Hole in the Wall

:Not to be confused with an entirely different pasta by Josef K.
You sit in your room, staring at the computer screen intently. You shift into a more comfortable position and resume scrolling through the web.
Scratch.
You look up at the softball-sized hole in your wall. Someone must be using the water in the adjacent apartment. You watch the hole for a moment before blinking and returning to your computer. After a few moments you hear the scratching sound again, this time slightly louder and in a different part of the wall.
You begin to feel uncomfortable. The sounds have never come from more than one spot before. The sound comes again, just behind the computer. You stand and tap the wall lightly where the scratching was coming from. It happens again, louder this time, much louder. You hear a clank and the sound moves again. It’s closer to the hole in your wall. You aren’t sure why it’s there, but you’ve never questioned it before now. You assume that it’s a rat, so you find an old trap, set it up behind the computer and go to sleep.
When you wake up, the trap has been sprung, but you haven’t caught anything. You reset the trap and leave the house for work.
A few hours later, you return home and find the trap, once again, sprung but empty. You set it once again, sure that you’ll catch it this time. After all, third time’s a charm, right?
You stare at the hole in the wall, daring the rat to come out and get caught. After a moment, you decide that you need to leave the room, so you go to clean the main room. While you clean, the scratching sound follows you around the apartment. It grows more and more insistent as time passes. You grab your iPod and play music to drown out the sound.
When the apartment is as clean as it possible can be, you return to the room, shedding your music player as you go. The moment that you take the headphones out, you notice something. The silence. The deep, resounding silence. You stop just outside of your room, feeling a sudden dread. You feel that if you go into the room, there will be something dreadful in there. Terribly dreadful.
You stand there for several moments, convincing yourself that there isn’t anything in the room. You take a deep breath and open the door slowly. You see the pillows first, which, considering that they’re everywhere, isn’t very surprising. They are torn apart and strewn around the room. You stare at the polyester feathers that cover the floor. You check the trap and aren’t quite sure what to think. It caught something, but it isn’t an animal.
It’s a picture of you.
You pull it out and put the trap away. Where did the picture come from? You don’t even have any pictures of yourself except in your… You check your wallet. Sure enough, the picture in your wallet is missing. You are starting to get thoroughly freaked out, what with the torn up pillows and stolen picture.
You spend an hour cleaning the feathers from the floor and bed. You stay awake in the corner of your room, facing the hole in your wall with a cleaver. Sometime in the night, you migrate back to your bed and grudgingly fall asleep.
You have a dream that you’ve been having often recently. You’re sleeping in your bed like normal, but there’s a cat-sized creature watching you from the foot of your bed. It has a scaly tail and uneven, matted fur. Its eyes are huge and round, glowing red. You see its teeth glint in the night, long and sharp. It just stares at you for hours on end and you stare back. After hours of this, the creature stands on its four squat legs and leaves the bed. It climbs up the wall and turns its head to stare at you one last time before it disappears into the hole. You stare at the hole before turning onto your side and falling back asleep in the dream.
When you wake up, you sit up and freeze.
There, at the foot of your bed, is the creature from your dream. Well, you guess that they aren’t dreams after all.
Category:Animals