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The house was quiet. Normally it was pretty quiet. But tonight it was eerily quiet. The kind of quiet that made you imagine sounds as something else while the wind pushed against the house, causing it to creak and moan like a thing alive. The fridge hummed in the background and occasionally the hanging lights outside would bang against the siding.

Isiah stepped into the darkness of the house, using his phone as a light until he found the living room switch. Bright flooded his vision and he turned his phone's flashlight off, setting it down on the coffee table to replace it with the TV remote.

For the rest of December, Isiah was house-sitting for his grandparents. He hesitated to call it house-sitting exactly. All he'd done was go up a floor, to check on the place to make sure nothing fell apart while the original inhabitants were on a vacation. All he did was go around the house to the base floor's main door. There wasn't even much to do with this house-sitting. It wasn't like they had any pets he needed to keep an eye on. If anyone tried to get in, he'd hear from his own place directly below. But they insisted they wanted the place checked on every now and than. That he was free to indulge on whatever they had in the house, as most grandparents always tell their grandchildren. He just planned to watch a little bit of TV before heading back down to his own living space.

Plopping his a** heavily onto the loveseat with his feet crossed at the ankles on the footstool nearby, he started flicking through the channels. Looking for something less...Holiday cheer. Something not filled to a nauseating level with sweetness and sugar, where the main characters reconciled their feelings in the end or got back together, kissing under the mistletoe as the scene faded to black. Why did everything have to have some sappy love story to it? If he could just find something tolerable until he could leave and browse his movie collection downstairs for something horror related. Bleach the sentimental images from his brain.

Now, it wasn't that he was nothing but a Scrooge or Grinch when it came to Christmas. He just....Had different tastes. Holiday movies were never his thing. The music was grating, most of the time. The decorations were fine. He even had his own tree downstairs, lights strung up along the ceiling, and garland along the doorways. The dude made the effort. Granted, not a lot of it was actually colorful. The tree was fake white. The garland and lights were white. The decorations on the tree were mostly collectable ornaments from movies, games, or shows he really liked. But he put in the effort and he deserved some recognition for that!

Isiah continued to flick through the channels, beginning to think this was a futile attempt. Nothing tonight was interesting him. It was too close to the actual day for anything but holiday movies and shows to be plastered over every station. Maybe he should just go back downstairs. He could come back up and check on things between movies. At least two movies' worth of that. Any more and it was overkill. Nothing was going to happen in the time they were gone.

With that settled, he flicked the TV back off, grabbing his phone off the counter and replacing it with the remote. Right back in the same place where it was before. As he went to return the house to complete darkness, there was a sudden noise above him, muffled by the extra floors. Instantly, he looked up at the ceiling, as silly humans are always doing when there's a noise above them and they can't even see it. He waited, heard nothing, and assumed it was just the wind causing something to rattle against the house. So he flicked off the lights and, using his phone once more, started to make his way to the front door.

But there it was again. A clatter. Like something hard was hitting the roof of the house. The only explanation he could think of was someone was throwing things at the house. Who the ******** would be doing that? Now that his grandparents were gone, did someone really now was the best time for sabotage?

Some punkass kids, he supposed. He should know. He'd been one.

Quickly putting on his jacket and shoes, Isiah stormed out of the house, flashlight on his phone rotating all around him to catch the little s**t in the act. He walked all around the house, looked both ways down the street. Even peered over the high fences into the neighbors yards. Unless they were moving around behind his back and covering their tracks with a broom at the same time, there was no one here. And yet, the noises were still in the air. So finally, he looked up at the roof, not expecting to see anything because why would he? On a roof? In a busy city?

But to his astonishment, there was something there. For a split second, he stared at a deer as it stared right back at him. A full-sized deer. On the roof. He knew from his inspection around the house that the only tracks in the snow were the ones he had just made. There was no way a living, breathing deer could have just hopped onto the roof from a neighboring roof. There was no way in hell it could be up there at all!

He blinked and it was gone. No puff of smoke or sparkles or even a sound like would be in some movie. Had this been a holiday movie, it would have vanished to the sound of sleigh bells. But it was just gone.

Unable to find the words for what he'd just witnessed-or did he, really?-Isiah just continued to stare at the spot it once had been, his mouth hanging slightly open. Until his throat started to chill from sucking in all that cold air and he closed it, giving his head a shake.

"I am losing my ******** mind. Shouldn't have made those drinks before I came up here. Nope." Locking the door, he walked around to his own, still mumbling softly to himself about how to prevent the next time the world wanted to throw him into a holiday movie with a talking reindeer.