by Tobias Wade
“He’s always looking though.” He was smart, so I had to be pretty damn convincing and get dark with this, or he’ll see right through it. My mother always used to tell me about the monster whenever I misbehaved, but she had mastered a sort of wild-eyed intensity which always sold the story. She was so convincing, that even to this day she has never admitted that it was all made up.
“The monster lives in your eye, so he sees everything you can see,” I told him. “And if you don’t behave, he’s going to know and start eating you from the inside out. He’s going to eat up your heart, and your lungs, and your stomach, and everything else until you’re completely hollow. And all the blood that has nowhere left to go, it’s all going to come out of your mouth and you’re going to drown in it.”
His face was getting paler with every word. Good, let him have nightmares about it. That’s his therapist’s job, not mine.
“What about you?” he asked. “Does a monster live inside you?”
“Sure there is. There’s one inside everyone. That’s why the people who make it to be adults are all so serious and good all the time.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” he said. “There are bad adults too. The criminals and stuff.”
“That’s just because the monster has already eaten them and is using their body to do bad things.” I never thought terrifying a child would be this satisfying. I wonder if Mom used to enjoy scaring me this much, or if I was just a bad person. It worked like magic though. Suddenly David decided that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. 7:30 PM and ready to sleep – it was a dream come true. Maybe this is the story I should use for everyone. All those hours I wasted pretending to be their friends – this was way more efficient!
David went to his room and turned off the light, and I got to work studying for my final exams next week. I thought I was going to have a full evening to myself, but around 8:30 I noticed the light was back on in his room. He was being quiet so I thought about just ignoring him, but he seemed a bit too clever to be fooled for long and I didn’t want to take any chances. It’s a good thing too, because when I opened the door I saw him out of bed, staring at his reflection in his mirrored closet door.
His left hand was holding his left eye open as wide as it could, while the right hand held a sewing needle poised to gouge straight into it. I wanted to tackle him to the ground, but the needle was so close it was almost touching the eyeball itself. I was terrified that any sudden move would just bump it straight inside.
“David! What are you doing you idiot! Put that down right now!”
He turned to look at me, still holding the needle directly against his eye. My whole body tensed as I imagined the feeling of that point scraping against my own eye. “I can’t. I need to kill the monster inside.”
His hand was trembling, but he pressed it a little closer into his eye. It looked like it had already started to puncture. I walked more carefully across that floor than if it were made of hot coals. No sudden moves. No harsh words. I just had to gently…
“David please listen to me. There is no monster, okay? I made it all up. If you put that in your eye, you’re going to hurt yourself very badly. You won’t be able to see anymore.”
“You lie,” he said. He wasn’t pushing it in any further though. He was listening to me. I took another step closer.
“I’m not lying. You can ask anyone you want – you need your eyes to see.”
“No you’re lying about the monster,” David said. “I saw him.”
“I’m going to call your Mom right now, okay?” I fumbled with my phone, trying to pull it out and dial without looking away from him. “You can ask her, and she will tell you the same thing. There are no monsters.”
“You’re lying, and I know why,” he said. “The monster inside you is making you do it. It’s trying to save the monster in me, but I’m not going to let it. I’m the only one who makes the rules.”
The number was in the phone. I was about to hit dial when –
His arm jerked violently. He screamed, and so did I. The needle slid straight into his eye, completely disappearing into the brilliant orb. He doubled over with pain, howling like a Demon. I threw the phone onto the ground and rushed to him – too late. He was clutching his head with both hands, howling and screaming and – and then nothing. He just went real quiet, his head in his hands, hiding his face from me.
“We’re going to the hospital. Now!”
He shook his head.
“David look at me!”
Slowly – tortuously – he raised his face to meet me. His left eye was sealed shut, but I could still see the end of the needle poking between his closed lids. A stream of blood was freely flowing down his face like tears.
“It didn’t work,” he whispered. Then he said something else, but it was so quiet I couldn’t hear.
“I told you it wouldn’t. Now come on, we need to go now.”
“It didn’t kill the monster,” he whispered again.
I picked him up, and he didn’t resist. He wrapped his arms around my neck to hold himself upright. I hurried him toward my car as fast as I could. Kids get things in their eyes all the time, right? This didn’t mean he would be blind. They just had to take it out and –
“I didn’t kill it,” he whispered again, right in my ear where he was pressed against me. “I only made the monster mad.” I felt his arms grow tighter around my neck. It was hard enough carrying a boy his size, but trying to force him while he was choking me was impossible. I had to set him down and get a better grip, but he wouldn’t let go. “He blames you,” David whispered in my ear. “It’s your fault we tried to hurt him.”
“David let go. Now you’re hurting me.”
“I know,” he whispered. “And that’s only going to make you mad, so I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. This time I’m going to finish the job.”
I forced his arms off me and hurled him to the ground. His right hand was balled up like a fist – clenching the bloody sewing needle that he’d somehow managed to pull free. His left eye was still clenched shut, and his right eye was narrowed as his face twisted into an animalistic snarl.
