THE TRUE MEANING OF NIGHT

AVA

I wake up early in the middle of the night for no real reason. I haven't had a dream yet tonight, which is good, I guess. It seems that all I've had are bad dreams lately, and I really want them to stop, but they don't listen to me. The first thing I think when I open my eyes is that I can see something. It reminds me of what Tony said before that if I can still see something, even if it's dark, then I'm still safe. I think maybe the bad dreams will stop now because I'm not scared anymore. That's a good thing, because being scared is an icky feeling. And now I can go back to sleep. Yay!

So, sometimes I hear funny things when I sleep. It started right around when the first blackout hit. They're sort of like whispers or swishes of movement somewhere around the edges of whatever I'm aware of. I can never tell what they are. They're not made up in my dreams, though. I know because I can always figure out what my dreams are about, and my dreams are of nicer things, thank you very much.

Every time I wake up from one of those dreams, I get the feeling that something bad happened and I missed it. It makes me feel icky, like I slept in a spider's web and only just managed to get out. My brain is fuzzy, too, but that might because I was just asleep.

But now it's daytime, and that's awesome because I don't have to be scared. I can tell Mr. Fluffy Cat is glad it's morning too when he smiles like that. I hope he had good dreams. I look at the clock and it's almost eleven. I jump out of bed and scramble to the door. I've almost wasted the whole morning sleeping when I could have been making ice cream! 

I run down the hallway and I know that the sound of my feet slapping against the wood floor might wake someone up, but I'm in a hurry to get to the basement. Well, actually, first I have to find the basement. Grammy Rose mentioned something about one a few days ago, but she never actually said where it is. I'm actually a bit nervous, looking around the house for a basement door. It's like the time I snuck out of the house to see a meteor shower at night. Mommy got mad at me after that. Getting in trouble isn't very fun.

The first door I see is a closet. Inside are lots of old clothes that I've never seen anywhere before and they don't smell very good. I can see mothballs on the top shelf, and there are boxes. I don't understand mothballs. They're square. Why are they balls if they're square?

Another door looks like it could have had a closet behind it, but it's really a washer and dryer stacked on top of each other. I think this is weird, because why would you clutter up a perfectly good closet with a laundry machine? That's difficult to move out of the way if you ever wanted to put anything there, you know.

I think I try five other doors before I finally find the basement. At least I didn't run into any spiders, but this door makes me think something bad is behind it. I open it anyway—I have to try all the doors if I want to find anything. The door creaks open, loud enough that I think it might wake someone up, and some wind breezes past my face. I didn't know wind could be inside. There's a staircase going down, so I'm pretty sure this is the basement. It looks scary enough to be one, anyway. So I found it. Now, what does an icebox look like, again?

Well, a box, I know. But there are a lot of box-looking things down here. And it's dark, and cold. This is where the monsters are, I'm sure of it. They're hiding behind one of the boxes and as soon as I'm not paying attention, they're going to jump out and eat me.

But Tony said there's no such thing as monsters.