Silence

The whistling of the teapot jolted me straight out of my skin and I trembled as I took it from the heat and poured the hot water into my cup. A stiff quiet had fallen over the house like a blanket. I dropped the teabag in and stared into the water as it steeped, the grayish-green of dried tea leaves seeping and swirling until the water turned murky. Warm, damp frills of bittersweet steam wafted into my nose, a sensation that often comforted me on nights like these.

There was a change in the air around me as if something had tainted the very oxygen I breathed as if some noxious vapor had begun to fill my tiny kitchen and invade my lungs. I moved from the room with an urgent swiftness. As I passed the front room window, my heart stopped with my feet. I had forgotten to pull the curtains over the large picture window in the room between the kitchen and the stairway to the safety of my bedroom.

The window, through which I could not keep myself from looking, appeared as black glass in the darkness. Outside, the sky was a charcoal plane dotted with few faint stars. The trees were so still, the scene could have been a photograph. The only thing I heard was the sound of my own breathing as I stared out into the night. And across the street, shrouded in the shadow of a maple tree, a figure stood staring back at me. It was him.

The cup slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor, a soft thud on the carpet, and I did not dare look down at the liquid soaking in. I was trapped now, cemented there to the place where I stood, my eyes locked with his through the window. I ground my teeth together, my eyes aching as the cold sharpness of unblinking pain crept in at the corners. With a whimper, I finally blinked.

He was closer now. I blinked again, though I didn't mean to, and he appeared even closer. He stood now in the middle of the deserted street, gazing at me with red, slatted eyes and wet, porous skin. I tried to steady my breath. I urged myself to move away from the window, but it was no use.

Again, I blinked, and he came closer. I wanted to scream, to run, to beg him to stay away. More than anything, I wanted him to disappear and leave me to live out my life without his incessant torture. He was always there, always waiting, always watching. I blinked again, he came closer.

He was now standing on my side of the street, at the edge of my small front yard. And I could see the pores of his skin even clearer now, dark and wide and housing tiny things that crept and crawled inside the layers of his awful, terrible face.

A hot tear slid from the corner of my eye and down my cheek. He smiled. My stomach turned at the sight of it; his jagged, rock-like teeth, stained black to match his forked gray tongue. His grin only grew wider as more tears fell down my face and I choked on the sobs that heaved my chest up and down. The rims of my eyes heavy with salty tears, I blinked again.

Now he stood before me, right on the other side of the window, and I could see the movement of his face. His pocked skin undulated like the uneasy turbulence of waves on the ocean, and my mouth watered as bile threatened the back of my throat.

I took ragged breaths in and out of my nose, my eyes burning with the knowledge that one more blink would bring him inside. One more blink and he would be standing in my living room, directly in front of me, grinning at me with those jagged teeth as his skin rippled with the crawling things that lived beneath its surface. My throat grew tight, and he stood gazing back at me with those narrowed, red eyes and that devious, malevolent grin. My chin quivered.

I could hold my eyes open no longer, and with a quiet mewl of defeat, I blinked again. And there he was. He stunk of stale cigarettes and mildew, and I could hear the skittering and squirming of the creatures in his skin. He laughed at me, a quiet, clicking sort of laugh that made my skin prickle. I couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't look away from his horrible face. Then, he reached out and grabbed me by the arms, pulled me close, and held me in a tight embrace. My ears rang in the aching silence as he stroked my hair.