Pulse hammering in his ears, the boy’s trembling hands slid the key into the locked door.
Cautiously, he turned the key and nudged the door open. It creaked open, and his eyes widened
in horror at the sight before him.

His parents were in the room, but they weren’t peacefully slumbering away. Lying
sideways in a pool of blood were his mother and father, lifeless eyes staring right through him.
They looked like the result of a horrible surgery gone wrong. Skewered limbs were strewn
around the room, limp stitches stark against ghostly pale skin. Muscles had been chopped,
sliced through the bone, lying in neat slices like a path of fallen dominoes. Blood stained every
possible surface, the room submerged in crimson. Organs were torn out from their chests and
either haphazardly scattered everywhere or stabbed into their ribs, like a gruesome feast. The
sight was so vivid and alive and real.

His gaze slowly rose until it locked onto the thing in the middle of the room. It didn’t seem
tangible, made of shadow, constantly glitching in and out of reality. It looked so human yet
inhuman at the same time, an experiment gone wrong. It dripped in carmine, cascading in
rivulets and smudged in deep. Scars littered its body, imprinted and criss-crossed into flesh.
Maniacal giggling escaped its pointed teeth, its mouth stretching into an unnatural grin. Its eye
pulsed a blinding green light, shining against the bedroom wall. It radiated an aura of terror, fear
washing over him in waves. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing the nightmare to go away, but no
nightmare could be so alive.

It turned to look at him and every muscle in his body froze. His nerves were screaming at
him to run, hide, scream, do something, but in his state of panic he could do nothing but stare at
the massacre in front of him. Blood rushed in his ears, drowning out everything in a sea of static
as the mangled creature approached him. His breaths came out short and erratic and the edges
of his vision blurred. It neared him and that’s when the adrenaline sent his body into panic.
He scrambled to get off and tore through the house, no clue where he was going but
somewhere away from that wretched monster. His limbs screamed in pain after being inactive
for so long, the pins and needles making him tumble. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and his
eyes flitted back and forth for an escape route. But in his rush, he misstepped and was sent
flying to the carpet, the rough surface burning against his forearms. The energy seeped out of
his body as he slammed into the floor, leaving him winded. His eyes flew towards the figure as it
creeped closer, a demonic look in its eyes.

It suddenly dawned on him that there was no chance of survival, that he would die at the
hands of this beast and suffer the same fate as his parents. He looked back at the looming
horror, and stared up at the ceiling in surrender. His flight or flight instinct tried to kick in, but
there was no use. It wasn’t him giving up, rather his state of shock had bled over into an
unsettling calm that shouldn’t have been present. He lied there, waiting for death to come upon
him, embracing it rather than fight like his parents did.

That fateful night, the neighborhood was haunted by the blood curdling screams that
were ripped from the boy’s throat, and the pin drop silence that followed his untimely end.