Lit Room

         Faces stared stoically from each side of the dim tapered hallway which seemed to stretch for miles into a chilling abyss. A beam of light illuminated from a narrow crack in an open doorway while maniacal crashes and mercurial chatter fluttered and drowned out the chimes of an old droning grandfather. Every touch on the hardwood floor got quieter as the door came closer. New sounds of irate tapping came from the bedroom following a screech that lasted for only a second. There was no good time to enter the room, but something had forced the door open. As the door came to a halt, an old man on a rusty step-ladder stopped what he was doing, and he gradually turned his head to see who was there. He smiled with a wink and continued to rip a piece of black tape from a small collection bound around his thumb. He smoothed the piece gently over a small green light that shone from a browned smoke detector. After he had finished, he grinned his largest and twisted his head toward the door-way, but it left his face in a second without warning.
         "Are you ready to die tonight, boy?"
         He said nothing more and with a demonizing stare he became catatonic. Pure silence flooded the room, but quiet went too soon as his transfixed stolid stare broke and he tilted his head back and began to cackle. His voice intensified into a roar of a deafening scream that could pierce the ears of the dead. The door slammed shut, and a thousand Faces came crashing to the floor while a harmony of laughter and shatter emerged into a hypnotic pattern that seemed to go on for a lifetime. Tormented by the pain and misery, the Faces faded into the floorboards as this lifetime of suffering lasted only a mere thirteen seconds, and then all went dead.