The Thing in the Shed

Written by Matthew Shute

Anita Whitehouse was at the kitchen sink, washing a pile of dishes, when she glanced out through the window and saw something move in the shed at the end of the garden. It was a fast blur of motion, gone in less than a second, and Anita couldn't make out what she'd even seen. She looked closely and, after a few seconds, she saw it again; a vague pale shape moving inside the shed, almost hitting the shed window before fluttering out of sight again.

"What the hell...?" she muttered.

She leaned forward so that her nose was almost touching the glass in front of her, and trained her eyes on the shed window, hoping to get a better impression of what it was in there. She waited for a few minutes but nothing further happened. She even began to have doubts about what she thought she'd seen.

"Could've been a trick of the light," she told herself. That and an overactive imagination."

But then she saw it again. This time it hovered in front of the shed window for almost a full second, long enough for Anita to be sure it was no trick of the light but an animal; an animal with wings.

"Paul!" she called.

From the lounge, Paul, her husband, shouted back. "What do you want? I'm trying to watch the football!"

"Come here! There's something trapped in the shed!"

Paul plodded into the kitchen, sighing and muttering as he came. "This had better be good," he said.

"There's something in the shed. I think it's a bird."

"A bird? What kind of a bird?"

"A white bird. I think it's a dove or something."

"A bird? Are you sure?"

It was Anita's turn to sigh. "Yes, I'm sure. I saw it with my own eyes three times."

"Three times, huh?"

"Yes."

"Well how could a bird get in there? It's locked tight. There's no way in or out."

"Maybe there's a hole or something you don't know about."

"I seriously doubt that."

"Look, I know what I saw, okay? Will you go out there and have a look, please? It'll die in there if it can't get out."

"Well why can't you go and look? I've been waiting to see this game all week."

"Paul, you know the doctor said I shouldn't go out in the cold for at least a week. You'll have to do it."

Paul let out another long sigh of frustration. "Yeah, okay. I'll do it if it'll make you feel better."

Paul could be a moaner sometimes, but Anita loved him. She kissed him and said, "Thank you."

He grinned. "I'll be expecting a better show of gratitude tonight in bed."

"Hey, no sex until I recover," Anita said with a laugh.

"D'oh!"

They both cracked up.

Paul put his shoes on and walked outside. Anita watched him trudge through the snow from her vantage point in the kitchen. She could see that he was looking down and muttering to himself again, probably moaning about having to miss the football game. He didn't believe she'd seen anything, obviously. To his way of thinking, he was missing his beloved football just to prove Anita wrong about something.

"We'll see who's wrong," Anita said, thinking out loud.

Once again she saw the creature; a white shape against a background of darkness. It stopped for a few moments in front of the window, flapping its heavy wings. Before it moved away into the shadows, Anita saw enough of it to change her mind about it being a dove. For one thing, it was approximately twice the size of such a bird. For another, it had none of the features of a bird: no feathers, no talons, no beak.

Anita instantly realised that this was a potentially dangerous situation. The creature, whatever it was, could be harmful or even deadly.

By now, Paul was already at the shed door, his key in the padlock.

Anita banged loudly on the window to get his attention. "PAUL!" she shouted.

He didn't hear. Without pausing, he turned the key, disengaged the padlock and opened the door.

Anita hammered against the window again, almost hard enough to break the glass. "PAUL!"

This time he did hear. He turned to face the house, an annoyed expression on his face.

"PAUL! COME BACK INSIDE!"

Behind him, a white shape flew out of the darkness. Paul must have heard it or felt the draft caused by its wings because he pivoted on his heel to face the thing. He didn't have time to scream before the creature clamped itself to his head.

Anita, in the kitchen, screamed loud enough for both of them.

Paul flailed around, trying to swat the white mass that was smothering his face. He didn't perform his bizarre dance of suffocation for long, however. Without any kind of a warning, some part of the creature - a stinglike aperture that extended from its abdomen - shot through the length of Paul's skull, killing him in an instant.

Hideously, it made Anita think of the guns used to kill cattle; the guns that shoot a large bolt through the unfortunate cow's head.

