Something Slipped In

She was my favorite pet sitter. The way she scratched my back felt almost unearthly, like her fingers knew where the bones of my old life still ached. She always made sure my bowl was full, slipped me treats that shimmered faintly in the dark. Every witch needs a black cat, and for a few stolen weeks each year, I was glad to be hers.

It started like any other Friday night except it was Halloween, and the moon hung low enough to taste. She let the big dog out again, as he was acting like he had to take another piss. But I know his secret. He just wants to stand in the mid-fall air and let it crawl through his fur while he howls with the coyotes and foxes on the hill. He talks big about joining the cougars one day, but he never does. He’s brave until the night gets too wild and the sounds get too big. Then he comes slinking back to the porch light like a little boy who just got his candy taken away.

While she was taking the big boy out, she heard the marching band. The sound drifted through the night like a bat patrolling the desert floor. The beat was steady, off-key, and wrong. Perhaps it was a freshman playing? She paused, one hand on her hip. It was strange for a marching band to be playing at nine-thirty, but on Halloween a smidge terrifying! She told herself their devotion just ran deep. Maybe too deep. Maybe deeper than the canyon's darkest pits.

The marching music on Halloween made me think of skeletons playing football with a pumpkin, their bones clattering like drums as witches cheered from the bleachers. The picture in my mind made my tail twitch with amusement. But her attention drifted somewhere far away. It wasn’t the kind of silence that comes from thinking — it was the kind that leaks from a wound. The sorrow on her face carried a weight only humans can give each other.

The unease that had crept in with the marching band was only a dream by ten. I sat there, tail curled around my paws, and watched her. She was watching Halloween—how perfectly human, to watch Halloween on Halloween. She was that kind of woman, always turning the ordinary into something iconic, even when the room felt colder than it should have. She couldn’t keep her loneliness to herself, but her ease seemed to grow with the feeling that something was about to happen.

A moment can’t last forever. But that Halloween night, every moment seemed to whisper its own story — a quiet tragedy of a young woman in her twenties, alone in a world that had already forgotten her. On a night when any witch could dress up and become something else, she remained herself. Curled on the couch, half-shadow and half-light.

Then the white dog, Clyde, had to pee again. It was 11 p.m., the hour when the night forgets it’s supposed to end. She stood outside with him for a few minutes, her breath ghosting in the cold, before she suddenly clutched her stomach nature calling, urgent and cruel. She ran inside, leaving the door open behind her. She should have known better. You never leave a door open on Halloween night. An open door is an invitation to all things wandering and waiting.

The door was open, Seeing the chance, it slipped in. It came from the hollows of the canyon, from the breath between the trees, carrying with it the warmth of everything that shouldn’t be warm. Something I’d never seen before—and pray I never see again. Small but big. Fast but slow. Fur matted, stinking like rot and rain. Eyes too wide, swallowing the light, drunk on the chaos it brought. And still, I couldn’t be sure I’d seen anything at all. Eyes can lie. Eyes can’t see what isn’t meant to exist. But something entered our home that night—something that never would have, if only she’d shut the door.

When she was done relieving herself, she stepped back outside with Clyde. That’s when she heard it—a holler, ragged and strange, like something trying too hard to be a wolf but failing, breaking apart halfway through the sound. Then another answered, deeper, hungrier. A holler from the hollows on Halloween night cuts colder than wind. It crawls down your spine until the crisp fall air feels almost warm by comparison.

She pulled Clyde inside fast. The sound out there wasn’t just noise—it was a challenge, daring Halloween itself to be more terrifying. Clyde, all muscle and pride, barked back with fury, but whatever lurked in the dark didn’t flinch. Its answering growl made the walls tremble. He might’ve charged into the night if she hadn’t called him, her voice breaking somewhere between a whisper and a cry. The hollers outside faded, but the way her hands shook said she knew—they hadn’t gone far.

She was always good at getting him to listen. I leapt down and tried to warn her that something had changed—that the house didn’t feel like ours anymore. I darted past the TV, the flickering light chasing me, and perched on the sofa beside her. She wrinkled her nose and asked if I’d farted. I wish it were that simple. I wish a fart could make the air that heavy, that foul. Not even the big white dog could have made the room smell like that—like something dead had remembered how to breathe.

When the pet sitter shut the door, a sense of finality cracked through the room—like lightning striking a snow-kissed field, bright and cold and merciless. Whatever had come in with the wind was trapped now. It had lost its escape route. Not that it wanted to leave. Things like that don’t run; they settle in, slow and certain. And even if it had wanted out, escape was never going to be that simple. Nothing in life ever is.

