The last thing she saw before everything went dark was the ocean.
She'd come home and found the doors to the house open, which wasn't entirely odd, her mother liked the sea air and that was the best way to get it into the house. But everything in the house was dark. Black. She could see that from the outside, before even going in. There were lights on in the house, but everything was black. Shadows filling everything up, keeping the light from piercing through.
It made her hesitant to go inside, but then she heard the noises. Screaming that was almost instantly cut off. Two voices, her father and her mother. She heard the screams first, and then the noise. Like bones cracking, like water gurgling, like some sort of sound that would come out of a nightmare.
By all rights, she should have run from the house, not gone deeper inside of it. Into the darkness. She should have run.
Going into the darkness was like being suffocated and still being able to breathe. Like swimming in a sewer. It was like she was being pulled into the house, because all she really wanted to do was get away. She couldn't help her parents, most likely they were already dead. She knew what this was.
Everyone knew what this was.
But she felt compelled to go in. To go into the living room and sit in front of the media screen. Images flickered. Horrifying ones. Docile ones. Things that kept her in place, some that made her touch the screen as if she could claw her way inside it.
She could feel the thing moving behind her, touching her back, her shoulder with jittering hands. That noise, that awful noise, in her ear. Louder and louder. The image of the ocean on the media screen. Terror bubbling up in her, filling her until she screamed. The thing's hand over her throat, nails in her skin and all she saw was the ocean as everything went dark and awful.
And all she heard was that sound coming from her own mouth.