“Stop playing games. We need to take you to a hospital,” I said.
But he wasn’t playing. He was lunging at me, trying to strike at me with wild flailing punches and kicks. I managed to create some distance between us, but he was absolutely relentless. I ran down the stairs, but he leapt from the top with a wild leap and was on top of me again before I reached halfway. I felt the needle pierce into the back of my neck and I had to physically throw him off me.
I was in an absolute panic by this point. I didn’t take into account how small he was, or how fast he was already going when he jumped from the top of the stairs. I threw him with all my strength, which would have probably knocked an adult man onto his ass. With David, it was enough to send him straight over the railing to tumble the half-story onto the ground below.
He landed with a sickening crack that made me want to just run and not look back. I rushed to where he lay spread eagle on the tile floor. A pool of blood was quickly expanding from his face. I tried to ease him onto his back to inspect the damage, but he surged awake again. He was swiping madly at my face with his little hands. I tried to pin him, but his hands were slick with blood and kept sliding through to force his needle into my arms and neck again and again. I had to grab him by the shoulders and slam him into the ground before he finally stopped.
“You have to lie still!” I was crying at this point. He kept squirming, but I finally had both his arms firmly underneath me. “There is no monster, okay? There’s nothing that’s going to hurt you. If you me take you to the hospital you’re going to be alright.”
David coughed, and blood splattered half-way up my arms. I climbed off of him, but he wouldn’t stop coughing. More blood – just like I’d told him would happen. Just like my mother had told me would happen. But it was absurd to think any of that
was true. He’d hurt himself from the fall and I couldn’t waste any more time –
So why couldn’t I stop crying? It was like all those years when I was growing up were flashing back to me. Every night I lay awake – listening to the sound of my own blood in my veins and the beating of my heart – wondering if I could hear the monster inside of me. All those nightmares I had as a child, everything was rushing back. I shouldn’t have done this to him. I knew how much I hated it when Mom did it to me. I shouldn’t have tried to scare David like that. But I was the adult now, and I had to take responsibility. So why couldn’t I stop crying?
“Shhh…. shhh… come on now… don’t cry.” It was David. He had stopped coughing and was kneeling beside me. I immediately tensed, but he was stroking my hair so gently that all I could feel was relief. He was okay. My sobbing choked in my throat, and I actually started to laugh. He was the one trying to comfort me!
“Shhh…” he whispered. “Don’t be like that. You have nothing to be scared of anymore.” I gave him a great big hug, and felt him holding me back. “We all have a monster inside us. Sometimes they never wake up, and sometimes they never go back to sleep. But you don’t have to worry anymore.”
“Our monsters,” I replied. “They’ve both gone back to sleep, haven’t they? But we’re still here, and we have to take care of ourselves. So will you let me take you to the hospital now?”
“No, not asleep. Do you really think your monster could stay asleep after you killed a little boy?”
I tried to pull him away to look at him, but he was holding on tightly again now. More tightly than ever – tighter than a boy his age should be able to.
“Why don’t I have to be afraid?” I asked, pretending I wasn’t trying so hard to get him off.
“Because it’s so much more fun when you let the monster out,” his words washed into my hear in a warm rush.
I was afraid his arms would break by how hard I pushed him, but finally his hands slid apart and he fell back onto the floor. He lay there stiffly, his arms maintaining their curved shape where they were wrapped around me. The shape they had when he was still alive. The blood had stopped flowing from his mouth. His blue eyes were both closed. His shallow chest had stopped fighting to breathe. And finally – finally – he wasn’t resisting me anymore.
I ran. I didn’t look back. I got in my car and just started driving. I don’t know what I’m going to do. David’s mother knew my name and the police would find me. I couldn’t even go back to my home or say goodbye to my own Mom. She’d take one look at me and know what happened, and I know she’d want me gone too. She’d see the blood that I was already starting to cough up, and she’d know the monster inside of me had grown too big. She’d know all her stories and warnings hadn’t been enough to get me to be good, and that now I was being eaten up too.
I’m going to drive now, and I’m not going to stop until I’m not the one making the rules anymore. I just hope David was right – that it really is more fun when we let the monster out.
My Family Tradition
to Feed the Spirit
It’s funny how the strangest traditions seem ordinary when you’ve grown up around them. One of my friends can’t get through Thanksgiving dinner without someone spanking the turkey, and another kid in my high-school said they threw a tea-party to celebrate every A. I’ve heard about another family who never wore clothes at home – the poor kid couldn’t figure out why everyone started laughing at him when he visited a friend’s house and promptly began to undress. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that nobody else lived quite the same way, and why should it? None of their traditions were more arbitrary than a cake on your birthday or an inside tree on Christmas.
My name is Elizabeth, and my family has their own tradition. Every night after dinner, my Dad would take a plate full of leftovers and bring it down to the basement. Every morning, it would be clean. My father said it was for the “spirit of the house”, and my Mom would just roll her eyes and smile. My Dad is a big man – 6’4″ and over 250lbs – and it wouldn’t have surprised either of us if he just wanted to save a little extra for a midnight snack.
