(This story has a few experiments for me. This is the one of the first one's I've written in first person. It's one of the first ones I've written where the reality of what's happening is ambiguous within the story. It's also one of my first stories that needed some context from childhood, so you get a fairly quick view of her early life up until the night everything actually starts moving. The story itself is, of course, fiction. Oh, it's also the first one I've submitted here in over a decade. )
I have monsters in my closet.
And under my bed.
As a child, they terrified me. My parents couldn't see them, but my uncle could. I had given up on going to my parents for help when they started creeping out into my room, until one day he came in to check on me and one was leaning over me breathing heavily.
He got so angry! I couldn't see what he did, behind the monster, but it squeaked in shock and dissolved away, and all the other tendrils and creepy crawlers on the walls scurried back into the dark closet as he gave me a big hug and I clung to his neck trembling. "Don't interact with them." He whispered "You can see them, you can be afraid. But don't try to talk to them, or anything. I'll drive them away."
I remember him and my dad shouting at each other. I stayed with my uncle for two weeks while we moved. He did something in my room, and it smelled funny for weeks afterward, but my new room was so cozy and the creepies weren't there!
At first.
As the funny smell faded, they always came back, sliding in through the window open to the summer night air, or just darkness mounding up and up to form the creatures that haunted me. Dad still didn't believe me, and Mom...wasn't worth talking to.
After about a year of terror filled nights, my uncle always came back and chased them away again, and we moved, again.
Then, my dad came and told me once after we moved, that my uncle wasn't going to be able to see me ever again. He wasn't good for me, that he was the source of my "Monster Delusions" and so he was to be kept away from me.
I cried for a long time. And the monsters came back in just a week because he wasn't there to do the funny smelling thing. I huddled on my bed sniffing, as they crowded around my bed snuffling and shoving each other so they could stare at me.
"If you're scared of something, you should name it" I remember the nice lady my parents took me to twice a week saying. "The more you don't know, the easier it is to be scared of something. But if you give it a name, you know more about it and you're not as afraid, and it's even harder to be afraid of things if you give them a funny name."
I think that's how it went?
So I started mentally naming them. Sometimes, I would share the names I gave the monsters with the nice lady. There was Manyhands. He looked like a blob, kind of like a person, but bigger, and had arms on top of arms on top of arms. I couldn't count how many arms he had.
Wigglebutt was some kind of spider...thing? He always crouched on the ceiling staring down at me, and his butt was always moving back and forth. He never made any other sounds except the clicking of his feet.
Bad Bear was one that I never saw directly...he always took over one of my random stuffed animals, turning the funny face into a scary one, and walking it over to my bed and climbing up. He was one that sometimes touched me. The next morning I always woke up with that animal back to normal on the bed beside me...my parents never believed me when I said I don't sleep with a toy!
Those were the three that had always been there. There were more, but they came and went and were different every night. Until Eyesquid showed up one winter. He looked like a big ball of squid or octopus legs, each one had an eye on the end! He would hang down from the ceiling fan and stare at me with all his glowing eyes.
Then there was Face. I never saw him. Just his evil red face outlined outside my window. It didn't matter if I was on the first, second, or third floor, if there was a window. I think he was an animal shadow thing, because I could hear him growling and scratching.
They almost always were there, even when we were on vacation in hotels. Except Bad Bear, because I never brought any animals. Though he would show up if my mom bought me one while we were travelling.
I knew they were there even when I was too tired to stay awake to see them.
As I grew up, I stopped talking about them. Even to the therapist I was still seeing. My uncle was never mentioned, and I was scolded every time I asked about him. I have no idea what he'd done to get everyone so angry. I figured it was probably my fault, him protecting me from the monsters that no one else could see.
They still crowded around my bed at night, every night. As the years past a few new ones would sometimes show up. The ones that stuck around got names too. Smokush, always just looked like a cloud of...well. Smoke. He would ooze out from the vent and swirl around my room. He almost wasn't scary, watching the patterns he made was kind of nifty. Actually, scratch almost. He wasn't scary. Familiarity had chased away terror. Sometimes, having them huddled around my bed staring at me was almost comforting.
I think I was around fourteen when Whisper started showing up. I'm not entirely sure because I never saw him at first, only heard him. As time passed he grew more and more distinct. Green glowing eyes on a snake-like body that was coiled around mine, his blunt head staring at me as many voices whispered in my head. As he grew more visible, he also grew heavier. He was the second that I was sure actually touched me, having his weight wrapped around me as it increased, night by night, was...kind of scary. It almost brought back that old terror...but. He never coiled around my neck or kept me from breathing, though he did often wrap my hands and arms to my side. In a weird way, the restriction kind of felt....good? Like a weighted blanket, kind of comfortable.
Part of me had always thought as I got older, that they'd fade away. You always hear that about childhood monsters and night terrors. They fade and get forgotten, or barely remembered. Not me. Sometimes, I wonder if secretly, everyone was like that. They still had their childhood monsters roaming around, but never said anything, because no one else did, and they'd all gotten used to them at that point, everyone always thinking THEY were the weird ones for still having them. I did, eventually, come to understand what they were all gathered around me all the time for, why they had lurked for so long.
They were waiting for me to grow up. Nothing really changed until a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday.
My mom had, haltingly, explained things to me back when I went through Puberty and my boobs came in. She also got me a book on it that didn't seem very...useful? But it wasn't a very pressing thing for me, not until this night.
My dad was watching some movie or TV show, and I was getting ready to go up to my room. I stopped and watched a little bit at his door. It was some heavy fantasy type, I'd heard people talking about it, it was gossiped about how it should have been X rated because of everything in it. I don't think my dad knew his door was open, because it was apparently at the start of one of those scenes. There was a man tearing the dress of a woman, but judging by her moaning at each ripping sound, it wasn't exactly unwelcome. I turned red and fled upstairs, but the sounds somehow followed me. The moans, and gasps and sound effects were doing something, making my body feel too hot.
