I had just moved again, which was a tedious and not unusual occurrence. We’d been living over seas because of my dads job and he’d experienced some trouble at work, none of it his fault his manager was just particularly terrible, and he exercised his return rights back to where we’d come from. It hadn’t even been a year.
None of us where happy with the situation but we put up with it and headed back to the US, finding a house after a little over a month and moving right in. I won’t bore you with what happened after that, it was just the regular moving things like getting our household goods and seeing a mountain of boxes everywhere we looked. It was a month after we moved in that it happened.
I was unwrapping some of my things in my room, I’d picked the basement since I was older and needed my own space. I wasn’t completely alone, the cats food was in the next room so my cat would be down there with me a lot but for the most part I was alone. The movers had used a lot of paper, maybe more then necessary, and I noticed too late that the paper I was holding had a strange bulge in the bottom and the bulge turned out to be my smallest snow globe, which fell to the ground and shattered at my feet.
I wasn’t particularly upset, it wasn’t an expensive one, just annoyed. So I went to get something to clean up the water and the glass before tossing it out. It was a stupid little Christmas themed thing, with a cheery reindeer depicted inside. I didn’t give it a second thought as I tossed it in the trashcan.
The way it shattered stuck with me though, it barely made a noise and since it had landed right on the glass part the shards had gone everywhere. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was just that it still annoyed me, since there was still glitter on the floor.
I started to have weird dreams not long after, of the snow globe shattering, just over and over again. The smiling reindeers face slowly moving to the floor. Often I’d wake up in a cold sweat but I wasn’t sure why. The weirdness started after that, I’d fine pieces of glass in places the snow globe never was like under the bookcase and by my vanity. The snow globe had shattered at the foot of my bed in front of my dresser and like I said it wasn’t that big. The dome was barely the size of a bouncy ball.
At first I thought maybe I’d dragged the pieces with me when I walked but that seemed unlikely because I didn’t wear shoes in the house so if I stepped on a piece of glass, it probably would have just gone into my foot. Then I began noticing other things, mainly at night. There was a subtle gentle knocking at the glass door in the next room that started a week after I found the glass. It was always at around 8, and honestly I didn’t even notice it at first since I’m usually awake on my phone watching videos.
I didn’t get worried until it started to get louder, and more frequent, lasting almost all night and causing me to spend most nights paralyzed in my bed. I didn’t know what it was but I’d seen enough horror movies to know not to get up. Some nights, when I could get up, I went and slept on the couch but the noise just followed me to the living room window. The blinds were always closed so I never saw who or what it was and I had no desire to open it.
After spending a few weeks in this anxiety ridden existence I decided that enough was enough. I waited until the sun went down and when the knocking started I gathered the courage to creep into the room next to mine. It was the laundry room and it wasn’t completely finished, the ceiling was just insulation and the floor was grey concrete. There were a lot of boxes in there and it was a little difficult to maneuver my way to the glass door but I got there. There were quite a few boxes blocking it but I could see the top half of the door and what I saw stopped me in my tracks.
There was a giant grinning reindeer tapping it’s forehead rhythmically against the glass. It was the exact mirror of the one that had been in my snow globe, and I knew that that one was plastic and if this was the same reindeer then that meant it could easily shatter the glass if it wanted to but it didn’t. It just stood there, knocking its head against the glass over and over.
I didn’t remember screaming or running but when I woke up I was on the floor of the laundry room, my head hurt and there was daylight streaming in through the glass door. The reindeer was gone.
I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t tell my family about it so I had to do something about this myself. I didn’t know why it was after me specifically but I figured it was because I’d broken the snow globe. Maybe it had been a cage? Or capsule of some kind? Had I freed it and now it was after me? This was what I settled on.
The next night I grabbed my old softball bat, which I’d found earlier, and crept upstairs in nothing but my sloth pajama pants and bright yellow sleep shirt. I didn’t know what I was expecting to do with the bat but as I slipped on my flip flops and headed out the front door my grip on it tightened. I knew the deer would find me, it had before.
I heard it before I saw it, it’s large plastic feet making noises in the grass behind me. I turned slowly, finding it’s grinning face looking down at me. It rushed me all at once and I ran, my heart pounding in my chest, into the woods to the side of my house. Branches bended and snapped all around me as I heard it’s crashing footsteps grow closer and closer.
I could hear my heartbeat thumping in my ears as it got closer.
Thump
Thump
Thump
That scared me a little more then the deer did, but I didn’t have much time to process that before it knocked me face first into the leaf covered dirt. I desperately grabbed at the ground with my free hand while the other gripped the bat tightly. I was screaming I was begging I was pleading as it lifted me up in the air with, what I didn’t know since it had hooves rather then hands, and turned me to look at its grinning face.
That smile contorted and stretched until it was way past its eyes, the mouth opening with a crack of plastic to reveal sharp teeth you wouldn’t find on a deer. It also had a surprisingly moist looking black tongue that writhed and squirmed in its gaping maw. I was nearly paralyzed with fear at this point, my wide eyes looking directly at those sharp teeth.
I reacted just before it could put me in its mouth, a little jolt making me realize what was happening and causing me to swing my bat with all my might. A large crack was heard and it dropped me back on the ground, when I finally managed to look up I saw that it now had a crack across its face. The mouth had closed back into that cheery grin and it simply lumbered off into the woods, without a care in the world.
I didn’t see it again after that, and it’s been years since this incident happened but even now, long after I’ve moved out of my parents house and married my long term boyfriend… I can still hear it occasionally. Tapping gently against the glass.
I don’t know what sort of monster I released when I dropped a carelessly wrapped snow globe on the ground by accident in my cold basement room all those years ago but I hope my husband never notices, because I wouldn’t want anyone else to see that large gaping maw.