You were frozen in horror as the huge dark creature emerged the wardrobe and turned its flat face towards you, piercing white eyes fixed on the glowing phone in your trembling hands.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” The operator called out to you, but you knew it was already too late for help.
The thing seemed to absorb any light which touched it, all you could make out in the darkened room was a silhouette and that was bad enough. It was tall and lithe, it had a mane around its head and shoulders, and curved horns like a ram. The only thing which pierced its darkness was its bright white blank eyes. It had six… limbs? And seemed to be standing on two of them. Its proportions were all wrong.
You stuttered uselessly, trembling and hyperventilating. It felt like your blood was on fire. Your mind was blank with sheer terror and you were transfixed on the blank white eyes of the monster.
“Hello? Do you have an emergency?”
Without seeming to move, the creature was beside you and you flinched, your vision blurred and your head felt light. It plucked your phone out of your trembling hands and you didn’t resist. You heard the phone crunch and shatter and pieces of glass and metal tinkle onto your lap, but your gaze was still fixed on the bright white eyes of the creature looming over you. It didn’t blink.
All at once the quiet was broken.
“NO.” It commanded, and its voice was at once rattling your windows and booming inside your mind. You tried to scream but the sound which escaped you was closer to a whimper. Your voice didn’t sound like your own. The creature pointed to itself with either a long thin finger or a sharp claw, raining down more jagged phone crumbs onto your lap and floor. “STAY.”
Its glowing white eyes were trained on yours, its flat otherwise featureless face was completely devoid of any tell of its intentions. Fighting through your terrified rigidity, you nodded mutely, praying to god this was just the most vivid nightmare you’d ever experienced. After a few moments of heavy silence, its dark mane bristled slightly, seemingly pleased by your obedience. When it spoke next, its voice had changed to a foul mimicry of your own from a Friday past. “THANKS, GHOST.” And when it grinned, its whole dark face split in half to reveal rows of sharp bright white teeth. It was more than you could take: your vision went dark around the edges and you felt yourself fall to one side before losing consciousness completely.
The following day was spent in almost total silence. You’d awoken still terrified and with your cheek and shoulder covered in small cuts from fainting on top of a thoroughly crumbled phone, but alone. You’d have been able to convince yourself that it was just an awful dream with coincidental phone explosion, if not for the fact that the wooden floor of your room was stained with black ichor in the shape of footprints from something with seven toes and long claws.
You inspected the back of the wardrobe and found it intact. When you pushed it out of the way of the door, you found the deadbolts still in place. Feeling lightheaded, you brushed the worst of the broken glass and pieces of metal off your bed and got back in.
You spent at least an hour sitting in bed alternately squeezing the sheets in one hand then another, staring fixedly into the distance trying to formulate a plan.
You took stock of the situation:
Locked doors and barricades were useless.
It had the ability to be invisible.
It didn’t want you to contact anyone.
It had a lot of sharp teeth.
Okay, good. Guess you’d just have to be eviscerated by a malevolent entity of pure darkness. Good death, as things go.
You’d checked yourself into a mid-range hotel that afternoon and had been living out of your hastily packed suitcase since. Your first impulse had been ‘I’m being haunted by an other worldly entity, I deserve feather pillows’ but the thought of your credit card literally being refused at the desk embarrassed you down a pricing level, even with your life on the line. Figured.
After a few nights of peace, room service, and hot baths at odd hours, you started to convince yourself that it had all been something between sleep paralysis, a hallucination, and a mental breakdown. You’d replaced your phone. You were reading a book. Normality had been restored.
It was Friday. You’d just applied several tiny bottles of conditioner to your hair and were letting it bake in, re-reading the same page of Schizophrenia For Dummies for at least the third time whilst Bohren For Beginners oozed smoothly out of your phone, which was perched on the top of the toilet away from the majority of the steam from the bath. You’d drawn the shower curtain around the bath in an attempt to keep some of the steam in, noting the lack of extractor fan in the bathroom and keenly aware that you were going to be paying for the phone for the next two years whether it worked or not. Maybe this was the sort of thought process your parents had meant when they’d warned you ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’.
