Quiet Screams Are Made Of This...

The darkness that enshrouded his room gave rise to thoughts of monsters hiding in the corners, in the closet, under the bed, or behind the drapes. He knew that there were no such things as monsters, but his imagination, his overactive, overstimulated imagination, wrecked havoc on his ability to be rational. 

To add to his anxiety, on nights like this, when there was no moon, when the wind was still and even the crickets seemed to be taking the night off, he sometimes thought he heard whispers...quiet murmuring coming from the far end of the room, or over by the bookcase, near the waste basket. 

He couldn't make out any words, it was more of a sensation of people whispering quickly and quietly to themselves, or having huddled conversations with each other but with slurred and slovenly speech.

On nights like this the minutes seemed to pass like hours. He couldn't fall asleep, for every time he got close to drifting off he would be startled by an imagined sound, or worse, an imagined presence. He had been laying in his bed for twenty minutes now, and despite his use of a deep-breathing relaxation technique and even counting backwards from a thousand, he was as still as wide awake as when he first walked into the room.

Finally he began to feel the heaviness of fatigue begin to take him. His eyelids remained closed for longer intervals, and his heart rate had started slowing down. To occupy himself and ward off his imagination's penchant for creating disturbing thoughts he had begun to run the lyrics to every song from the Beatles' Sgt Peppers album through his mind. He became aware that he was drifting off when he found himself struggling to remember if he had jumped from Lovely Rita to the Sgt Pepper's reprise.

Then suddenly he was wide awake again, conscious of...something different in the room. He slowly opened his eyes and looked into the dark, hoping he would not see anything. He looked into the near-blackness at the far end of the room, at the books and papers stacked on his desk, at the cluttered bookcase, the even more cluttered dresser and finally he looked towards the drapes and the closet door. Nothing was amiss. 

But then a thought hit him like a twenty-pound mallet. Why could he see anything? Where is the soft light coming from? He turned his head toward the door to the room and his breathing stopped. The door was open. It was only open a inch or so, but it was open. When he had shut off the television set and walked upstairs to his room, the first thing he did after he turned on the light was securely close the door.

And now the door was open.