The Cricket

I wasn’t sure when it had started. The chirping.

Something about it just sounded…off. I thought I was imagining it at first, my lack of sleep finally catching up with me. 

But then the dogs had started reacting. 

Sporadic at first. The occasional head tilt at the mechanical chirping emanating from the pantry. Twig would sit at the edge of the kitchen; paws tucked neatly with her tail curled just around herself. Tipping her head side to side with curiosity.

Bouncer had quickly moved from curiosity to actively avoiding the pantry, tucking his head and scurrying through to the back door to get outside. He would whine if it took me too long to cross the kitchen, skittering backward into the door as if afraid something was going to come out and bite him. 

I had cleaned the pantry, throwing away nearly half the contents before cleaning every square inch of the space. Floor to ceiling had been scrubbed and inspected for pest. Traps purchased and placed.

Checked every day, always clean.

I convinced myself that if I didn’t acknowledge the sound, maybe it wasn’t real. Cutting vegetables for dinner, making coffee, or even grabbing a dish too close to the yawning archway, trying to remind myself it’s not real.

There couldn’t possibly be anything in there, it had to be my imagination.

Right?

But the dogs…

It had to be a coincidence. I had always yelled at them for going in the pantry, for raiding the big container that held their kibble. That had to be it.

Bouncer was sensitive after all.

The days marched on, and summer bled to autumn.

The chirping was almost a mere nuisance I had tuned out, but the seasonal shift had changed something. It was louder, more insistent. 

My sister had asked about it one day when she stopped by, I made a lame joke about a fae trap.

Her face had paled, she quietly told me not to make those jokes, not so close to the forest's edge. I laughed. We were indoors after all, the forest couldn’t hear us, and the fae weren’t real. 

But things shifted after that, didn’t they.

The dark was no longer so empty in the middle of the night, and the dogs refused to leave the room unless I did. Where I went, we all went. Together all the time. The house creaked and groaned at night, and branches tapped the windows. Scraping the glass with their sharp, bony fingers…

The unease that had started so softly, it was smothering me. I tried so hard to brush it aside, but it was getting heavier.

How I wish I could take it back.

Take it seriously.

Twig was the first to pay for my mistakes.

Her sweet curiosity, the little tilting of her head as she stared at the darkened pantry. I had let her out one night. It was horribly still, suffocating. Too suffocating for so late in the season. I waited, but she never came back.

I searched for her for days, posted flyers around town, up and down the streets. I called shelters and vets, hoping she would turn up. Neighbors would tell me of random sightings, how my sweet girl Twig would growl at them. How something wasn’t quite right with her. Eventually, they stopped seeing her altogether. 

Bouncer only became more anxious as the days passed by, becoming more and more a shell of himself. Without Twig…

He refused to go out alone, crying by the door until I came for him. 

It never stopped. The chirping.

I heard it through every activity through the day. I heard it as I fell asleep, in my dreams.

Twig would visit me there, some desperate message in her heterochromatic eyes.

It was always the same, but I can’t understand what she wants me to know.

She always runs up to me, and I fall to my knees, crying and reaching for her. But she always remains just out of reach before she leads me along a path I do not know, in a forest I do not recognize. Crickets falling blessedly silent as we pass where they cower in the dark. She always looks back at me as if checking I’m still with her before she charges on.

No matter how fast I run after her, I can never catch her.

I always wake tired and sore, my limbs cold and numb as if I had been out in the night chasing a ghost. Bouncers thin body curled against me, whimpering in his sleep.

It hurt my heart the way he would snuggle in closer.

He never used to be this way, preferring to sleep on the cot by the dresser. Until Twig never came back.

I had spent so long trying to ignore the looming presence that had invaded my home, spreading like a disease from the long-abandoned pantry, that I hadn’t realized how much of the house I had stopped occupying.

I hadn’t realized how long it had been until I was left standing in the kitchen, clutching a near frozen can of coffee staring at the coffee pot, a thick layer of mold growing over the forgotten coffee still in the pot.

As troubling as that was, it was far less troubling than what sat on the counter.

I took another gulp of the drink, barely noticing the metallic aftertaste as I stared at Twigs’ collar.

Caked in muck, tags worn and dented as if it had been through hell before it found its way home.

Only I hadn’t put it there.

And the doors were locked.

Somewhere in the house, something heavy moved, and Bouncer whined. A sound somewhere between fear and aggression as he pushed to his paws, alert and afraid.

The fear that had been making itself quietly at home inside my bones now screamed to life, my heart fluttering like a thousand birds trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to go.

The vague sense I had lost touch with reality skated through me as I considered the idea I could be hallucinating. Was this real?

Shadows crept from the pantry and I screamed, coffee splashing along the tile as Bouncer barked at the door. His once massive frame scraping as he bounced off the door, his barking intensifying as he locked onto something behind me.

Eyes clenched shut, I scramble for the door, panic overriding the crowded feeling overwhelming my senses as I fumble with the locks. My nails chip and tear as I fight to open the door, any relief is short lived as the crisp air fills my lungs as we fall to the deck outside.

My lungs burn as I scream, blindly scrambling for the woods, Bouncer on my heels as I broke into a run.

I dared to look back, and that was my final mistake.

There are a lot of good reasons not to look back. They always look back in the horror movies and look what it gets them. When you look back, you don’t see what’s right in front of you.

You miss things.

But sometimes…

My feet seemed to stop on their own.

Bouncers barking growing more distant as he ran further into the woods. Branches cracked as I fell to my knees, but I didn’t seem to notice.

Because there was a face staring back from the bedroom window, a pale hand pressed against the glass and mouth opened in a silent scream as shadows swirled and thickened around her.

A face I had seen staring back through the mirror every day.

And then she was gone. Swallowed by what lived in the shadows that had been too heavy the past months.

And the last thing I heard before I joined her was the damned crickets.