Strange Minds:( Don't Bother)

Strange Minds: Don't Bother.

Introduction to David.

Epilogue. Fear.

...TB swung the door of Chefette open and held it for her other two friends and a stranger before closing it. Surprisingly she was feeling much better already, just being away from David made her feel so much calmer and less agitated., for some reason when she was around the man that her mother was in love with she just felt the hair on the back her neck and palms rise in a mixture of anxiety and fear.

The attention the man gave her was unnatural and obviously meant to mean something totally different from what they should have, but the problem was that these things he did he was careful to do when her mother was no where near. A week after he’d come into her mother’s life it had begun. TB convinced her mind that what it was thinking was all wrong. At least that was what she told herself initially. A week later she’d realised it couldn’t possibly be all in her mind - she caught David leaving her bedroom late one night.
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TB awoke much against her will. She was enormously sleepy from last night’s activities. The whole bunch of them from Jacobean had gone to a school fete for Combermere at Boat Yard, the support for the fete had been great and they’d ended up having a blast. Sara Mak dropped them home a little after three and TB had stumbled into bed immediately afterward. TB could remember her last thoughts thinking thank god there wasn’t school tomorrow. Not that it was possible for her to go out on a school night but it did sometimes happen for whatever special reason there was.

So TB’s last thought was of school and when she woke she found a shadow in the far corner of her room closest to the door. TB’s room wasn’t shaped in the form of a rectangle or square, it was more along the lines of a polygon, the architects of the home had been ordered by the eccentricities of her grandfather to build a less that cookie cutter house. Which they indeed had succeeded in doing.

TB fluttered her eyelashes somewhat to allow her to see the shadow, it didn’t appear to be a normal shadow she thought to herself, then it moved. She resisted the urge to take in a sharp breath. Was it a burglar? A rapist? Killer? Who was in her bedroom in the shadows this late at night?
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Once, when her parents were together, she’d ran to their bedroom in terror sure that a shadow in her bedroom belonged to something out of the ordinary. Shadows had a way doing that to someone’s mind, because since anything could be a shadow, a shadow could be anything. As a young girl this terrified Tiffany Baker.

Finally, out of fear that his daughter would see something that she shouldn’t happening in his bedroom, Tavian taught his daughter a simple rule. He made her scrawl it out in her simple handwriting and keep it under her pillow to recite before bed every night:

I shall not fear, for it is a mind killer, shall I come to feel fear I shall face it and I shall let it pass through me.


To which he had added after careful inspection of what she had written: repeat 5 times) in his small script. In spite of everything, TB had never lost it and still kept it till this day locked and hidden away in an old carved chest her father had given her.
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These were the feelings coming back to her now, her insane fear of what lay in the shadow. She reached beneath her pillow and grasped the imaginary piece of paper; silently she repeated the twelve year old dogma to herself. I shall not fear … I shall let it pass through me. Repeat five times.

Against her will her eyes opened. She found herself staring at the back of the shadow, for she was now absolutely certain that this shadow had a back and she was indeed looking at its back, such reasoning was not rational but in her state of fear she held to the belief of some concrete thread of knowledge of what was in her room. Her eyes followed its passage to her bedroom door. Her heart pounded inside of her chest and the urge to gasp for air returned. The shadow slid miraculously to the door then stopped and turned to look at her. Maybe it wanted to be sure she was sleeping what ever it was. In the faint gleam of light coming from a street lamp outside she could identify the slight outline of a face. David. Her heart escalated to a scary speed. David? Her thoughts swam before her. Was she sure? No she wasn’t. The light… it was, it was… too low. For a moment the thought of Stephen King’s Men in Low Coats crossed her mind.

The whisper of what she could only imagine was a zip floated through the air and what was David straightened himself and was gone the departing sound of heavy boots coated with.... What was that thought? Yes mud. David’s shoes were always muddy. The departing sound of heavy muddy boots disappeared further and further away, a pause was made at the stairs and then she heard the opening and closing of the front door.

A car started, for her to have heard this car meant it would have had to be parked somewhere on the grounds itself since the house was plum in the middle of the land and tall, solid, concrete walls guarded it. Couldn’t her mother hear that car? No she was a heavy sleeper wouldn’t hear a siren even if it was held directly to her ears. TB worked up enough nerve to go to her window but first she closed the door and turned on the light, she did not want anymore shadows following her.

At the window, she swept her gaze from one end of the house to the other, she caught the movement of tail lights of a black escalade moving out and down her drive way. With a frantic hand she reached blindly to her nightstand for her glasses almost knocking them behind her bed in her fervor. Squinting through the lenses of her spectacles she saw the head of the driver peeking out his side window looking up to the house, TB ducked beneath the ledge and waited a few seconds before coming up; when she did the driveway was empty, the black escalade that held David was gone.

TB shook her head to herself and murmured a few words of disbelief. Crawling back into bed she sat her bed for a few moments contemplating what had just occurred. If she had indeed just experienced what she thought she had, before she could make up her mind that night though TB dropped off into the abyss of slumber...