Prompt: A story that answers the song title - Am I Going Crazy? by Korn
His hands knotted into his hair, pulling once more on the grimy blonde strands. His sheets rustled as his arms moved, whispering at him, asking him why he hadn’t moved yet. The whispers died as he stilled, focusing on the approaching footsteps outside his bedroom door.
The house was empty; the front doors locked and checked three times, each window sealed from the inside, making entrance impossible. Making escape impossible.
He knew without a doubt that it was all in his head. The sheets didn’t whisper. There was no one walking down the hall toward him, toward the tiny room in the middle of the vast house. But that didn’t make it seem any less real. The light grey walls silently watched him, curled up in those whispering black sheets. He pulled his knees to his chest as the footsteps paused outside of the door. The blanket tangled around him. He ignored it, staring in anticipation, in horror, at the closed door.
The clock across the room, the one illuminating the area around it with an eerie red glow, blinked at him, tracking the minutes as five, ten, fifteen of them passed. Still, whatever had invaded his impermeable fortress stood outside. Waiting for him to make a move. Waiting for him to make a mistake.
He had grown accustomed to this life. He had grown accustomed to sitting in silence in the tiny grey room, waiting for the sun to rise again. Waiting for whatever was outside of his door to retreat into wherever it came from. Waiting for it to get bored with his torment and evacuate the building.
It came at the same time every night. He quickly checked the clock to make sure. Yes, it was just passed three. Always at three. Every night for the past ten months it had been at three.
He supposed it made sense. That was when she died. That was when he had been too slow to save her. Too far away. Nothing near the hero she needed. He was slowly realizing that he never would be. Well, at least not for her. Nothing would ever be anything for her anymore. She was dead.
He checked the clock again. It was nearly four, then. He briefly wondered where the time had gone before it began. Whatever was out there was pacing, pacing back and forth in front of the door, like a dog about to lie down or a cat who wanted let it.
He couldn’t let it in. He didn’t even know what it was.
The pacing would continue for another thirty-seven minutes before halting abruptly, leaving the intruder once more staring at the closed door. If he let it go on that long.
He had spent the first few nights of this shaking in terror, muffling sobs into the whispering sheets, taking shelter in the soon-forgotten blanket. He thought it was an actual person roaming around. Not the idea of one. Not the remnants of one in his mind.
No, he didn’t think that she was still around. She deserved better than to be left with the man who let her die. She deserved better than an eternity of watching him stay up late, listening to footsteps and counting minutes tick by, hoping that whatever it was would just stop.
He had tried to tell it to, in the beginning. The footsteps had once been in the living room, stomping around like it was on a mission. They had stayed there for almost a month before he made the mistake of screaming. Screaming at it to go away. Screaming at it that he had done nothing wrong. Screaming just to scream. It was awfully quiet in that big empty house.
But once he screamed, it found him. He had to switch rooms, still able to hear the pacing down the hall in front of the room he had once occupied. It was like in one of those video games she used to play, where a development in the game unlocked a skill for the play. Whatever it was, it had leveled up. And that kept him up, watching the locked door, making sure it didn’t do it again.