A huge chunk of skull and brain exploded from the back of Paul's head, parting is blonde hair at the point of exit. The escaping fragments of gore landed in the snow, dying it a vivid crimson. In different circumstances, the contrast between the pure white and the deep red would have been a beautiful thing to look at.

Anita watched the entire spectacle with wide-eyed terror and revulsion. The shock of seeing the love of her life being slaughtered horrendously in front of her tested her sanity.

Paul fell backwards. The creature, which appeared to be a kind of albino mutant insect, detached from the imploding skull and allowed Paul to slump into the thick snow.

Too shocked to move, Anita could only look on as the creature settled on her dead husband like a vulture upon a carcass, and began to feast. The way it consumed food was similar to the way of a housefly. From its mouth, the creature secreted a strong acid to dissolve the material of Paul's jacket and the flesh beneath it. Then it used its long proboscis to suck up Paul's liquefied guts.

Anita somehow snapped out of her dumbfounded state, and called the emergency services, telling them only that her husband had been killed, before hanging up. Then a kind of rage gripped her. She wanted to kill the bastard thing that had made a snack of the husband. She threw on a jacket and some shoes, grabbed a nearby broom, and ran into the garden to confront the monster.

It was sucking up the last remains from within Paul's hollowed-out ribcage. Anita raced at it, swinging the broom handle about her like a knight's mace. "DIE, YOU REPULSIVE FUCKING THING!" she was screaming, no thought given to her own safety. "I'LL BREAK YOUR STINKING BODY IN HALF!"

The fearless approach had some merit, at least. When Anita ran screaming at the creature, it looked up at her, saw something it didn't like the look of, and took to the air. It sensed a threat.

Swinging her makeshift weapon, Anita continued toward the thing, shrieking every curse she could think of.

Unfortunately, the creature was too fast. Once airborne, it gained altitude quickly. It flew off into the distance without looking back.

The beast was unconcerned about the screams of rage behind it. It had other things to think about now. Heavily pregnant, the creature had another nest to find, and quickly. It's eviction from the shed was bad because it's progeny would need somewhere warm and sheltered, a nice cosy place where they could hatch without the danger of freezing to death or being eaten by scavengers. The creature wanted to be a good mother to her offspring. She intended to find a good nest, this time; somewhere with no chance of getting stuck like before. She had learned a valuable lesson, also. Never again would she get herself trapped. Never again would she attract the attention of the humans, who were the most dangerous creatures she'd yet encountered, unless it was to kill them. She knew from past experience that humans could be unpredictably lethal; one of them had blasted her mate to death with a strange weapon. The humans were enemies. The humans were bad. Eventually, her species would have to find ways to outwit and defeat the humans. But that was for later.

"COME BACK HERE!" Anita screamed as the shape moved further away and finally flew out of sight. She could hardly believe that she'd been cheated of her revenge. Still screaming, she collapsed to the floor and began to weep uncontrollably. She was still sobbing when the police arrived in her garden.

"What the hell happened here?" asked one of the officers when he saw Paul's partially disintegrated remains.

Anita told him. She told him everything, the whole story about the insect that had come out of the shed. She spoke fast, her words spilling out of her mouth and colliding with each other. Several times she was asked to slow down and speak clearly.

Strangely, nothing she said could convince the police of her story, though they listened patiently as she recounted it over and over again during next few hours. Finally, one of the officers put some handcuffs on her.

"Anita Whitehouse," he said. "You are under arrest for the murder of your husband, Paul Whitehouse."

Anita ended up in a large psychiatric hospital, studied by teams of psychologists, and drugged up to the eyeballs. Her rants about giant moths did nothing to convince them of her sanity, and gradually she even came to doubt her own mind. The official story was that she'd horrifically killed her husband with acid in a psychotic episode, accompanied by wild hallucinations.

After a long time in the psychiatric hospital, the drugs and the isolation from the normal world began to take there toll. She found it increasing impossible to cope with the idea that she could've killed her husband, and she eventually did lose her mind completely. When that happened, she was confined to a small cell on the "disturbed" ward, straight-jacket and all.

The creature, meanwhile, vanished without a trace. It's species only came to human attention much later, when the population became so large that they couldn't maintain their secrecy. But by then many years had gone by and Anita Whitehouse had been forgotten completely.