Drabble: Horror

I can’t remember.  You took it from me.  I don’t even know whether it was a good memory or bad.  Whether I would really want it back or not.  Whether it was from my childhood or teenage-hood or just yesterday, whether it was about you, whether it was about you and me.  It’s just one blank in my mind but it feels like you stole everything.

I can’t remember.

What was it?  Was it something you don’t want me to know?

Was it something you did to me?

What have you done to me?

Oh god please, give it back.

Drabble: Horror

Something wakes me.  A sudden absence jerks me awake, and I open my eyes to find the room pitch-black.  I know the night is cloudless – I checked the weather report before bed.  I know the moon isn’t new – it shone full the night before.

I get up and go to the window.  The landscape is black, with no hint of the moonlight.  I step out onto the balcony, looking up.  There hangs the moon, round and silver but radiating nothing.  It’s holding in its light, not even softening the sky.

What will happen when the sun comes up?

Drabble: Horror

I know we haven’t spoken in a while but I have something to tell you.  I’ve been seeing you.  Just walking around, not noticing me, just walking and staring.  Mostly late at night or in the early morning hours when it’s dark – so dark it was hard to tell at first that it was really you.  But during the day too, in the shadow cast by a passing cloud.

I don’t know what’s going on.  These things… they can’t possibly be ghosts.  I mean, here I am talking to you on the phone, and you’re clearly alive.  Right?

…Right?

Drabble: Horror

He had been inspecting the hospital for four days, speaking with the sick and dying children who had no family to come visit them as they lay in their sterile white beds.  He had listened to the ancient nurse and caretaker as she sang to the orphans each night.  It was a strange song, soothing but also somehow disturbing.  It reached deep inside him, touching the edges of his mind like a faded memory.

And it was strange how his clothes seemed to be one size larger than a few days ago, and how he had developed a persistent cough.

Drabble: Horror

“Daddy, she’s at the window again.”

I open my eyes to see Arty standing next to my bed.  He points to the window behind me and I lift my head to look.  There is a dark figure sitting at the window, watching the snow fall outside.

I open my eyes.  It was just a dream.  Arty isn’t in the room, and the figure at the window…

I roll over.  She’s there, sitting at the window.  She begins to turn to me.

I open my eyes.  Just a dream.  But I can feel her eyes on me, watching.  I roll over…