Nyctophobia

A Story by Em

The dark can play the weirdest tricks on you mind, but there not real. Or are they

NYCTOPHOBIA

It seems like any normal night. You’ve eaten dinner, turned of the lights and settled down to watch t.v. The show your watching isn’t anything special, just something to keep the silence of the night at bay. You eyes slowly grow heavy. Your body relaxes; muscles loosening up and becoming lax. Your breathing evens out and you enter a state of calm as you fall asleep. Before you lose consciousness, you reach over to grab your remote and turn the t.v off. You lay on your back and drift off. The silence consumes your surroundings and slowly you fall asleep. Right before you enter sleep a slight noise breaks the silence. Your eyes fly open and you wait. The world makes no other noise and all you hear now is your breathing. As you come to terms with the fact that it was nothing your eyes become heavy again. You slowly close your eyes and then the noise comes again. It almost sounds like a faint scratching sound. Subtle, but a constant scratching noise; like nails scraping against wood. You strain your ears to hear where it’s coming from. You sit up and search your room. Being that it’s dark you obviously can’t see anything. You reach over to turn on a light but then your hair stands on end. A shiver starts from the top of your head and travels to the bottom of your feet. A cold chill spreads and your spine immediately stiffens. Your heart rate increases as you realize that you feel someone looking at you. You have the feeling that eyes are blazing into your back. Paranoia sets in; you want to turn around and look to see what’s staring at you, but an instinct deeply ingrained in your mind screams at you not to turn around. The feeling of being watched increases. You feel the intensity of stare as an emotion almost. An emotion of pure anger and hatred. Go on turn around. Slowly turn your head inch by inch and try to see the thing that seems to hate you with every fiber of its being. The feeling of curiosity creeps onto you and before it fanishes you whip your head around, forgetting to turn on the light and look in the direction of the eyes. As your eyes adjust to the location you look at the corner of your room and see nothing. Confusion fills your mind. You finally breathe out a sigh of quiet relief. You heart rate returning to normal. A small smile begins to form on your face as you also realize that there is just complete silence filling the void. No more scratching.
You shake your head a little as a quiet laugh begins within you as you find the humor in your overreaction about the situation, but before you can voice this laugh your heart stops. The smile falls from your face as you hear it. Faint but closer to you now is the sound of scratching. Your heart pounds inside your chest as you realize that the scratching is coming from under your bed. You freeze as you don’t want to look, but the thought of not knowing pushes you to find the location of the noise. You lean over and grab the covers and slowly lift them in trepidation to see under the bed. As you lean farther to see the scratching stops. Your stuck in between a state of confusion and relief when a light cool breath blows on the back of your neck. You freeze and your spine becomes like steel. As you think of what could cause this. You think maybe it could be your imagination but then you feel a weight slowly sink into your bed. Inching its way to you the weight gets closer and closer. Your heart beat is now like a jackhammer pounding away in your chest. It almost hurts to even breathe as you feel like your heart is breaking your chest cavity to try and burst free and high tail it out of there. Then a constant heavy hot breath streams down on your neck. You mouth dry’s up and you almost want to gasp out and cry from fear, but noise seems to elude you. Then just as quickly as it had started it stops. You swiftly turn around and see nothing. You look around and everything seems to be the same. You turn your lights on and search around your room. Trying to find something that could explain what had happened, but you find nothing. You slide back into bed now with a little more trepidation than before. You fall back to sleep, but not with a little bit of difficulty. The rest of your night is uneventful, but not peaceful as it once was the first time. The only sign of your discomfort are the lights that you leave on all night. And the nights after; not from fear of what happened, but of the fear that even as you leave the lights on there is always the constant faint sound of scratching. Always under your bed. Sweet dreams.