The Worst Kind of Monsters

by Elias Witherow

  Russ pulled me away and took me by the shoulders. “You’re a lot stronger than you think, Jack. Never forget that.”

  I wiped tears from my face, unable to stop more from coming. “I won’t forget. I promise I won’t. Thank you.”

  Russ nodded. “Are you ready to go back?”

  I nodded, sniffing.

  Russ closed his eyes. “Good luck to you, slick. I’m proud of you.”

  And with that, he pushed me backward—

  —and I awoke with a start on the bar floor.

  Faces were looking down at me, a blur of color and noise. I blinked and then everything rushed into focus. It was the bartender and the two men she had been talking to. Their faces were filled with concern and I realized they were talking to me.

  “Hey, you OK?” one of the men asked, getting down on one knee and helping me sit up.

  Relief washed over me in a suffocating wave and I gritted my teeth as my eyes filled with tears.

  I smiled up at the three of them, my head clear and focused, all traces of a hangover gone. “I’m all right, thank you. Must have slipped in my stool and bumped my head is all.”

  The bartender told me they had heard a crash and looked over to see me lying on the floor, unmoving. She said it had taken them a little bit to wake me, almost to the point of calling an ambulance.

  I assured them I was OK, climbing to my feet and brushing myself off. My inexplicably calm demeanor clearly confused them to the point of not pressing me further. I thanked them for their concern and told them I was going to call a cab and go home.

  After making sure I was really OK, they told me to take care of myself.

  I smiled. “I will.”

  That was three years ago. It’s been a long, hard road since that night, but I’m doing well. It took months for my wife to get over that horrific act of selfishness, but I’ve proven to her since then that I will never be that man again. I can’t believe she didn’t leave me, and it fills me with eternal gratitude.

  I’ve spent this time proving to my family that they can rely on me. I’ve shown them my resolve and we’ve grown closer, making it through those horrible early months of uncertainty. But we’re stronger now and life has begun to show promise of happiness.

  I did end up losing my job, but my boss was able to secure me another job with a sister company. It was an act of kindness I wasn’t expecting, and it furthered me down the path of positivity.

  It’s taken three years to rebuild my life to a point of hesitant optimism.

  And it’s been three years since I had a drink.

  I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it was easy, because it wasn’t. It was hard, impossibly hard, even after everything I went through. There were days I almost gave in to the temptation, but I would open up to my wife during those times of weakness and she got me through them. She gave me hope that I could change. But I had to face what I had become first.

  And I will never go back to being that man.

  I’ll find my own way to the meadow.

  I know it’s out there, waiting for me, the path to its peaceful serenity growing more clear the longer I walk the road of recovery.

  And even though I’ve come so far and made so much progress…I’m still filled with fear.

  Because I know he’s out there waiting for me.

  He’ll always be there.

  The Whistlin’ Man.

  10

  Where Is My Son?

  My son has gone missing.

  It’s been three weeks. The police can’t find him. The detectives I’ve talked to inform me they haven’t found anything, but they won’t give up. My neighbors are constantly ringing my doorbell, offering support, offering help in any way they can. My daughter, Lily, misses her older brother. At just five, she doesn’t understand what’s going on. What’s happening.

  My wife is a mess. She’s drunk herself stupid, keeping the blinds closed and wandering aimlessly about the house. My life is a mess. My world has shattered, every day feeling like a nauseous dream. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t even think. My little boy. My little man. Where did he go?

  Justin is eight years old, loved by all, charismatic and full of kind words. He’s an angel. He is my everything. And he’s gone. Where? There’s not an easy answer for that. The only thing I do know is that the story I told the police fell on deaf ears and raised more than one eyebrow.

  It was three weeks ago. Everything was normal. Everything was how it should be. The kids had come home from school and I had taken Justin to soccer practice. I had watched him play, talking with the other parents around me, humbly thanking them for their praise as they watched my son dribble the ball like he was born to do it. It was cool that night, a relief from the August heat. I felt at peace. I was happy.

  Later, after practice, I had taken Justin to get ice cream. We laughed and I joked with him that one day he’d have more girls chasing him than he knew what to do with. He made a face and told me girls were gross. He was eight; he wasn’t thinking about girls. He was thinking about sports, about becoming a star player. Just like he should be.

  We went home, our stomachs bursting with sweet sugar, and I instructed him to take a shower. As he showered, I played with my daughter, Lily. She loved me and she loved her brother. She was quiet, unlike Justin, and had a gentle sweetness that I prayed she would hold onto as she grew. She didn’t get it from her mother, that’s for sure.

  My wife Tess was a hard woman. After Lily was born, she began to despise everything. The kids took up most of her time, her freedom, and she didn’t like that. I had talked to her many times, begged her to stop yelling at the kids, and asked her to soften her heart and words. But she hadn’t. She had started drinking instead. More times than I can remember, I would come home and find her slumped over on the couch, an empty vodka bottle next to her.

  My heart grew heavy. I loved this woman. I wanted to see her smile, to see her live and love. I wanted her to love me. But her anger just seemed to grow the more I pressed her to be that way. Did I go about it the wrong way? Probably. But I knew that behind all of it, she knew I loved her and knew I wanted what was best for her. I wanted our family to be happy.

