The floor was slick with grains of rice. Alan slipped and caught himself only when his elbow came down on one of the counters. He pointed his light towards the door as he ran to catch up with the others. The shadows were shifting fast. It wasn’t the motion of his light. It appeared like the shapes of the racks and counters were changing under his beam. At the door, Amber was holding it open as she tossed rice in his direction. Alan skidded and slid through the doorway.
Liz and Ricky were already shoving a rectangular table towards the kitchen doors. Amber got out of the way.
“It won’t do any good,” Alan said. “The doors swing both directions.”
Ricky ignored him and lifted the lip of the table, flipping it up.
“It’s not much, but it might slow them down,” Ricky said. He rushed to get his stake and pick up the bag of rice and his sesame seeds. Liz and Amber tore open the beans and they were spreading the contents of their bags in all directions.
“Ricky, help me push these together,” Alan said.
The door from the hall opened a crack and the tapping started again. At almost the same time, the door from the kitchen swung inwards. Alan ignored those and waved for Ricky to help him. Together, they pushed several tables into a cluster in the center of the room and shoved the others away. They littered the floor with beans, seeds, and rice and then climbed on top of the tables with their stakes and flashlights.
The island of tables was surrounded by a rough circle of nothing but scattered seeds.
“There’s one,” Liz said, pointing towards the kitchen door.
“I don’t see it,” Amber said.
“It’s gone now. It went along the wall, behind those stacks of chairs.”
“They’re going to surround us before they move in,” Alan whispered. “Everyone back to back, so we can keep an eye on all four directions.”
Standing in the center of the middle table, they pressed together, facing outwards, looking towards the four corners of the room.
“It’s not too late to run,” Ricky said. “I think we can still get to the door to the back hall.”
“And then where?” Amber asked. She threw another handful of dry rice. Most of it sprayed across one of the far tables and pattered to the ground like light rain.
The tapping began from the direction of the kitchen and then was repeated from several locations around them. The effort was synchronized. Amber wanted to plug her ears. The tapping formed a resonant wave that felt like it was throbbing inside her head.
Liz was quick with her response. She turned on music from her phone. It disrupted the rhythm of the tapping and the creatures soon gave up their effort.
“Good one,” Ricky said.
“Thanks,” Liz said.
Their celebration was quickly over.
“I think that one is…” Alan began. His mouth stopped working halfway through the statement.
“Alan, are you okay?” Liz asked over her shoulder. She was facing the opposite direction as her husband. When she started to turn around, Amber put out a hand and stopped her.
“Don’t look. He must be looking at one of them,” Amber said.
“I see something coming over one of the tables,” Ricky said.
“Close your eyes,” Amber whispered.
Behind her, she felt him shaking his head.
“Just do it, Ricky. If they catch your eye, it’s like they’re inside your head.”
Amber was still finishing the sentence when Alan took a step forward, away from the rest of them. Liz had been leaning back against her husband. She stumbled backwards a step. Amber and Ricky grabbed Alan to hold him in place. It didn’t require much force at first, but then he really started to pull.
“They’ve got him in some kind of trance or something,” Amber said.
“I can’t keep my balance with my eyes closed if he keeps pulling,” Ricky said.
“Wait,” Liz said. She bent down and grabbed the empty rice bag. She reached up and covered her husband’s head with the bag. It took a second before he came back to awareness.
“What’s happening?” he demanded.
Amber and Ricky were still holding onto his arms. Instead of stopping him from walking off the table, now they were preventing him from taking the bag off of his head.
“Keep it on, Alan,” Amber said. “So you don’t look at them.”
“Okay. Got it,” he said. “I understand.”
Ricky tipped and began to fall. Liz reached back and tried to hold him up until they both began to fall. In an instant, they were all falling, collapsing on top of Ricky, who was pushed across the top of the outer table, towards the edge.
The tapping began again.
Liz’s phone stopped playing music. Amber had fallen on her side with her eyes squeezed shut. She put her hands to her ears to try to block the reverberation of the tapping inside her head. When Ricky tried to get out from underneath Liz and Alan, his leg slipped over the edge of the table. The whole thing began to tip with their unbalanced load.
Liz grabbed for the lip of table as she started to slide. Her flashlight rolled down the surface and then clattered to the floor. Alan swung his legs over to an adjacent table, stabilizing everything for a moment until Ricky could pull himself back up. The table righted itself and the four of them collected back in the center, sitting back to back.
“Amber?” Liz asked.
Amber’s hands were still pressed against her ears to block the sound.
“I can’t take it… It feels like my head is going to explode.”
“Hold on, I’ll get the music going again,” Liz said.
She found a loud rock song in her library. When it played, the tapping fell into disarray and then the creatures stopped. They were disrupted by the song’s rhythm.
“Eyes shut,” Liz reminded them.
“Eyes shut,” Alan confirmed.
“What do we do when they stop counting?”
