Prompt 6 - Strange White

The house was empty, of that he was sure. Every room, every corridor, every space accounted for with no persons present. So the alarm in his brain was hellish and most prevalent when he heard the words "Sweet dreams" muttered behind him...

Whirling on his feet, he found – nothing. Nobody. As he scanned his room, he found himself doubting his sanity, if only for the moment. Once he secured his confidence in his thoughts once again, he returned to dressing into his pajamas and lying down to sleep.

After only a few hours, he was awoken by the needs of the body; not unusual, he groggily went to the bathroom. Upon his return, he only vaguely noticed the light frost against his window through the half-asleep haze and took a small mental note of the cool weather outside.

He lay down in bed and pulled his covers over, waiting for the heat to collect and push back the creeping cold that the night inevitably became. His mind had finally drifted backward to the welcome darkness, his body snug and warm, when it happened. The heat was suddenly gone and there was a still coolness across the whole room, wakening him sharply.

He looked over to the window, and there was a whiteness to the frost over the glass, not bright or even quite frozen, but a coldness of color that spread evenly over the incoming light. He’d never seen anything like it before, at this time of night it should be rather dark out, even with the moonlight fully bright. Yet this light, it was something else.

Stepping out of bed, he felt the cool air sitting still within the room, and for his feet to touch the floor was as if he were standing on the moist cold dew of morning. He moved to the window for answers and found none as he touched the window and withdrew immediately, so cold as if it burned without heat.

He turned from the window and was startled to find the form of a person lying in his bed, covered as he might be, though he could see no such person where their head should be exposed from the covers. Cautiously he moved back to his bed, slowly stepping nearer and nearer, until he was beside it and still unable to make out anything filling the space.

Leaning over the bed now, he took hold of the covers and began to pull them back when it showed itself. It was as if made of daylight shining through a cloud, the form of a woman lying in his bed as if asleep. At his action it stirred, and in a single motion opened its eyes, lunged at him and shoved him to the cold ground.

He scrambled to his feet in disbelief as he watched it rise upright out of the bed before him, and in the strange white light filtering through the window’s frost he could have sworn it looked just as his wife had before she had died. He took a step back from it, and before he could make any other move it was beside him, holding him by the neck with fingers so much like ice that when it flung him he momentarily thought he’d be frozen in its grip.

Whatever appearance he might have thought he’d seen in it before, it was quickly fading as its form grew foggy and filled with the bright whiteness of color. He wasn’t going to wait, pulling himself from the wall with a difficulty he might have found in raising himself from the floor. Every step that rushed him out of his room seemed colder than the last, the soles of his feet feeling as though they might freeze should they step for too long.

Once in the hallway, it was only a short distance to the stairway, but it seemed to take forever for him to reach it. It was as if time slowed and the cold spread, a gravity of the strange white frost surrounding him and pulling him into some place that he was meant for all along. Just when he thought he was frozen in place, a living statue, it all resumed again. A trick of the mind, a true stop-motion of reality, whichever it might have been it was passed now, just in time for his foot to step onto the first step in the stairway.

The first step was cold, far too cold, it had frozen his foot onto it enough that when he placed his other foot on the next step, the first did not want to move. Yet already in motion, he felt a great long sting of pain across the whole bottom of his foot as it raised as if out of his control. His foot in immense pain, he stopped to examine it and find the cold behind him grow, the presence of the strange cold thing just behind him, an icy death against his back in the form of the palm of a hand.

As if the force of the icy gravity swirled around him, he still held his injured foot and spun on his other heel, that one as well tearing its own sole from the frozen step and facing him toward the cold thing that loomed over him as he fell away from it, tumbling down the stairs at a pace that was ever so slightly slowed by the frozen stairway that would not yield that which its cold grip held.

When his body came to rest at the bottom of the stairs, his neck and a fair deal more were broken, and even though his body was gone numb, pain disconnected from his fading mind, his twisted head held his eyes up to the top of those same stairs where it stood and watched it waft down to him, not yet finished as his eyes glassed over into ice and his vision faded to a strange white.