I woke to the steady patter of the rain against my dorm window. Normally, the sound was soothing and lulled me to sleep, but tonight it was different. It held a more dissonant, ominous note, as if the night itself pressed against the glass. I admit that when I first moved in at the beginning of the year, I was ecstatic about having a room with a window overlooking the forest and the marsh beyond it; now, however, it seemed as though the very trees sought to cover the secrets that the darkness could not. The way they bent and bowed and the way the leaves fell softly in a pirouette towards the earth; it all had a dreamlike quality about it, though the dream they portrayed was not a pleasant one.
3:42 a.m. Damn. I hate waking up in the middle of the night like this, but every night, almost like clockwork, it happens. It was really starting to fuck with my grades.
“Maybe I should look into sleeping pills,” I thought as I clicked the lock button on my phone plunging myself back into the abyss. I rolled over away from the window and let out a heavy sigh, attempting to force myself back into subconsciousness. Just as the comforting hands of sleep started to welcome me back into the dream world, I thought I heard something outside, beneath my window 3 stories down. A child. A girl specifically. From the sound of her voice, she couldn’t have been older than 7 or 8. It sounded as if she was singing a lullaby. Slowly, I sat up and peered down, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever was out there.
For the longest time I saw nothing but the sheets of rain and the ground occasionally illuminated by the stray bolt of lightning here and there. Just as I was about to lay back down, I saw what looked like the tail end of a child’s dress disappearing into the woods amidst the underbrush and fallen tree limbs. Without thinking, I jumped out of bed and quickly threw on my shoes and Rolling Stones tee shirt that was laying over the back of the chair. In almost record time, I was out of the door and running through the monsoon in search of the little girl. She couldn’t have gotten far, not in this; I ventured into the darkened forest where I had seen her enter.
It seemed like an eternity that I searched for her, but it couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes. It even seemed like I was going in circles, even though I knew that wasn’t possible… was it? I didn’t really know anymore, the storm made everything so disorienting, especially in the trees at night. Come to think of it, I had never actually been in the woods at all. At this point, I was convinced that I had been seeing things. I resigned myself to trudge back through the mud and rain to dry off and knock myself out if necessary just to get some damn sleep. I turned back in the direction of the dorm only for something white to catch my attention; a ripped piece of fabric. I told myself that it could be from anything and that I should just go back to my dorm and forget about it. But there was something clawing at me, something itching in the back of my mind on the edge of nothingness, refusing to be ignored.
Suddenly, every hair on my arms and neck stood straight up. Primal instincts kicked in, telling me to drop whatever I was doing and GTFO now. I wanted to run, to sprint through the trees and reach the safety of my dorm, but I seemed rooted in place. Out of apparently nowhere, a small girl came skipping out of the nearby brush humming a nursery rhyme as if nothing around her existed, as though there was no pelting rain or gale force winds. I thought I must be going mad. I assumed she would keep bounding into the forest from the way she carried herself, but to my shock, she came to a very unnatural halt about 20 feet away from me.
“Leave!” my instincts screamed at me. “Get the fuck out!” I told myself with every fiber of my being. I couldn’t tear myself away from the spot, though; my eyes were locked on this seemingly innocent young child. Seemingly innocent. Lightning flashed and a loud clap of thunder overhead sent a new wave of fear down my spine, the likes of which I had never experienced or even knew existed; a fear to so primal and base, that the word fear did not even apply to it.
In the midst of all my fear, the little girl smiled at me. It started small and innocent, just like a child. But then it began to grow into something unnatural. Behind the smile, I could see a row of teeth as jagged and sharp as the lightning overhead. She began laughing, but it was not a little girl’s laughter; it wasn’t even human. It was a laughter that was deep and brutish, and almost duo-tone, as if two laughs and voices had been recorded and placed over each other. The sound of it sent more than a few chills through me. Her snow white dress began to drench from the shoulders down in a deep crimson shade of red, almost like a mixture of blood and hell fire. Her head began to tilt back, slowly. I could hear the bones and vertebrae start to pop and snap as the back of her head came to rest against her spine. I saw a vertical slit start to open in her throat and descend down her body as the flesh, muscle, and bones began to fall away. Slowly, another being emerged from the decaying carcass; first the class pushed through followed by arms that were too long to belong to any human. A head emerged with a look made solely of the most pure form of evil followed by a torso half decayed showing ribs and rotted innards. Next came the legs and feet, part human, part animal. I knew what this creature was; it was something I’d only heard about in a book. An old book. But taking one look at this supremely malevolent being, I knew it could only be the devil himself. I stared into his abysmal eyes unable to look away; that stare in itself could have killed and seared the soul away from its still breathing shell.
Finally, I ran. I ran as if the apocalypse itself nipped at my heels; for all I knew, it did. I ran for ages or so it felt like. At last, I emerged into the yard of my dorm building and into the safety of the street light nearby. I collapsed onto the ground, letting the rain wash over me, mixing with the sweat from so much exertion, letting my logical brain catch up with what I had just witnessed. Finally, I picked myself up off the ground and began to make my way up the three flights of stairs back to my room. I needed a shower and one hell of a cup of coffee.
As I entered my room, I threw off my wet clothes and hung them over the clothes rack for them to dry. Slowly, I walked to the bathroom feeling half dead and turned on the shower. As I waited for the water to get warm, I peered into the mirror, feeling a sense of relief that when the sun rose I could make sense of everything that had happened. Subtly, almost too subtle for me to catch it, I saw my eyes slowly start to change color, drifting through every shade and hue of every color. I could have sworn that they even started to swirl. I heard a voice then, not from the woods, not from my room, but from within my own head, my own mind. That monstrous sound; as deep, demented, and evil as it was. There was no mistaking that duo-tone voice, not after hearing it laugh so clearly only moments before. It could only have been the entity I experienced in the woods. Him. It could only be him. “Welcome home.”
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