It’d be wrong to say I don’t like kids. It’s adults I have more of a problem with. In my last school when I called one of the ten year old boys in my class a little bastard, he wasn’t the problem. His parents were the ones who insisted I get fired. But that boy didn’t mind me swearing at him because he knew damn well he’d keyed my car, even if I had no proof. He just thought it was funny, no different to the sort of interaction he’d have with an older sibling. On that note I wouldn’t say I like children either. Kids are little adults. They’re more truthful but only because the stakes are lower. People with jobs and mortgages tell great big tremendous lies. Kids don’t have the weight of the world on their shoulders so why lie about mistresses and promotions and why you’ve been crushing up antibiotics into your wife’s morning smoothie. Instead they just lie about where their homework is.
Kids I teach are right on the cusp of it. Some of the boys might get caught sniggering at the back while showing each other naughty little videos they don’t understand but can’t look away from, but then they go out and chase each other around. Do cartwheels. Play tag. Hide and seek. Cry if they take a particularly bad knock. Kids are weird. Got one whose dad’s in jail and he talks about it like it means nothing. His old man tried to kick a woman to death in the parking lot of a bar and won’t be out until the boy’s a teenager. Kid don’t care. Doesn’t get it. If anything he thinks it’s funny. But then last week I confiscated his novelty pencil that was the size of a cucumber and he screamed so hard he threw up all over the speckled tiles that have been glued to this floor since ‘96.
Ten is a weird age. Old enough to feel the vaguest hint of life’s problems just beneath the surface like lumps in a pillow, to question why Mommy downs three bottles of wine on a Tuesday, or why Daddy changes his shirt and hides it in the garage before coming in from work, but too young to know what’s really under the surface. These kids can feel something is wrong with the world. They just don’t know what. Not yet, anyway. They have my sympathy. Twenty-six years teaching has eroded most of everything else. I’m not particularly invested in whether these little shits become scientists or janitors. Nor am I particularly interested in helping them process their emotional luggage. If any of you want me to undo the damage you’ve done to your own kids, then you can start by paying me a hell of a lot more. But I do feel sorry for them because they don’t really know what’s going on, but unlike a five year old they can’t just fumble around in blind ignorance. They’re stuck in between worlds, one where you cry yourself to sleep at night over your parent’s divorce but still think Santa and the tooth fairy are real.
Maybe it’s different at a rich school, one where kids don’t go to food banks or where whole families don’t have to share a smartphone. I doubt it. Don’t know why. I just doubt anyone’s out there living the plot of the Berenstain bears, rich or otherwise. I used to dream of teaching at one of the big schools a couple towns over, the ones with all the funding. Oh that’d be nice. Walking into a building that doesn’t look like set dressing for the next season of True Detective. Now I just dream of getting out of this profession entirely.
Maybe if I play my cards right.
Sounds crazy to say it out loud, so I won’t. But maybe I found a way out. Well, to be exact the kids found it. Don’t know what they got. Course they fucking don’t. They’re kids. They haven’t got a clue. But I think I’m maybe thirteen weeks from another go and when that happens, you can bet your ass I’m asking for a ticket outta here. At first I planned on getting a cushy job in one of the schools a few towns over. One where the schoolbus doesn’t have to plan its route around multiple trailer parks. Now I realise I was thinking small. If I’m smart, I won’t ever have to work another day in my life.
Imagine that?
Thirteen more weeks.
Right now Grenwig is with Layla. Sweet girl but she’s smart enough for it to be a problem. The dumb ones fair the best. You wake up to something grinning at your bedroom window, it helps to have the sorta mind that doesn’t ask questions about what floor you’re living on. Layla isn’t winning a genius grant anytime soon, but I can tell it’s bothering her because deep down she knows how wrong this all is. Dark circles under the eyes. Pallid skin. Eyes that keep darting to dark corners. Sometimes she falls asleep at her desk. Sometimes she wakes up with a little jump, like something only she can see has startled her. It’s hard. Only reason she sticks it out is the same reason you or I would.
