You can’t remain at the graveyard any longer, not without losing your sanity. But ask yourself, do you really feel any safer at home in bed? Can you answer that honestly, or will you comfort yourself with more lies of my non-existence?

The familiarity of your home offers no safe haven from me. Do you hear that floor joint squeaking in the next room? It isn’t the house settling, it’s me. Was that a shifting sound you heard in your closet? I’m there, moving slowly, with crimson stained fangs, the better to eat you with my dear. Is there a reason why you don’t sleep with your feet uncovered? It’s because a single touch from my slimy tentacle would send you into a cardiac arrest. I anxiously wait for you to forget. Perhaps you wonder why I’m telling you this. Am I trying to warn you? Is there someway to save yourself and your family from the horrors I have planned for you? Of course there is. But naturally, I wouldn’t dream of telling you what it is. Besides, knowing the possibility of escape just adds to your fear when you never find it.

No, the reason I tell you is simply that I live off fear. It radiates from you like an ultra-violet light that only my kind can detect. I want nothing more than to have you fear me even more. That’s why I anticipate it. And after your death, we’ll have all of eternity together.

Before then, however, I will destroy both you and all those you love. Age and gender are meaningless to me. I loathe all your kind equally. Your race’s every word, deed and action repulse me, just as you’re repulsed when you see a hideous spider. As you want to crush the arachnid, so I want to crush you.

You’ll never see it coming. Your death may be fast and painless, or it may be slow and agonizing like a cancer that eats away at your every cell. While I wait on that wondrous day, I will feed on your every fear.

Deep in your mind, you know that there has always been a dark, malevolent presence hovering around you. It has been me. But when you put this letter down, you’ll walk away telling yourself that none of it is real. A part of you will laugh at the prospect of facing death , it won’t happen to you anytime soon. This is nothing more than the product of some twisted author ‘ s mind.

Yeah. You just keep telling yourself that.

In a few days, you’ll pick up the local paper and read in the obituary column that someone close to your age has died. You’ll first wonder if I was responsible. Then you’ll wonder if it could’ve been you.

To both questions I answer a hissing, ‘Yes!’