Tuesday, November 12th - Thirteen Years Prior
HADLEE - Age 5
There is a monster upstairs.
The ice cream is good. Creamy and slimy and yummy, but so cold. Daddy says good girls eat downstairs, so I do. Chocolate is my favorite.
Momma and Daddy are up there. I don’t like being down here alone. I want Momma here.
But the ice cream is good. Daddy says not to go up there. There are noises. Monster noises.
The moon is out. I see it. I don’t like it down here. See monsters crawling on the floor from the sky moon. Coming for me. To take me away forever and ever.
I don’t like it down here. I’m scared and sit on my feet, so they don’t grab my ankles.
I need to go upstairs. I just want them here. Need to be safe in bed.
I finish my ice cream and leave the bowl on the couch. Look up there. Voices. I think it’s Momma and Daddy. But the floor has bad things that can grab me. I want to cry.
But I’ll be a bad girl. I could watch a movie like I’m s’posed to. So I don’t get taken away.
Then Momma cries, like I do when I fall down and get a scratch and need a Band-Aid.
Daddy talks, but I can’t hear what he says. So I jump from the couch to stairs but hurt my knee.
“Momma!” I try not to cry. There is a lot of pain. I sit on the bottom stair, safe from the floor.
No one comes to help me.
There are noises here. Things in the dark I can’t see. My body shakes. I freeze ’cause they can’t touch me if I freeze. Count down like Nani taught me and stand.
I walk up the stairs. They make loud noises, so I stop. Close my eyes. Don’t want the monster to hear and grab me. My knee hurts bad and something behind is watching me. I feel it. ’Cause I didn’t watch a movie. ’Cause I left ice cream on the couch.
Nothing happens. I open my eyes and get upstairs fast to their bedroom door. Hall isn’t safe yet.
Noises. Loud. I can’t hear it.
Momma is crying even though Daddy doesn’t like it.
He’s talking but sounds funny.
She cries a lot when it’s just us two.
My hand reaches for the door. Maybe it’s too late.
Something is watching me still. More shivers. I need to go potty.
I turn the handle until it cracks open and stops. Press my ear to the crack. Stay in the dark.
Momma talks low in her voice. I don’t like when she is sad.
I can’t hear Daddy, but hear the monster, so I stay quiet. The monster is inside now. I’m too late. We are in the bad place. Where bad people go. I wait to be picked up.
Push open the crack wider until I can see. Too black.
Just dark things moving on the bed. Maybe they’re both swallowed by bad things.
I lick dry chocolate from my lips but taste salt and gag.
Look at the dark for a long time. Knowing it will come for me. Waiting to eat little girls.
It swallows little girls with sharp teeth.
I felt the teeth once. They hurt me. Daddy was there at the end.
It stops. The noises and the movements. I hear Daddy again, but it’s hard. He’s alive! They need my help.
I feel it behind me. It will take me. I’m not ’llowed to scream or cry.
“…cleaned up. Don’t…Hadlee se—…”
Then Momma: “Yes, okay.”
Footsteps. Not sure who. I run into my bedroom like the game we play. The dark thing is in the hall, then the bathroom. The door is loud, and it hurts my head. I feel it in my knee.
Crying again, so I sneak out. Momma is in the bed. The covers are like mine when I wake up. I want to see her, but can’t walk. I stare for a while. Scared to come out of the dark.
“M-Momma?”
She stops crying and looks at me. Rubs her eyes. “Oh, baby.” She tries to sit but something hurts her in the bed and can’t get up. She makes a noise I don’t like and holds out her hand, so I go grab it.
“Is the monster gone?”
“Hadlee, sweetie.” She rubs her thumb on my hand. I shake. We are in the bad place now. I’m too late. “Did you see us?”
I nod cause it’s what I’m told to do when someone asks me something. I want to be good. “Did the monster hurt you, Momma?”
She touches my face and shushes me with a finger. “Tell me, baby girl. Are you happy?”
I nod again and bring my hair to my mouth and start chewing on it. The dark thing has me now.
“Can you keep a secret?”
PRESENT DAY
DEV - Age 16
I wake up alone, shirtless, shoeless, and lying freezing in the woods. I have no idea how I got here. My hair is soaked, and my breath condenses in the chilly night air. It’s completely black, minus the pinprick glow from the half-moon in the sky. The tall trees obscure any stars in the night. It’s dark.
Eerie.
No. No no no.
My lungs seem to close up like they’re suffocating––the vast nothingness. Tears well in the corners of my eyes, so I inhale a few breaths to settle my racing mind. I try and call out for help, but all that escapes is hot air, and then the thought:
You’re going to die here.
It takes a moment for my ears to register the sounds of crickets playing their orchestra. There’s the scent of pine, dead leaves, and moss. I extend an arm and feel something cold and wet before hitting a coarse vine.
My heels sink into soft earth, so I jerk my foot to fling off the clay and stand up. A light breeze licks the tops of my shoulders.
Heart skips a few beats. Breaths, shallow. Mouth, dry.
You’re alive. You’re okay.
I wrap my arms around my body, my teeth chattering, and look around to determine the direction I came from and to let my eyes acclimate to the dark. By now, it should be second nature. My mind should possess the map needed to find the way back to civilization. But, of course, this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. It always takes a minute for the fog to clear from my head and for warmth to fill my body, my bones––my soul. But I’ll find the right way and get back to the main road.
The woods. This place. Desolate and dreary––is always where I go when I’m asleep.
