Midnight’s Fables

The Burglar Alarm

“I want a story…,” you say slowly, selecting your words carefully, so as not to let Midnight get the wrong idea – again – about exactly what you want to see. “…where they think everything is horrible and dangerous and they think they’re going to die or get hurt or something, but… but actually they end up fine.”

Midnight cocks their head for a long time, trying desperately hard to understand what you’re asking for.

That silhouette… the form they take… pure darkness, like a person is standing right there except… its just a hole. A nothingness, cut out of space itself. The longer you spend with this… creature, this entity… the more you start to see shapes shifting in that darkness. Twisting, swirling shadows, black against black, imperceptible and yet noticeable all at once, though you somehow sense it isn’t your eyes that are alerting you to this detail.

The hairs on your neck stand up on end when you look at Midnight for too long. You see shapes and shadows swimming in its dark, empty form. You get the sense that if you kept staring at it, kept looking into that void, you’d slowly lose the ability to see anything else. Eventually, you’d waste away in that darkness, until you were nothing but skin and bones yourself… your story just another shadow in its endless, empty expanse…

“I think I have a story like that,” it nods slowly, and beckons you to follow it.

A story like… like what? Right, you’d been talking and…

You shake your head to snap back out of it. That creature, whatever Midnight truly is… there is something fundamentally insidious about that entity, and while you desperately want to better understand your kidnapper and its domain, you start to sense that to do so would give you no advantage in escape, and if anything might further bind you to its power.

After a while, strolling through the vast halls that one moment belong in a cathedral, the next in a palace, the next in a museum, passing thousands upon thousands of exhibits, Midnight takes you to its latest goal.

This display consists, as the others all do, of a white pedestal and a clear glass case, containing a CCTV camera, which has been removed from a wall, wire and screws still sticking out the back.

“The main front door camera from the home security system of Sasha Leading,” Midnight introduces the artefact. “I hope this tale satisfies your request, my friend…”

***

“Every night at 1am,” Sasha explained. “Doesn’t matter if the lights are on, doors are open or shut, curtains drawn or open... the burglar alarm goes off.”

She was exhausted, bags under her eyes, skin pale and clammy. Clearly a woman who hadn’t slept in quite some time.

“I can’t sleep anymore, because I’m always so afraid, or anxious and waiting for it to go off but... I can’t cope. I’m exhausted. It started six weeks ago. I checked the logs in the alarm, and it said the front door had been opened. I live alone, I own my home, and I’m the only person with a key. I even changed all the locks when I bought the place – I admit, I’m... a little paranoid sometimes. But... the front door had been opened. I checked it myself, and it was locked so... it had been unlocked, opened, closed, and locked again. It has a latch, so it can be opened from the inside no matter what, and it locks automatically when it closes, so my first thought was that someone or something had been inside my house and... let themselves out. That was the most rational explanation, I decided. I called the police, but... I live off a forestry trail in a stretch of isolated woodland in the middle of the Scottish Highlands. By the time they got there, goodness knows what could have happened to me. I mean... nothing did, but... it could have,” Sasha continued, voice quivering with anxiety and exhaustion and fear.

She took a long, deep breath, her throat rattling slightly as she did, before slowly exhaling with a sigh and a croak.

“When the police did arrive, they searched the house and told me there was no sign of breaking and entering, of trespassing, of theft, of anything. They agreed that something had clearly tripped the burglar alarm, and that my claims about the workings of the front door were accurate. They didn’t say as much, but they clearly agreed with my best theory too, though if anybody had been in my house, they hadn’t broken anything, hadn’t taken anything, and had left nothing for the police to follow. They offered to bring a sniffer dog, but it was 3am by then and I just wanted to go to sleep. They had searched the house, confirmed I was home alone and my property was secure, and so I told them they could go,” she said, voice taught with anxiety, staring forwards, barely blinking. “I tried to chalk it up to a glitch or something, and decided to get in touch with the company that had fitted the alarm in the morning. That fantasy worked up until I woke up the next morning, and with the daylight coming in the window, I saw how it was all scratched up, with loads of sets of four long scratches running across the outside. Yeah, I called the police again. It took a while to go through the whole rigamarole of the night before – apparently nobody had yet written a report from the previous callout – but eventually, the officers agreed something suspicious was going on, and called for a sniffer dog.”