  It got worse. She kept spiraling down the dark hole of alcoholism, growing worse and worse every day. As she sank, I found myself shrinking into myself. I found myself spending as much time as I could with the kids, away from the house. Away from her. Away from the screaming, the anger, the bitterness. If she wanted her freedom, fine; I needed my kids and I needed to be a good father to them. I wanted them to grow up and remember a happy childhood. I wanted them to smile.

  Why didn’t I just leave her? Take the kids and get out? Because she was my wife. She was the mother of my kids. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I was stubborn and I desperately believed things could change.

  And they had.

  But not the way I expected. That night after practice, after putting my little angels to bed, I climbed into my own bed, next to my wife who was already snoring off her day’s dose of alcohol.

  I awoke to Lily frantically shaking me, her tiny face inches from mine. She looked terrified. She was crying.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Justin’s gone,” she sobbed softly, rubbing tears from her eyes.

  I bolted up, taking her by the shoulders. “What?”

  She looked up at me, lip quivering. “He got taken down the hole.”

  I charged into my son’s bedroom, heart thundering, praying my daughter had some nightmare, that my son would be fast asleep in his bed.

  His room was empty. The sheets on his bed were cast aside, his race-car nightlight was off, and the room was unusually hot.

  I turned on the light, feeling fear throttle my senses. My hands shook as I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed, convinced I’d see him under it. Nothing.

  I heard crying behind me and I spun to see Lily walking into the room. I went to her, crouching down to her
level, and grabbed her, voice cracking with hysteria.

  “Where did he go, baby? Where’s Justin?”

  She pointed toward his walk-in closet. I turned, seeing the door slightly ajar. I went to it, my mind spewing a thousand desperate prayers, and flung the door open.

  My breath was robbed from my lungs. My legs melted and I crashed to my knees, eyes bugging in my skull.

  There was a dark hole torn into the floor just big enough for a small boy to fit inside. Written on the wall in front of me in a dark ashy scrawl were the words:

  He’s My Son Now.

  I scrambled to the edge of the hole and peered down. I could feel heat rising up from its depths and sweat popped out on my forehead. I screamed for Justin, my voice gaining an echo as it cascaded down into the depths. I screamed and screamed until my throat was raw. What was this? What was happening? Who had done this? Where was my boy?!

  I turned and saw Lily sobbing, sitting on her brother’s bed with her knees pulled up to her chin. I went to her and took her tear-soaked face in my hands.

  “Who took Justin? Where is he?”

  Lily just shook her head, crying harder.

  I tilted her chin to look up at me, feeling my own tears form as panic gripped me in a way only parents can feel when their child is missing.

  “Lily Pad,” I said, forcing the hysteria out of my voice, “who took your brother?”

  She looked into my eyes, her soft voice shaking.

  “The monster with the big horns, Daddy.”

  And that’s what I told the police. They all thought I was hysterical, and I was, but I didn’t care what they thought of me. I just wanted them to find my son. Anything that would help. I didn’t know what my daughter meant, what she saw, but I knew she was telling me what she saw in the way she understood it.

  The police didn’t know what to make of the message on the wall or the hole. They had investigated but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was too small an opening to send someone down into it, so instead they had dropped glow sticks down into the darkness. We watched as they disappeared, swallowed by the black, straight down, impossibly, terribly far down into the ground. They walked around our small one-story house searching for an exit hole but came up empty. They had nothing to go on. They had no leads. Forensics came and swept the entire house but came up empty. The only thing they deciphered was that the message on the wall was written in ash. That’s it. They boarded up the hole and told me they’d keep looking.

  It was as if my son had ceased to exist.

  I felt useless. I felt like a failure. I wanted to lock myself in my bathroom and weep. I wanted to pull my hair out until blood poured from my skull. I wanted to scream. What had happened to my son? What was that hole? Had someone tunneled under our house and grabbed Justin while he slept? None of it made sense. Things like this didn’t happen to people like me. To people like us. What was that hole? And what was that message scrawled on the wall? What did it mean? Who would do such a thing?

  Or was it something else?

  Was it something…more terrible?

  My daughter’s words kept coming back to me.

  “The monster with the big horns…”

  Lily was at school and I sat on the couch, watching my wife pour herself another drink. I felt irritation bubbling up inside of me as she took a swig, her eyes meeting mine over the glass rim. It was only noon but she was on her third drink of the day.

  “Don’t you think you should take it easy?” I said, already knowing it was pointless.

  She snorted, “Why? So I can sit there and be miserable like you? My boy is missing, too. And I hurt. I ache. This helps.”

  “’Cause you didn’t drink before he went missing?” I spat.

  She slammed the glass down on the countertop. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  I rubbed my hands over my face, feeling my rough, unshaven skin grate against my palms. “Never mind. Drink away. The hell do I care?”

  She took a step toward me. “You think I don’t care about him, is that it?”

  I balled my fists. “Not today. Please. Let’s not do this today. I can’t take feeling any worse than I already do. I don’t want to fight.”

