A Friend in the Night
At night it sits at the end of my bed and looks at me as I sleep. Its teeth are like sharpened porcelain toothpicks, and they click periodically as I lie in bed. At first it was difficult to even close my eyelids, its ebony orbs reflecting the image of the room and refusing to give me even the momentary peace of blinking. Eventually I began passing out at work from the exhaustion. I was sent to the doctor to get some pills. It clacked its teeth when the doctor wrote the prescription, as if trying to imitate a laugh. I never seriously considered telling the doctor that there was an emaciated, deformed thing behind him, pretending to be human. He wouldn’t have seen it no matter how long I pointed.
I never got the prescription filled. Instead, I tried to photograph the thing. It smiled for the camera. Then it grabbed the camera, crushed it, and emitted such a high-pitched sound that I collapsed, clutching my ears. I spent the rest of the day in a closet, its clicking teeth the only sound reaching me inside.
Last night it talked to me during my sleep. I awoke to what sounded like a low rumbling, followed by a loud whine. Whatever language it spoke, I could not reproduce with even a hundred years of training, but it created in me a fear that I had never imagined possible, a fear deep within me that elicited images of a world unbounded by physical laws, a world of primordial chaos. It gripped my head with its hands and forced me to listen, the clicking of its teeth growing ever more rapid and distinct. I have no idea how long it held me there, only that at some point the sun rose and that eventually I screamed. Then it let go and I bolted out of bed still screaming, yelling incoherent words in between each breath. I ran outside and as I did I felt it and heard its incessant clicking as it ran otherwise silently behind me. I collapsed in the street begging the pedestrians around me for help. No one can hear me screaming, I realized, just as those pristine needle-like teeth punched through my skull and scattered the rest of my thoughts.