Charlie

I can’t remember when it started. I know that it involved a sound, I was walking home from school on the same path that I used every day, four years and nothing ever happened that is even worth mentioning.

I had my headphones on, choosing to block out the sound around me rather than take it all in. That was my first mistake.

In the silence between songs, I heard it, but I didn’t even notice that it hadn’t been there before. That was my second mistake, an honest mistake that anyone could have made.

I didn’t notice the sound because it blended in so seamlessly with the other sounds around me that I assumed it had always been there. I was wrong.

Gravel crunched under my school shoes, tartan gray skirt and a white ugly shirt. I was wearing an average school uniform, because if there’s one word that describes Isabel Waters perfectly its average.

I didn’t tell anyone what happened to me, I couldn’t. The fact that I can write this, and leave it for you to find… It’s like a miracle. Writing from beyond the grave.

I walked under a streetlamp still looking at my phone, and something wet dripped onto the top of my head. It was a clear and sunny day, so it couldn’t be rain. It wasn’t cold enough yet for melting frost. I reached up with my hand to touch my head.

When I bought it down to look at it, my hand was smeared in red.

The sound that I should have heard, that would have saved me. It was the drip, drip, drip, of blood. From a body that was hanging on the curved part of the streetlamp. Right above me.

I drew in breath as if to scream, but some deep survival instinct told me to be silent. At the same moment I saw the body, I also saw something. Someone. I don’t know what or who it was.

Something with tentacles, but… It was the shadow which really made the hair on my arms stand on end. The shadow was tiny and in the shape of a little boy. No older than three.

I ran home. I didn’t stop until I got inside and then I locked every door and every window. I don’t know why, but something deep and primal told me that I had to lock them all.

I stayed up all night, with one of those big kitchen knives in my hand. My parents were away on a trip but they would be home tomorrow. Our house is old, wooden, and creaky. I jumped at every noise until the sun came up spreading orange across the horizon.

I went to school, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything that was happening around me. The body, I don’t know I think it was a lady. I didn’t hear anything on the news about a body been found. I doubted my sanity, whether I actually saw anything at all.

By the end of the day I had chalked it up to stress and hormones playing tricks on me. That should have been the end of it all, but, the thing with the tentacles who I would come to know by at least one if its names. It was scheming.