The rewards.
She got a smartphone last time. I wonder what it’ll be this time. These kids don’t ask for a lot. Toys, mainly. One of them got crazy good at football crazy quick. That makes sense. But it’s that kinda thing, you know? They don’t ask after the lottery or nothing like that because money’s a little too abstract right now. Strange thing though, as young and naive as they are they learned the rules pretty quickly. I guess Grenwig’s lessons aren’t subtle. Just look at one of my former students, Jared. Now at the time all this flew under my radar. Kid in my class lost a parent, moved away. So what? Happens. Turns out he asked for his father to get sober. Next day the poor guy got caught in the machinery at his job. CCTV footage was very popular on LiveLeaks. Makes for grim viewing. I’m not particularly handy so I never knew a lathe could do that to a human body.
Anyway, it’s not good to ask after other people. I wish my dad was this. I wish mom was that. Ooph. Alia told me that up front around the time I started asking why half the kids in my class had new iPhones and Nintendo Switches. She said it was easy to ask for things, but it was riskier to ask to change something into another thing, and downright awful to ask it to change a person in any way, no matter how small. Even that kid who got good at football played a risky game. It paid off but the other kids wouldn’t go near him for a week. They kept expecting something bad to happen to him and they didn’t want to be in the splash zone. I can’t pretend to understand the subtleties. Like the kids, I can only observe what happens to other people and learn the lessons that imparts.
Nothing about Grenwig is guaranteed. There are no certainties. Even the kids get worn down by it. Whoever has it, they’re a pariah. Risk assessment in under-elevens. Strange thing to see. But unless it’s your turn, you don’t even want to risk something as inane as a game of catch with his chosen friend. Grenwig is territorial. Possessive. Bizarre. Didn’t even believe in it until it was somehow my turn, which the kids found pretty alarming. Grenwig doesn’t like adults.
I thought it was a ghost at first. Lights coming on and off. Footsteps in the corridor outside my apartment. Pretty creepy, sharing my home with something I couldn’t see. I didn’t like it but it had only been a couple of nights and I did a good job of convincing myself there was no ghost or poltergeist. Just an overactive imagination. Yeah sure the tv channel changed and there were finger marks on my bathroom window I hadn’t put there. So what? Way at the back of my mind I’d reserved a little bit of space for the possibility of a haunting, but otherwise I remained a sceptic. Jesus, if only it was as simple as a haunting.
I don’t know if I could explain to you how it felt that first time I woke to Grenwig gently stroking my toes. Jesus. The violation of it. The feeling of a world that didn’t make sense. My eyes glared at his fingers, terrified, heart pounding, head throbbing like I’d taken a knock, and I kept waiting for it to make sense. My eyes wandered, tried to find the hands those fingers belonged to, but they just kept going. And going. And going. They stretched for metres until they disappeared into the shadow of my closet. Whole time they kept massaging the big toes. Cold as ice. I started counting the knuckles. Got to thirteen and gave up. But they were fingers. I could tell from the nails. The hair that ran along dimpled skin the colour of cement. And then just as I started to really appreciate that I was awake, 100% stone cold sober and lucid, and what I was seeing wasn’t a dream or a nightmare or some other fucking conjuration of the mind, just as I felt panic begin to flare up inside my chest like a burgeoning heart attack, those impossible long fingers withdrew into the darkness like a spider curling its legs.
I got up and threw on the lights but found my closet empty. Felt like the world was coming apart. Had to be a night terror, I decided. Hadn’t had one for decades but what else could it be? I wanted to go back to sleep, to at least try, but I was so scared I couldn’t face the dark again so I decided to stay up. Went out into the living room and turned the tv on, plopped down onto the sofa, and let my head tilt back. I might’ve drifted off again. I don’t know for sure. All I remember was the feeling as the cushion beneath me adjusted and I heard it. The sound of something tightening, like a creaking door.
