THE ‘CREATIVE WRITING’ SERIAL!

THE ‘CREATIVE WRITING’ SERIAL!
[commenced Monday, 29th June 2009]

She came awake immediately, sitting up abruptly, her heart thumping crazily, her eyes wide and staring as they roved wildly around the room, trying to pierce the dense blackness, her ears straining for any sound. Had she been dreaming? She had no recollection. What had woken her in such a panic? She clutched the sheet under her chin and continued to listen intently.

Gradually, as the seconds ticked slowly by on the illuminated dial of the clock beside her bed, she began to relax. Her heartbeat slowed and she sank back on the pillows, her hands releasing their frantic grip on the sheet. She started to recognise the reassuringly familiar night noises; the rustling of the ivy outside the window in the breeze, the hoot of the resident owl in the old oak opposite her window and the usual creaking of the floor boards in the old house. Eventually her eyelids fluttered downwards as they became heavier and she started to drift off to sleep once more. Then she was wide awake again as she recognised the noise which had so abruptly awoken her before. There it was again. What was it? An alien sound intruding into the familiar, a sound which shouldn’t be here in this time and place – and it came from the hall outside her bedroom door.