Humming Bird

• Horror
• Fiction

								
Jessamine never liked going to sleep by herself. Heck, she slept in her parents’ bedroom until she was nine years old. She always had a creepy feeling about her room. The way her house was spread out it was Jessamine and her older brother by two years (Theo) who had rooms on the exact opposite side of their three bed/two bath trailer house. 
	The house was old. It actually was supposed to be replaced by another trailer three years ago, but because of her parents' low income they said it was fine besides a few mold spots on the roof in the kitchen. They always had a candle melting in pretty much every separate room because of the constant dead odor from the rats that lived in the walls. 
	Night time was always scary for her because when she was three she was playing hide and seek with Theo and accidentally locked herself in her parents’ pitch black master bathroom for fifteen minutes (though it felt like hours on end). It didn’t help that both her parents were highly spiritual and always said there were ghosts living in the house. They told her that their neighborhood was built on a Native American burial ground. Her mother was a Wiccan and always prayed over her before she went to bed. She didn’t know if it was because of her fear or because her mother felt it too. There was something in her room. 
	Her fourteen year-old brother was obsessed with ghosts and would often bring his EMF meter into her room to scare her because right in front of her bed the light always flashed red. Today was the first night her parents had let her and her brother stay home alone and when her brother went to bed he blew out the candles, gave her a bottle of Febreze and wished her luck. That was a few hours ago and now the stench of long dead animals crept out of the walls. 
	She decided to lie down until she heard a low humming sound. “Theo!” she yelled out of her cracked open door. “It’s not funny, you're not gonna scare me!” her little twelve year-old voice squeaked out. 
	The low humming got closer and turned into a tune. A loopy kind of tune you might hear from a drunk as you walk down the streets of New York at night. It rose then lowered and then rose into a kind of cooing of a dove then back down to like the growl of her stomach if she missed lunch. 
	When she heard a tap-tap she whipped her head around to her window where the blinds covered any misshapen face that might be beyond. She curled into the opposite corner of her bed. Her friend had told her about a Japanese ghost that would tap on children’s windows to make sure they were asleep, and if they weren't, the ghost would crawl through the window and eat the naughty child who was still awake.
	The tapping grew more loud, more frantic. The humming grew more sadistic, more crackley and ripply until a bright line shone through the window. Her parents were home. She heard one last tap-tap like rain water, then silence. 
	The front door opened and she came running out into the living room. “Mom, Dad, can I sleep in your room tonight?” her mother’s calm eyes looked down at her. “Oh honey,” she put a soft hand around her cheek while her father’s rough construction hands brushed her hair back. “Of course.” 
	She ran back to her room to grab a few things for sleeping before making a mad dash on her toes to the other side of the house, the darkness’s hands just barely grazing her as she ran back to her parents’ room. 
	As she laid down on a floor pallet, she started drifting off to sleep before she heard the strange humming sound again. Chilled, she shakily looked in front of her.  Jessamine, she thought to herself. Jessamine you are twelve, you are brave, there is no such thing as ghosts or yurei. She looked forward, under her Granny Matt's old dresser to see a white faced little girl, black hair drooping around her. Jessamine froze as the little girl's lips pressed together and started to hum, melancholy sounds filled the room, as if she were in a glass room and the doves' sadistic cries reverberated off of the walls. 
	She took one last glance at the girl, whose lips now formed a wicked smile as she raised one of her ghostly white hands and pressed a single, slim finger to her lips, as if shushing the screaming in Jessamine's mind. Then she disappeared into the abyss of the old, green dresser.
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