I looked down and saw white bands wrapped around the entirety of the sofa. Fingers. They tightened, and the material let out a groan as the tension went up a notch. I flew upwards in a terrible panic. By the time I turned back the fingers were gone, but the indent they’d left in the sofa remained.
This repeated itself all night. Each time I felt close to drifting off, those impossibly long fingers would reach out of the darkness somewhere and make an appearance. They knocked glasses off countertops. Opened the fridge. Turned on the oven. And, whenever possible, they touched me. Stroked an ear. Tickled my nose. Slid between my fingers and tried to hold my hand. I tried to play chicken with it at one point. I stayed stock still as a greasy finger plucked at my lips and tried to find its way into my mouth, but before it met any success I flipped out and ran shrieking into the corridor outside my apartment.
Panting in the hallway, I told myself I’d never step foot in that apartment, but there was something about the way all my neighbours came to their doors one-by-one and just stared at me in my underwear and sweat-stained vest. I felt like a fucking idiot and before I knew it, I was offering muddled apologies while slinking through my front door.
By the time I got to school the next day, I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. I genuinely suspected my day was going to end with me being carted off in a straight jacket. Last people I expected to find any understanding from were my students, but when I came in looking like a sleep-deprived drunk they all stared at me in silence. And this wasn’t the slackjawed idiocy I’m sometimes used to with these kids, like that time I told them I used to have a wife. This was something else. Took me a second to decipher it. Not the sort of expression I’m used to from kids in that age group, what with half of them being miniature psychopaths.
It was sympathy. They felt sorry for me. But when I took a step forward, every single one of them scooted their chairs backward.
Just like that it clicked. I’d spent the last year watching them take turns ostracising one another and I’d written it off as just a peculiar product of childhood social dynamics. It felt cruel, and I’d tried over and over to mitigate it. To sit with the excluded kids and talk with them, try to figure it all out. But it was an enigma, all of it. If it wasn’t for the fact that this fucked up system seemed to operate on some kind of rota, I would have been forced to intervene. But as it was, the kid who was targeted would always be back with the crowd a week later, and they’d be the ones excluding someone else. But now all of that made sense. The way they were looking at me. Pity. Recognition. They knew what I’d spent the night going through, and for the last year they’d gone through it themselves one-by-one.
“You should play with Grenwig, sir,” one of the quieter girls piped up looking wide-eyed like a hostage at gunpoint, and all the other kids nodded.
“Yeah he wants to play.”
“You need to play with him.”
“He gets real impatient.”
A chorus of whispered uh huhs.
“Grenwig?” I muttered. One word. Is that what it’s called? I wondered, and all the kids nodded like they could read my mind.
There are no records of Grenwig anywhere, by the way. Good God I tried a thousand times over to find something, anything. The best I could think of was that Grenwig was a kinda boogeyman, but what does that even mean? Just a word I used to give the world a little more shape. A little more structure. I’m not sure Grenwig has much of either. The games he plays are like what a toddler or a young dog would be interested in. Basic stuff. No rules. I move something. Grenwig moves it back. Hours lost tracing the spiral of my hair, or pulling at my cheeks and face to create strange new expressions, or flicking the lights on and off. During that week I took to eating lunch in my car, largely because it was hard to be around people who couldn’t see why a glass went flying at the wall, or why I had to keep stacking plates until they were so tall they toppled over.
At least the kids gave me a head’s up. Most important warning I ever got in my life. Every kid had their own observations, some more reliable than others. Most of them boiled down to the simple fact that for seven days you belonged to Grenwig. You were a toy. A source of endless amusement for something that had the sense of humour of a three year old. Pretty much every kid agreed on one concrete thing though.
Saying no to Grenwig was dangerous.
