Through Glass(14)

I screamed as my anger melted into fear, my heart clenching until my scream vanished and the evil glare froze me in place. The look that the thing had given me shivered through my body before the monster vanished from sight. It left me alone with the terror and blackness that inched closer and closer, threatening to push through the glass and take me with it.

I looked away from the smothering black of the sky toward Cohen. My heart caught in my chest at seeing him staring at me, barely visible through the blackness that was swallowing us up. His hand was still pressed up against the window. His face was streaked with tears while his eyes were as wide and scared as I felt inside.

I could see my own fear mirrored in him; the realizations that I had fought acknowledging were now staring right back at me.

We were trapped inside.

We were alone.

I saw the terror in his eyes and felt mine increase. My heart was a heavy mass of lead inside of me; a lifeless piece of flesh that was draining me.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from Cohen, even though I could barely see through the black.

He was just there beyond the glass.

Too far for me to get to.





The dancing black ribbons grew and grew until I could no longer see Cohen. It had taken him away from me. I could no longer see anything. My room was as black as everything else, the light sucked from it and surrounding me in an abyss of nothing. The skin of my arms prickled where small bumps had started running up and down my arms and across my neck as I squinted into the darkness, trying desperately to make something out. I knew I was in my room—I could feel my desk under my legs, the glass against my fingers—but I saw nothing.

The blackness consumed me for one moment before the sounds of the screams outside my window grew, pulsing through the air. I turned toward the window, expecting to see something, only to be met with obscurity which caused my ears to prickle as it heightened the noise. The sounds of terror, fear and death rang in my ears as they vibrated through the air and shook the window in its pane.

The screams continued before they changed, turning into yelling and grunting that was mixed in with the sound of terror. I heard footsteps as someone ran through the darkness outside and then a man yelling back at his wife as he guided her through the dark only to end in screams of death. My hand tensed against the window as I focused on the black in front of me. My heart pulsed the blood uncomfortably through my fingers; the joints straining from the pressure that I hadn’t realized I had applied against the pane.

Another sound joined the panicked battle outside; the deep grunts of exertion, a man fighting the assailants even though he couldn’t see through the dark. My nerves tensed in fear as the sound continued to grow and swell around me; the cry of a child joining in before it, too, was silenced and another scream took its place.

I looked away from the indistinctness outside the window as the shouts kept coming in an attempt to move past it. There was nowhere to look; there was only the black that had swallowed me. My heart beat so loudly, so painfully, that my breath sped up to match it, every muscle hurting with each pulse.

The yells continued, the sounds increasing as someone fired a gun in the dark. His terror filled yells made it obvious that he was hitting monster and human alike. He screamed as he shot, the screech of the monster sounding loudly before a child’s scream interrupted it. The gun only going quiet as the owner’s life ended with his own stifled cry.

I listened to it all, my eyes shifting wildly through the darkness of my room as I searched for a way to fight back, a way to save them all. I couldn’t see anything, though. Slowly I slid off my desk, my fingers trailing over the smooth surface as I searched for the edge, something that had been so familiar before now felt foreign and scary in the dark.

I found the edge and dropped my feet to the carpet, the sound of my landing muffled by the cry of a woman that pierced the darkness like a knife. I stiffened at her voice, my head whipping toward the noise. My heart pulsed at the sound, the recognition that I fought against strangling my breathing like a vice. It couldn’t be my mother. It couldn’t be.

My hands flew out in front of me. My fingers stretching as I searched through the dark for a light. I grasped at the air until I found my lamp, the switch clicking in the darkness. I gasped as I looked through the darkness, the light from my alarm clock nowhere to be seen. The power to my house had been cut. My fingers continued their frantic search through the dark, running over blankets and walls as I began to get lost in my own room. I couldn’t focus. My breathing picked up as the memory of that scream continued to terrify me. Pricks of terror rippled over my skin as my uncertainty of the situation took over. It was a heavy weight inside of me as well as without. It seeped into me as everything good leaked out of the world.

I pushed the oppressive darkness out of me, trying to block out the sound from outside while I listened to the echo of my heartbeat in my ears. I tried to ignore the familiarity that the scream had brought me while pushing away the pain and terror hearing it had created.

Night had come and eaten everything.

I pushed the memory away just as a final shot echoed, the sound triggering a scream. The crescendo of a human’s death rang through the darkness as the last bit of life in the boundless shadows ended. The high pitched screech of death rang high and clear before it, too, faded into nothing. The monster’s call wailed as the scream faded. The thing called out through the blackness that pressed against the world until it was also gone and the silence took over. The hush came and left me alone, bringing the fear right back to the forefront of my mind.