In The Dark

What was that noise?! It sounded like a scream. Woke her up. Why was her head so woozy and why was it so cold in her bedroom? Had the heating broken down again? And why was her bottom bunk so hard and where were her covers? Maybe her sister, Elizabeth had taken them.

“Elizabeth? Have you taken my covers?”, she asked, whispering.

Elizabeth didn't answer.

Darn that Elizabeth! Lizard Breath, she called her. She’d begged Mom for a bedroom of her own but Mom had insisted on them sharing a bunk bed.

So cold, she thought; wrapping her bare arms round herself and shivering, noticing that she wasn’t wearing her pyjamas but something else, like a dress and there were shoes on her feet. Why was she wearing a dress and shoes in bed?

“Darn you, Elizabeth”, she said, banging on the bottom of the bunk above, “I’m coming up there and getting back my covers!”

But Elizabeth said nothing. She seemed to be completely silent; not even breathing.

“Elizabeth?”, she called again and this time she noticed how her voice seemed to echo in the darkness.

Worried, she decided to get out of her bunk and turn on the light but, when she turned over to her left and tried to get out, she bumped her face into a wall.

“That’s weird?”, she thought. Her bunk was on the right side of the room and so the wall should have been on her right, not on her left; unless Elizabeth had moved the bed for some kind of a dumb joke.

She tried getting up out of the right side of her bunk but her face just bumped up against another hard, cold wall.

“Oh my god!”, she thought. This wasn’t her bunk bed…it was some kind of…box!

Then she noticed something about her head. There was something round it , like a headband and, at the front of the headband there was something spiky and made of plastic. Why was she wearing that?

Suddenly, memories came flooding back from yesterday; halloween, trick or treating with her sister, her fairytale princess costume with the plastic crown and that old man who had given them the candy that had made them sleepy.

Then she heard a voice from outside the box. It was the voice of that old man. “Trick or treat!”, he said, and the lid of the box creaked open.