When Halloween ended, she put on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She never watched films like that—too violent, too loud—but something in her eyes looked ready for noise. I thought the movie was terrifying. Still, not half as terrifying as what I couldn’t see. Whatever had slipped into our home was quiet now. Too quiet. I’d lost track of it, but I could feel where it might be—lurking in the wine closet. The one place I was never allowed to go.

It kept making noises—small, deliberate ones—but the pet sitter didn’t notice. I still couldn’t see it. The air in the room had changed; what once felt lonely now felt dry, brittle, like it was drinking up the light and everything good left in the house. It was still only 11:30. I knew she was lonely. I could feel it in the way she sighed, in the way her eyes lingered on the shadows instead of the screen. Maybe she wished she had a costume buddy—a witch with her werewolf, the two of them holding each other close, stealing soft Halloween kisses. But she didn’t. She was here with us. And I, for one, was glad. Still, my parents would never have left the door open that long. They would never have welcomed the unknown inside—and left it unattended.

At 11:45, the man in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre drove his chainsaw straight through a girl who had tried to hide in a bus. Why would he do that? What could possibly make someone act without reason? Action without intention—that’s the purest kind of terror. The man on the screen didn’t think, didn’t hesitate; he just moved. The sound of his chainsaw swallowed the room, almost too loud for me to hear the soft, restless stirring coming from the wine closet. Almost.

When the clock struck midnight, strange sounds began to drift from the bedroom. Not the creaks and sighs of an old house, but something unnatural—the kind of noises that dance with everything Halloween brings. Still, she sat there on the couch, pretending not to notice. “Want to watch one more Halloween movie?” she asked the big white dog, her voice too casual. “It’s barely even midnight.”

Friday the 13th flickered to life, spilling its campfire screams across the room. The tragedy of Camp Crystal Lake played loud enough to drown the world, until the first growl broke through. She snapped her head toward Clyde, hollering at him, maybe hoping it was him. But you can’t growl from the other room when you’re sitting right beside her.

Her face went cold, and I watched the color drain from it like paint sliding down glass—slow, beautiful, wrong. Humans love their little sayings, their charms against fear: “It’s raining cats and dogs,” “Don’t let the cat out of the bag.” But we have our own ways of speaking about them. “He’s slower than a human at dawn,” “She’s clumsier than Kelly.” We study them, the way they breathe, the way warmth pools beneath their skin. We learn their softness before the night takes it back.

No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see it—and I can look intently. I’m a cat, after all, with diamond-shaped eyes sharp enough to cut through dark. I searched high and low, every corner trembling with shadow, but nothing moved. Still, I didn’t dare leave the living room. If I left, she’d be alone, and she was already afraid. Some might call me a scaredy-cat, but they’d be wrong. I wasn’t scared for myself. I just couldn’t bear to leave Alice.

But Alice wouldn’t move—not even to save her life. She sat there, bathed in the flicker of the screen, eyes wide and empty, watching the same horror she’d seen a hundred times before. She heard the noises; I know she did. But she didn’t care. It wasn’t fear that held her still—it was apathy, deep and heavy, like something had already drained her. All she cared about was Pennywise, the painted smile on the screen. Her thoughts floated toward him, like balloons lifting into the dark. I wondered if her mind would be the next to drift away.

There were three noises no one could ignore—and one growl that certainly wasn’t the dog. The first sound only made her sit up on the couch, startled but unmoving. By the second, she rose and drifted toward the noise, though I think she didn’t want to find anything. Some part of her already knew what waited in the dark. Then came the third sound—louder, sharper—followed by a screech that didn’t belong to this world. She turned to me, her voice trembling with a strange calm. “Do you have a friend over?” she asked. I stared back at her, unblinking. Sometimes she asked the strangest things.

The white dog wanted to go outside again. There hadn’t been any noises since the last time, but I could tell she wished he wouldn’t ask. His ears twitched toward corners where nothing moved, and I think he heard what I did—the thing breathing beneath the quiet. Fear had found its way into him too. It’s a cruel kind of horror when fear makes you want to leave your own home. A home should be the safest place in the world.

The second Clyde’s paws touched the cold pavement, silence shattered. A chorus of unearthly sounds rose from the dark—hollers of despair, cries of pain, screeches sharp enough to peel the sky. It was a song no living thing should ever hear outside its door, least of all on Halloween night.

She grabbed her phone—of course she did. Humans always reach for those glowing rectangles like they can save them. We cats have plenty of sayings about it. “He’s stuck to it like a human to a screen.” Or, “What’s deader than a human scrolling?” Maybe only the litter left outside the box. You’d laugh—if you were a feline, and not sitting in that room.