  “You brought it up!” she yelled.

  “Just drop it. Do what you want.”

  She sneered at me. “Look at yourself. What are YOU doing to find our son? You sit on that couch day in and day out, staring at the walls. Are you trying to wish him back? You call yourself a man. Why don’t you get out there and look for him!”

  I stood up and advanced on her, shaking with a sudden fury. “Shut the fuck UP! I’ve looked! I’ve spent days and days looking, hoping, praying for him to show up again! Don’t you dare say I haven’t!”

  She took another drink, our faces inches apart. She smacked her lips. “You want to hit me, is that it? Storming up in my face, screaming at me? Go ahead. Hit me if that makes you feel more like a man. A big strong man who hits his wife. Go ahead, do it!”

  My teeth ground together like pieces of rusted iron. I took a deep breath and turned away, forcing my anger down.

  “That’s what I thought,” she muttered. “What a coward.”

  I snapped. I grabbed the coffee table in front of me and threw it with all my might against the wall. If exploded in a shower of splinters and I turned on my wife. “Enough with your POISON! I miss our BOY! I die every day he’s not here! We’re supposed to support each other! How the FUCK are we going to get through this if we’re at each other’s throats?!”

  Tess stared at me, a small smile on her lips. She glanced at her watch, then turned and walked away, calling back over her shoulder. “Don’t forget to pick up Lily in an hour.”

  God bless me for not beating the fuck out of her.

  We had eaten a silent dinner and when the sun was safely tucked in for the night, I put Lily to bed. She asked about Justin and I told her we still didn’t know where he was. She nodded sadly and I could tell her little heart was breaking along with mine. I kissed her on the head and tucked her in.

  Back in my own room I found my wife fast asleep. Thank Jesus. Not wanting to even be near her, I grabbed my pillow and a blanket from the closet and went to sleep on the couch.

  I stared at the ceiling, our dark house silent, and felt the tears coming before they even reached my eyes. What did I do to deserve this? I tried so hard to be a good person, a good husband, a good parent. Why was this happening to my family? I squeezed my eyes shut and, not for the first time, begged God to bring my son back. I wasn’t a religious man, never had been, but it’s funny how we find ourselves on our knees in times of hardship.

  “Please bring him back,” I cried, staring up into the darkness. “Please tell me where he is…I beg you…” I wiped my nose and waited.

  Nothing.

  “I’ll do whatever you want me to,” I continued, openly sobbing now. “Just please God…help me…I need you…I need you so bad right now…”

  Silence.

  I ground my teeth together, jaw locking, anger suddenly burning in my chest, “No answer? Then what fucking good are you? Sleep tight, you malicious fuck.”

  Sleep did not come quick.

  My dreams blurred and shifted, voices and noises rising and falling around me. I swam in a sea of images, all of which were just out of focus. I heard Justin screaming for me. I thought I could see him, surrounded in a haze of red and black. He was reaching out toward me, pleading with me to help him. The air swallowed me up, pulling me back away from him. I strained and fought, but the dream wouldn’t allow it. I screamed his name, screamed for him to tell me where he was.

  Just as he disappeared, something huge and black loomed over me. Heat enveloped my body and I choked on ash and smoke, eyes watering.

  A long, clawed hand reached out toward me, finger extended, pointing down at me.

  And then a voice erupted, deep and sinister.

  “He is no longer yours.”

  I was driving Lil
y to preschool, trying not to fall asleep at the wheel. The nightmares had continued until I cracked my eyes open at dawn, not sure which reality was worse. I glanced in the mirror at my daughter in her booster seat and saw she was frowning.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.

  “I had bad dreams last night and they made me sad,” she said quietly.

  “What dreams?”

  Her lip began to tremble. “About Justin. He…he said he wanted to hurt me. And it made me sad.”

  “Aw honey,” I said, reaching an arm behind the seat and rubbing her leg, “Justin would never hurt you. He loves you very much just like Mommy and Daddy.”

  She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “He looked scary.”

  The memories of my own nightmares, still fresh in my mind, made me ask, “Why was he scary?”

  She looked up into the mirror, her eyes meeting mine. “He had horns on him.”

  After I dropped her off at school, I went to get a coffee down the street. The fresh air felt good, the morning still clinging to a slight chill before the afternoon heat. I saw a few parents who had also just dropped their little ones off and I was greeted with the sad looks I had grown accustomed to. What was worse were the questions. How are you and Tess holding up, have you heard anything, how’s Lily? And then came the false positivity, the hand gripping my arm as a sign of support, the assurances that we were in their prayers.

  I bit back my anger at the last part, instead smothering my face with a big phony smile and thanking them. They meant well; they really did. What else could they say? I was so tired, my mind sloshing like a slop bucket of pain and misery. I didn’t want to go home to my wife. I didn’t want to watch her drink today. I didn’t want to do anything. If I could, I would have stood there, hot coffee steaming in my hand, and stared at it until it was time to pick Lily up.

  I could have gone back to work, but the thought of being in that environment made me sick. I would be useless anyway. My boss had told me to take as much time as I needed until things got resolved one way or another.