Her Last Night on Earth

Abigail lived in an old ranch house in a little town called Munday, Texas. She inherited the home in her thirties when her parents died.

Her family owned land, picked crops, and raised cattle for generations, but the fields were barren now and all that remained were rusty, old, John Deere tractors and dilapidated barns. 

There was something nostalgic, even bucolic, about the round bales of hay that sprinkled the horizon as the sun set that late autumn evening. The north Texas gust caused the giant cypress trees to sway slowly in a manner that seemed intentional...deliberate, as the wind-chimes on the front porch sang their verse.

There was no way, of course, Abigail could have known it would be her last night in that house; indeed, her last night on Earth. Had she known, she surely would have stopped to enjoy the fields, the wind, and the trees, if only once more. 

It was nearly ten o’clock when Abigail retired to her bedroom as she did most every night. The cool evening breeze whistling softly through the open window screens provided pleasant company to a woman who lived alone. She pulled back the light-blue quilt her mother made when she was a child and exposed clean, pressed white sheets. She slipped under the covers and sunk gently into the bliss of down pillows, down comforters, and feather beds. Her sleep was peaceful that night; until...

...she awoke and sat up in a panic; cold sweat, chest heaving.

Her damp, white night-gown clung to her skin. What time was it? Had she been dreaming?

The questions raced through her mind as her eyes adjusted to the dark. It was a moonless, permeating, thick blanket of darkness familiar in the country. What seemed unfamiliar to Abigail was the quiet...

There was no breeze. No wind whispering lullabies through the window screens, no soft song of locusts in the cypress trees, just stillness - terrible, unusual stillness and silence so complete she worried without knowing why. 

Then she heard it...

Breathing, but not her own. 

Abigail froze. 

Someone was there in the corner, stifling their breath as she strained to see. 

A piercing, terrible shriek let out from the dark as a shadowy figure bolted toward the bed. In a moment, Abigail was in a fight for her life.

Her hands reached frantically to grasp at the limbs of her attacker, but she fumbled helplessly to no avail. In those brief, terrible seconds which, to her, lasted a lifetime, she realized her hands slipped every time she gained a grip on the invader.

Was it sweat? It felt like slime.

She felt hot, panicked breath in her face as she was pinned down under the incredible strength of her assailant. An otherworldly, horrific, animal squelch roared inches from her face as droplets of ooze dripped on her forehead.

Just then an enormous, blinding light filled the room from the windows. The creature, now revealed, was grey with great, black, oblong eyes and nightmarish rows of pointed teeth.

Abigail became aware of a deep rumbling which shook the foundation of her country home, rattled the framed photographs of her parents on the bedside table, and vibrated the glass panes in each window.

The monster forcibly tore Abigail, screaming, from her bed, taking with them the light-blue quilt she clutched in a desperate attempt to grab anything for salvation. 

There would be none for her that night.

With amazing speed, the two were gone through a large tear in the window screen and out into the yard underneath the great flood light from the sky. Abigail had mere moments to look upward, blinded after seeing rows of smaller lights she struggled in her daze to understand. 

Then the light was gone and, with it, the pair from the yard.

Everything returned to normal and as it should be in the country. The moonless night blanketed all beneath with its pervading darkness; the cypress trees in the yard began their deliberate sway; and the locusts their soft song to the verse of the wind-chimes on the porch. 

Inside, the new hole in the window screen altered the pitch of the whistle from the breeze. The clean, soft sheets of Abigail’s bed rustled in the wind, never to feel the warmth of her skin again.