Through Glass(17)

The sounds around me continued to increase as they came closer. The walls shaking as they destroyed the last of my life. I listened as the destruction of my parents’ room ended. All the while, my heart painfully thrashed against my chest.

I waited; waited for them to come, waited for the noises of destruction to find me. Yet nothing came except the slow tapping of claws against the wooden floor in the hallway outside my room.

I tensed as the door to my room finally opened again. The quick pace of claws against wood was loud as the thing moved through my room, opening drawers and pushing objects from my dresser onto the floor. I heard the destruction, my eyes following the noise, although I couldn’t see it occurring. The things could see through the dark. Even if I could move, even if I could get away, I had nowhere that I could go that the thing would not find me.

As quickly as the monster had come in, it left. The clicking of talons resounding through my house before the front door closed with a bang. The familiar sound of the ancient, wood door seeming foreign and unwanted as it closed and the screeches left me to the silence once again.

And I waited.

I didn’t dare move, it wasn’t worth it to try. I didn’t dare leave the space under the bed. I could still feel the vibrating explosions as they moved on. I continued to hear the screams ringing through the air as one life after another was taken.

Whatever they were, they were killing everything.

I listened to the screams from where I was huddled under the bed, wishing I could block out the sound. I didn’t want to hear Cohen’s screams amongst the sounds that seemed to be moving inside of me. I didn’t want to hear the screams of my mother, my brothers. I didn’t want to hear anything.

I clung to the carpet, listening, silent tears dripping down my cheeks as I said good-bye to everything.

In less than an hour, the world had fallen apart. I didn’t want to think about what they were doing, or who they had killed. I wouldn’t think about why they had spared me. I didn’t want to think about being left.

About being alone.

The explosions continued to rattle my house for minutes, hours, days. Everything blended together in the darkness until the noises lessened to nothing more than an echo in the distance. The silence deafening in the darkness. Still, I stayed crammed under the bed, even though the pain in my body had gone; even though the screams and tears had left. I lay there, my fingers gripping the carpet until a dull grey light filled the sky and gave me back my sight.





My eyes perked up as the room lightened, shapes slowly swimming back into view as a dim light seeped through the window. My body moved on instinct, squeezing me out from under the bed as if the sun was calling me to wake.

However it wasn’t the sun, not really. It was a dull replica of light that seeped from the sky as if the ebony blanket that covered the world wasn’t quite strong enough to keep the sun out. It stretched over the world with that dim grey light of dawn; shapes remained undefined and colors faded to nothing.

It wasn’t much, although it was definitely better than the previous gloom.

I blinked my eyes furiously, waiting for my eyes to adjust after being kept in the darkness for so long.

I slowly slipped myself out from underneath my bed, my body aching from the remains of whatever the creatures had done to me with their screams. My movements were slow as I emerged. My shoulders knit together as I tried to regulate my breathing while my eyes scanned what was left of my room in fear of seeing one of them lurking in the corner, ready to attack.

My breath came out in a strangled puff as I freed my legs from underneath my bed. I curled against the frame as I looked around me, my clothes sticky against my skin from the layer of sweat that covered me.

I had expected the monsters to destroy everything; to rip the room to shreds. In a way, they had, though not completely. Each of my drawers were turned over, the perfectly arranged figurines on my dresser scattered and broken.

It wasn’t the mess that caught me off guard, however, it was what they had done to those items. The red digital clock on my dresser had been thrown across the room; the upturned display black like the rest of the world. I would have thought it to be simply because the power to the house had been cut, but no, the battery compartment had been emptied.

I looked from my dresser to the lamp on my desk to see the bulb was crushed and the cord had been pulled from the base. They had taken away any source of light, any way for me to create light.

They had taken it all. Cast our world into endless night. The only light we now had was a false light; gray and dead as they had now made the world. The monsters had taken away everything that was familiar and pulled out shapes and shadows that you could only see when the lights were turned out. It brought out monsters. I could feel the darkness seep into me, the fear and desperation that it brought rolling over me in waves.

I moved away from my bed toward the contents of my dresser drawer that had been spread over the carpet. My fingers reaching for my SpongeBob flashlight that my mother had given me for emergencies. I pulled it toward me, my teeth clenching to see it broken in two.

I held the pieces in my hands; the yellow of the flashlight looking dull in the dim light. The things were scared of the light, that much was clear. If they had targeted the light in my room, then finding a light source anywhere else in the house was going to be a nightmare.

Even so, I had to try. I had to get out of here. Out of the hell they had brought and find the sun again. The sun that had shown brightly what felt like days ago while Cohen had held me.