[Short Story] ENTITY - Based on True Events - Chapter 3 3AM

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As opposed to recent trends, Lyla didn’t just wake up in the middle of the night. She was, and had always been, a sound sleeper. This crazy 3 o’clock thing was such a crock, she thought. The odd encounters seemed to be centered around this time, give or take a few minutes. She’d done a bit of research and concluded that whether it was the “witching hour”, the “devil’s hour” or “dead time”, it was all equally bad. 

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These incidents seemed to be escalating toward something and Lyla was resistant to know what that might be. A post about her experiences on a popular online forum had warranted the rather humorous response of “I think you just had sex.” after she relayed that her bed was shaking, she was having odd feelings, and then “it” touched her. Whatever the case, she was beginning to think about it more and more.

The way her bedroom was situated, her bed was parallel to the wall that held the doorway to the stairway. The door in question was at her feet. Across the room was a window, a dresser, and a writing desk. This was all that resided in the sparsely-furnished space. 

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On this particular night, again, she woke from a dead sleep. She didn’t open her eyes or move. She faced the wall and listened to the creaking on the wooden stairs leading to the landing outside her open bedroom door. There was no sound of footsteps, but the steps played an odd solo of the sounds they make when someone is climbing them. As the sound grew louder, indicating its source was closer, Lyla thought, “Someone is out there, they are coming, and I’m going to die now.”

Her mind reasoned with her. In order to breach the first floor of her home, someone would need to kick in the door or break a window. Surely, this would wake her even though she had slept through several violent thunderstorms in her lifetime. Plus, the absence of footsteps...did this person hover? Well, then, what about the creaking? She argued and reasoned in the moderate to heavy downpour of thoughts that was her mind. She could thank Attention Deficit Disorder for that. 

Her fat tomcat, Beau, was an ever-present body of fur on the foot of her bed. He curled there every night on a particularly fuzzy blanket that was deemed “his”. The stairs creaked closer and louder still. Suddenly, Beau jumped up from his assigned spot and from a deep sleep. He ran up the bed behind Lyla’s head on her pillow. He cowered there. Lyla’s eyes were still closed. In fact, she was clenching them shut now. All of her effort was now poised on the edge of listening from whence the next creak of the floor would occur. She breathed in little quick spurts because it seemed quieter to do so. Her mind searched her restless reasoning insecure that her next thought would go uninterrupted by the phantom intruder that most certainly must be at the foot of her bed by now. 

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The entire house was silent save for her and Beau’s breathing. The thousands of thoughts soon wooed her back to sleep and ushered in a normal morning. She had forgotten the events during the night until she had been up for a while. Her brain ran in circles. What was it? Did that really happen? Beau did react. What was it?

When she met Christine for drinks that evening, Lyla began telling her the sordid tale. 

“Wait, it was 3AM every time?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“Yeah.” Lyla nodded to bolster the tone of her response. 

“It follows me.”

Christine’s eyes widened and half-rolled toward the table as she reached for her drink. “I think you should lay off the uh…” she gestured as if drinking from her glass.

Lyla rolled her eyes and looked away to distract herself from the conversation that wasn’t going quite how she hoped it would. It was more than clear that Christine didn’t believe her. Lyla decided to skip the part about it happening at Christine’s house as well.