I opened my eyes and stared at the glowing red numbers on the bedside clock: 11:47. I jerked my head up for a better look.
What?
Yes. A quarter till noon. I’d overslept. Not that I had anything in particular to be up and about for. Well, Ellie, of course, but she wanted to be alone, so no use in getting up early for her.
But I never slept this late. Never. Plus I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. I must have been more exhausted than I’d thought.
I threw off the comforter and padded to the kitchen where I put the kettle on for tea. While the water heated, I checked Ellie’s room to see if anything had changed. Out of habit, I knocked before entering, just in case she’d come back through the passage.
“Ellie?”
As expected, no answer, so I pushed through and stepped inside. I glanced at the arch of her construction—the same dark opening as yesterday—then at the window.
The globes were still there but now they were crammed full of dark shapes and countless frantically wriggling legs. I cried out and recoiled, backing against the door and slamming it shut.
Vibrations from the slam caused the globes to jiggle, and then…
I watched in horror as they loosened from the sill and tumbled in a cascade to the floor on the far side of the bed where I couldn’t see them.
In the ensuing silence I reached behind me for the doorknob but before turning it I realized Ellie had entrusted these globes to me. I needed to check on them. Just a peek. Carefully, I stepped up onto her bed and edged toward the far side.
Oh, God, they were out. The globes had smashed and the floor was a writhing, undulating carpet of black wriggling forms the size of marbles, marbles with legs, so many legs, and they were…they were eating the broken fragments of the globes.
Slowly, carefully, I backed off the bed and stepped toward the door, but before I reached it they were everywhere, swarming over the bed and under it and around it and flowing toward me in a wriggling black wave. I was barefoot but even with shoes I’d have been defenseless. They surrounded me, blocking my route to the door, and as they closed in I screamed.
And then a voice echoed down the passage.
“That is my mother and she is not to be touched!”
The black swarm froze.
And then the voice said, “Come to me now. Come to me, my kiddlies.”
The black wriggling wave turned en masse and raced through the arch into the passage where Ellie waited.
I stood frozen, awestruck, horrorstruck.
Kiddlies…she’d called them her kiddlies.
And then I screamed again as the boiling kettle let out a high-pitched whistle.