With a sigh, you gave up on the page you’d read over and over again without absorbing anything, raising your eyes to stare blankly at the tiled wall opposite you. You couldn’t help notice small blooms of black mold at the corners of the tiles and wrinkled your nose slightly in disgust. Time to get out. You split your book over the side of the bath and closed your eyes, laying down dunk your head under the water. You ran your fingers repeatedly through your hair, shaking it until it didn’t feel slimy any more. Something tugged at your awareness urging you to snap your eyes open, and your blood ran cold as you saw that a few inches from your nose were the dark flat face and the bright white eyes from your nightmares. You took in a breath to scream but a heavy paw pushed your chest down before you had the chance, plunging your whole body and face under the water. Cold panic gripped you as you held your breath and looked up at the creature through the clear stinging liquid: it was gazing down to you with an inscrutable expression. You grabbed onto its arm with both of your hands and tried to shift it from your chest, but it was immovable. You were going to drown in a mid-range hotel for trying to scream at a hallucination.
“NO.” It boomed inside your mind. You nodded and blubbed a bubble helplessly up at it, pushing impotently at its arm to try to secure your freedom. Your lungs were starting to burn and you were struck with a fresh panic, writhing under its grasp and struggling to break the surface of the water. You felt your book plop into the bath. After a long moment of study, it removed its paw from your chest but didn’t move its face from hovering a few inches above the water. For a moment you seriously considered drowning a better option than being closer to it, but your survival instincts propelled you to the surface. You gasped cold lungfuls of air and stared wide eyed and unblinking at the dark flat face looming over you. Even under the fluorescent light, it was almost impossible to make out any details apart from its lithe silhouette, mane and horns. Every aspect of it exuded darkness except its lidless white eyes, which you felt boring into your soul. You took several short gasping breaths and tried your best to smother the urgent desire to scream. You were dimly aware that your chest was bleeding where it had touched you.
“STAY FOR FRIDAY.” It screamed painfully loudly inside your mind. It was bristling, you could tell it was angry at you for leaving.
Your mind raced, desperate for anything to help you stay alive. “I had to come here for work.” You lied, hoping beyond hope that the entity didn’t have enough experience of the mortal realm to know people didn’t generally need to move into a hotel 2 miles from their house for work. It stared blankly down at you. There were a few long moments of silence. “I need to work, to live at the house-” you corrected yourself “-our house.” It didn’t move, it wasn’t breathing, it didn’t blink, it just stared silently down at you with its face a few inches above yours. “If I don’t work, I can’t get money. If I don’t get money, I can never stay in our house ever again. They’ll take me away.”
It raised its face another inch or two above the water’s surface, breathing room you were incredibly grateful for. The voice inside your mind was less painful, more questioning. “WANT TO STAY.”
“Of course I want to stay!” You gushed quickly, momentarily relief washing over you. “But I need money to keep the living at our house. You just startled me. Please don’t push me under the water any more, it really frightens me.”
It stared down at you for what felt like minutes, assessing you. After the silence, it seemed to notice that you were bleeding for the first time.
“WAIT.” It commanded, and vanished before your eyes, leaving you alone in the bathroom once more. As soon as it was gone, you sat up and hugged yourself, sobbing in terrified heaves with waves of nausea and panic crashing over you. You rocked backwards and forwards, mind blank with fear and dreadful anticipation of its return.
You had the presence of mind to pull the plug out of the bath to allow the water to drain away, but were too scared of angering it further to get out of the tub. So you sat there covered in goosebumps, cold and alone in a dry bath, dutifully waiting for your demon.
Despite girding yourself, you still visibly flinched when the 7 foot tall monstrosity of darkness reappeared in the small bathroom. Its flat face split in half completely to grin, showing off its many rows of sharp, bright white teeth which had stolen your consciousness from you the week before. “COME LOOK.” Feeling nothing but dread and resignation in the pit of your stomach, you got out of the dry bath and skirted as wide a berth as you could around the creature to walk into the main room.
Your mouth literally fell open when you saw what it had prepared for you. On the bed, piled halfway to the ceiling were crisp bales of cash. You’d never seen anywhere near this much money in your life, it was completely dumbfounding. “..Wow.” You managed, and the being let out a shrill cackle before taking up its foul imitation of your voice once more to declare: “THANKS, GHOST.”.