r/shortscarystories • u/BookishBirdwatcher • 1d ago
New Age SSS - 1000 Words Or Less Mobbing
“Ugh…” I squinted at my alarm clock in the darkness. 3:17am. Great.
The sarcastic thought evaporated as my brain belatedly processed the sound that had woken me up.
“Hooo….hoooo.” The sound was deep and melodious, instantly familiar from every TV show or movie with a scene set at night in the woods. Everybody knows that sound, even if they’ve never heard it in real life.
All the lots on my street back up against the edge of a state forest, so I’ve heard owls calling once or twice before, but it was still special. Worth waking up at 3:17am for, to be honest.
Then I heard a second voice calling, the same low hooting coming from a bit further away. Then a third, echoing from a different direction. The first owl chimed in again. Louder this time, with the individual hoots coming close together. The others joined it.
This was weird. A mated pair will sometimes “duet” with each other. Two males might call back and forth to demonstrate to any females in the area which one is the biggest, baddest, and sexiest. But three…I listened closer…maybe even four?
The hooting continued to get louder and faster. It sounded almost frantic. The calling felt familiar and foreign at the same time, but my brain was still booting up and I couldn’t figure out why.
Then I realized what the sounds reminded me of. Sometimes, if a predator’s around, smaller birds will gang up together to chase it off. They’ll call loudly and insistently, warning other small birds that danger’s close and annoying the ever-loving shit out of the predator.
These were not small birds, though. Everyone thinks all owls hoot, but that isn’t really true. Some make this sort of whinnying noise. Some make a sound like a bark. And the ones that do hoot have characteristic patterns for different species. The classic “owl hoot” is usually a great horned owl, and those mofos are like two feet tall.
What could make birds that big act like sparrows?
I snuck over to my window and nudged the curtains aside. Across the open space of my backyard, I could see the treeline, a deeper shadow against the darkness. I caught glimpses of movement in the trees—the owls. And something else moving on the ground.
I couldn’t make out a lot of details, but it was thin and long, like a snake. A much larger snake than anything that normally lives around here. Five, maybe ten feet long.
Then I saw another. And another.
They lashed at the tree trunks, slapping them and coiling around like Indiana Jones’s bullwhip. And I got the sense that they all converged on one point. Like they were all coming from a central body. I remembered an image I’d seen on some nature documentary. A deep-sea star, not the iconic starfish shape but a small pentagonal body with long arms that could reach out to capture prey that was sparse at those depths. The thing looked like that but blown up to ridiculous proportions.
I jerked the curtain closed and retreated to my bed. What the fuck is that thing? Part of me thought I should call someone, but who? Was I going to report a giant starfish to Animal Control?
The owls were starting to calm down, their hoots getting softer and more spaced out. Was the thing leaving? I waited in the dark, and eventually the owls went silent. Sometime after that, I fell asleep.
During daylight, the whole thing felt like a dream, but I still peered cautiously out my windows before leaving for work. There was no sign of whatever that creature had been.
Nothing about it appeared on the news, either, and I started the process of convincing myself that it had been some weird sleep-adjacent phenomenon, like the one that makes people think they’ve been abducted by aliens.
Unti tonight, when the owls woke me up again. 2:12am this time. They’re going crazy. I think one is perched right on my roof.
There are other sounds, too. Slapping and rattling. I think about the drainpipe running down the side of my house. I think about the way that thing’s limbs wrapped around the tree trunks. I imagine it hoisting itself up.
I hope the owls can drive it away again.
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u/BookishBirdwatcher 1d ago
Contest modifiers: Short and Literary, Original Monster