She took a long moment then, eyes unfocussing, like she was no longer really present, mind drifting to another place and time, or entirely lost in its own chaos. Eventually, she said in a very small voice, “it wouldn’t stop barking at me.”

Tears were in her eyes as she looked down then. “The dog sniffed the scratches in the window and the front door and came right up to me, and started barking and growling and... it was like it wanted to attack me.”

Another long, deep breath, eyes hollow and empty.

“The cops asked if I’d put the scratches there myself. I told them I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t, I hadn’t faked any of it, why would I do that? But… I could see it in their eyes. It was too late. They left. Told me to call if there were any more problems, but… their tone made it clear that another callout would not be treated with patience.”

She seemed to fade out again for a moment, as though Sasha were no longer entirely present and the mere shell of her body alone remained.

“The next night was the same. Alarm at 1am. Said the front door had been opened, but when I went down it was locked. This time there were scratches on my bathroom window too – on the outside – and when I went outside in the morning, the walls all around my bedroom window and my bathroom were all scratched up too. They’re old redbrick, solid stone in some places… what could do that…?”

She closed her eyes and took a long, slow, shaky breath. “I called the alarm company, and they said they’d send out an engineer within two weeks. I just hung up on them. The next night… 1am… and the next… and the next… and the… all my windows and all over the outside of my house was scratched up within a week. Brick dust and mortar in piles all around the edges on the ground, and those scratches, always in long rows of fours. Like… claw marks. But my house has three storeys so… what could have reached that high? What could have reached that high but not just… broken in? I guess it must have broken in mustn’t it? That’s why the alarm was going off…”

She trailed off again, eyes forgetting to blink, thick tears like congealed glue dripping from her eyes and nose. She was pale, her hair dry and wiry, and she was clearly starting to suffer from malnourishment.

“It was nine days after the first incident, on the tenth night, when the alarm went off at 1am, that… it was… there…” she whispered, voice like the wind in old rocks on the mountain side. “Its head was… long. Its skull I mean, was… tall, stretching back, and was sort of… jagged. Craggy? With nooks and notches and bumps and bits all sticking out. It was stooped over, but if it had stood it would have put its head through the ceiling. Its legs were bent, like it was squatting, its backside almost on the floor, but its legs were out sideways, twisted round too far to be… Human. Arms just… dangling there. Way too long. Elbow bent a little because they were so long they were resting on the floor. It had a tail too, a long thing, longer than the rest of it was tall, and… if it had a face, I… I couldn’t see it… it was just… hair, long hair, but… they wriggled and writhed like… tentacles… thick hair, but… moving, just… a big clump of it all hanging down and squirming instead of a face and… it just stood there. At the end of my bed. Staring at me… watching me. At… at least, I… I think it was watching me. If it had eyes, I couldn’t see them. But its tentacle-hair-face was pointed at me and I… I heard it breathing. Rasping there. In the dark. At the foot of my bed. I woke when the alarm went off and it was there. I screamed and it stood a little, its tail twitching from side to side, like when a cat is about to pounce or something and I… I screamed and screamed and screamed and I froze, I wanted to reach for the light but I couldn’t stop screaming and the thing was just there, watching me and…”

She was hyperventilating now, hand on her throat, briefly touching the purple and grey bruises there, as she struggled to breathe through her panic. Mucus still dripped from the corner of her eye.

