and there it sleeps, the creep

by Cocaine

and there it sleeps, the creep

Fluttershy found silence and tranquility in her cottage. As always deep in the woods, her home is prone to becoming disturbingly quiet in the night. For any other pony, it would be a deliciously awful opportunity to be scared right out of their fur, but not Fluttershy. Every night she sleeps in her cottage, not counting those occasional sleepovers, and every night, she finds solitude. Solitude in her quiet home, all alone.
The young pegasus found herself very much alone on this night in particular. It may have been an effect of the severe lack of light from the moon; it may have been the overabundance of quiet behavior from the forest; it may have been her own paranoia; it may have even been her very own Angel creating pranks. Every night was the same, however. Tea, toast, news, couch. That’s the nightlife of Fluttershy; nothing more, nothing less.
On this night in particular, there was much more awaiting the shy yellow pony. It came in the form of a sound reminiscent of the wind, but it was far top similar to metal grating against metal.
Fluttershy popped her head from her newspaper, looking around scarcely in her dark room. Angel bunny was nowhere to be found, and neither was an accomplice of light.
With a complaint of her negligence to get more candles, Fluttershy continued to scan the room. The lavender and blue colored rug that laid so perfectly in the middle of the room; the placement of chandeliers above it; the steps that led to her bedroom; the door that took any willing pony out into the dark, but most importantly, it kept the dark out; and especially the windows. So many windows- if the timid pony were to try and keep her gaze upon each of them, she would have definitely seen things.
And she did.
In her soulful gazes at her many windows, Fluttershy caught the darkness in one of its many devious acts; a shadow.
She stared at it. Not because she wanted it to go away, but she did; not because she wanted it to stare back at her, which it did; not because she wished it to be a figment of the night, though it was; but because she wanted to understand it, which she did not.
She spoke in her whimpered tone to the shadow in her window, but no reply came. She has grown accustomed to these practices- many things refuse to talk to her. Especially those that aren’t real.
Or, at least, that was what Fluttershy thought of the imaginary shadow that created nothing less than a hand gripping onto the little light that was left in her home.
The pegasus was not one for perception, but she had the mental capacity for common sense. She noticed the severe lack of light behind the shadow; it was a shadow within the darkness, a darker being of black.
The frightened mare jumped to attention, glaring at the shadow and pointing one of her accusing hoofs at the shadow. In her mind, she shouted for it to leave; to be gone; to never to come; to frighten her no more, but all that came out was a polite request for the darkness to stop scaring her. Of course, if it was okay with the shadow.
It moved.
Fluttershy gasped and threw the newspaper at the window and got exactly what she did not want. The window opened, and the darkness poured in.
The pegasus, rather than her initial thought of fleeing like most cases of situations regarding horrible paranoia of the dark, dashed to the window and closed it.
She was inches, centimeters, millimeters- and a mere hoof’s reach away from the shadow. She saw it as though it weren’t a shadow in the dark; nor a blacker than black being; nor a figment of paranoia; and especially did not see it as a harmful attacker.
It was one of her plants.
Fluttershy sighed in deep relief, bowing her head to the floor. She mumbled her tenacity to overreact beneath her sigh, then created her journey back to the couch.
The sound of grinding gears resounded subtly throughout her cottage.
The young timid mare stood no chance against the sudden outbreak of sound and ducked her head under her hooves.
The sound quieted.
Fluttershy rose.
A new sound made its presence known; a breath.
Fluttershy dropped again, though this time she made an effort for under the couch.
The breath was quick to follow like a veil of transparency. It had no connections, no fluency, and no restraint. It was on her, traveling down her neck, through her spine, in her nostrils, into her lugs- it was her breath.
Fluttershy gulped down the thick musky air as she returned from the cover of the couch. She glanced around once more, taking note of the windows especially.
One was open.
As she walked to close it, she noticed something very odd. There was no shadow that resembled a plant outside the window. There was no shadow, because there was no plant.
Fluttershy, trying to make sense of the ordeal, turned around at one of her other windows.
And there it was- the plant creating the ever present shadow.
This window wasn’t opened by her newspaper; not by her negligence; not by her apparent lack of memory; not by her flees for the couch; it was not opened by her.
She turned back around with trepidation, and she did so for a reason. There it was.
The breath oozed over Fluttershy like a chilled blanket. It reeked of the cold that any pony would call less than fortunate.
In front of Fluttershy, the most timid pony known by anypony with a brain that had more mental capability than paper, it stood. It floated. It breathed. It moved. It slept.
Under any normal circumstance, Fluttershy would have been a hundred miles away at the very stench of the chilled darkness before her, but this was no normal circumstance. Her fur was devoid of its yellow; her mane was lost of its pink; her eyes lost its blue; the only thing left was her rapid pumping heart.
The darkness found her in its sleep. Its dream was of fortune and joviality, yet it seemed more than a pitch of nothingness; it had eyes.
Fluttershy locked with them and could not derive a single piece of essence from the white oval-shaped eyes. They simply sat, stared, observed, and envied.
As though being in the mere presence of this darkness, the mare discovered knowledge. It was knowledge she had no memory of; no remembrance; no way of recounting where or why; it was simply there. It was the creep. That’s what it was.
There is no such thing as evil- there is only what you fear and what you know. You fear what you don’t know, and that was the exact mentality of Fluttershy. She wanted to know this being- the creep.
It had none of it. It stayed there; it was stoic; it was horrific; it was the creep.