Cold room, warm bed. So help me if that alarm goes off now I’m going to launch it through the fucking roof. Awake enough to hear the sounds in my room, the ticking of the clocks (I have two.) and the whirring of the running laptop. Asleep enough to not give a flying shit about what I hear in the room all the time.
Except for the sound of something under the bed. High pitched, so it’s small. A softness to the tone, must be plastic. Wobbly? It’s round and it’s being spun. A tink and a slide later, my brain has identified an object that matches the noise profile I’m listening to. It’s a bottle cap. Probably one of the new and improved versions made with less plastic to be environmentally friendly but shatters if you look at it too hard. Okay. There’s a bottle cap under the bed and a mouse is playing with it. I’ll put out traps tomorrow. I’m too warm to give a fuck right now.
Wait.
I sweep under the bed weekly. There is nothing there but two days of dust. And I have a No Food Trash rule. I may eat in here, but all food related trash goes in the kitchen trash can. And I have not had a soda or water bottle in here for months.
I mentally run through everything that is sitting out on a shelf or on the dresser. Is there anything there that if knocked off onto the floor, would make that particular noise?
No.
Okay. I’m wide fucking awake and listening to the plastic thing being slid about under the bed at the head of the bed. I’m trying to gauge if it is one mouse or two. Is the mouse playing or trying to scrape the last bits of sugar water from the cap. Which way will the mouse take the cap? This will tell me where best to place the traps later.
I’m lying completely still. The plastic continues to slide. I almost have a visual profile in my mind built up from the sounds and echoes of those sounds. I can see the cap, sliding and bouncing off the wall footboards. Whatever is pushing it has more mass than a mouse, though. Something is not quite adding up in my mental simulation.
The sound stops.
I feel a sudden absence under the bed. Something that was there, no longer is.
I feel a sudden large presence at the side of the bed. My back is to this presence. I open my eyes knowing I’m facing the door to my room. The door is closed, matching the state I went to sleep with.
The large presence behind me looms over me, grabs a non-trivial amount of my afro, and pulls.
“MOM!”
That’s not Dter’s voice, though the presence is taller than her. My hair is pulled again as the voice turns whiny. “MooOOOoommm!”
It’s the voice of a very young girl, but the presence is adult sized. There is no hostility in the voice. It’s that of a young child wanting attention, and nothing more.
“What. I’m awake now. What do you want and why do you think I’m your Mommy?” I’m more comfortable than I am scared. I don’t turn over. In my mind’s eye, I see the figure of a half-translucent girl with grotesquely long arms and legs. She’s wearing a dolly night gown that is far too thin for the weather.
The grip on my hair is released. “I’m lonely.”
“Snuggle down then. It’s too cold for me to get up.”
“Okay!”, she replied cheerily. Her presence melted into a dark cloud that smothered me and the bed.
“No more hair pulling or you get kicked out. And if you’re thinking to make of me a late night snack, I eat those that would eat me. Ask the survivors here if you doubt me.” The cloud stopped settling. “If you’re just lonely, however, settle down and let me sleep. Come the morning, you can introduce yourself to the others.”
“This is good.”, the cloud agreed in the girl’s voice.
“Okay.” I turned my attention away from the cloud and called Horatio. “Can you find the [Exiled Angel]? Yes? Good. Go find him, tell him of this entity and ask him if he would come by here. Something is not right.”
I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake until the alarm went off. When the alarm sounded I realized I had become so warm overnight that I was sweating despite the frost outside. There was no trace of the girl. I took a flashlight and looked under the bed to check for evidence of the mouse and/or bottlecap. Two days worth of undisturbed dust lay evenly under the bed. Nothing had skittered through there last night.
Well, fuck. Did I imagine it?
I called Horatio and asked him if I had a visitor last night. He confirmed I did. I asked what happened to that visitor. “The flaming dog took offense at it and chased it away before the [Exiled Angel] came. When the [Exiled Angel] came, he was upset by something the visitor left behind and left to go track it down. He said to tell you that you’ll probably not see it again.”
Is that so.
Hmm.
Good doggy.