Kelly Ann Stevens was only nine, but she wasn’t stupid. She made a point of telling herself this when she first heard the ominous and all too familiar shuffling in her closet. She also knew better than to scream as soon as she realized she wasn’t alone. She had tried that the first couple of nights she had been watched. It hadn’t worked. Whatever the thing was, it had just laid low until her dad went back to bed; and then it had come back.
She didn’t know what it was exactly in her closet, but she did know she wasn’t just mistaking a harmless jumble of clothes and toys for something silently watching. Whatever this thing was, it was alive. She knew because the first time she saw its eyes, three nights ago, she’d seen it blink.
On that night Kelly had been laying awake, scared to fall asleep, waiting for the creature’s nightly visit. When she realized it was there, she had propped herself up on her elbows and slowly scanned the darkened bedroom. Her eyes had settled on the closet door, directly opposite the foot of her bed.
Its eyes were red. She had told her father that when he came responding to her scream and it was probably the reason he didn’t believe her. In movies, all monsters had red eyes. Kelly had stared back at the narrow, softly glowing lights she could see through the slats in the door and felt her chest tighten. On previous nights she’d felt the evil emanating from the creature as it silently watched her and had heard it clumsily shuffle away (to where?) after it finished it’s nightly vigil but she had never seen any part of it; until now. She was just getting ready to lie back down, believing her dad was right, that she was just imagining things, when the red winked off and back on quickly.
A few seconds passed as Kelly tried desperately to think of a toy she possessed that had blinking red lights. She slowly realized the only object in the room with lights even remotely like that was a thirteen-inch tall toy robot on the floor under the room light switch. She glanced to her right to make sure it was still where she had left it and that she hadn’t forgotten putting it in the closet before she went to bed.
Robo-Czar the Destructor was exactly where she had left him. She could dimly see his shadowy form looming threateningly over several shorter action figures he had “ambushed” and was “attacking” when her mother had told her to use the bathroom and go to bed.
Kelly turned her eyes back to the closet door, just in time to see the red slits blink off and on again and this time she knew what had happened.
She took in a short, surprised gasp of air. The creature in the closet could apparently see her too because when she showed her alarm, the red briefly glowed brighter. Then, as Kelly stared, the creature winked at her.
She saw the red line on the right of what would be the creatures head go out and re-light while the left continued to glow softly. Kelly gasped again and heard a low rumble from the other side of the closet door that she instantly recognized as a chuckle.
She had tried to hold on to her composure and not give in to the fear that gripped her. The fear had won, and twelve seconds later she found her breath and screamed and her dad had come, unbelieving.
