Copyright © 2024 by Brittany Noelle
Five Nights Ago
A weighted hush falls over the student-shared house as midnight passes. Start of semester nerves keep the freshman awake for hours of restless shivers and giddy laughter. But as phone screens mark the late hour, the students regretfully retire to their individual bedrooms with yawning calls of goodnight.
One young freshman, Sarah Starr, curses the dark as she strives to stay awake as long as she can. At first pacing, then curled up with her stuffed penguin. She prays for a dreamless sleep. Biting her nails, she counts the stars outside her window, clears her mind of shadows, longing for the simplicity of life back home, even at the cost of her newfound university freedom. Under her parents’ protective roof, she never used to have the nightmares.
When she finally falls into exhausted unconsciousness, dreams swirling of cozy blankets and ice-cream preteen summer days, the creeping-crawling begins.
Tiny legs skitter up and down her arms, across the lengths of her legs. Weaving between the locks of her hair like a maze. Searching. Clicking mouths whispering.
Outside her comforting dreams, Sarah’s sleeping form twitches.
Between her toes, insects patter and prod. Crawl into the crooks of her ears. Push against her belly button. Their crawling, searching, poking bodies stroke down her skin.
Her dream finally breaks when she’s covered in them. Panic-frozen, she tries to swat the invaders away, but can’t fully wake, can’t move out of her protective pose over her stuffed animal. A paralyzing venom? The strange insects’ whispers drone through her, a buzzing din of sound taking shape. “Home,” they hum in a unified song, over and over. “Home, home, home.”
A knock comes from the door. “Sarah? You okay?”
She wants to wake, answer the call, escape! But the crawling legs merge and double and inch across her skin until they finally discover her nose and mouth. Push for entrance.
There’s nothing she can do but mentally howl and screech as they stream inside. A thousand skittering legs crawl over her tongue, jam inside her cheeks, knock against her teeth. They mass and poke beneath her face, until their blind search discovers a channel down. Her body convulses, choking for breath.
“Sarah! Wake up!”
Sudden human touch shocks her. A tether to the woken world.
Sarah jolts upright, scream ripping her throat. She digs fingernail stubs against her cheeks and tongue then spits across the bed to be rid of the tiny, prickling legs. But nothing she does ends their tickling torment. The insects still creep, still crawl, across her entire body. Unseen creatures converging up her neck, her chin, following their brothers inward.
“Sarah?” Her roommate tries to reach out with a calming hand to the shoulder.
But Sarah shrieks away. Shocks from the bed. Itches at her face and arms and knees and stammers over and over, “They can’t come home, they can’t come home.”
“What? Sarah, wait!”
Sarah staggers out of the room, slips down the stairs. But even as she bumps her head against the walls and her ankle buckles on the landing, she hurries to escape the house.
Bursting into the cool, night air, she sucks in a full breath and shouts her warning, “They can’t come home!” before collapsing unconscious on the lawn.
Tiny legs recede from her unmoving body, their buzzing, clicking whispers for home fading into the dirt.
Author’s Note:
Hi everyone!
Thanks for reading this first part of my new webs serials Penn and Sword. I’m super excited about this urban fantasy series and hope for it to continue for a long while.
Let me know your thoughts down below!