This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/BlibbidyBlab on 2025-12-07 16:34:21+00:00.

They came with tooth, and claw. 

Danielle snuggled further down into the warmth of her bed as the sound of the television crept upstairs and sneaked under the door into her listening ears. Her parents were watching a horror film she knew; they liked to do so on a Friday night, and she was long used to the screams that echoed up towards her. They didn’t bother her, not really, but the day had been a long one and her tired eyes twitched every time the heroine screamed, or monsters wailed with guttural ferocity. 

She had considered going downstairs to ask her parents to turn it down, but the cold chill outside her duvet trapped her as surely as any monster, so she snuggled down instead and tried to force her mind into sleep, an action as oxymoronic as it was unsuccessful. 

She was furiously not hearing sounds from downstairs as they swelled into a nightmarish crescendo, when another sound reached her ears; a sound that fit the mood of the evening even as it caused her breath to run quickly and her ears to sharpen. And then another, closer now, sending further shivers of cold to run up her back like a light brush of cold fingers.  

It was a scream of pitched terror that reached into her mind and shook it awake, a lady’s cry, clearly terrified beyond all thinking, and despite telling herself the alternative Danielle knew it hadn’t come from the television downstairs, but from right outside her window. 

She knelt up shakily, clumsily parting the curtains and wiping the condensation from the window as the cold streaked across her body. Her breath caught as she saw them, a display as horrific as any her parents might be witnessing downstairs. 

Outside on the lawn a young lady lay crawling, a lady that Danielle recognised from down the road. They’d never really spoken, but she had always seemed nice enough to Danielle, and had laughed when her friends had knocked on her door and ran away. Danielle could still remember the vision of the lady, opening the door to nothing, a brief quizzical look before a knowing chuckle. 

‘You’d better run!’ she had called out with a cackle, before going back inside; Danielle and her friends had found it hilarious. 

But now the lady crawled, and her right leg was missing. Her left was barely present, connected by a small section of skin that dragged precariously across the cold ground as she clawed her way forward, snatching into the icy grass to leave a slug-like trail of blood and terror in her wake. The lady screamed again, louder than Danielle thought possible as the shadows behind her twisted into a nightmarish form that loomed into view. 

It moved fast, a creature as horrendous as it was impressive. Even from up in her room Danielle could see that it was big, standing higher than her father would with a thick body, and arms that ended in wicked looking claws of bone. Its mouth opened wide into a melody of teeth beneath eyes that were blank yet focused; it was bestial and basic with an intent clearly on death. For a second the lady looked up, and their eyes met with a watery terror before the creature brought its bladed appendage down onto her throat to cut the moment short, and the watery eyes of the lady ran red, and silent. 

Downstairs a window smashed. 

She heard her father scream, and loud clumping movements smashed into her mind as it stalled. 

What should she do? 

She had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. Her mind still reeled at what she’d seen outside *(the lady was dead!)* even as fear galloped about her body; sweat poured off her as she sat on her bed and blinked away tears listening to the furore downstairs. Her mother was screaming, pitched cries of terror that crawled into Danielle’s mind and made it weep as the television was suddenly silenced, bringing the screams of her mother into a new sharp contrast with the silence of the night. She realised that her father had stopped screaming. 

Suddenly her mother’s tone changed, and a rage of anger filled the house, shaking Danielle psyche with a morsel of hope before it was also cut short amidst the sound of wet rhythmic thumps, and the end of her childhood. 

Danielle knew then that her parents were both quite dead, and that she was probably next. It had all been so quick and without warning. Not five minutes ago she had been safe in her bed, yet now she was defenseless, and whatever those things were would find her if she stayed. 

A calmness seemed to take over her, and even as she heard the slow thump of something heavy moving up the stairs towards her, she very carefully went to the window and slowly opened it. Her parents had always warned her about playing near her window, but whilst refusing to think about them *(Mummy! Daddy!)* she climbed quietly out with only a glance at the body of the lady that lay staring glassily at the stars, and with the agility of youth she clambered up the small wall and moved softly up the steep slope of the roof. Her breath hung heavily in front of her as she climbed, billowing out into white clouds that hung in place behind her until, only seconds later, she reached the apex of the roof to sit painfully on its crest and hug her knees in the frigid wintery air, wrapped only in her soft pyjama's emblazoned with ponies. 

She had nowhere else to go, so she just sat, ignoring the cold as best she could, and waited to be taken. 

She couldn’t see much even as high as she was; the roof was sloped such that the immediate ground around the house wasn’t visible, and the night was dark enough that she could not make out any details far.  

She heard them, whatever they were, clambering about her room and chittering softly - she heard them move her bed and pull over her wardrobe. She heard the chittering increase as they presumably reached the window before eventually pulling back into the depth of the house. 

Somewhere a dog was barking. 

She heard them leave, moving with purpose away from her as further screams echoed around the night; her house may have been left in silence but the night itself was alive, and filled with violence. She did not go back into the house; she did not dare, so she sat on the roof of her family home and dreamed of her warm bed, and the sounds of horror movies to be drifting upstairs. She dreamed of her parents, alive and well, to find her and coax her back inside and tell her it was all a nightmare with a kiss on the forehead and the realness of love. She dreamed of her friends, and her schoolteachers, and everyone she knew, not to be dead, or dying.  

But such dreams were just dreams as she sat on the house, in the cold, and the dark. 

So she dreamed, but she did not sleep.  

At some point during the night the screaming moved off into the distance, and the trail of terror that had found her small house crawled away, hauling itself upon the grounds of despair littered with corpses, until she had found herself in absolute silence. The cold gnawed at her, and as her bare feet and hands turned slowly blue her lips chattered with insistence. She tried to stop them, worried that they would give her away and the monsters would return, but they carried on. Chattering and chattering. 

The morning creeped upon her with an ever-increasing radiance that bled into the night. At first what felt like wishful thinking for daylight slowly turned into the realness of just another day. She had wished hard for daylight throughout the darkness, yet when it came, it did nothing more than highlight problems and solved nothing; the fear remained. 

She told herself the monsters had gone, and that they had other lives to ruin. But still it took some time for her to move. 

Finally, realising quite how cold she was she forced her body to move, at first slowly she went down the slope of the house, listening with every fibre of her being to every rustle of the wind and every bird’s call. The house was silent, a tomb of her previous existence that nonetheless called to her chapped and bleeding lips, and fingers that had long since turned numb, with the promise of warmth. She scooted down, and telling herself that she could not stay on the roof forever, she dipped down onto her windowsill with feet that stepped gingerly with painful shoots of cold.   

She stilled her breath as she clambered awkwardly back into her room, the light from the window highlighting a scene of chaos and destruction - her room had been trampled, her entire life smashed and ruined, books and games flung about haphazardly as her bed lay broken and smashed. Her wardrobe was on its side with clothes strewn all about. 

Acting on instinct she grabbed at a handful and pulled several jumpers over her head as quickly as she dared; her heart thumped as the fabric nestled comfortably around her as the shelter of the house warmed her tired and aching mind. She put on 3 pairs of socks, at first her feet shouted achingly back at her, but she did so anyway before two pairs of jeans and a hat she didn’t remember owning saw out the outfit. Her hands were still bare and blue with an ever-increasing itchiness creeping around them, so she pulled her sleeves over her hands, her whole body feeling flush with energy at the warmth. On a whim she touched a radiator and with a whimper of joy felt the painful touch of heat leak into her fingers. She crouched down and wrapped as much of her body against it, then whilst trying not to make a sound, and for the first time since the attack, allowed herself to cry. 

----- 

Ten years later 

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