He left the door unlocked on purpose, just to see what would happen. He'd been warned by both Ma and Da that strange men would creep into the house and eat him alive if he ever left a door or window unlocked but his friends at school said they were lying.
So he put it to the test.
He'd left a couple windows unlocked for the last few nights and nothing had come from it. Maybe a few more beetles around the place but nothing as drastic as his parents had warned him about so leaving the back door unlocked was the logical next step in his test.
In the morning there were beetles clustered all over the place and the door itself was slightly open. He shut it and locked it before his parents came down to check and locked it again when he left for school. In his mind it was definitive proof that they were wrong, something he planned to confront them about when he got home.
He never got the chance.
The back door was unlocked and wide open, as was the front door. He called out for his Ma and Da, hearing only a faint clicking sound coming from upstairs. Being a child without much experience in fearful events, he ran to the source of the sound and didn't think to look around first.
The sound itself was coming from the master bedroom, another door that was always meant to be left closed and was wideopen today. He caught his breath at the top of the stairs and called out for his parents one more time. The sound stopped.
A chitinous shape emerged from the doorway, blood spilling from its eerily still mandibles that whirred into action again as its jewel-tones eyes met the frightened gaze of a child who didn't stand a chance. The world became a blur of glistening black and red and then silence.
If anyone noticed an unusual amount of beetles running from the house, they kept quiet and ran home.
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