The Horrible Thing That Slipped Through My Window One Night

"Get your ass back here!" yelled his dad. "I want some company Thomas, and I'm going to get it! It's cold in my casket and I think your fat ass could warm it up!"

Tom cruised up the porch steps (he could really move when he needed to) and twisted the brass knob on the door.

Locked.

He could feel that muggy dreamlike sensation falling away, being buried beneath a black blanket of unforgiving doom, as he turned the handle back and forth, using both hands. But he knew the door wasn't going to open; he had known it before he tried the first time. He could hear the man's feet brushing through the grass beside the porch, only a few yards away. He wasn't hurrying. Whatever it was, it expected to get him without much trouble.

Tom turned from the door and ran around to the back of the porch, without bothering to look at his pursuer. The world around him was a haze of green and light brown. His senses were bent to their limits. He could still smell the organic scent of fresh cut grass, and it amplified his terror; it assured him that this was really happening - that there would be no waking up.

He leapt over the railing on the back of the porch, methodically using both hands to make a clean job of it, and began to run blindly through the back yard, toward the forest, where a gathering of maple and oak trees silently observed him. If he could make it in there, perhaps he could find a place to hide, perhaps he could –

Tom felt a greasy hand clamp around the calf of his right leg and yank him downward. All two-hundred pounds of him tumbled to the ground like a bag of bricks. His chin smacked a hard rock jutting out from the ground. Tom heard an awful sound, like a body-builder snapping a broom handle, and pain exploded in his head.

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