The Grin in the Dark

One night, as I lay in bed, my room was bathed in a soft, silvery glow from the moonlight streaming through the window. The quiet of the house was thick, wrapping around me like a heavy blanket, and I drifted in a half-sleep, hovering between wakefulness and dreams. Then, a sound broke through the stillness—a faint rustling,
as though something were moving carefully in the shadows. Still groggy, I thought, If there’s a mouse in this house, I swear I’m going to burn it down. But as I blinked my eyes open, I quickly realized this was no mouse. Sitting atop my laundry basket, barely visible in the dim light, was a creature unlike anything I had ever seen. It was about two feet tall, perched awkwardly but deliberately, its body eerily humanlike yet somehow completely foreign. Its pale, hairless skin gleamed slightly under the moonlight, and its proportions were unsettlingly strange—its body was small and compact, but its legs were unnaturally long, bent at sharp angles like a frog’s, with
knees pulled up in a crouched, watchful position. But it was the creature’s face that stopped my heart.......