The Inner You
Apparently I wrote this back in 2006. A fragment of a story which I never completed; seemed quite fitting to the season, so i reproduce it here.
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The Inner You
I first noticed my shadow when I was twelve years old. My parents had gone out for the day - one of my uncles had committed suicide, though I knew nothing of this until years later - and with my brother away at college, there was no-one to babysit. I was left with the only dependable sitter my parents could find - television.
The minutes stretched into hours as I sat there, near motionless, being lectured by the idiot box. As night drew near, so the shows I was watching became darker. It was during a late-night showing of John Carpenter's Halloween that I first began to notice the presence of somebody else in the room.
This during the climactic final scene with the virginal babysitter versus the bogeyman. You can just imagine the impact it had on me. I was sat holding a cushion up to my face when I realised that I could sense a man behind me, doing the same. There was, of course, nothing behind me - our sofa facing the wall as it did at that time - but that did not dismiss the certainty that I felt. There was someone here besides me; a dark malavicence (I think I meant malevolence - Ed) toying with me for its own amusement.
Those who have become certain, late at night, possibly in bed, more often than not in a heightened sense of awareness due to a scary movie, or book, or something on TV, of a another presence in the house, something unwanted, something logically not there, but there nonetheless, will know of what I speak when I try to explain that I stayed in that same position in that sofa for a full twenty minutes; frozen to the spot in that uselessly well-lit living room while on the screen in front of me, the cold killer with the devil's eyes made good his escape for another picture on another day. Yes, it was twenty minutes before I moved. I had not even the courage to make a noise or to look behind me. It was there; I knew it was there. It knew me, too.
Eventually steeled for inevitable confrontation and with nerves and muscles creaking like an ill-oiled door, I coiled in my seat and leaped from my frozen spot, jumping into the centre of the room and turning behind me as I landed. Our living room was ill-stocked for encounters with monsters of the real or imaginary kind, and so there was no convenient rusty poker at hand to brandish in attack. All I had was my speed and my terror (the latter infinitely more useful, as history and urban legends have told us)...
--
And that's where it ends. I like it though.
--
The Inner You
I first noticed my shadow when I was twelve years old. My parents had gone out for the day - one of my uncles had committed suicide, though I knew nothing of this until years later - and with my brother away at college, there was no-one to babysit. I was left with the only dependable sitter my parents could find - television.
The minutes stretched into hours as I sat there, near motionless, being lectured by the idiot box. As night drew near, so the shows I was watching became darker. It was during a late-night showing of John Carpenter's Halloween that I first began to notice the presence of somebody else in the room.
This during the climactic final scene with the virginal babysitter versus the bogeyman. You can just imagine the impact it had on me. I was sat holding a cushion up to my face when I realised that I could sense a man behind me, doing the same. There was, of course, nothing behind me - our sofa facing the wall as it did at that time - but that did not dismiss the certainty that I felt. There was someone here besides me; a dark malavicence (I think I meant malevolence - Ed) toying with me for its own amusement.
Those who have become certain, late at night, possibly in bed, more often than not in a heightened sense of awareness due to a scary movie, or book, or something on TV, of a another presence in the house, something unwanted, something logically not there, but there nonetheless, will know of what I speak when I try to explain that I stayed in that same position in that sofa for a full twenty minutes; frozen to the spot in that uselessly well-lit living room while on the screen in front of me, the cold killer with the devil's eyes made good his escape for another picture on another day. Yes, it was twenty minutes before I moved. I had not even the courage to make a noise or to look behind me. It was there; I knew it was there. It knew me, too.
Eventually steeled for inevitable confrontation and with nerves and muscles creaking like an ill-oiled door, I coiled in my seat and leaped from my frozen spot, jumping into the centre of the room and turning behind me as I landed. Our living room was ill-stocked for encounters with monsters of the real or imaginary kind, and so there was no convenient rusty poker at hand to brandish in attack. All I had was my speed and my terror (the latter infinitely more useful, as history and urban legends have told us)...
--
And that's where it ends. I like it though.