Chapter Text
The fingers are reaching up to grab me. They want me. They won’t go away, they’re always watching. Hiding. Making sure I won’t see them, won’t know they’re there, but I do. I can hear their soft murmurs underneath the floorboard. They're scheming to get me, to take me. To take my soul.
The fingers are getting closer, inch by inch. They don’t have five fingers like we do; they have three. Three thick, gnarled digits, each culminating in an obsidian-sharp claw, the size of a butcher’s knife, stained with a reddish substance that leaks down into the floor. Scales, thick and uneven, some a dull grey, others a bulging purple, line the hand, barely covering the pulsing, rotting flesh that reeks with the cloying sweetness of decay.
They’re scrapping my bed frame, the monster’s immense palms, rigged with calloused, leathering hide clamps down the side rail. With a sickening groan that echoes like human bones snapping, it simply twists. The screws that hold it together are not simply loosened by sheared off, and each nail is ripped from it’s socket, and the joints burst off, exposing raw, fractured wood. The very act of contact seems to accelerate decay; where its scales touch, the varnished surface appears to dull and age instantly. The flesh of its hand, visible beneath the scales, seems to absorb the life from the world itself, leaving behind jagged, splintered wreckage, a testament to the ongoing demolition performed with not just precision but with sheer, terrifying, primal force.
The impact was jarring, a brutal thud echoed in the room, as my back slammed against the cold wall. Every instinct screamed to escape, to put distance between myself and the encroaching terror, and I frantically scrambled back from the precipice of the bed. It couldn't reach me. I wouldn't let it. Yet, relentlessly, it persisted, its grotesque hand tearing chunks away from my bed frame at a barbaric pace. Coming ever so closer to me, filling my shrinking world. My bed had become a death trap, a stage for my demise. I had to move. If not, I’d die.
A shower of dark, downy feathers drifts through the air, settling like macabre snow as the jagged claws tear and sink deeper into the mattress beneath me, each rending sound a direct assault on my nerves. My entire body screams to flee, to break away from this cage before those talons find flesh, before the flimsy bed is utterly shredded, exposing the true horror of the hand's unseen owner. But I am frozen, paralysed, rooted to the spot by an invisible, crushing dread. I am nothing more than a helpless lamb caught in a snare, anticipating the inevitable, agonising moment the wolf will finally descend. To tear me apart. Limb from limb.
Its claws, those obsidian-sharp daggers, kept inching closer to me, a slow, deliberating march across the ruined mattress. Bit by bit. It was a painstaking, agonizingly slow advance, each millimetre a lifetime of dread, oh how I wish it a sudden lunge. That the thing could just get it other with. I could feel the glacial breath of its proximity, a promise of my demise to come. The scraping sound of those three gnarled digits against the splintered wood, the very sound that had heralded the destruction of my bed, was now a morbid timer, counting down the seconds of my impending doom.
The deafening scraping that had filled the room stopped as abruptly as a snapped wire. Silence, thick and heavy, rushed in to replace the sound, save for the frantic pounding of my own heart. The claws remained where they were, lodged deep within the ruined mattress, now just a menacing, black presence on the edge of the bed. My breath hitched in my throat, a tiny, ragged sound swallowed by the stillness. I waited for it to move. To begin its torment once more, but nothing happened. The claws were utterly still, haunting me with their terrifying proximity. I wondered, with a sickening mix of dread and morbid curiosity, if a single twitch of my body would reignite the destruction. Would this agonizingly slow demolition continue if I dared to move? I couldn't bring myself to find out.
An eternity passed. My muscles ached from holding a single position, a silent, motionless vigil. The creature offered no sign, neither withdrawing its claws nor resuming its attack. A desperate, irrational thought took hold—a need to understand, to challenge the paralysis. With a slow, agonising effort, I began to lift my hand, each millimetre of movement a deliberate act of defiance against my own terror. My fingers, trembling with a life of their own, crept forward toward the nearest claw. It felt surprisingly cool, a surface as smooth and unyielding as polished obsidian. The moment my skin made contact, a faint, almost imperceptible pulse seemed to vibrate through the monstrous talon, not of life, but of pure, cold awareness. In that instant, I knew it wasn't just waiting. It had been listening.
The cold pulse that shot through my fingertips was not a physical sensation, but a mental one—a shuddering, abyssal awareness that had just registered my touch. My own hand felt like a beacon, a screaming signal in the dead silence. The claw didn't withdraw. Instead, with painful slowness, it flexed, the tip of its monstrous blade shifting a single, purposeful inch within the ravaged mattress. It had been listening, and now it knew exactly where I was. A low, guttural grinding sound, like two great stones shifting, emanated from the darkness on the other side of the bed. It wasn't a beast blindly demolishing its prey's hiding place; it had been a perverse game, a test of my resolve. And I had just lost. The creature, no longer content with its slow demolition, began to pull its other massive claws from the bed frame with a sickening, wet-leather squelch.
The game was over. It was time for the hunt to begin.