Clyde was barking back at the hollers with the fury of a dog whose bark might finally be louder than his bite. He was a big dog, strong and proud—but his cat sister could tell. Beneath all that white fur and thunder, he was still a frightened puppy aching to be let back in. By the tenth time she called, he pretended to come in grudgingly, tail stiff. But I knew—he was relieved.

Then Clyde growled at the pet sitter, as if she could stop the things screaming just beyond the glass. She was only a girl. Her thumb trembled on her phone, scrolling like it mattered, like the light might protect her.

It blared from the television while shards of glass glittered across the floor like frost. The air pulsed with tension, but the sadness never left; it lingered, soft and heavy, wrapping itself around us both. The two emotions seemed to move together, slow and deliberate, dancing in the dim light—sadness leading, fear following close behind—each daring the other to break first. We just wanted something to happen, anything to split the silence, to let us breathe again, to remind us that warmth still existed somewhere in the season. But if the flying glass couldn’t shatter the spell, what could?

Pennywise's laugh was distant as it echoed across the screen. somewhere lost, and hollow. Then came more than a sound—an act. Sudden, sharp. A glass flew across the room, hurled by something unseen, shattering into a thousand glittering teeth against the floor. It missed us all. Barely.

I still didn’t know if the thing had a body. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it—its gaze brushing against me, light as static, steady as breath. The tension crawled over my fur like a spider tracing its web, patient, deliberate, waiting for the next shiver to fall.

Something shot out of the storage box where Mom kept her knitting. A blur of black, thick with fur. It landed on her with a snarl, clawing and biting, tangled in her hair as she screamed. Clyde went wild—barking, spinning, desperate—but too afraid to charge. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t something a dog could fight.

I still couldn’t tell what it was, only that I couldn’t look away. It was like watching a fight you can’t stop—her against the dark. She was bigger, stronger, but the creature was relentless, all claws and fury. She screamed, raw and broken, her voice twisting into something almost inhuman—like the hollers outside had found their way into her throat.

Then the garage door burst open. A man ran in—young, breathless, and startlingly handsome. The air changed the moment he entered; the sadness that had drowned the room seemed to lift, if only for a heartbeat. But the attack raged on, and the open door drew the creature’s attention. It froze. Turned. And in that stillness, I finally saw what it was…

It was a monkey—a small brown capuchin, shaking, his arm wrapped in crooked bandages. He looked terrified, wild-eyed, like something that had escaped one nightmare only to fall into another. Before he fled, he let out a string of unearthly cries and left a mess on the floor. Blood streaked the couch, and little red prints trailed toward the garage. Yet somehow, despite the chaos, the room felt lighter—cleaner, almost peaceful, as if the darkness had finally stepped outside.

Then they looked at each other. Their eyes met, and the space between them seemed to hum, charged and alive. It was like a ship finding its harbor after years lost at sea. The heaviness in the room lifted all at once—the despair dissolving so suddenly it almost startled me. What replaced it wasn’t peace, exactly, but something warm and trembling, something that made the shadows hold their breath.

My pet sitter looked happier now than she did before she got beat up by the monkey. She had bite marks all over her arms and one on her boob, but the man that walked in cleaned her, especially the one on her boob. She was pretty messed up, he asked if she wanted to go to the hospital. But she assured him she'd go tomorrow, but the hospital on Halloween would be scarier than the possibility of an infection. She gave him a stare like that might not be the actual reason she didn’t want to leave.

They had a conversation that attempted to give him credit for saving her. I found it honorable that he didn’t want to take credit for such a grand act just for pushing a button, but who knows when that monkey would have stopped had he not come. He was going straight for her eyes. They walked into the bedroom and did the things that only humans knew how to do. Things I couldn’t understand, and didn’t want to. I was so mad whatever was happening was happening in my parents house, but at least it was not in their bed, but the guest room. I ran into the room and made myself super big and hissed, but my efforts were completely unnoticed, so unnoticed I was almost insulted, like they could at least look at how big I made myself instead of just looking and kissing their naked bodies. For a minute the warmer part of fall promised to be extra warm.

Sleep finally settled over the house, soft and heavy. But as quickly as he had slipped in to save the night, he was gone—no note, no goodbye. Just gone. He didn’t have work in the morning, and she knew that. So when she woke, she woke to the echo of absence. Despair crept back in, quiet at first, then growing wild and stubborn, like a weed you can’t quite pull from the roots.

This isn’t a love story. It’s a warning. Never leave the door open on Halloween night. But if something ever truly goes wrong, remember—sometimes the person who caused your despair is still the one who’ll save you.