Now I can’t say for sure but I’m positive Grenwig gave the kids more leeway. He left them alone for lunch and dinner. Bedtime games were usually quieter. But for me it was almost like part of the game was watching me go about my adult life as he did everything to fuck with me. He’d snatch at my steering wheel, giggling from the dark footwell, yellow eyes peering up from between my legs. He’d grab my phone and throw it into the middle of traffic. Or sit there tickling my neck and armpits as the principal demanded to know why my class’s behaviour was so erratic. He made it difficult. Pushed me right up to breaking point.
Eventually I did snap. I slapped his hand away as he tried to mess with me during a traffic stop. Felt like screaming at him that he was this close to getting me shot, but of course I couldn’t. Just had to sit there as this cop looked over my licence and mulled giving me a sobriety test. Couldn’t blame him. I’d been swerving all over the road until I saw the flashing lights. Didn’t help when, as he approached my pulled-over car, he saw me slapping furiously at the steering wheel while hissing,
“Stop it!” over and over.
He inevitably issued the test which I passed. The cop gave me a long narrow-eyed stare before telling me to get some sleep. He must have figured I was just a stressed mental-case instead of a drunk. And he was right. It was day six and I’d barely slept. Despite all the grave warnings from the kids about the dangers of telling Grenwig off, I drove off hoping that maybe he would just let this one go. I went to school and taught lessons as usual, but Grenwig made no appearances. I asked the kids if his little rota ever found itself wrapping up a day early and they all shook their heads like they knew bad news was coming my way, but none of them wanted to say for sure. Still, it was my first time so I ignored the look in their eyes and tried my best to focus on the hope that maybe Grenwig was going to finally leave me alone.
A feeling that dissolved in its entirety when I opened my front door and found a package on the floor. A large box, about one foot cubed. It looked like old cardboard, like what happens when it gets soaked but left out to dry. Just dingy. Its sides had been stapled together too, and that gave it a real homemade look that went the extra creepy little mile. I expected something bad. I knew the second when I went to lift it and it was too heavy that something was wrong. It just felt… well it felt like lifting an overfull bucket from the bottom. And then there was the smell, and the noises that sounded like a distant transmission of a mewing child. Tinny, like the muffled cries of someone on the other side of a very thick wall.
When I finally opened it, I found the policeman inside, familiar because of the shield and name. He… well he’d been folded, I guess is the best way I can describe it. At first I thought it was just his uniform but, well, clothes aren’t warm and obviously a folded uniform wouldn’t explain the forearm hair and skin poking out the side. I recoiled, terrified. Fell backwards onto my ass and this was when Grenwig made an appearance. His arachnid fingers curled out of the box. I’d say about a dozen of them this time, but there are always more in the dark. Out of sight. And these did what I couldn’t have brought myself to do on my own.
They unfolded the policeman. Lifted him up like a tailor showing off a suit, and the flayed skin opened up to reveal the barely recognisable outline of an adult man.
He was still alive.
And the rest of him, I soon found out, was in my bathtub. And that half was also very much alive. Thrashing and sliding as it struggled to gain a grip on the smooth ceramics, begging for its other half. Words I don’t really think were a natural fit for the stern man who’d interrogated me just ten hours ago. But then again it wasn’t really the same man. Either way, he spoke of the darkness between atoms, the infinite space where time doesn’t exist, and the endless shapes that swim the murky abyss, fleeing their cruel god. More than that, he lamented no longer being whole. Feeling himself in two places at once. He called it wrong and on that he had my agreement.
I begged Grenwig to take it away. To undo what he had done.
And that was how I used my first favour. The box and the man disappeared, dragged off to some dark corner that was out of sight. And that was the last I saw of him, although a bit of research later on revealed that while Grenwig did indeed put him back together, the poor man has been catatonic in a hospital bed ever since.
Alive, but definitely not well.
