Title: An Hour Past (#6, The Drabble Bin)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek TOS or AOS
Characters: McCoy
Summary: Written during wordwars at jim-and-bones; born of boredom and the recollection of what it was to be a child awake at night.
Previous Drabbles: The Old Four | Those Neighborhood Hoodlums | Trapped | A Cage of His Own | Of Perky Starfleet Bottoms

When an hour past of midnight fell across the house, all was settled into the routine of repose except for a young child who could not succumb to the spell of sleep. Awareness pricked at him endlessly like tiny pins, coaxing him to contemplate the spidery webs of shadow across his window and the gap beneath his closet door from whence nameless night things might come. He tentatively, cautiously, slipped from his bed, crawling past a mountain of garments and mismatched shoes and discarded toys, guided only by the steady beam of a favorite miniature flashlight. As he eased open his door and entered a hallway, his bare feet made muffled, creaking impressions upon the old frame of the house.

Lenny felt safer here, less afraid of this place he scampered up and down in daylight than the eerie unknowns of his bedroom. He listened for the downstairs clock and chewed at the tip of a fingernail to its beats of tick-tock, tick-tock before bravely creeping onwards. In the dark, doors were indistinguishable but he still knew them. A bathroom door. Mother and Father’s door. Clutter-closet’s door. His hand was wrapped around the knob belonging to the latter when he was taken by surprise—an unfamiliar sound, a shuffle-thump at the end of the hall cutting into the soft silence. His heart leapt and quickened its pace, like the too-rapid beating of a hummingbird’s wings, and from his fingers the flashlight slipped, cracked against the floor and its bulb dimmed as it rolled away. He did not think, only acted with a child’s fright, and curled himself into a small groove inside the packed clutter-closet. But its door he did not fully close, fearful the echo of its latch would call attention to his hideaway.

Time still moved but it was slow, slow, clunking past. When the odd sound came again, fresher but more frightening, Lenny tried holding his breath. Beyond the door, the small flashlight cut a thin beam across the faded hall runner. Then a dim, perplexing shape moved into the frail light, never pausing, and drifted past. It was a stranger’s ghost. Lenny’s limbs felt rigid, his fear spiraling high in little hiccups of breath, until the wispy thing disappeared beyond his field of vision through the cracked door.

He waited, time ever-so-slowly crawling and marked by the thumps of his heart in his chest, until he could no longer remain squatted between old, unused coats and sharp-cornered boxes. He eased from the closet into the empty hall. Lenny then took up his flickering flashlight in one swooping, stumbling motion and scurried quickly for his bedroom door.

It didn’t seem so unsafe now, the four moon-washed walls of his room, painted in sporadic, muted colors by his latest drawings. Yet, ensconced though he was under many pillows and sheets, his thoughts bucked sleep rebelliously until his child’s body could not hold them in any form. They soon filtered into dreams that floated obediently after a limbless figure in the night. The thing made no noise but it turned, toward the dream child, a discernable faceless hump atop an unmolded block of a body, what—he realized—must be a head. It saw him following behind; and it knew him.

Lenny’s dream body could not run as he had once fled in the physical world. He was trapped now, a captive companion to the result of something unexplained which his imagination had wrought into a nightmare. His only release was his terror, culminating into a scream, that brought the boy’s parents to his bedside to awaken and console him and, in the end, assure him everything—his night-wandering, the ghostly figure, the fear—had all been naught but an unpleasant dream.

-Fini

War of the Bots

Related Posts:

• Stay With Me (#29, The Drabble Bin) – from December 29, 2023
• An Ominous Setting (#28, The Drabble Bin) – from May 4, 2021
• Beyond the Call of Duty (#27, The Drabble Bin) – from September 24, 2020
• Surprise Meeting (#9, The Drabble Bin) – from December 31, 2012
• The Best Substitute – from August 3, 2012