Five Stories for the Dark Months Read Free

careful voice she’d taken to using
lately.
    Adie spread one blanket across the
old tweed couch cushions. “I’m sleeping down here tonight.” She had
given up explaining herself, since they never believed her
explanations anyway.
    There was a flurry of whispers.
“Um... okay, honey,” her father said. She heard him close his
newspaper. “Good night.”
    She stacked most of the throw
pillows at one end of the couch, then spread the other blankets on
top of them. As she slid between the covers of her makeshift bed,
she heard chairs scrape in the kitchen. A moment later, the kitchen
light went out, leaving the downstairs infinitely vast and dark.
“Good night, sweetie,” her mother called.
    “Night, Mom. Night,
Dad.”
    In the darkness,
her hearing grew sharper. She listened to her parents footsteps as
they climbed the stairs and started down the hallway. They were
still whispering, as if they thought she didn’t know what they were
talking about. One of them stepped on the creaking board outside
Adie’s bathroom. There was a soft click— someone turning off the hallway
light—and the darkness deepened. A moment later, Adie heard her
parents’ door squeak open and shut.
    Now the living room became an alien
wasteland, alive with strange black shadows that seemed to move
whenever she tried to look at them. Shivering, she pulled a blanket
all the way over her head. Like everything in the linen closet, it
smelled vaguely of mothballs, although her family had never used
them.
    She tried to reassure herself that
she was safe. For one thing, her parents were probably still awake.
They always sat up talking and reading for a while after they’d
changed into their pajamas. In her mind she saw the clean white
light of their reading lamps, heard the placid murmur of their
voices. It made her feel a little better to know that they’d hear
if anything strange started to happen.
    Then she remembered the menacing
stare of the thing behind the mirror. It had traveled from the
bathroom to her room so easily. What was to stop it from traveling
to her parents’ room, as well? Her reassurance twisted into anguish
in her gut, but she did not dare climb up the stairs to warn
them.
    The house grew very quiet, and into
the silence there came a dream. Adie was walking. She had in her
arms a long, thin parcel: the mirror from her room, safely covered
once again.
    Something was pounding against the
glass beneath the sheet. Adie knew that if she didn’t lock the
mirror away, the thing inside it would get out. Then it would get
her, and maybe after it killed her it would take on her face and
kill her parents, too. Her bedroom closet was the nearest safe
place to put it.
    As Adie tried to
shoulder open the sliding door, fingers rose from beneath the
sheet. They clawed at her arms, leaving welts that stung like cat
scratches. She forced back a scream as she wrestled the mirror into
the closet. “You are nothing, ” hissed a voice from beneath
the glass. “You are food.” Sharp teeth bit into her neck just as Adie hurled
the mirror into the corner. She heard the glass crack, and saw the
sheet start to fall. Leaping backwards, she dragged the door
shut.
    For a moment, there was
silence.
    Then something began to scrabble
against the door.
    Adie screamed herself awake. For a
moment she lay paralyzed in the darkness, soaked in sweat. The
stifling air was full of harsh, desperate breathing, as if an
animal’s lungs had been ripped from its body and left to die on
their own.
    Gradually the breathing slowed, and
Adie realized it was her own. The last black shreds of the
nightmare fell away. She remembered that she was still curled up in
the darkness beneath a nubbly, scratchy old blanket that smelled
vaguely of mothballs, on a couch that under ordinary circumstances
she’d have gotten in trouble for sleeping on. This was the living
room, not her bedroom at all, and the mirror she’d dreamed about
was nowhere nearby.
    Her mouth was as dry as