Next day the kids asked me what I’d requested. I told them I asked for a new playstation. Didn’t tell them the truth, partly because it’d traumatise them, but partly because acknowledging it even happened would traumatise me. After that I crunched the numbers. I figured out the number of kids and how often the rota would fall on me. Based on this info I booked the week off work ahead of time and well, I just waited. I tried to support the kids as best I could when it was their turn, but they didn’t really have the same problems as me. I mean… it wasn’t a holiday for them either. Each one came to school looking like they’d spent the night watching their dog die over and over. Just distraught. Ruined. Exhausted. But like I said, Grenwig generally let them eat their food, or interact with their parents and siblings without demanding attention at the worst possible time.
Eventually round two came along. The kids seemed damned relieved. As for Grenwig’s games, this time I came prepared. I’d already noticed that Grenwig only ever emerged from the shadows, and the kids corroborated that fact. So in the run up to my turn I spent a few weeks setting my bathroom up with as many lamps and torches as I could find. Wasn’t easy to eliminate all those shadows. I had a lot of sleepless nights trialling different arrangements but eventually I got one as close to perfect as I could. I figured if I could have just one or two nights of sleep it’d be damned easier to deal with him.
An hour passed before my stomach started to ache. By the time I realised what Grenwig was doing I could already feel the urge to throw up. Guess I hadn’t given him much of a choice. He wanted to play and there was only one place in that room that was still dark. Wasn’t until I threw myself out into my living room and switched off all the lights that the pain eased up, but by then I was already close to suffocating on the finger sticking out of my throat. When it finally withdrew and I took my first breath in over a minute, I collapsed to the floor, unable to do much of anything except heave and sob.
Grenwig, yellow eyes glaring at me from the space beneath my sofa, giggled. In hindsight, I’m lucky he found it funny. I think he thought it was a game of sorts. God knows what would have happened if that little stunt had made him mad. Otherwise, that second round passed without incident. At least, I wasn’t at work. It was hell, but I didn’t have to worry about driving anywhere or being out in public waiting for those wretched hands to find me. I just stayed indoors and played his weird little games, which mainly just involved me cleaning up whatever stupid thing he’d decided to make a mess of. I found it helped if I played up my exasperation. The less I reacted to his mischief, the more likely he’d escalate.
When it was all over I asked for a winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately I didn’t specify the amount, which I supposed is my fault. At least the amount I won covered rent that month, even if my expectations were a little higher.
Still I figured it’d be better next time. I’d be more specific, I decided.
Best laid plans of mice and men…
You ever lost someone? Most people have. I have, for sure. More than once, too. It nearly unmade me and I was a fully grown man.
It was about a couple days before my turn that Alia experienced her first loss. Most kids it’s a hamster. If they’re unlucky, a grandparent. For her, it was her older brother. I’d taught him eleven years earlier and he was a good kid. Smart, like her. Went on to become a mechanic. His passing wasn’t anything strange or sinister. Just an accident. Jack popped off. Car crushed him. Random. Devastating. She was called out of a lesson by the principal and her parents, the three of them looking like hell. Like they’d spent a month one-on-one with Grenwig. A little reminder that not all nightmares hide in the dark, I suppose.
I don’t know why this hit me hard. I think it was probably my own experience with grief. Either way it stuck with me. Her absence, the empty chair and desk, felt hard to ignore day-after-day, knowing what she was going through. I think it’s one thing to accept that these kids’ll face circumstance. Poverty. Shit parents. Life isn’t fair. I don’t get a say in the way society says some kids get ponies and others get rickets. But there’s something about losing someone that way, just a random confluence of bad luck, that hits harder than most. I don’t know if I can explain it. It’s just Alia was already growing up at the bottom rung of our not-very-invisible class system. Hadn’t she had her fair share of bad luck already? I mean, fuck, even Grenwig grants favours! Even that wretched monster isn’t all bad. But an accident like what happened to Alia’s brother. There’s no upside. It’s just shit.
