What I've Got . . . "The Warp." The First 500 Words

The Warp
By D. Nathan Hilliard
(My mishmash for Nanowrimo)

Liza woke, huddled in the back corner of her dark closet, and lay silently as she let her hearing determine her chances of exiting her lair alive.

After five minutes of nothing but the sound of her own pulse beating in her head, she decided to risk moving. The clothes carpeting the floor muted any noise she produced as she rose to her feet. Her questing hand found the rod where her clothes used to hang, now empty to ensure that no accidental clatter of hangers might bring any number of forms of horrible death upon her.
Putting her ear to the door, she stilled her breathing and listened again. This constituted her “door routine,” one of the many habits that kept her alive. Even though this door represented the fourth door between her and the outside world (the others being the bedroom door, hallway door, and then front or back doors), things had gotten in as far as three doors before. Only a week ago, she had been forced to lie almost two days in silent terror while listening to something move around in the bedroom outside the closet.

She never found out what it had been, and didn’t really care. Once it left, she only concerned herself with finding its means of entry and seeing what she could do to prevent it from happening again. Figuring out some way to lock the hallway and bedroom doors listed high on her priorities, although she feared the presence of a locked door might alert one of the more intelligent predators that wandered through of her existence.

Not everything that roamed her neighborhood killed out of mindless instinct. Some thngs put a little forethought into it.