The Monster in the Window
The air was dry and the back of his throat burned. These feelings of discomfort skewered into Spike's mind and tugged him away from restless dreams to the warm darkness of his room. He felt his blanket twisted into a line and wrapped around his hips; it covered neither his torso nor his legs and yet he was still overheating. He kicked his legs about and tried to spread himself out to cool off, but it was no use; even if he could manage to get the swelter to ebb, the dry burn in the back of his throat required attention before he could get any worthwhile vestige of his important sleep.
His eyes finally fluttered open to his room in greyscale. Sight was provided from Luna's gift shining through the two crystalline windows on either side of his bed. The shadows of the tree emblemed on the windows reached across the floor and walls, like long dead claws of some beast calcified into the colorless white of moonlight. Spike shook away the darker thoughts of a bleary mind and swung his legs off the bed.
The dragon stumbled upward and stepped toward the bookshelf next to his bed, another commodity that came with the castle itself. He hadn't seen a single room without a place to store books; even the kitchen and closets had shelves. Distantly it reminded him of home, before that disconnected lament faded too.
His body floated forward, his steps following after it as he sleepily managed his bedroom door open. The hall was showered in the same whites and blacks of night, cast from another window along the same wall that ran parallel in his room. He slowly blinked at the small vitreous nightstand wreathed in darkness just below the lambent ray of moonlight that shed from the window directly above; its color and lines had blended away for an approximation of the object, like something the night was trying to hold onto until the day could correct it.
Spike shook the thoughts away again and spun on heel to walk toward the stairs down to the main hall. Come morning the nightstand would just be a nightstand, and this would be an ill remembered half-dream of a quest to quench. The pang in his throat called to him more than his tired thoughts and he let his memory of the castle lead the way, rather than trust his vision any more than to make sure the floor beneath his padding feet was clear of obstruction. Gray carpet passed to black crystal floor, to lighter gray stairs.
At the bottom he looked up again, taking in how large the foyer of the great tree's entrance hall was. Light shown in green here, through the two windows near the towering slabs of door that bunkered his home in safety. The dragon held his shoulder with his claw, quickly hiding himself from the empty room and creeping green and hurried along the hall behind the stairs. His form felt small and oddly thin in the darkening passage, and he found his mind racing and heart thumping while he passed the many doors. The green light didn't reach as far as the kitchen, but he felt grateful to be away from it. He passed through the kitchen door and went immediately to the sink.
He pushed through and made methodical work of the task at hand. Open cupboard, get glass, fill with water, drink. Each swallow of the mild sink water bathed his parched throat with joyous relief, and he was quick to fill the glass again and drain it down. Satisfied, he set the cup next to the sink and made to leave but instead yelped and stumbled back as he caught sight of a ghast in the window.
It had stood like no pony he had ever met, hunched over its own spine so it both hulked and spilled across itself in a gangly fashion, with sharp teeth set beneath a firm frown. The green of the window had hid any color of the beast, leaving it an apparition of itself much like the nightstand. Unknowing and afraid Spike's breathing labored while he tried to convince himself to get to his feet, to run, to look back out the window, to do anything, but his fear glued him firmly to the floor.
What truly had startled him even more than the alien way the creature had been structured, was how it perceived him. Its eyes hadn't been angered, hungry, or scared. It looked tired and somber. The monster had regarded him with the thought of a thinking thing, and that felt so much worse than a mere beast.
Spike's mouth dried despite having just slaked his thirst. He finally found himself and shakily pushed himself off the ground as quietly as his body allowed. He glanced back into the window with his fear sharpened senses. He couldn't see outside; he realized with growing panic. The only thing that greeted him now was the reflection of an empty kitchen with an open doorway to a hall filled with void.
Had he shut the door before? His mind conjured up the idea of silent monsters with razor teeth and sad eyes filling every shadow just out of reach of his line of sight in the hall. He had left the door open; he told himself. He had to have. He would have heard it latch open if he hadn't.
He turned trepidatiously and made some small steps toward the door of the kitchen. At the precipice of the hallway, he stopped again. The lingering dread of the monster he had spied in the window's reflection crept up his spine like a cold drip of ice water. Silence greeted him, as it had the whole night so far, and despite him knowing, absolutely, that he was alone, he could not shake the feeling that something lied in wait for him on his journey back to the warmth of his room.
Spike took a large breath and held it, taking one step out the door, and another, and another. The only sound that met his ears was the padding of his feet on the ground, but he couldn't shake the feeling of the eyes on his back, the breath on his neck, of something terrible just behind him as he continued his way back to the foyer. He didn't dare look, and only hurried along his way. The path felt so much longer now that he felt the danger of it than when he merely had acquiesced his need for water. Before long his steps became strides toward the now comforting green light, and those became bounds with which he leapt up the stairs of the entrance hall two at a time. He sprinted down the hall above in a mad dash and didn't stop until he was back in his room, back against the door that he had slammed shut behind him.
The held air in his lungs burned out of his lips with a wheeze and he desperately gulped oxygen while his heart slammed against his sternum. Over the course of several minutes his body regulated, and the quiet of the castle settled in place of his panicked rasping. He listened to the hall outside his door, almost sure the beast was in wait on the other side.
He could feel it searching for him, prowling the silent castle just behind the wall, not making a sound in case it alerted its prey.
Spike was startled awake by the knocking of hooves on his bedroom door. His whole body hurt from the terrible spot he had chosen to pass out at, and it felt like he hadn't gotten any sleep. He foggily recollected the night prior, but in the morning light it all felt like a distant nightmare.
"Spike, if you don't get out of bed I'll come in there!" The voice of the princess of friendship was followed by another round of knocking on the door his back was against. The dragon winced at the crunching sounds his spine made as he crawled forward and climbed his way to his feet. He cracked open the door and beheld the purple pony as she beheld him. "You don't look so good." Twilight said, concerned. She had drawled the first word out, letting it help her think out the rest of her sentence. Spike considered her concern for a few moments, the previous night's events seeming so far away now.
"Aw I'm fine Twilight. Just a bad dream is all." Spike gave her a smile and Twilight took a breath, smiling back. She meandered back down the hallway, likely heading to either wake Starlight or to the kitchen for breakfast. Spike went out after her but stopped at the bathroom a couple doors down from his room. He kicked the door shut behind him and stood in front of the sink, reminiscing over the times when he hadn't been tall enough to see himself in the mirror.
The night terror from his venture into the night was finally losing its paralytic grip on his mind as he reached for his toothbrush and toothpaste, and he was glad to let it go. He eyed himself in the mirror as he started to brush and regarded himself with some tired contemplation.
His eyes seemed tired and sad, he realized, likely due to lack of sleep.
Author's Note
Do you ever feel like you're forgetting something obvious?
