When she heard the sound of scrabbling under her bed she gaped in horror. The roof was no longer there and the sky was crammed with stars. The yellow lamplight had its neck twisted and the light was dimming, a dark hairy whisker of shadow creeping up to swallow everything. The sliver of light coming in through the parting curtain was the only thing remotely consolatory in the creepy hotel reminiscent of horror movies, old and new. The wooden cabinet shook and the drawers slid out, one after the other, like the many tongues of a hysterical creature of the nights. The clothes hanger slid to a side and revealed the crack in the wall beyond. She tried the light switch but obviously it was not working. The bedspread was damp from something that was not hers – an ache spread through her limbs, paralyzing her, bolting her spine to the cot. A whiff of chill air snaked through the open fisheye hooks of her blouse, circling her rigid frame, raising the hair on the back of her nec
Whenever someone asked him what he would do if it was his last night on the Earth he said he would sit and chew his tongue. Of course a reasonable answer would have been to either play loud music or make passionate love to a woman, but he somehow found it inconsistent with his own intellectual curiosities, to be trapped in something so real as drinking costly wine for example. He thought he would spend his time mulling. The prospect of last night affected him deeply. Unlike for many, it was not the night to fritter away. To know that tomorrow does not exist, to know that it was the last night did not rearrange priorities in his mind as it did to his friends and relatives. The apocalypse was announced and pretty soon the last night was upon the planet. He tried, as he imagined he would, to sit and mull, to do nothing more than introspect, to pursue a cosmic dimension of some sort. But he was not alone. There she was, the sexy receptionist he hired only last week. They had to