Into the dark…
Sam took a deep breath and looked nervously over her shoulder. The reassuring line of light under the bedroom door that usually showed that Mum was still reading had been turned off long ago. The midnight darkness was complete, enveloping, clinging like a cloak around her, raising her other senses to a level where everything was twice as large. Someone needed to investigate what was making that noise - and only Sam was awake. There was the sound again - Sam tried to identify it in her imagination but failed. The darkness let her thoughts run riot, exaggerating the possible source; what was it? Could it be a troll that had slipped from another dimesion into the kitchen, and was now foraging for food? A slavering beast that had got in through the catflap and was now waiting, just waiting for somebody to come down stairs so that it could leap out and scare them? “This is no good” thought Sam “I need to deal with it myself”, and hesitantly stepped onto the first stair. Thankfully Dad had fixed the creak that it often made so that the ogre in the kitchen didn’t hear her, and Sam slowly continued down the stairs, holding tight to the banister as if it was a lucky talisman, protecting her from the horde of dwarves, their sharp teeth clattering together as they prepared to devour her flesh.
One more stair to go. Sam gulped, and gathered her courage ready to open the kitchen door. On the long anxious journey down the stairs the sound in the kitchen had been heard two more times, and had changed from a relatively quiet scratching (the sort that an alien might make, looking for human samples to take back to his ship for horrible and gruesome testing, only to later release them into a pine wood where they would wander aimlessly until the forest warden found them in the morning, still dressed in their pyjamas and muttering incoherently about alien abduction) to a louder rustling that grew and grew, indicating that whatever made the sound was growing in size at a tremendous rate and now must nearly fill the entire kitchen. Whatever it was, Sam had used up nearly all her courage and was wide-eyed and ready for the deathly hordes of an ancient warrior to come from the kitchen, their swords being brandished in their bony hands as they sought revenge for some deed perpetrated and long-forgotten by mere mortals. One more step…
This post is in response to a exercise set on the Meole Brace English blog by Mrs Dean for her Year 7 English class. After reading the first paragraph of a story they need to write the second, continuing the tension generated by the darkness in the story. They will be writing in their own blogs, and using trackback to link to the teacher’s via a comment. In later lessons they will be inviting comments from others, and a continuation of the story. So I had a great time writing my version of what might happen, although I expect the young and fertile imaginations will make a better job of it.