Are you afraid of the dark?

It was all dark and swampy. She could hear her ragged breathing echo against the walls of the tunnel, the sound of her footsteps reverberated throughout.  Her body was numb! She could feel it tense even more, as if preparing to put in more.. to run faster, but she knew.. it did not really matter. It was closing in, the time has come...

She woke up in cold sweat on her bed. Clutching her bed sheet, she tried to stop from shivering, she realized that she had goose-bumps all over. She sat up after a while. Her room was shrouded in darkness, the only thing that she could make out was the pattern of the grills of her window that the moonlight had carved in the wall opposite, it was strangely distinct and resolute considering the moon outside which was dull and almost hidden behind clouds. A slight breeze made the pattern waver.Some clouds might have passed across the moon.She noticed that the lights were out, probably a power-cut or something, the expressway that overlooked her window was pitch black except few appearances of one or two vehicles hurrying away. She checked her cell phone for the time.. It was 3:30..

It was all very very silent, she could hear every breath she took, even almost the thud of her heartbeats. Though sound, sight every kind of sense was overridden by her sense of fear. She had never felt so scared.. She did not know what to do, whether to run with all her might or whether not to budge even an inch. She gulped noisily, adding to her discomfort, because she realized that she was thirsty and that she needs to go out to get water. The situation was getting really uncomfortable.

She decided to stay put, to divert herself with something else. Running her hands through her bed-sheet tentatively she decided to get hold of her phone so that she could listen to some music. She found her phone at last, plugging in the the headphones she went to her playlist and played a DJ mix, at-least that would be loud enough to deafen her from the sounds outside and since the song was really remixed in a night-club or something, bouts of hooting at regular interim made her less aware of the fact that she was all alone.

As she settled against her pillow, in a half-lying position, something very very strange happened, the pigeon which perpetually lives outside her window was looking at her, with a unfaltering and unnerving gaze and weirdly it was not seeing through her, it was looking at her, as if it had been suddenly endowed with human intelligence. It took every ounce of her courage to get up and go towards the window and try to shoo it away but it did not move a bit, rather one can say settled down more comfortably on the sill. She was almost on the verge of collapsing.

Suddenly the pitch-black expressway outside was again filled with lights from the lamp post and just a second later her room lit up brightly and the fan started rotating noisily. She heaved a sigh of relief, the room which minutes back was closing in on her, now looked very much familiar and welcoming. But she still did not have courage to go out and bring water. To hell with water she though, she might as well die of thirst. Lowering herself on her bed, she tried not to remember the nightmare that triggered her fear.. but her ragged breathing, footsteps on a wet-surface, the feeling of suffocation just at the altar of collapsing, and the fact that she felt really really exhausted, like one feels after running for a good length, did worsen matters. It had all felt so real. She could not shake it away. Closing her eyes tightly now, she clutched her sides and with all her might tried to go back to sleep again..