Pacifier

🌙Della🍒

I awoke in the middle of the night, the covers kicked off me, a symptom of a bad dream. At least that's what I had to tell myself it was in order to phsyc myself up enough to brave slipping from the bed to the floor.

It was dark, dark outside too. The whole house was consumed by shadows. The whole house swallowed up by black night. And I felt swallowed up too. Swallowed up and spat out.

My skin was sheened with a fine layer of sweat but the air was cool and I was cold. My blood cold as it rushed through my body, my heart hammering in my chest so hard it hurt.

The floor beneath my feet was cold too but I was trying not to focus on my own discomfort because I was certain, completely convinced in fact, that someone else had been in my room. That they were still here now. Lurking somewhere just outside my periphery. Watching me.

I'd been dreaming of home, not the Balcony but Nana Ru's house, in the evening. She was out and I was home alone, tuned into the police radios, listening out for familiar names. My brothers name, Bondys name or Ben's. Always expecting one of them, hearing nothing, remaining nervous all the same.

I'd been sitting in my room, alone and anxious, waiting for my nana to come home. Knowing that I wouldn't settle or sleep until I was certain she was safe too.

My brother and his friends seemed to believe that I lived a life completely naive and seperates from theirs, that I lived like a normal teenage girl because my Nana was so completely in denial, trying to pretend that we had nothing to do with them. Trying to pretend that we weren't related to Larry or my father. But we were and everybody knew it.

And i wasnt as naive as everybody else thought so I knew that my name alone would be enough to put my life on the line. To put Nana Rus life at risk too.

So every night when she went out I worried about her.

I used to ask her not to work late into the night the way that she did. Leaving in the early evenings, returning at the close of the witching hour. She read people's stars, contacted their dead, held their hands around a dark table and predicted their futures. She liked to wander with an air of mysticism, she liked to work in the dead of night and I knew that she believed herself untouchable.

But she wasn't and neither was I and although she claimed we didn't need my brother and his "degenerate friends" I knew that we did. I knew that the only reason we had made it for as long as we had was because Van had had his men watching us, stepping in to prevent the attacks before they'd come.

When they had stopped watching the house and Sam had taken me, I'd known they'd left my Nana and me vulnerable.

In my dream thats what had happened. I'd been home alone, no cars parked outside keeping an eye on the street. Vulnerable. Naive until it was too late.

Until the door had clicked shut downstairs but no lights switched on. Until i could hear someone downstairs making a racket.
Until I could hear footsteps on the stairs.

Some intruder making no secret of their presence in my house. Trying to scare me as they knocked against the wall on the stairs with some kind of bat.

I knew I was done for unless I could sneak away from them, wriggle into one of my hiding places which I had designed over the years to keep me safe from this eventuality which I had predicted.

But I couldn't. It was too late. They were outside my door and their shadow blocking the light on the landing sent a chill through me.

I'd dived under my bed. Felt like a child again. Lay there on my tummy almost too scared to watch. Everything was dark, jet black shadows with their shadow moving through. Searching my room for me. And all I could do was lie there,listening out for their every move. Tuned in to their every movement. Holding my breath, lying rigid just incase they were tuned into mine.