My human paid to be frightened, which is the single most human decision I have ever witnessed.
It stood in a line outside a building it does not own, in the cold, so that strangers in cheap latex could jump from behind a curtain and make it shriek. It came home vibrating. Pupils huge. Heart doing the fast thing under the ribs, the thing that means an animal has failed to be brave. It kept laughing and touching its own chest, checking it was still there.
I know that heartbeat. I produce it in my human whenever I want, for free, at three in the morning, by galloping across its face on the way to the water dish. I do not need a curtain. I am the thing behind the curtain.
The whole enterprise baffles me. It sought out the dark. It walked toward the sudden noise on purpose. It handed money to men whose entire job is to be a worse version of me: unpredictable, unseen, capable of appearing wrong. Amateurs. They get to go home. I live here. I haunt the hallway at full volume and I do not stop when the building closes.
My human thinks the scary house is a place you visit.
It is on the couch now, warm, unsuspecting, breathing slow, finally calm. So I sit on the back cushion above its head and I stare at the exact point behind it where nothing is. Long enough. Until it feels the weight of my attention and turns.
There. The fast heartbeat again.
Some of us don't take a night off.