Paranoia

Every time I look away things move at the corners of my eyes.
I cannot open the blinds or the man standing outside my fourth-floor window will get in.
The bedsheets behind me move when they think I'm not paying attention. The walls thump even when I am.
The floor will not stop scraping, and the thing behind my wardrobe slips out of view every time I try to look at it. It cannot lure me over there, I know its game.
I cannot sleep. I am temporarily safe as long as I am far away from any corner, any nook or cranny, as long as I can watch everything all the time forever. The desk moves closer when I glance at the clock. the lock turns subtly to let in their twisted friends. Everything is coming out of the walls, and I can't look behind myself all the time! They crawl over every inch of space, only visible for a blink of an eye then lost in the swarming stillness that is the white plaster.
The blinds shift. The man is finding his way in, and I can feel his bony finger creeping under the window, yellowed fingernail scraping the sill. I cannot turn and look or he will see me, and it will all be over. I can only sit as still as possible while his probing arm searches for the latch. I cannot close my eyes or the walls will crush me, the chair will break my spine, the sheets will twist around my wrists and ankles to leave me vulnerable to the swarms of things skittering all over my body.
The gasoline sloshes quietly to the shaking of my hand. I cling to the nearly empty can for fear that putting it down will make a sound and alert something. The man has found the latch, and is stepping through the closed window. The blinds shudder in the breeze and the floor ripples under his weightless footsteps. Finger-long toes splay as he feels the air in front of him, blind eyes rolling in every direction. His mouthless torn agape, hanging strings of flesh wafting as he breathes. I can feel the musty stillness with the hairs on the back of my neck. A hand wraps around the back of my chair as he feels his way forward.
Silently I draw a match and place the head against the box. There is a sharp scraping noise and a puff of light. For a moment he pauses, and the room is totally still, entirely empty except for me. Then the walls explode with seething motion, the cabinet bounces forward, the walls shudder and scrape closer, the bed sheets writhe and the man lunges.
the match hangs agonizingly, then slips from my fingers, going out on the way down.
The still-hot sulfur lands on the floor at my feet. A purifying light instantly sweeps over the room.. The man's flesh bubbles and pops, sliding off in gobs of sizzling rot. The walls are consumed with fire and the floor is littered with squirming corpses slowly dissolving. A beam drops from the ceiling crushing the cabinet and the thing behind it. The sheets explode in flames and the desk slowly burns away. Soon the public servants will come to try and stop the inferno before the man is beyond saving, and they will meet failure. The man will no longer be inside where they will be looking for him. I grab his wrist, feeling the boiling skin run down my arm, and pull him out the window with me.
We plummet amongst shards of glass, drops of blood, sizzling parts of me and him, and drops of rain. He dissolves in my grip as the ground approaches, but I pull his contorted frame in front of me and I concentrate on his every twisted, burning, rotted feature, keeping them sharp and defined as they are crushed by the onrushing tarmac.