I guess I never gave it much thought until my history class watched a video on the Black Death in Europe. They talked about how the rats would infest granaries and spread disease, and how some people actually exasperated the problem by leaving food out to appease the angry spirits. I mentioned how we always leave out a plate for our spirit, and my whole class seemed mortified by the thought. The teacher (Mr. Hallwart) spent the rest of the class blatantly circumventing my desk as though I was the one carrying the plague.
That night I had a terrible nightmare about rats swarming through the house and eating our leftover food. I woke in a cold sweat, lying half-awake for a long time as my sleepy brain tried to separate the quiet night from my encroaching dreams. I was about to drift back to sleep when the pitter-patter of light feet clearly distinguished itself in the still air.
I was fully awake now, lying very still with my ears straining against the oppressive dark. Scratch scratch scratch – like fingernails dragging along a rough piece of wood. I pulled the blankets up over my head, more to block out the sound than to offer any real protection. Maybe this had been going on a long time, and I simply hadn’t distinguished the sound from the creaking house or the night air playing through the wind chimes. Now that I was focusing on it though, I couldn’t hear anything else.
I thought about calling for Mom, but I was 15 years old and trying to build a case to convince them I was mature enough to have my own car. Running around crying about a nightmare was as good as giving the murder jury my bloody axe. I crept out of bed in my underwear, using the flashlight on my phone to steal through the hallway and down the stairs.
The sound grew louder as I approached the basement door. If this was a rat, then it had to be the biggest rat in the history of the world. I froze at the sound of a chair being pushed across the concrete floor. Half of me wanted to turn on the light to scare it off, but the other half declared much more loudly that it was better not to risk being seen. I turned off my own flashlight and carefully opened the door…
Something snarled and I immediately shut it again. I pressed my back to the door and tried to catch my breath. I hadn’t realized how fast I was breathing, or how loud. I let the air out in a gasp and slowly inhaled through my nose, trying to be as quiet as I could. Scratch scratch scratch – right on the other side of the door. I turned around and saw the doorknob beginning to turn. There’s no way it was a rat in there. I can’t explain how my curiosity overpowered my fear in that moment, but I put my hand on the doorknob too. I must have believed my Dad when he said it was the spirit of the house. We had been taking care of it after-all, so why would it want to do me harm?
The door opened and I stood face to face with a pale girl a few years younger than me. Her sunken dark eyes vanished beneath her mangy bangs, and her lace nightgown failed to conceal the terrible thinness of her limbs. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. I slammed the door as hard as I could and turned to run. I sprinted up the stairs, locking my room behind me and diving into bed. I held my breath until it felt like I would burst, until there – the pitter-patter of soft feet climbing the stairs and approaching my room.
The doorknob began to rattle. I couldn’t hold it any longer – all that breath I was holding in was released in one noisy rush and I screamed for all I was worth. The doorknob stopped and lights sprang to life around the house. In about a minute, there was a pounding on my door.
“Honey? Everything okay in there?” It was Dad. I ran to him and unlocked my room. He was standing there, looking dazed and confused, ready to collapse back into bed. Now that the lights were on and he was here, I felt like an idiot for being afraid. I’d feel even stupider telling him about the girl.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I heard something downstairs.”
“Damn, who needs an alarm when you can
scream like that,” he said.
“It was probably just a bad dream. Sorry for waking you.”
Dad looked around behind him, making sure we were alone. Then he leaned in close and whispered: “Was it coming from the basement?”
I nodded. His smile was nothing but relief, and I couldn’t help but feel it too. At least until he added:
“That’s just the spirit, honey. Don’t bother it, and don’t tell Mom, okay? It’s not going to hurt you.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. He grinned and ruffled my hair before plodding back to his room. I gave the empty stairs a quick glance before locking myself in again and climbing back into bed. I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t sleep until the sun began to repaint my room.
I slept in late that day, but by nightfall I was ready for answers. I tried asking Dad again, but he just told me every house had a spirit and not to worry about it. He must have been lying though, considering how my class reacted, and it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. That’s why I waited until both my parents were in bed to creep down to the basement and wait.
The basement door was open when I got there. I turned the light on in the kitchen which connected to it, but didn’t dare go down the stairs. Three pieces of leftover pizza sat in their box on the table, and I poured a large glass of soda to go with it. I just sat there with my hands folded in front of me, waiting for her to come again. If she was a friend of the house, then I wanted to meet her. And if she wasn’t… well surely we’d know by now.
My mistake was to watch the door. She was corporal – she ate food, she turned doorknobs – she must go through doors, right? Wrong. Despite my resolve, it was impossible to hear the scratching sound above my head without my entire body tensing up. I watched a ventilation grate in the roof slide out of place, and then the girl dropped through as lightly as a shadow. Her hair was hanging over her face, but I could imagine it all too clearly as the animal snarl began to rise in her throat.
