A Life To Waste by Andrew Lennon

couch.
    BANG!!!
    “Again!”
    He turned around, this time
there was something behind him.
    “Oh shit! What the fuck!”
     
    There was a huge shadow behind
the couch, he jumped up and turned around so he was stood facing
the shadow, but there was no one else there. It wasn’t his shadow,
was it a ghost? He was terrified. The shadow moved. Dave jumped in
fright. The shadow had moved to the left side of the wall. Dave,
paralysed with fear stood staring at the shadow. To the right he
noticed movement. Another shadow had appeared on the right hand
side of the wall. He looked behind him, no one there. Where were
these shadows coming from? Who did they belong too? Dave’s fear was
growing inside him, he felt himself shaking, he could feel sweat
dripping down his forehead. Are these things monsters? Are they
here to kill him?
     
    The two monsters stood
stationary on the left and right sides of the wall. Dave stood
stationary, almost like he was in a standoff with these two creatures. He noticed something else. Something starting to
fall from the ceiling, it began to move down the wall. This wasn’t
another shadow, it was something else, some form of liquid. It was
red. It was thick. It was blood.
    “Oh shit, oh shit what the fuck
is going on?” Dave said, his voice high pitched almost sounding
like a small child.
     
    The shadows still didn’t move,
still stood staring at him. He couldn’t see that they had any eyes
but he knew that they did. He knew that they were watching him,
staring through the black pits that were hidden in the huge black
hole that shaped their body. Oh yes, they were definitely watching
him. The blood continued to spill from the ceiling down the wall,
it had reached the floor now, a puddle was starting to form at the
bottom of the wall.
     
    “This is what happened next
door” Dave thought “this is what happened, these things came and
took Lisa and now they’ve come for me!”
    The puddle continued to grow,
the blood started to creep along the floor towards Dave. He stepped
backward trying to distance himself from it. He kept stepping back
until he reached the wall. The blood kept coming, splitting into
different routes, looking like fingers from a growing hand reaching
out for him, it kept coming. The shadows started moving in, closing
in on the room, they weren’t just covering one wall now, they were
surrounded the whole room. Darkness was growing all around Dave.
The only thing he could see was the black giants surrounding him
and the red blood hand reaching for him across the floor. They were
coming to take him.
     
    He screamed “NOOOOOOO!!!!”
    Dave sat up, he was still on the
couch. He had fallen asleep drunk again. The TV was still on, he
looked around. There were empty Stella cans all over the floor and
an empty whiskey bottle next to him on the couch, which presumably
Dave had been sleeping on.
     
    It had been a dream, well a
nightmare.
    “Thank god” Dave sighed in
relief.
     
    He was pretty shaken up, it must
have been all the thoughts about Lisa next door playing on his
mind. Drinking to forget about the scenes next door didn’t work as
well as he had planned. In fact it looked like it made it a hell of
a lot worse.
    That was only the first
nightmare, the next night he had another nightmare. Then the next
night, then the next. It came to the point that he was getting too
scared to sleep. Lisa’s body still hadn’t turned up, which meant
who ever or what ever had been the cause of the house next door
being covered in blood still hadn’t been found. This didn’t help
with Dave’s dreams, what if it came back? What if his dreams
actually came true? They felt real enough to him, he was
overwhelmed with fear. He tried staying awake, he started drinking
coffee when he felt tired. It didn’t work, he still fell asleep,
even during short naps, just closing his eyes for a couple of
minutes. The dreams came rushing back into his mind and he would
wake up screaming again. The lack