that something was in the ceiling vent. I could see nothing in the pitch black grating, but noticed that blood began dripping through the crevices. My sister shrieked in terror as she gazed upon some unspeakable horror in the vent. I had turned my back to it to grab her hand and pull her up as she screamed, so I was not subjected to its appearance, thank God. I slammed my free hand down on the door lock, sharply twisted it and flung the door wide open. To my surprise, there was a message, scrawled on the door. It appeared as if it was carved out with fingernails.

“YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE, MY PRETTIES.” It read.

My hair stood on end as I laid my eyes upon the crude message. I heard the crashing of the ceiling grate hitting the floor within the bathroom, and quickly slammed the door shut. I pushed my sister forward, forcing her to move towards our escape route, instead of fixating on the madness that dwelled within the bathroom. I tried my best to maintain traction on the blood-ridden floor, but I slipped every now and again, none-the-less.

As we stumbled down the stairs, I realized that we were once again in total silence. It appeared that the only noises through-out the house were coming from our own, reckless footsteps. We had staggered from our once safe haven and into the bowels of our abode. I do believe the thing that made me most uneasy about our situation was the fact that the monster lurking in the shadows of our home was able to appear almost anywhere, with great stealth. True, it had made a lot of noise while lurching down the hallways towards the door, but I had not realized that it was directly above my head until it sighed. I was anticipating it to be behind me, claws dying to rend my flesh from bone.

We were two sibling pioneers venturing into a pool of moonlight. Beyond that laid the land of absolute darkness.  As we tried our best to tip toe across the rooms, I noticed a blood stained figure laying in the beams of pale, sickly light that ebbed and flowed through the window tapestries.

Father.

Long spent shotgun shells were scattered around his body. Pieces of his flesh were torn off, and a majority of his skull was missing. Blood was a profane element, overshadowing all other colors and concepts of the room. Even the moon herself was drowned out by the ocean of death.

My sister wished to go to his corpse and make some sort of peace, but I held her back as I saw something shift in the far distance of our house. Even though the shadows allowed for essentially no vision at all, I could tell that something was amiss. I hastily took a few steps back, pushing my sister along with me. There was something sinister in the gloom beyond our father’s corpse, and it was a presence neither of us could begin to comprehend.

The moon’s desperately needed light ebbed away, throwing us into complete darkness. I covered my sister’s mouth in an instant; certain that she would scream. As soon as the silent darkness had begun, it was broken by the sounds of rustling and dragging. My eyes shifted nervously, trying desperately to dilate my eyes more, and see what we were up against. Sweat crept down my brow and my legs began to quake. I was thrown out of my element, and I had no idea what I could do about it.

Within a few more moments, the moon’s light bled back into the room, and our father’s corpse was gone. From within the darkness came the sickening, disturbing sound of a child’s laughter. High pitched, and playful. The laughter seemed to go on and on until I thought I was going to lose my mind; staring off into the black of night.

Without any sort of foreplay, the laughter ceased. It didn’t die off first or diminish in sound, it just stopped mid-laugh. My hair stood up straighter then it ever did before. I heard the giant crunch of jaws snapping bones, and scraps of flesh fell out of the darkness and into the moonlight.

I grabbed my sister’s hand without a moment’s pause and bolted towards the front door of our house. However, I soon tripped on something bulky and hard. My sister went tumbling to the ground with me, and we both scrambled to our feet, scared that the darkness would take us too.

I looked back to see what it was I had tripped on, and soon realized that it was our mother. At least, what was left of her. I couldn’t quite tell through the hazy black night, but it appeared as if she had been turned inside-out, or had change shapes into some unrecognizable form. My eyes bulged at this unsightly horror, but I knew that I must press on toward our escape.

Off in the way corner of our house, the sound of lips smacking and heavy footsteps preyed upon my ears. I quickly patted down the key rack by the door until I came across the 2nd to the last key set: Our deadbolt keys. As I jammed the key into the lock and turned, the pace of the footsteps increased almost exponentially. It became more like gallops as I flung the door open. Just as the sounds of the monster’s hunger came within 3 feet of our bodies, I ran out of the door as fast as I could, pulling my broken-minded sister behind me.

We ran out into the streets, sobbing. I gasped for breath through tears as I looked back as the pitch black doorway. The interior of our house seemed to be totally engulfed in ink, allowing for no visibility through the windows. For a second or two, I believed that I saw some deranged, malicious figure hunched over in the upper part of our house, glaring out the window at me, but that visage was soon gone. Even if it was there, it was an abomination beyond description through the tongues of mankind.

It was not much of a wait before we discovered that the blessed sun was rising into the sky. The horizons began to slowly light up with brilliant shafts of day, piercing through the loathsome darkness and eradicating the foul nightly creatures. I sobbed some more at the thought of safety, and even though I smiled at the day, I remembered the night, along with the figure in the window, and I couldn’t help but wonder…

“What will become of us, when night falls once again?”