Orange Room

The room had an orange hue from the center lamp light. A warm, inviting embrace to contrast the pale fluorescent ones lining the street outside, giving the feel of a cold morgue to vagrants wandering around after dusk fell into night. Among the vagrants was a cat, curious as ever, who saw the light while perched on the roof of the house across the street.

Jumping down in two hops, first onto a trash bin and then onto the ground the cat then made its way from one side of the road to the other. Meandering around the invitational glow in an attempt to find a point of entree. Leaping up onto the wall, and climbing the house's windowsills then to a smaller open attic window.

Making its way down through the house to the light the cat heard scuffling and mumbling as it approached the shining source. Suddenly halting, it began to morph. Paws became hands and the tail retreated into an arched spine as the feline contorted into a what resembled a hominid silhouette. Its fingers and limbs continued to elongate, nails sharp and ligatures tall and thin to the bone with an astonishing height. Continuing then to the room, sticking to the shadows it entered and found an elderly couple asleep on the couch, lamp left on as the TV played reruns of 1950s westerns on low volume. Inching forward the former cat made its way to the black and white screen.

"What in the sam-hill," a gravelly old voice spoke quietly behind it as a sharp and audible click was occurred. The creature turned around quickly to an awakened old gentlemen who had felt it brush his leg on the way to the TV set. But, before he could pull the trigger the creature whipped back to the screen and leaped into it like a diver at a lake. Rippling waves across the screen then turning into a whirlpool behind it, then bleeding out in waves across the atoms of the room catching the old man and his now awakened and terrified wife in their clutter pulling them in along with the creature. Then, as if nothing had ever happened, the television returned to its scheduled program and room stilled, without a trace of any oddity.

A week later the concerned daughter of the couple stopped by. Having not heard from either parent in a week and with her mother's increasing dementia was concerned as to what she might find. Opening the door she was greeted to more stress as the house was completely silent. Walking into the living room, she saw the orange lamp flickering in and out, needing a new bulb as the television buzzed with static and universal background radiation. Alarmed the daughter began across the floor to the coffee table where the lamp sat near the couch. Grabbing the landline phone sitting there atop a stack of half-finished sudoku books and beginning to dial emergency services, the device began to melt in her hand. The liquidated phone coated her hand and expanded, growing to cover her entire body as the contents it coated within began to deflate.

Receding finally, all that was left was a cat who then wandered back outside.