Spoopy Short
For anyone that likes to take comfort in hiding under their sheets...
A little challenge a friend came up with that I enjoyed thinking about. The other story I've got for the Halloween season didn't feel properly 'spooky', and I've always enjoyed short spooks that make an impact.
Hopefully I was able to pull this off! Enjoy this greatest season and stay safe lovelies! <3
Alan Wallace was never one for fantasy.
The dingo didn't believe in the supernatural. He had spent his entire life up to this dark point focusing on reality, the tangible; logic won out over everything. It had earned him a good comfortable living, if a somewhat isolated one. A big house, a nice car, plenty of colleagues that looked up to him...
As he lay in his dark bedroom, tucked tightly into his king sized bed, the thought of ghosts and spirits ate at his mind. Some primal part of his mind that still jumped at every snapped branch in a forest, or sudden jolt of noise in the distance that demanded he prepare to fight or flee.
He lay frozen in abject terror, wondering if he had been wrong about it all while he stared, petrified, beyond the foot of his bed to the double doors of his walk-in closet. They stood wide open; a gaping maw into the void that not even the slight light filtering in through the blinds from the streetlamps outside could illuminate. His sheets were soaked with cold sweat, his tail curled as close to his body as it could get.
Alan wished he didn't live alone.
Though he wasn't at all certain that he could have called for help, or even reached over to shake a partner awake even if someone had been there. His throat was seized up, afraid that even the slightest whimper would set everything off, and his body fared no better. His fingers clutched at the heavy sheets of his comforter, but he couldn't take any solace in it. He was clenching his teeth so hard he thought they would shatter. His entire body ached.
He lay there, staring. The canine thought if he didn't blink, didn't allow for that abyss to leave his attention for even the briefest of moments, he could stave off whatever horror gazed back at him until dawn. The sun would drive it away, whatever it was.
That was a paltry hope, though. Alan knew he was already doomed.
Though his eyes were locked on the blackness within his closet, his attention was focused exclusively on the unnaturally large, cold hand that gripped his ankle tightly from under his sheets and the wide crazed eyes that glared at him from just over the edge of the mattress in his peripherals...