The tap had dripped for as long as they could remember. They had heard the insistent plip, plip, plip the night they had moved in, as they lay down to sleep. It was the strangest thing, though: they could hear the drips, could see them gather and fall from the tap into the bath, but no water gathered underneath and no water fell into their hands cupped beneath the faucet, though the steady beat continued.

A stream of plumbers couldn’t fix it. No amount of twiddling the taps made it stop. They felt sure that replacing the whole bathroom would do it but as soon as the water was back on, the infernal dripping resumed.

After a time, they grew accustomed to the quiet, regular rhythm and it faded into the background of their lives.

It was with some surprise, then, that in the early hours of a November morning, many years after they had first come to live in the house, they found themselves woken by the dripping noise. They lay awake in the darkest hour of the night listening as the dripping became louder and, somehow, closer.

Shrinking together in fear, they watched, frozen, as the bedroom door opened, to reveal a young girl illuminated in the ghostly, pre-dawn light; grey skinned, blue lipped, her sodden nightgown clinging to her slight frame, she watched them, a steady drip, drip, drip falling from the water-heavy tangles of her raven hair.

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.