Human Emotion: Fear

"H...hello?"

The static and his cold make his voice crackle like the messages in horror movies, right before the girl says, "seven days." Your throat tightens and you whisper, "Hello." There is no one awake in the whole house; you am utterly alone. Creeeak. Your heart leaps into your esophagus, clinging onto the inner walls of your neck like a shocked cat. Save me.

"I heard..." your voice is drowned out by the pumping blood in your veins, the release of adrenaline that makes the hairs on your neck stand and your breath to come faster and faster until it is one breath, and it is saying "save me."

He sighs and clears his throat, hacking and coughing, but through his fit he replies, "it was a bad dream."

"No." You stop. You hear a noise of footsteps. It is right outside your door. Now, every scene in every horror movie you watched up until this point flashes into your mind, and the door knob turns, and there is a black figure staring at you with eyes as dark as the night. Or maybe they're red. Maybe, against the cinematic hallway that is too dark for having windows that look out onto a major street, the killer slowly pulls out a knife, and your scream dies in your throat because your heart is clogging up the airway. Your thoughts fizz out into white noise as every sense is tuned into the footsteps the figure takes, closer and closer to the edge of your bed. The face is unclear, but as he pulls his hand higher you pray to God for the first time in months.

"I can't sleep!" You whine, tears streaming down your face as you turn away from the door. You don't want to see it open.

"It's okay. It's probably one of your roommates going to bed. Please, I need to sleep, you need to sleep. Everything is going to be fine."

"No. No. No. No..." You trail off and you can't remember if you had locked the door behind you when you had returned from school earlier that day. It was all fuzzy, white noise.

"Look. Just sleep with the light on."

"Yeah, but the light is all the way across the room, and I'll have to run back to my bed in the dark!"

At the word 'dark,' your bones quake and you think you hear footsteps again, not as close, but like someone is lurking. They're waiting for you to get off the phone. Then you will be alone. Alone.

Alone.

You cry again, and you bury your face in the pillow. A car rolls by, and through the blinds the headlights throw a strip of light that floats across your wall. Like a ghost. It disappears and you shiver. You are afraid of ghosts too.

"It's not a ghost." He says after you tell him your hypothesis, "Hey, I gotta go to sleep. I am sick. You're imagining things. It's all in your head."

"But..." It was waiting. It knew that within moments you would hang up. Then the doorknob would turn, and black figure camouflaged against the eerily dark hallway would take out a knife, and out of the four other rooms, walk into this one, and the knife would be over your body, your last breath would be prayer, then...

You hang up. Without a goodbye, without even thinking really. That shadow must be as confused as you are right now, but you know that calling a sick person at two-thirty in the morning is a jerk-ass thing to do. So come what may.

The only sounds are crickets and cars. The little buggers laughing in their little scratchy voices,

Ha ha...ha ha...