This starts the same way they all do. It's a preteen boy in his bed, curtains drawn, shadowed shapes of trees making arachnoid outlines in the curtain fabric. All is quiet. There are clues of the activities taking place before, a tented book on a nearby desk chair awaiting the next chapter reading tomorrow night, a short, half-drunk glass of water on the small, glass-topped table. The well-trampled carpet gives the only sense of texture to the room, with footprints appearing like moon craters in the dim, directional light. Downstairs somewhere, you can hear the murmured voices of adults, one with the timbre and volume of a man, the other, the thin, pitched voice of a woman. The words cannot be understood. To us, the observer, there is nothing amiss. But abruptly, the voices go silent. The rising and falling of the covers and the boy's body beneath them pay no heed. But there is no mistaking the creaking of footfalls on the stairs. There is no mistaking the thick, suffocating silence that otherwise settles into the air in the house. The boy, sleeping peacefully, doesn't notice any of this, alone with his dreams.
It is then, when the silence has taken on the heat of a summer day in its oppression, that the door, so tacit just a moment ago, explodes into the room, its pieces knocking knick-knacks off the shelves and desk, the deafening roar of a suddenly assaulted wooden object rapidly deconstructing. What person could sleep with such noise? With the humming in his ears, the panic in his head and his heart suddenly pounding in his chest, the way his ancestors would do when threatened when threatened and all the animals do now, the boy bolted upward from his sleep, suddenly and violently wide awake, the only remnants of sleep the eyelids uncooperative against opening. In the last rain of wood shards striking the hard surfaces, silence again falls, as he is paralyzed in the bed. Were this a movie, this is when the subwoofer would shake us into the foreboding, while our jaded nature assures us that we've seen this before, many times, as movies have tried to scare us. But nothing else happens.
The boy's paralysis suddenly loosens its grip, though the physiological reaction is maintained. Scared as he was to move, more afraid was he to sit still, because we are all taught by movies the same way, even characters in stories. Moving quickly and silently, he steps out of bed, feeling his heartbeat throughout his head and his chest seized against breathing, a burning sensation in his ears. Expecting a form to emerge from the darkness, he freezes again, but nothing comes. His instinct is to call for his parents, but he is afraid to do it, and paralyzed against making his presence known. The animals in his ancestry were brought up this way, the primal self-preservation they have shown is why we persist now. For this boy to persist, though, he must overcome his instinct, the way his body has betrayed him against action and the youthful way hiding always seems best during scary times. The darkness suddenly thicker than the silence, the dim light once entering in through the window extinguished somehow. Nothing moves nor makes any sound. So the boy feels his way to the light switch by the door. That's when the guttural noise, like the creaking of wood against asphalt, crescendoes out of the darkness, from the direction of the corner opposite his door. This refocusing of his attention causes him to forget where he is in the room, and, suddenly dizzy with fear, he falls to the floor. Desperation sets in now. This bomb in his chest, feeling close to the point of exploding, compels him to do what his body was preparing for anyway--run. As he hits the wall, a picture frame falls right before him, freeing him from the feeling of being in infinite space. Now he knows--he's three feet to the right of the now-vacant doorway. Tears jump to his eyes as he finds it, not bothering with the light switch, he fumbles through the door, half walking, half crawling, and down the stairs. Darkness persists at the bottom of the stairs but the door to the outside is there, 90 degrees to his left. There is no sign of a living soul in the darkness. The TV that should be on keeps its location a secret. Finally, the fear lets its grip on his throat slack and he manages to yell, "HELP!" before stumbling toward the outside door, unlocking it and hurling himself outside into a heap on the concrete porch.
Was there danger? His eye suddenly burns, and he feels it with a hand. His hand, in the dim light of streetlights is wet and shiny black. Blood. Something terrible has happened. Then, from inside the door, a primal roar, something beyond human, something large. Without turning to look he runs. Down the stairs of the front stoop. Into the street. Turning to his right, he runs down the street, his liberated vocal anatomy shrieking, hoping to find its way to competent, sympathetic help. But he can only run, so that's what he does.
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