By Elizabeth Kovacs
They come after dark.
Only when my waking eyes flicker shut do they open theirs — smiles stretching their lips taut as their limbs elongate and their forms bubble up to size.
Only then do they gaze down at my sleeping form, wonderment blossoming on their faces. They are the good ones; wispy white forms that hang onto the edge of my dreamstate vision. They dance around the room, handling objects with grace — making them float and fly through the air.
The smallest one holds back the others; eyes wide and innocent as a smile flickers briefly across her mouth. Her face is calm and happy, so similar to my own. Eerily so, but her face doesn’t crease with worry at her forehead like mine, her mouth doesn’t droop into a frown. At one point her serene hands sit against the wall, fingers splayed so gently that they appear to barely touch it.
Wall. The door to darkness. To the others. Bleak monsters. Those that creep underneath childhood beds. The blackest thoughts, haunted memories and deadly beasts.
Still she beams, unaware of the nature of what lies beyond that door, and her hands are soon herding the other wisps again.
Her smile is infectious and warmth flows through me as a similar smile sketches itself on my own sleepy face.
They dance, woven into the air, alive. Time ticks on as the small one grows tired, face drooping from the effort at keeping the others at bay. Her smile is the barest flicker of light, and dewdrop tears roll down her pale face.
Her guiding hands falter and I wish to console her, to coddle her and pat her hair. To rub her back and wipe away her tears. To tell her nothing can ever go wrong. But her hands slip — slip and fall — to come to rest on her small knees as she bends her head in terror. Small, she is so small. Tiny compared to the hole that has appeared and grows bigger and bigger until it engulfs the entire wall.
Then the beasts come.
Dark animals with manes running down their backs. A roar. And screams: banshee screams so loud and high that I want to tug the pillow underneath my head and throw it at the monsters. Banish those creatures of the night.
But I can’t. I am frozen still. I cannot move.
My smile is gone. Gone. In its place a mask of terror. A mask perfectly etched into each line of my face. A mask they create.
They. They round up the wisps. The ghosts. The fairies, the little one. Force them back through the hole. The hole in my wall.
I let out a shudder and attempt to rise from the bed — the bed that holds me captive. But it is all too late…
I wake, covered in sweat, the door of my room swinging on its hinges.
About The Author
Elizabeth Kovacs
Elizabeth — at only 16 — is an avid reader who has enjoyed the art of words for as long as she can remember.
She owes a huge gratitude to her family, friend’s and school’s undying support and hopes that she makes the person on the other side of the screen smile.
As Time Ticks On is her debut work with many more to come.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
David Whitaker is originally from the UK though has travelled around a bit and now resides in India. He has a degree in Journalism, however decided that as he’s always preferred making things up it should ultimately become a resource rather than a profession.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.