In the Shadows

What is hiding in the depths of a mirror? What is waiting around the corner of a building? What is lurking in the Shadows?

As you tuck your child in her bed and kiss her good night, the monsters get ready. You reach for the light switch and say good bye, for when your child sleeps in that room she does not come out the same.

When the ghouls and the ghosts, and the dolls and the spiders come out there is nothing to protect her. Burying deep into her covers and singing herself a lullaby she lulls into sleep.

Then they come.

They slip from the shadows and appear from the mirrors, they squeak and they crawl and the clamber all over her. They whisper in her ears and they pull on her clothes. They infect her mind and become her nightmares.

Then she wakes up.

She snaps her eyes open and sits up in her bed, looking around her room in the darkness for any sign of the monsters. There is only one left. A little girl, the exact copy of the one in the bed. She grows nails and fangs and approaches like a predator. The fiend gets closer and closer, closer and closer, until...

The family leave the hotel, as happy as ever, they get into their car and they start on the empty country road through the forest. A thick fog envelopes the car, the sun sets, the trees seem to get larger.

Three months later there was a story on the news.

"A family of three, a little girl with her mum and dad, were found dead in the middle of the forest only 800 meters away from a small hotel. It looks like the daughter, Mary, killed her parents by choking them, proceeding to kill herself by clawing her arm until she ran out of blood. Everyone who knew the little girl said that she was a happy girl and would never do something like that but evidence proves the fingerprints covering her parents necks were Mary's."

Several more cases like this were reported around the same area, until police started investigating the hotel. It was run out of business and converted into a hospice, that very room was still there and all of it's occupants committed suicide, ill or not.