(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.
