roosting in the eaves of the mind

Many, many things scare me. Many, many many things. My age. Flying without valium. The fact that our sofa doesn't lie flush with the wall so that if I'm watching anything scarier than Doctor Who I can imagine how easy it would be for someone (or something, thanks Stephen King) to crawl into the triangular gap and wait amongst the dust and the dark, waiting for me to relax a little, or for a lax curl of my hair to spill within it's clammy, callused grip. The eventual death of my cowboy boots. Zombies. Voodoo. The diabolic creaking outside my room between three and five every morning. This is true, it's like a bothersome spectre running up and down the corridor. In fact that last one wouldn't be frightening at all, it would just be annoying were it not for the fact that it happens in the dead of night, where your tired, overstretched mind will believe anything. It's why it's called the dead of night, not the 'lovely comfort zone' or 'the hour of rapture and good cheer.' No, it's the dead of night sunshine, just past the witching hour, and that noise isn't a tap dripping it's the slow steady hammering of the evil leprechauns breaking in through the cellar to steal all your toes and teabags and because it's the dead of night suddenly that idea has more plausibility then it would at any other time.
I am writing this late, not quite the dead of night but certainly day is in it's terminal stages.
My room is on the ground floor, facing the street. Our road is very posh, and very quiet and there is rarely a squeak after say, ten o'clock at night. The other night a cat miaowing on a window sill just past midnight received a record number of residential complaints and a petition to have it's voicebox removed. I signed it.
There is a man whistling outside my window. Perhaps it is a solitary drunk tunelessly picking out the notes to 'Two Little Boys', heading home after another late night. But the crashing dark doesn't want me to think that. Oh no. I have him in my head now, tall and stooped and irregularly shaped, like an amorphous shape squeezed into a man costume. His puckered lips are wet and his nose is bleeding. His shifty eyes don't leave my lit window, and his hands are deep in the pockets of his long coat which falls into pools of shadows by his feet. In the gloom you can almost see him smiling a little, a grin like a slit throat. Each note withers and dies as he croons it out.
And he's probably controlling the fucking leprechauns in the cellar as well.