Art and words

"Leave my loneliness unbroken!"
~The Raven
I was a big scardy cat when I was a kid. Many things would set me off. A fear would run through me and no amount of talking to myself could calm me down. Most of the time it was at night. The house was still, the parents turned off the tv and shut things down for the evening. And fears took off.
One year I was worried about witches. It seemed everywhere I looked, or anything I read had a witch. I pushed my bed up against one of the walls so there would be no way that anyone could come up behind me as I slept. I would make sure that my back was to the wall or I would sleep on my back. If "they" did get into our house, that was locked and blotted because of my dad's fears, they couldn't sneak up on me.
I was still awake when my parents went to bed one evening. Everything checked and re checked by dad, even the heat was turned off. As I tossed around from my back to my side I heard the "rapping, rapping at my chamber door." My door was not shut and the more I listened to the rapping, it sounded more like stepping, stepping walking down the hallway to my room.
The steps were very deliberate. Not fast, not slow. Even.
I listened to these steps for what seemed like twenty minuets. The hallway was only twelve feet long, so the person coming down the hall would have had time to come into my room, clean it, grab me, walk away slowly into the night and then cut me into little pieces.
I made up my mind that I need to time the steps and see if they were coming for me or just walking up and down the hall. I got my little alarm clock and watched the time go by.
"Only this, and nothing more."
"Darkness there, and nothing more."
"Merely this, and nothing more."
'Tis the heater cooling and nothing more.
It took many days before I mustered up courage, got out of bed, went into the hallway, then to the cooling wall heater where it rapped and tapped it's stepping sounds.