Short Story - Dark Unicorn

“Why must I go to bed at 8:00pm Daddy?” moaned Emma.

“Because if you’re not asleep by 9:00pm the dark skies will swallow you up!” her father replied. Emma’s mum gave an exasperated look and told Emma to put her pyjamas on. However their daughter had already disappeared upstairs. She had a plan.

“Night-night mummy, night-night daddy.” Emma smiled sweetly. “Good night darling, we’ll see you in the morning” chirped her mum. But Emma wasn’t going to sleep; she was staying up until 9:00pm to see what would happen. All of her friends in year six went to bed at 9 o’clock, so why couldn’t she? She might have been the youngest in the class. A ‘summer-born’ as her mother put it, nonetheless the fact that they were eleven and she was ten made no difference.

“Chapter ten.” Emma had been reading for half an hour and already she was halfway through her book. Bored, she tiptoed to her desk and took out her notebook. “I’ll start a night diary. Every night I’ll keep a record of what I do” she whispered to herself. Settling down to write, she looked at her desk clock, 8:32pm it read. Her heart sank. Already she was bored and tired, wishing she had just gone to bed. Still, she had come this far now, there was no going back.

“It’s 9:00pm!” Emma sang quietly, shining a small torch on her clock. Looking out of her window, all she could see was the ever-hopeful moon, shining down on her. Smiling, Emma hopped into bed and started reading again. Yet it was impossible to concentrate, the apprehension was too much. She waited and waited. Nothing happened. The seconds ticked by, they became minutes, the minutes became a quarter of an hour. Still nothing. So she decided to go into the garden, where she would be fully exposed to the dark night sky.

Her feet sank into the wet lawn of the family’s back garden. Suddenly, everything went black. The moon had been blocked out and she could feel a presence in front of her, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness the silhouette of a unicorn became clear. “Hop on my back and I’ll give you a ride to eternity.” Emma jumped as the sentence left the horse’s mouth. “Can you hear me Emma?” the figure looked up to where the moon had been and everything was illuminated again. “How do you know my name?” Emma croaked, petrified.  “I know a lot of things, little girl” the tone of the unicorn wasn’t menacing, it was a soft melody to Emma’s ears and she liked it. She relented, “Take me to a wonderful place, oh white horse.”

“Jump on my back,” spoke the mythical creature. Emma clambered on and they flew into the dark sky. However the Unicorn wasn’t taking Emma to a wonderful place. The dark sky engulfed them. Emma was tumbling, falling, and never coming back . . .