Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

Night Comes Creeping

If there were bags under his eyes, there was no wondering why. Since early childhood, he was visited in the night by the horrors. They came in that instant between the flick of the light switch and the security of his blanket. The horrors came gradually, but they always came. He would lie awake, wide-eyed and staring into the darkness, waiting for the tell-all signs of the horrors come sniffing. The muffled thump as something came dislodged in the closet; the creak of hinges as its door popped ajar, the narrow slit of further darkness deepening, widening, as the horrors pushed it open and emerged into his room.

He had grown up since then, but still the horrors came. He had gone to college, and they had followed him to his dorms. The horrors came in increasing numbers when he rented his first apartments and settled into his first home, mortgage looming like a bastard moon with a callous grin and malicious eye. He had entered into middle-age, and still his somnolent horrors hadn’t abated; they revealed themselves nightly, in the wane hours as he wished only for the peace of unconsciousness. The horrors of childhood, unlit, unseen, remained the horrors of today.

Every night, the closet door would finally come to a rest and although he could see nothing beyond the obscurity of his bed’s foot board, he knew they were there. Squat, twisted creatures possessed of ill-symmetry and offensive proportions. They lingered between the closet and bed, unseen but not unnoticed. They stank of sulfur, of sewage, of unknown but odoriferous bouquets from another world. They stank of the unimaginable, they stank of the scent of fear and dread encapsulated into a singular sensation.

They waited, there in the darkness, and they always waited long. The horrors never hurried; they came as the dawn, when the night has been so cold and hopeless that any change was a welcome one. They came as death to the tortured, they came as dope to the junkie, but they brought with them no relief. The horrors tortured him with fear and paralysis, played with his impotence and crippling dismay, and when the horrors finally showed him their faces, they brought only a near-madness which destroyed him without offering the bliss of oblivion.

There was no telling how long they would wait. It became time incomprehensible, a murky stasis where he would lay dormant and shivering, waiting for the horrors to metastasize into something physical, something with names and weaknesses. But they never did. They lurked in the unseen corners, they emitted foul odors that left the taste of bile in his mouth. And when they felt they had waited long enough, they began to creep.

The horrors would creep onto the mattress, a shape beneath the sheet, nearly amorphous but always writhing, writhing. They huddled around his feet, turning his toes cold with their rank breath. He could feel the downy silk of their fur—an irony, he knew, that these horrors could possess such softness; softness which could—perhaps—entice a child closer, within reach. But their fur eventually led to talons. Talons of infinite strength which were made for gripping, always gripping. And their talons ended in claws, claws which could pierce the flesh and give the horrors a greater hold on their prey. And there, huddled around his feet, the horrors began to tickle with those claws; a scrape here, a scratch there. Not prodding in curiosity. Poking, tormenting, mocking. And as they moved along his legs, to his crotch, and to his belly, the shape beneath the sheet would quicken and the horrors would set in with their teeth.

The doctors had said they could make the horrors go away. So many, many doctors. The lie therein was that no pill could kill what it hadn’t created. They said the drugs would end the anxiety, the sleepless nights, the suffering of constant mortal fear at the onset of night. They said the drugs would help him, but instead they caused nausea, itching, rashes. They caused shaking limbs and sweat patches in his pajamas. They caused hallucinations as vivid as the horrors and he found himself wondering, every night, which of these creatures was worse—the real or the imagined? And which of these was which.

And every night the horrors would crawl onto his chest, weighing him down beneath their wriggling bulk. They would voice their moans to him in amused, questioning tones. They would squirm on his paralyzed body, asking their foreign questions, pressing the air from his lungs, leaving their fell scent locked in his nostrils as he wondered again if tonight was the night they gave lie to the doctors and their drugs and just outright killed him.

But they never did. The horrors were there to torment, to waste and use up their prey. And when nothing was left to their satisfaction, they would discard the rest. They amassed there, that shape beneath the sheet, and as they moved forward, the sheet began to lift, to pull away. And, as every night before since time out of mind, when the horrors showed their shifting faces, he wondered again if these were real or imagined, the frontal cause or side effect.

And then, as every night before, he began to scream.