The Sleepwalker

Part Three: 14

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Chris 

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The young boy was terrified. He heard something move outside his window, yet when he peeked from under his covers there was nothing but the billowing curtains and whistle of the wind. He listened intently until he heard it again. It was a click, like someone tapped two metal objects together. Chris waited in five minutes of silence before throwing off the covers and racing out of his room, stepping on his toy train tracks as he went and wishing he had listened to his mother when she told him to tidy up.

He woke his father and mother by jumping between them and shaking their shoulders with vigor. They were, as expected, unhappy.

"What the... oh. Chris." His father slurred that last part upon realizing it most likely wasn't important. "What're you doing out of bed?"

"I heard it! The monster Evan was telling me about!"

"Monster? Really? Go back to bed already."

Chris turned to his mother, hoping for an ally, but she had seemingly already fallen asleep.

He left their room and, filled with undying hope, went to his older brother's room, which was adjacent to his parents. After shaking him awake, Chris pointed outside.

"I heard the monster right outside my window!"

Evan blinked. "Tell him I said hello then."

"I'm not lying! I heard its bones click!"

"Bud, I hate to say it, but that's just a story. Now leave me alone."

"If it doesn't exist, why don't you open your window at night?"

Evan laid back on his bed. "Personal preference."

"You're afraid of the monster." Chris practically whined. He had expected his brother of all people to believe him, and here he was telling Chris off.

Evan sat up and glared at his younger brother. "I'm not afraid."

"Yes you are! Evan is ascared of the monster!"

Suddenly his brother threw the sheets off himself and stood slowly. In the relative darkness of his room, Chris barely saw his big brother walk to the closed window, until he threw open the blinds and moonlight streamed in.

"If I sleep with the window open, will you go back to your room and leave me alone?"

Chris nodded and dived under Evan's bed, just in case, though it seemed counterproductive considering everyone knows that's where monsters love to sleep.

His brother gave an annoyed sigh.

"Oh monster of our woods, if you are out there I beseech you to show thyself!" He mocked, before unlocking his window.

As if summoned by the click of the latch, a large white animal bursted through the glass. It was the first and last time Chris heard Evan scream.

The thing growled and began doing things to Evan. Chris closed his eyes, but he could still hear the clicking... and the wet, sloppy noises.

The Crick had arrived.

The Crick was a peculiar creature. It needed to eat bones, and it was cursed for its entire life for its bones to painfully catch on one another before scraping free. The myths never agreed on anything, but the most common legend is that a scarecrow was made from human bones and doused in blood... you can guess what happens next. Moral of the story is... well, Chris couldn't quite remember. His young mind was more engrossed in the fact that there was a large bony monster out there, who ate children and took their bones.

And now it was in his house.

Through his fingers, Chris could only just see the legs of the Crick. Its bones looked like they were stuck in clear jell-o, because its flesh was made of some gelatin-like substance. Chris never wanted to eat jell-o again, especially red jell-o. He pretended the red stuff on the Crick's legs was not blood by thinking of ketchup.

The monster soon finished with Evan and moved click-by-click to the door, until Chris could no longer hear him. Hoping for the best, he crawled out from under the bed.

The carpet was stained. That was all that was left of his brother.

Tears never came for Chris. He didn't fully believe that his brother was gone, so he stepped out past the stain and into the hall to look for him.

Family portraits were shattered. Wallpaper had been torn to shreds. The house was in disarray, to say the least. And by following the trail of red and the smell of rust, Chris was able to discover where the Crick had gone.

His parents bedroom door was slightly ajar, its knob covered in red.

"Mom?"

No answer.

"Dad?"

Silence ensued.

Chris went closer to the door, and the rust smell filled his nostrils as if it were being pumped out of one of those aroma-diffusers that his Grandmother always had running. But those were nice smells, like flowers and strawberries, never were they blood or the odd smell of death that seemed to pollute everything in young Chris's house.

He pushed open his parents door.

"Evan? Are you there?"

The darkness inside could not hide the beast. Its gelatinous skin gave off a slight sheen from the moonlight coming through the window, and its bones and insides were very much visible to Chris. Slurping noises came from its place on his parents bed, but it evidently heard the creak of the door and turned its head.

It had no eyeball, but had an orange slit from the top of its head to its chin. Underneath, a shattered human skull sat frozen in the clear flesh. As humanoid as it seemed, it was very clearly not human, nor were most of the bones in its body. Some too large to be belonging to a mammal, some far too warped to even belong to an animal at all, and most stuck right out of its skin like a scary porcupine.

It stared at Chris, its eye slit unmoving; unblinking. Until it began to click. It moved its arms in unnecessary moves, making more and more noise.

Chris didn't move, he didn't even know what to do. The Crick seemed to know this, because it sprung off the bed and crawled toward him.

Even on all fours the creature was taller than him.

It stopped about a foot away, the eye slit still focused on him. Chris barely noticed it reach out with its index finger, which had a large hooked bone protruding out of it, and give him a slight cut on the side of the young boy's neck. It pulled away, and Chris saw out of the corner of his eye something green glint on the Crick's bony finger in the white light of the moon, but he didn't dare look away from the eye slit because the Crick didn't look away either.

Until, that is, the walk-in closet door was kicked open. And Chris's mother stood in the broken doorway, his father's rifle in hand. Blood covered her face, but there was a fury in her eyes that Chris had only seen when wolves had gotten inside their chicken coop.

She screamed in anger, the Crick clicked, and the gun went off multiple times. A window shattered, and something much like a finger, white and bony, hit the floor.

A mother cried, a son and father had died.

But, in all the fright, a Key was forged that night.