Under_score

As I'm the better of the two admins here, I got first post priviledges. So I'm going to use this post as my introduction to myself. If you've read the homepage you'll know that I mainly write short horror stories, so without further ado, I'd like to begin with a quick short for you, to give you a taste of things to come. 

There was no dark and stormy night to prepare her for what was about to happen. There was no creaking floorboards, ominous noises, or voices on the wind to scare her into paranoia. There was nothing, nothing, to warn her about the darkness, creeping silently up the stairs. 

She slept soundly, dreaming nothing at all, no nightmares to shock her into opening her eyes; no dreams that she could be brutally awoken from. Just empty peace inside her quiet mind. She was in a deep sleep and breathy snores of content escaped her lips ryhmically.

The shadow crept into her room, the door was ajar, this made the creature slip in easier. Stupid girl. If you listened extremely closely you might just be able to hear the tiny thud as its feet padded across the open floor. In the darkness, the shadow could only be distinguished as a darker shade of black as it walked past the furniture. Noticeable, but most of us would pass it off as something we see to scare ourselves, a figment of our imagination. If only we knew how wrong we are...

It leaned down, a thin, wispy tendril brushed a strand of hair from her face almost lovingly, at the same time, another tendril of smoke like blackness pushed down into her nose and eyes, deeper, until the girl awoke, clutching her face in pain. But the smoke did not stop, now she was awake and likely to scream it sent a strand of itself deep into every orifice on her face. Two went up her nose and one long one went straight down her throat, choaking her wail of pain and terror off before it had even begun. She reached to bang on the wall next to her and hopefully wake her parents. Like handcuffs, darkness wrapped around her wrists and legs and chained her down. 

Her eyes hurridely scanned the black, hoping to see something, anything, but her eyes saw nothing. She could feel the black working it's way down her throat, into her lungs, she gagged, coughed, spluttered, but no sound other than her desperate attempts for breath peirced the veil around them. Her mind was screaming, her lungs were aching and her heart was throbbing so loud. Tears of pain and fear made her eyes sting and she begged silently for release. Her limbs began twitching and she tried rolling away or fighting back, but she was fighting air. This monster had no corporeal form, it was silent, violent, and took more than feeble punches of fear to erase. 

She felt bile and blood spew out of her mouth, her limbs were burning white hot and she knew she only had moments left. Crying and attempting to scream was no use. She knew this now. The demon would take her, it would mangle her corpse beyond recognition. She only hoped her family got out before it took them too. 

Just as her eyes were blurring into black, she saw a bright light burst through her door. Not a saviour, not help, the final blow to end her pathetic distress. Red hot flames consumed the room, consumed her, consumed her clothes and the smoke creature.

Sometimes the thing you fear just leads to worse to come. The smoke creature wanted to take her soul before the burning flames could, before they scorched the skin and bubbled her organs to paste. Smoke kills to save from the pain of the fire that follows. That doesn't mean that escaping it's grip is any easier, the grim reapers choose when your time is up, sometimes they arrive in the form of the thing you fear the most. The darkness.