Posted by
Catmman on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 12:30:48 PM
You recognize the sound as a moan…
A moan which makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Goose bumps break out on your skin. In a manner of seconds, your face feels flush, your heartbeat quickens, your mouth dries. You're scared? And the fear is rising with the moans, a primal fear. You feel an ‘itch’ in your mind – something familiar about these sounds, but you can’t quite put your finger on the feeling. Your mind is reeling; your conscious and subconscious mind grappling for control.
After a few seconds, you notice it’s not just the moaning of one person. It sounds like several. Three? Four? How many? You can’t be sure. You must look. At first you think, “Maybe I can see from upstairs.” You then remember the porch overhang – you wouldn’t be able to see the very front of your house.
“Who’s there?” you begin to shout out, but something in your mind stifles the words just as they rise in your throat.
No.
Whoever, whatever it is outside your house doesn’t sound friendly.
You make your way to the front door. “I’ll look through the peep hole.” In a reflex, you reach out to flip on the porch light. The switch ‘clicks’. Just at that moment you curse silently under your breath – “Stupid! When the light comes on, they’ll know you're inside for sure!” It never crosses your mind as to why you don't want 'them' to know you're inside.
Fortunately, the power is out and beyond the click, nothing happens. You breathe a small sigh of relief. The peep hole looms before your eyes. “What the hell,” you think and look through the peep hole…
Nothing - shadows swaying back and forth - nothing. No light, beyond ambient moonlight, so you can’t make out many details. You see what could be three or four separate shadows, but you can’t be sure.
You step back from the door. One thing is for certain, the scratching and rubbing noise is definitely more pronounced here right by the door. You can also make out a more determined scratching, rubbing at the front window.
And that moan…
You must try to see what is going on. You decide to head upstairs to look outside. At least you’ll be able to look into the back yard - you haven’t noticed any sounds from there. And you’ll be able to look into the street in front of your house and see a little bit of your front yard. You enter your kids’ bedrooms and glance ever so carefully from the sides of the windows into your back yard – you can’t see very well, but you don’t notice anything obviously out of place. You notice no lights from your neighbors’ homes, so the power outage is deeper than just your house. No lights or ambient reflected light from a distance either so it is also bigger than your neighborhood. Other than the moonlight, it’s dark.
You head into your room to look out your window. You see the phone next to your bed. “Why didn’t I try that before?” you mumble. You pick up the receiver – no dial tone, no sound. The phone is dead. Now you know something is very wrong. The phone always worked in other power outages, but not now. You put the receiver back into the cradle absentmindedly and turn to the window.
You glance out and see…a few people walking in the street. For an instant you think of banging on your window to grab their attention but something's not right. There are only three or four people in the street, but that’s not what catches your attention. They are walking in the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. As you watch for a few minutes more, you notice they aren’t really walking. They are shuffling, dragging their feet. One of them is walking with a very pronounced limp.
You look across the street and notice a few ‘people’ walking around the front of that home. They are slapping the walls, the front door, the garage door, scratching at the front window – your mind clicks
– just like they are doing at the front of your house…
THEY ARE TRYING TO GET IN!
To be continued...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3