Characters Featured: None

Ships: None

Warnings: Mentions of horror

Short Descripton: Was given the prompt of describing how creepy your own home can be. Think I might be convinced to write more horror.

There’s something funny in the way you can come home at night and wonder about the shadows at the corners of the door. The old Christmas lights we never took down just don’t shine quite bright enough to see if it was the start of early-morning frost or eyes glimmering just around the corner of the house, dull white glows echoing off the shadows that swallow a new bulb each day. Sometimes the lights aren’t on, and in the twilight you find yourself fumbling to get your keys, because there might be something sitting in the broken chair by the door that only a child could have sat in many years ago.

Nights like this, your keys never fit just right in the door, and the stars just can’t seem to glow, though they never stop watching. And when you finally push the door open and lock it behind you, chances are the TV’s on to some channel you’ve never seen before. And if you squint just right at where the kitchen peeks out from behind the divider wall, chances are you’ll see the outline of the same hulking beast you always see right before the light switch is flipped on.

No one ever goes down the hall without turning the light on first, because no one wants to stare at the creature always perched at the edge of the bed in the room at the very end of the hall. Any clock hung there has stopped working, and more often than not the enormous fluorescent light barely clinging to the ceiling of the bathroom will flicker briefly when the switch is flipped. Sometimes it won’t work at all. Don’t linger for too long as you walk past it, because no one really knows what's behind the enormous two-way mirror that stretches almost the entirety of the wall above the sink.

But the one place you never walk into without a light is your own room. There’s nothing more terrifying than going inside, because the shadows there are particularly hard to get rid of. And when the power’s out, they get darker. Because that bundle of jackets no longer looks like a mound, but like a small monster with too many teeth, and our pillows now look like they’re waiting to swallow you up while the bony thing in the corner where your dresser used to be looks on. Most nights, you can feel the wind howling through the single-pane windows that have been there since the two cabins the house used to be were fused. No outside light shines through those windows, but a full moon can almost blind you if you’re not careful.

Though the shadows never move far from their perches, never take them for granted. Because they may not move, but the thing scratching in the walls does. It prowls inside the plaster and hardwood, always right behind your head as you sleep. But as frightening as it is, there’s no reason to be afraid. It may be terrifying, but really, it's just like you. So long as you turn the lights on when you’re home, and you don't stray into the dark, the thing in the walls will be slow to crawl. Because you remember last time, don’t you? When you crawled out of the wall?