A serial killer murdered my grandmother on her 80th birthday, breaking into her house and stabbing her over seventy times. He had killed other senior citizens in the area with the same MO, but to this day he hasn’t been caught. He stopped killing people after my grandmother. She was his sixth and apparently final victim, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
I was absolutely heartbroken. My mother had died young of breast cancer the previous year, and my father was somewhere out on the West Coast, a hopeless alcoholic who hadn’t contacted me in over a decade. My grandmother was my last close family member. In her will, I got everything, including the house that she died in, but that didn’t make the sadness and despair any less. I felt totally alone in the world, and during quite a few low points, I even thought about hanging myself or taking an overdose of prescription opiates. I didn’t want to be alone anymore, and I was so tired of being depressed that I would have taken any means to make it end.
After a week of endless depression and not sleeping, I started to get so desperate that I began reading the New Testament and praying every night. I would get down on my knees and ask God for help. On the third day, I think he answered.
I had fallen into a restless sleep for a couple hours, the first real sleep I had gotten in days, when I heard a creaking floorboard next to my bed. I jumped up, but the darkness was so thick I couldn’t see more than silhouettes. I floundered around and turned on the light next to the bed, horrified to see someone in my room with me.
The being looked like an angel with chalk-white skin, totally bloodless and as smooth as polished stone. Its eyes were pure black orbs, and its teeth were sharpened to points. Massive white wings covered with tight skin extended behind it in each direction for eight or nine feet. The wings absolutely dwarfed his body.
He wore armor that glowed like bright silver with chain leggings and spotless glowing metal boots. A soft interior light seemed to emanate from his skin, his armor and his wings.
“Jenna, God has heard your prayers,” he said to me. He came and put his hand on my cheek, softly stroking it. “He will help you through this time of sadness and depression. God only wants one thing from you in return.”
“Anything,” I said. “Name it.”
“He wants you to kill one random person and bring the body to the sacred altar in the forest,” the angel said, his black eyes staring into mine, his face only inches away from mine. I felt hypnotized. “If you do this, He will reward you with whatever you desire.” I felt sick, pulling back as the impact of his words finally pressed in on my mind.
“What?” I asked, putting my hands up in front of my face suddenly, now terrified of this creature. “You’re no angel! Get out of my room!” His smile widened from ear to ear, and his hand reached out in the blink of an eye and smashed my lamp, plunging us into blackness. I fell back asleep instantly, as if by magic, and awoke in the morning to find the broken lamp on the floor. Otherwise, there was no sign of the mysterious visitor.
I figured it must have been a dream. Perhaps I had simply reached out and broken the lamp during the night by accident while I was deep in the grips of some nightmare, and my mind had simply added the noise of the breaking lamp into the dream and made up the entire interaction with the angel. It was the only thing that made sense, after all. It made far more sense than actually being visited in the night by some supernatural entity asking me to murder people.
I went through the door like a zombie, feeling the effects of sleep deprivation more and more clearly. After making a pot of coffee and drinking three or four cups, I felt I had enough energy to at least leave the house for a few hours. I decided to go for a walk in the nearby mountains.
As I walked down the trail, I kept seeing someone peeking at me from behind the trees, but every time I looked they had somehow disappeared. It looked like a dark silhouette of a human body, playing peek-a-boo with me and constantly winning. I even tried running to the area where I saw the figure a few times, but there was no one around, no twigs broken or brush pushed out of place, no sound of receding footsteps. I couldn’t figure it out. I figured either the sleep deprivation was getting to me, or I was seeing a ghost. I had never actually seen any evidence of ghosts or demons or anything before, so I just chalked it to the massive, long-lasting sleep deprivation I had been going through and started to ignore it.
But when I got home, things didn’t improve. I saw a figure peeking out from my closet door, which was open only a crack, and now that I was much closer I could see the face clearly. It was the face of that nightmarish angel with the chalk-white skin I had seen the night before. It kept appearing everywhere I looked, hiding behind the sofa, lurking behind me in my reflection in the bathroom mirror, even peeking out of the cabinet where I stored cereal and canned goods, a cabinet which was far too small to hold anything bigger than a cat. But I still saw that face, and everytime I got a good look at it, its smile had grown, its teeth growing longer and sharper, its eyes growing darker and more manic with every showing.
Now I was truly afraid to go to sleep. I stayed up brewing pot after pot of coffee late into the night, reading book after book until I started to nod off despite all the caffeine I had consumed. I caught myself a couple times, but it was a battle I couldn’t win, and eventually I nodded off for good.
In a half-hypnotized, dream-like state, I saw a cupboard I had never noticed before opening up in my living room, a little gremlin-like creature peeking out. It was totally different from the angel I had seen, but had the same huge black staring eyes. As I woke up fully, I saw it grow and transform into the white-skinned demonic-looking being that had accompanied me in my room before.
Ignoring the being standing before me, I walked right past it and opened up the hidden cupboard. It blended in perfectly with the wall, and if I didn’t know exactly where the door was, I would never have found it. Inside there was a miniature table, tiny chairs, a tiny mirror and a hole in the ground that smelled absolutely foul, like urine and old, dried-up feces. I turned my attention back to the angel standing there, but found instead a little gremlin, two feet tall with pure black eyes, skin as green as the needles of a pine tree and huge, bat-like ears. He looked small and almost cute in the half-light of the moon.
“So,” I said, crossing my arms and looking down at him, “you’re the one causing me all this trouble, huh?” He trembled slightly, raising his hands.
“Please,” he said in a small voice, “I just want to continue living here in peace. I was friends with the old woman who lived here before, but the bad man came in and she died. I wasn’t here to protect her…” His small voice died away into silence, the buzzing of cicadas and crickets the only noises remaining.
“Well,” I said, kneeling down and pinching his long, crooked nose, “you are just the cutest little guy I have ever seen!” He hissed at me, raising himself up to his full height- which still barely came up to my kneecap.
“I am not!” he said in an outraged, high-pitched voice. “I am the nightmare that haunts the streets! I am vicious!” He showed his tiny fangs and baby-sized molars at this, and I squealed with delight.
“That’s it,” I said, “you’re staying here with me.” I swept him up in my arms and gave him a hug. He didn’t resist, but his thin arms wrapped around my neck, and he put his warm face against mine, sighing in his squeakiest voice.
***
I came back home in the middle of the night from the cemetery, covered in dirt and grime. Uruk, as he had told me his name was, ran out of his hidden cupboard, dressed in a fashionable suit originally designed for children. He loved to dress up and impress me, putting on tiny bowties and pint-sized fedoras I had bought him, clothing that made me laugh and pick him up. I was happy to have a companion now, and the depression and sleeplessness that had plagued me had left completely. I often fell asleep holding Uruk, spooning him like a teddy bear.
“Jenna did you bring it did you get it did you did you…?” he asked rapidly, his pupils dilating in excitement. I nodded, dragging a tied-up tarp in through the door and laying it out on the kitchen. It was a freshly dead human body, an old woman who had died from heart disease by the look of her. Uruk clapped his hands in joy, jumping up and down like a kid on Christmas morning.
He knelt down, using his sharp fangs to rip the skin on the face off, before moving down to the neck and chest. I left him to his dinner, as watching him eat often made me queasy.
As long as I kept him fed, though, he said I was in no danger. He could only eat human bodies, but whether they were killed or died from another cause made no difference to him.
At least I’m not alone anymore, and that has made all the difference to me. My prayers had been answered.