It's always been my habit to do check that every light and switch in the house is off before I can go to sleep. Call it a leftover from a childhood full of shouted arguments between my parents, always about money and somehow always caused by me forgetting to switch off a light and over the years it's just stuck in my head.
Yesterday had been a normal night of me going round the house from top to bottom, switching everything off and checking the doors were locked as usual. I only saw it after I'd turned off the last light, backlit by the orange haze of the streetlight outside the kitchen.
It was enormous, squatting like some kind of gargoyle and staring right at me with a smirk on its torso-sized face like it knew something I didn't. When it eventually backed into the darkness of the field beyond the streetlight and I backed up to the farthest kitchen wall, I caught a glimpse of a clock showing we'd been locked in that staring contest for well over two hours.
I couldn't sleep for most of the night, constantly checking my front door and garden cameras in case it had showed back up and eventually managing to catch a couple of hours rest at dawn. When I checked the kitchen window in the morning I saw inhumanly large footprints leading from my window back to the fields and from my window down the street.
A quick look outside, disguised as gathering my mail from the post box, showed that every house before mine had been broken into. There was glass everywhere but no blood nor bodies. I still called the police and ambulances just in case and now I'm waiting for them to show up.
Some part of me knows that if I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't be writing this right now.
Thank god for little routines.
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