The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Phantoms 
by Kathryn Ptacek 

Footsteps, then a pause. Footsteps again, and then what seemed like a slithering noise along the rain-soaked pavement.

She quickened her pace and glanced back over her shoulder, but saw nothing in the gloom. She paused under a lamppost at a corner and waited a bit and listened … nothing now.

She looked back again and thought she saw movement a few stores back, and not for the first time she wondered why she had waited so long to go out. She was an idiot. Well, she knew that, she thought, almost smiling at the thought.

Head down, shoulders hunched, she rounded the corner just in time to catch something out of the corner of her eye. She whirled around but saw nothing … again. Losing her mind, she thought … she was losing brain cells left and right obviously, if she was seeing these phantoms.

She walked faster … She didn’t have far … just a few blocks to get home. Next time she would go out when the sun was out. Next time … if there was a next time.

And once more she heard the slithering, and she shuddered and broke into a run. The house was up ahead … set back from the road as she had always wanted, shrouded by tall shrubs in the front for privacy, and she started to cry as she opened and closed the gate, her hands shaking from effort, and she rushed up to the door, only to see the reptile’s face reflected in the glass

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Fiction © Copyright Kathryn Ptacek
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com