“I woke up the next morning, alarm still going off, but I was asleep in bed. I must have passed out from all my screaming, I’m so tired, I… I called up the alarm company and demanded they come and install security cameras immediately. With the promise of plenty extra money, they were more than happy to send out an engineer that day, and by the time night fell again that day, I had sixteen new cameras linked to my security system and the app on my phone. I sat up that night, watching the hours tick by, scrolling through the camera feeds, watching, waiting for something to happen… I… wasn’t ready when it did. I’ve scrolled through the footage so many times. I’ve spent hours looking at it. But… it doesn’t matter how long I spend staring at those pixels, I can never see the moment she appears. There’s footage she definitely isn’t in, and there’s footage she definitely is in, but… I can never pinpoint the moment she starts being there. I simply notice one moment that she has already appeared. She’s a young girl. A teenager maybe. She wears a white dress down to her knees and no shoes. Black hair, pretty face. Or she would be pretty. If it wasn’t for that smile. Too wide. Ear-to-ear in the most literal sense. And too many teeth, all of them too sharp. Like a shark’s mouth crammed into hers. She’s just… there… standing in my hallway, staring up into the camera. I watched as I sat there in bed, lights on, and stared at the feed on my phone. She walked up to the door, put her hand like she was about to open it…”

Sasha was trembling, mucus dripping faster and faster from her eyes and nose. “My bedroom went dark. The alarm went off. And I heard it… rasping again. There, in the room with me, at the foot of my bed.”

Sasha had grown less animated now, looking like she was ready to give up, like she was ready to just lie down and sleep until death took her. “I screamed again. I turned on my bedside light and the thing was still there so I kept screaming and it stood taller, its fingers like foot-long steel razor blades, and it stared at me through its writhing tentacles and hair and… and I stayed there, screaming and screaming until daybreak. The sun came up and I was alone and… I must have slept all day because I didn’t wake again until the alarm next went off and the creature was back and… I tried to run away, tried to get past it, but whenever I tried to move I got so afraid that I froze. If that was the creature or just my panic I don’t know but… I was trapped.”

She stared forward, like she couldn’t even see. The mucus in her eyes was so thick now that she probably couldn’t see much at all. And that grin… her teeth were definitely too sharp, her mouth a little too wide, always smiling, just a little, even as she cried.

“It’s been a long few weeks,” Sasha confessed. “I… I’ve tried locking my bedroom door, barricading it, I’ve stayed in hotels, but… no matter what, the alarm wakes me up at 1am, and the creature is there at the foot of my bed. Even in the hotel, somehow, I still heard the alarm, I… it’s following me no matter where I go. Even here. Even now… it happened, even last night. The alarm went off at 1am, and I saw the monster, in here, in this room, with me.”

Sasha looked down at her arms, the bandages wrapped tightly around her wrists. “I can’t escape. I’m not crazy, it’s real. It’s haunting me. Please… please help me. It won’t leave me alone, it won’t let me sleep. Please…”

She reached out, almost touching the mirror, almost touching the glass. She hoped someone was on the other side. She hoped someone was listening.

“I’m not crazy,” she whispered to herself, sitting back down in defeat. “Please help me…”

***

You stare in horror at your captor as it finishes its tale.

“You see? She thought there was a monster, but maybe she was just crazy. No monster. It all worked out well. She tried to escape, but now they keep her safe, you see?” Midnight promises you, and deep in the pit of your stomach, something twists and sickens.

“That’s not a happy ending,” you whisper, horrified that this thing could mistake that for a nice ending.

Midnight cocks its head. It still doesn’t understand. It still doesn’t get it. How? What is this thing, that has such a wealth of stories and yet no concept of a happy ending, or of happiness?

You almost sit down in defeat. The longer you are here, the more you feel yourself eroding, feel the darkness of your captor wearing off on you. It sickens you. Tires you. This thing… it haunts you, inside and out.

“Just, tell me…,” you say, trying to find the words in defeat. “Tell me a story you like.”

You haven’t the energy right now to keep trying to convince this thing that it can tell you a happy ending.

You can almost sense it grinning as it nods, and leads you away into its realm of terror and dread.