The True Meaning Of Night

Chapter 5

"We've tried that already, boss; we can't get a connection to make a call to anyone in that area.

"What are you, mice? Get something done about it! Find another way to contact someone!

"Well, actually, sir, mice—"

"Do I look like I care about mice?"

"No, sir."

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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?