The frigid night air seemed to tear at my throat as I tried to inhale enough oxygen. I could feel the muffled pounding of the bloody soles of my feet on the pine-needle covered forest floor. The pain was unbelievable as I ran, but I had to keep going or else it would catch up with me. I ran until I was forced to a halt by a giant rock wall, gasping for breath I looked around for another escape route. Not seeing one I began to climb. I went higher and higher until the thing was only a dot the size of my pinkie nail. I smiled and reached for the next handhold; I was almost free! Just as my fingers had curled around the little rock outcrop, it broke. A sensation of falling was all I could feel for a moment. Then terror gripped me in its icy grasp and I screamed as I felt the hot pungent breath of the creature on my neck and the hardness of the ground thrust against my back.

Jolting awake in a cold sweat, I sat up. "A dream," I sighed in warm relief as I thought, ok a dream I can handle. Getting up I pulled on a navy blue robe over my pajamas and headed down the stairs. Pausing on the last step as I always do, I looked at the ancient picture of soldiers and long dead ancestors. Their eyes seemed to follow my every movement and I shivered. Shrugging off the feeling I walked into the dining room.

My parents John and Leslie Hopkins, had inherited this old house recently after my great grandfather had died. I remembered how my hand had trembled as I punched the numbers into the phone to call my mom to tell her that grandpa had died in his sleep. Sighing, I walked past the dining room table and into the kitchen where we ate breakfast every morning. My Mom was standing by the stove making breakfast when I walked in.

"Morning, did you sleep well?" she asked smiling

"Not as well as I would have like but well enough." I replied half lying

"Breakfast will be ready in a second." She said; then yelled "John! Zack! BREAKFAST!" The rest of the day went by normally. Zack, my six-year old brother, and I went to school. I got a B on a Civics test, and that was about as exciting as my life was. When I got home we all ate dinner in the kitchen, and Zack and I did the dishes. Once the last plate was stacked and the last glass was sparkling that my Mom came over to me and said "I want you to sleep in Zack's room tonight; he's having nightmares about people in the ceiling."

"They're in the walls and it's not nightmares, I see them before I'm sleeping!" Zack said. "Sure you do sweetie, but they still scare you." Mom replied.

"Fine." I mumbled, wondering if I should tell them that I wasn't sleeping well either. I decided not to.

That night when the lights were out and I was soundly asleep, a small voice whispered in my ear. "Jenny" someone said, waking up I looked to where the voice was coming from and saw Zack leaning over me in his Transformers pajamas. "What Zack?" I whispered back, wondering if he had had another nightmare.

"Can you see them?" He asked, in a whispered, hurried voice.

"See who?" I replied,

"The people in the walls." He said simply. Deciding to humor him I sat up and looked at the pearl white walls, there was nothing there. "Zack I don-." He cut me off

"Look harder." Rolling my eyes I squinted at the wall.

Then I saw it, rolling masses of almost humanlike shapes writhing in the background, or was it the foreground? It was impossible to tell as the shapes seemed all the way across the room yet at the same time only a few inches away. Then a face appeared, but it looked far from human. It was ghostly white with nothing but black holes where its eyes and mouth should be, and their blackness seemed to swallow all the light in the room. I stifled a scream and Zackbegan laughing at my terror, it was a cold harsh laugh that made the hairs on my arm stand on end. I looked at him and he grinned, his eyes nothing but bloody sockets.

Then I looked back at the face as it loomed above me. Its mouth opened wider and wider until it engulfed the whole room and then it closed around us shrouding the world in its darkness.

I screamed myself awake and looked around panting and wide eyed. Then I looked at Zack, who was now awake. He asked if I was alright and I told him to go back to bed. "But I need to know!" He said, and then asked "Did you see them?" All I could do was nod, and then I began sobbing.

The dreams kept reoccurring, each and every night. Some worse than the others, but they never stopped. Zack kept trying to tell me that they were real and I kept denying it and he would just laugh. I kept denying it until one night, I couldn't wake up.