Haunting Romantics

It was the sound that woke her. The nights weren't silent; the coyotes and owls could be heard through the walls. 

But this sound woke her. It wasn't a call of nature, not an animal hunting at night. It was a sound that didn't belong, and it had her heart racing. 

She lay still in her bed, staring at the dark ceiling, counting her breaths.

Then she heard it.

A shuffle. A slow, dragging sound coming from the porch.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. She did not reach for a candle. Light would only give her away. Instead, she slid from the bed, the cold floor biting into her bare feet. She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders with shaking hands and moved toward the doorway.

Moonlight spilled down the hall, pale and unforgiving. It illuminated the stairwell and the empty darkness below.

She listened.

The sound came again. Footsteps. Careful. Patient.

It was just her in the house. There was no safe reason why someone would be lurking on her porch. 

Fear urged her back toward the bed, toward the blankets she had once used to hide from childhood nightmares.

Ignore it, and it will go away.

But this was not a child’s fear; this wasn't a shadow of a branch casting ghoulish shadows on her wall.

This was a man.

A man was on her porch. Someone who knew her father was gone.

She knew who it was. And she knew why he had come. He had been watching her, sneaking closer and closer to her as her father's absence grew. 

She looked around her room as if her childhood bedroom would reveal a secret way for her to escape. 

Tears started to fall. She wished for her father. 

The doorknob rattled. The sound echoed like a shot through the empty house. The lock held. 

She couldn't stay upstairs. The stairs creaked, but she knew which ones to skip. The doorknob rattled again, and it froze her on the bottom step. 

As if he could smell her fear through the wood, the man started throwing himself against the door. 

Quietly trying to sneak in was over. He was going to get that door open one way or another. She wasn't sure what was worse. The quite violation of her safety while he snuck around or the violence of pushing himself into her house. 

Neither was going to end happily for her. 

The wood shuddered and groaned under his weight. 

She watched in terror, her body frozen. Thoughts flashed through her mind. Last winter, when she fell through the ice on the lake. The freezing water entered her lungs when she gasped in shock from the cold. 

That's what it felt like now. The fear was cold. Burning. She didn't want to breathe. It would pull her under, where she will sink and die. 

A crack of the wooden door frame shocked her enough to shake off the dregs of fear. 

He was going to get that door open. 

She needed to move.