Mom and Dad used to be really worried about it, and eventually the occurrences became less frequent, and then after a while I just stopped telling them. I’d be back to the motel before they even realized I was gone.
It’s better that they don’t know.
SNAP
The breaking of a twig echoes from behind. Could be a few feet, could be a few yards. Instantly, my body stands alert, hairs on my neck rise, and my stomach lurches hard enough to make me gag. Just when I think I had imagined the sound, it happens again. Closer.
SNAP
Someone’s here.
This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m alone, practically naked. No one knows about this place besides my parents.
Dev. Run.
When my mind clears, and the tree bark looks familiar, I count backward from three and head to the right, careful not to make too much noise. A spider web drapes across my face, so I slap as much of it off as I can, feeling phantom spider legs crawling through my hair and laying eggs. I leap over one log here, a tree stump there. My shins brush past a few prickly bushes, but I continue.
Soon, I find myself on the dirt gravel outside the entrance to the trailer park. The cold stones hurt my feet, so I step carefully around them until I hit dewy grass. A shiver creeps up my ankles, and I dash in the direction of the motel, just a couple miles down past the trailer parks and River Road, past the abandoned gas stations and an old convenience store that was looted long ago.
I want to look behind me, worry that someone wielding a machete is going to be there, suddenly within arm’s reach, but I don’t. Ignorance is bliss. What I can’t see won’t hurt me. Snot leaks from my nose, so I wipe it off with the back of my hand.
The blood in my veins warms up with the movement of my body, my joints, and I’m invigorated. My breath quickens. My lungs burn in the cold harshness of night––of my body coming alive. I pump my legs harder, despite the pain in my feet when I hit a rough patch of earth. But the running warms me, wakes me up, takes away the fog and confusion. Like maybe it never happened. Like it never happens.
And I’m alone, always alone. Always that same place. Sometimes farther in, sometimes closer, but always the same woods. The same trees and isolation. The same throbbing in the back of my head like I have right now. The steady thump thump thump.
But never has someone been with me when I woke up. Never. I run.
It’s not long before I round the bend past some of the poorer neighborhoods and run-down houses and spot the lights inside the motel’s front office. I slow down and drop my hands on my knees to catch my breath. I’m sweating now and will probably come down with a cold, shivering again. Still, I don’t look back.
But Dad is there, inside the front office that’s half the size of a bedroom––a glass outer wall so anyone driving by can see we’re open, see there’s still vacancy. He’s hunched over some books, probably looking at our funds and crunching numbers like he always is, or maybe doing a crossword. I can see him blinking his brown eyes, rubbing the stubble on his chin that’s overdo for a shave, and I imagine that if he looked up and saw me right now, he’d dart, thinking I’d been shot.
For now, he rubs his temples as if he has a migraine and cranes his neck. From here, I can tell how rosy his puffy cheeks are, how pale his complexion is in the crude lights. He’s put on weight over the years. Mom isn’t anywhere visible, so she must already be in bed.
It’s been two months since the last one happened, and almost nineteen months since my parents last found me.
I walk past the parking lot to the opposite side of the motel where there’s a wooden fence taller than me that separates the road from our lot. Like usual, I back up, count to three, and dash for the fence until I get enough momentum to spring forward, grip the top, and hoist myself up and over. With a soft thud, I land on my feet like a cat and scan the courtyard behind the motel lobby. There’s a narrow concrete walkway just beside the little laundry shack and a rotted iron fence that closes off the in-ground pool, which hasn’t been operational in years. The bottom is littered with dirty, green water and garbage from kids who throw stuff over the fence. The concrete is cracked. Uncut grass and weeds sprout through and brush my shins as I pass.
I yawn, still unable to check the time because my mesh shorts pockets are empty, so I jog behind the building, along the lines of motel rooms. Each with a tiny window every few feet, and around the L-shaped design until I reach a second building perpendicular to the first. The one that hasn’t been used in years. There’s no key on me, so I go to the back window for Room 13, crack it open, and crawl through. I step onto the toilet seat and close the window behind me.
Flicking on the dim yellow light, because the wirework was never updated in this building, I see that my curly hair is a mess, and my face is covered in dried dirt and grass stains. I’m too tired to clean up with the faucets that spit out nothing but black goo, so I shuffle out of the bathroom and into the main area with the beds.
Room 13 is exactly as I left it: the bed unmade, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor I need to take to the laundry shack to wash, and my Geometry notebook opened on the nightstand. The walls are adorned with old photos, trinkets, and drawings from the past few years. I shut the bathroom door behind me and find my phone and earbuds resting on the pillow where I had been sleeping. I put the earbuds back in and play the last song I was listening to.
In the far corner, propped next to the bathroom door, is the old 50s red Schwinn bicycle, dusty from lack of use. I don’t ride it anymore.
Dirty, disgusting. As if my skin covers nothing but rot.
Unable to think about it, I tear my eyes away and my gaze drifts to the collage tacked up on the far wall, opposite the bed, at what has been collected.
I lay my head on the pillow and close my eyes, back in my “real” bed. Back at the motel where I live, that my parents own.
It’s been years since I’ve slept in my actual bedroom; I much prefer this one. I close my eyes, letting myself drift off as “Come Fly With Me” by Frank Sinatra croons in my ears.
I can’t let this keep happening. Not again. Not so my parents worry or coddle me.
I just wish I knew what it was or how to make it stop, make it go away.
The scar on the back of my head still throbs.
But mostly I wonder why, above all else, do I feel that as soon as I leave the woods….
I need to go right back.
