[Short Story] ENTITY - Based on True Events - Chapter 1 Asleep or Awake?

2010

Lyla wasn’t asleep...or was she? The touch was cold and prickly, but it had nothing to do with temperature or a physical sensation. She lay on her side in bed inside the 95-year-old home of her friend, Christine. She did just wake up, she thought. She was suddenly aware of herself, but her eyes did not open. Her eyes did not open because at the moment of consciousness, the touch happened. She couldn’t move away without the possibility of intensifying the feeling or encountering more of what or who was there. 

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Lyla breathed quiet and shallow hoping her presence could not be sensed. She was wrong. The voice came. It was a guttural whisper just behind her ear. Had there been breath, surely she would have felt the heat of it, but there was none...just the voice. 

“Kill, kill kill.”

Lyla’s heart began to thump. It was as if the fear were physically running down a tiled hallway inside her being stomping toward an exit. Her lips parted and she heard only her own breathing. As she began to roll onto her back, the voice, the touch, and the thickness dissipated completely.  Her eyes fluttered open, and she reached for the lamp with a swift movement she half hoped would be perceived as intimidating. Light revealed the small upstairs room. She was alone. She glanced at the clock. 3:03AM. “The witching hour”, she thought, followed by, “too many horror movies”.

She exhaled as she gazed at the ceiling. The fog of sleep still affected her mind. “What just happened?” she wondered aloud and then regretted it.

What if it answered? She restricted her thoughts to the confines of her inner voice. She was indeed awake. She believed she had been awake a few moments ago when something spoke to her. She believed she felt a touch. 

Oh, that touch. It was otherworldly and sinister. It emanated a speaking even before the voice. It spoke in millenniums and antiquities. It said, “Do not move. I have a face. You do not want to see it. I feel you breathing. Oh, you are awake, I see without looking. I can kill you without weapons or actions of killing. I steal lives. I can feel your insides...your organs, the warmth of your blood and it makes me thirsty.” 

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At that moment, it was as if this thing, dream, person had conjured enough energy to speak the ragged phrase: “Kill, kill, kill.” 

The speech was so distorted it sounded like “keyhole” or “guilt”, but yet it sounded. It was real. Lyla was shaken. She dare not turn off the small lamp or look around the room in search of the disembodied voice of a ghost with a cold...or a bubble in its throat. She tried to find the humor, but she was numb. The touch had drained her of every feeling. It was if her heart were a freshly wiped dry erase board and everything in it discolored the felt eraser. She only felt one thing and it was the remnant of an intense loathing of her own existence.

Not being one inclined to such, this was strange. Lyla loathed the horrible feeling. Indeed something had happened here tonight, but it wasn’t the first time.

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