ENTITY

by: Sarah Kelderman


“Excuse me.”                                   \

Samantha squeezed her eyes shut harder, knowing that no one could be there. It was the middle of the night. She lived alone. Her apartment door was locked. She distinctly remembered locking it before going to bed. The voice may have been soft and smooth, but it was menacing at the same time.                       
 
Not real.                     
                          
She was just dreaming.           
                   
“Excuse me,” the voice said again, and this time, whatever it was, shook her.   
                                       
The shaking should have jarred her awake, and Samantha opened her eyes. An entity floated beside her bed, in the shadows of her darkened bedroom, all purple and black swirls and long, flowy dress and hood and triangular face. It smiled at her, a devious smile, and Samantha wished she had kept her eyes shut. This was just an hallucination. A waking nightmare.
 
Sweat dripped down Samantha’s back.        
               
It loomed over her now, and all she saw was its purple and black swirls, and then she stood in darkness, before the outline of a decrepit house and rotted porch, where a girl sat at a piano, playing silently. 
                                         
The entity floated beside Samantha.              

There was something sad and crazed about that girl silently playing the piano—no sound came out of it. All she heard was the girl frantically pressing on the keys, the hard clicks of her fingernails. Samantha wanted to be back in her bed.                  

Just a waking nightmare.                        

The entity held out a purple and black swirling hand, and Samantha reluctantly took it. It was silky and cold. The entity led her to the porch and the pale, thin girl playing the silent piano, which Samantha now saw was covered with a thin layer of gray dust. The wooden steps of the rotted porch creaked as she stepped up them, loud in the silence.                            

She tossed and turned.                          

The entity opened the door of the house.        

She did not want to go in that house.         
  
Salty sweat dripped into her eye and burned.    

“No,” she said.                               
  
“Yes,” said the entity.   
                      
She was in her bed, still sleeping. This was just a waking nightmare. This couldn’t be real.                         

Beyond the opened doorway was blackness.        

The girl continued playing her silent piano, oblivious to them, clicking at the keys. Then Samantha was in the house, and the door shut behind her. She smelled wet paint. The entity floated beside her, all its swirling purples and blacks, and she saw they were in an enormous room, the ceiling and walls painted black, with multitudes of glowing white stars, and it was beautiful, and some of Samantha’s fear melted away.                  
In the center of the room sat a large piano.                       

“Go to it,” said the entity.                    

Samantha went to the piano and sat down on the bench in front of it, and she played, and the song filled the huge, empty starlit painted room, swirling around them, like the purple and black swirls of the entity, who floated beside her. Samantha’s fingers glided over the smooth and cold piano keys, white like human bones, and she hadn’t even known she could play the piano, but she supposed in waking nightmares you could do anything. The song lifted her up higher and higher, to the stars on the blackened ceiling, and she felt trapped and longed for sunshine. She longed for it to be morning. She swirled in black and purple with the entity, who smiled in its strange, triangular shaped face.            

She stopped playing.                            

She tossed and turned.                          

She laughed.                                    

The entity floated beside her.                  

She wanted to wake up.                          

She wanted to see the sunlight.             
    
She sat on the bench before the enormous piano, only echoes of the song revibrating in the room, and then she stood with the entity before a different closed doorway, this one chipped wood. 

Light shone beneath it.   
                      
“I’m dreaming,” said Samantha.                  

“No,” said the entity.                          

“I want to wake up.”                            

She tossed and turned, could vaguely feel the blankets twisted around her legs and the cold sweat on her face and back.   

“We have to go to the beach.” 
                  
“I don’t have a swimming suit,” said Samantha.  

“Now you do,” said the entity, laughing, and when Samantha looked down saw she wasn’t wearing her penguin pajama bottoms or baggy t-shirt but a purple and black bikini.   
                    
“Come,” said the entity.                        

The door opened. Bright, blinding light washed over them, and Samantha saw a beach and the glittering shimmers of the ocean in the distance, and she opened her eyes a second time it seemed, covered with cold sweat, black spots dancing across her vision from the bright blinding white light of the beach, eyes stinging.     
​                                  
She saw slivers of morning sunlight through her bedroom window blinds.