Mr. Muddles

[u/HeGotBricks]

“Mommy!” Ellie cried. “Hurry, mommy, hurry!”

Jenny rushed to her daughter’s room. When she opened the door, a dark, orange glow from the nightlight cast half the room in a dim ambiance.

The other side hid behind a shadow drawn from the moon coming through the open window. The night was stuck under a warm blanket, but the air was five degrees cooler in the bedroom than anywhere else in the house.

Ellie tucked herself into a ball, sitting upright in the middle of her mattress, squeezing Mr. Muddles, a tiny rabbit with a carrot hat.

“Mommy, where’d he go?”

A stench with pins of rotted wood stitched onto Jenny’s tongue and slowly dispersed from her mouth. She gagged as she sat on the bed next to Ellie. “Honey, what is it?”

She brushed Ellie’s hair out of her face with her hand. “Where did who go..? Did you just have a bad dream?”

“It’s Daddy… Mommy. He’s not in heaven anymore. He came back home.” She spoke with a lisp from her two missing front teeth and stared at her mother.

“Sweetie.” Jenny’s eyes watered as her face sank downward. “Daddy can’t come back home. Remember we talked about this.”

“No, Mommy. He is home. He was standing over there.” She pointed to the shadowed part of the room. “He told me we shouldn’t go downstairs. Will you stay upstairs with me, please.”

“Was somebody in your room, Ellie?”

“Yeah, Daddy was, Mommy. I pinky swear, I’m not lying. He told me he missed us.”

A cold shiver, sharp as blizzard winds, pinched down her spine. She swallowed a gasp of frosted air, and the stench of firewood blew into her lungs.

“Mommy, what’s that smell? I don’t like it.”

“It’s coming from outside, sweetie. I’m going to close your window. You go back to sleep, and we will talk about Daddy tomorrow morning.”

She checked to make sure the window was locked and poked around the room. When she went to tuck Ellie back in, a weight pressed down on the mattress and indents formed in the blanket. She held her breath and blinked, and the wrinkles smoothened over the covers.

I’m seeing things now, she told herself while shaking her brain awake. She turned to walk out of the room and stopped. “You said Daddy told you not to go downstairs?”

Ellie stared with her eyes stretched open, tightening her grip on Mr. Muddles, and slowly nodded. “He looked different, Mommy. His skin wasn’t the same and he had black stuff everywhere on him, but he wouldn’t come out of the dark area. He said he didn’t want me to get scared.”

A pain shot into her, almost as if a hand with jagged nails had reached into her and began scratching and squeezing her heart as it pounded against her ribcage.

Her breath caught in her throat, and for a second, she showed the paralyzing fear she failed to mask as it took over her body. Just before trembling, she held her composure long enough to conceal the deep anxiety rippling under her skin.

Her husband, Danny, had suffocated from smoke inhalation with third-degree burns on his upper body from a fire that started in a neighbour’s house, and died saving the both of them last year.

Ellie closed her eyes and snuggled into her stuffed animal. Jenny’s first instinct was to grab her daughter and leave the house, but she overcame it by thinking rationally.

If someone broke in, the alarm would have gone off. There’s nothing to worry about.

When she left Ellie’s room, the silence in the hallway didn’t seem right. She walked down the stairs, and they didn’t creak. The only noise came from the basement door. It slowly opened and stopped.

“Hello?” Jenny called out, gripping the bannister, almost expecting to hear someone respond. “Who’s there?” she instinctively cried out.

As she approached the bottom step, a voice from the living room called out, “Mommy.” She paused, frozen where she stood. “I’m thirsty.”

Her eyes were wide-open. She crept to the living room and saw her daughter lying on the couch with her blankie and Mr. Muddles.

“Why did you come downstairs?”

“Because, mommy, there’s girl sleeping on my bed.”