A story I wrote for Concept and Story class about a dream I had…
He sits at his computer, in his silent room, the only noise and light, from the wind blowing through the trees and the afternoon sun shining in through the window. Click-click-click, ssssh.
The breeze meanders through the woods as he is thinking he would rather be outside than working. The quiet hum of a truck engine starts and grows louder from outside of the window, the wheels rubbing rocks together on the pavement. It’s a black truck, and quieter than it ought to be. Almost more like a tank than a truck it has no windows and only a single door. He notices the sound and watches out the window next to his desk as the truck pulls up in front of his house. It stops in the middle of the street. It’s just sitting there, humming, waiting, like a tiger about to strike. After a few moments, the singular door clicks open, and masked figures donning only black begin to pour out. They vanish around the side and under the overhang of the house.
He begins to back away from the window, concerned and confused as to why his house is suddenly surrounded by these masked ghost-like figures. When suddenly he hears clanging on the screens in the windows. Clanging from metal-on-metal. His windows are now being bombarded by small fragments of black iron, flying up, hitting, and falling back down again. He rushes out of his room, down the hallway and into the living room, hoping to distance himself from the persistent clanging on the windows.
Meanwhile outside, a car is speeding up the street. It’s loud and old and also shrouded in black. One of those muscle cars from the 1960s. It speeds up to the house and swerves to right into the driveway and down the side of the house. He cannot see it but he follows its path with his ears. The car runs down into the yard at the side of the house and swerves again to the right, crashing onto the porch under the sunroom. The sunroom is attached to the living room and he sees it shake as the car pounds its foundations. The whole house shakes. The clanging from the metal on the window-screens continues on in the background; while footsteps are heard running across the roof, and a zip as steel ropes suddenly fall down to the ground in front of the house. More clanging, the back windows now being hit by the same strange fragments as the front. He glances into the kitchen as through the windows he catches the mysterious figures flying down from the roof onto the ropes.
A bang on the outside wall of the sunroom, he sees one of the figures climbing up the wall and latching onto the window with insect-like precision. He runs to get the phone to call for help but as he is dialing the window bursts open and he turns to see a tall masked figure of about 6 feet high in front of him. He reaches for the only mobile and reasonably solid object close to him, a shoe sitting on a cabinet outside of the entrance to the sunroom where the figure is now standing. The figure is yelling in a foreign language of the Germanic sort, possibly Swedish or Icelandic. The man takes a swing at the figure with the shoe, still holding the phone in the other hand. The figure clasps the man’s wrist as it flies past its face. Holding on, it squeezes his wrist causing the shoe to drop to the floor. The room begins to warp, the walls bending under the weight of the room knocked off its foundations.
Slowly the sunroom begins to break away from the house and the figure disappears downward releasing the man who falls backwards onto the living room floor. Crash, the sunroom lies in rubble on top of the black muscle car, the engine still sputtering. A rain of figures then flies down from the roof, picking up their comrade and disappearing around the corner of the house and into their black tank. The tank speeds backwards down the single-lane street and a vague silence returns to the house, the wind now blowing cool through the hole living room instead of the windows.
He glances around; absorbing what has just come to pass. Walking cautiously back to his room he looks around to see nothing out of place. The ropes are gone and there is only the sound of the wind in the trees and the hum of his computer in the background.
He leaves his room and runs down the stairs and out the front door. Stunned, he again finds nothing out of place, no evidence the figures had ever been there, no iron fragments and no ropes, not even a footprint in the grass. He walks around to the back of the house, needing to see the sunroom to confirm himself sane. To his confused relief the sunroom still lies in rubble in the backyard, but every trace of the black car that caused the incident is now gone.
He stands alone in his backyard, amidst the remains of his house. The cool breeze now a comforting reminder of reality as he begins to pick up the bits of wood that once were his.
End.
