Penny Dawson woke and heard something moving furtively in the dark bedroom.

She lay there, silently as possible, not daring to breathe. She felt as though ants were rushing through her veins and a sharp pain in her midsection as the terror gripped her, hard.

Silence. Nothing.

Penny opened her eyes a slit, experimentally, and she saw the light from the motion sensor over the garage outside filtering through the blinds. She could see nothing, and it was still silent.

Then a wet, furry snuffle came from across the room. Her heart leaped and she snapped her eyes closed, willing the sound gone with all her might. She promised every deity she could think of that she would be good, stop smoking, stop secretly hating Brenda at the office, who was so nice but was always wearing holiday-themed sweaters...

She could picture where the sound was coming from: the corner between the closet and the door to the bedroom. If she wanted to get out, she would have to go past whatever that thing was in the corner. There was a pile of clothes there, and other sundry things, things laying where she'd dropped them on her way to bed or the shower. She cursed herself for not cleaning up- it was almost like the laundry had come alive, or that the pile of clothes had proved irresistable to some terrifying creature looking for a nest...

She felt hot tears leaking from her clenched eyes. The tension of holding herself so still was making her ache all over, and the noise just wouldn't go away. That's all she wanted. She quietly bargained with the noise- she wouldn't try to find out what it was, she would just lay there if it would go away, but as soon as she started to relax, it would snort again. The silence was almost worse than the noise- at least when she could hear it she knew where it was.

She laid there for what felt like hours, and then with seemingly no conscious decision, she leapt up screaming and hit the light switch. She screamed with a blind fury backed by the hours of sleepless tension, snapping like a bowstring, ready to strike at whatever was in the room.