Thing is… like I said, my turn was coming up, and I mean, the way I saw it, the boy was already dead, right? Wasn’t like he could die getting wrapped three times around a lathe? Worst had already come to pass. I decided to do something that, even at the time, I figured to be pretty stupid. But if there was a chance it could work, well… I had to try.
Round three with Grenwig went real easy. I preemptively bought a bunch of jigsaws and left them half done. He honed in on them straight away. I did as much as I could in a single sitting, turned around, turned back and he’d muddled them all up. I’d play up my anger and irritation, then go back to it. Drank a lot of coffee and whiskey. Watched a lot of movies. Grenwig loved it. Broke a couple plates and mugs too. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Woke up one night to find him licking my neck and had to rush to the hospital to get the chemical burn treated. Still, for the most part the week went by without much incident because, well, I had something in mind. Couldn’t get it out. This idea, I had to act on it. And the promise of what it would mean if it worked meant I practically skated through that week with a smile on my face.
At least I had the sense to specify that the boy return to me. Not Alia. I thought if anything went wrong, it’d be best if she didn’t have to see it.
It was four in the morning when I was awoken by a sound that had slipped into my dreams as a kind of creaking door. But as I opened my eyes and reality reasserted itself I realised that what I was actually hearing was a little more like gravel being trod on. Strange. Distant. Quiet. I held my breath, if only so that I could hear better, but it seemed to only amp up the sound of blood rushing through my ears. White noise. It’s so hard to perceive what’s there sometimes, isn’t it? All I wanted was for my ears or eyes to report something useful to me without having to get out of the safety of my own bed. Instead all I got were dim shadows and the sea-like susurrations of my own breathing.
At least I could ascertain I wasn’t alone in my apartment. Over time, the longer I waited, the more sure of that I became. Something was out there, in the corridor between my bedroom and living room at a guess, moving with the kind of irregular rhythm that belongs only to living things. This wasn’t the wind or some pipe settling. Something was moving, and it was moving in my direction. Low to the ground. A noise I couldn’t put any shape to. Wrong. All wrong. Made me think of breaking pencils. Grinding teeth. In the end I couldn’t help myself. I got up and called out. Who’s there? The words didn’t feel real to me. The world took on the realer-than-real distortion that comes with terror, coupled with a prickling white heat at the nape of the neck. For a moment I swore I was outside my own body staring down at myself from above. It was too much. But that sound was clearer than ever before. There was no pretending this ghost wasn’t real.
I turned on the light.
Alia’s brother screamed and crawled away from the light, neglected whimpers left behind like a trail that led me to the living room where I found him curled around a table leg. He was alive but not whole. Guess I hadn’t given much thought to what a car would do to a man’s chest. Every breath was a strange orchestra. Too many sounds to disentangle. Bone on bone. Crumpled ribs expanding, or at least trying to, and drawing oxygen into blood filled lungs. Moss had grown across his face, even in the short time he’d been in the ground.
A hand, ice cold, shot out and grabbed my wrist and I cried out, but he didn’t let go. He followed as I tried to push myself away, his bottom half trailing along, limp and misaligned with his torso. Felt like pulling a sack of meat across an ice rink.
“Don’t send me back,” he whimpered. “Don’t send me back.”
Eventually my foot hit the sofa and I fell onto it. He dragged himself using his hands over to the side so that we were face-to-face before I even had time to push myself upright.
“He likes you,” he whispered and I recoiled at the smell of his breath. “There are so few things in the dark that know how to leave. But he does. Don’t… don’t ask him to send me back. Please?”
For the first time my mind started working. Was he talking about Grenwig? I wondered. But of course, I told myself, who else?
“What… what’s over there?” I asked.
He went to answer before the words choked in his mouth and his face twisted into a mask of melancholic agony. Trying to utter something, he burst into painful sobs.
“Don’t make me go back,” was all he could manage to say. “Don’t make me go back! Don’t make me go back! Please please please don’t send me back there you don’t know what they do to us!”
“I don’t… I don’t know what to do,” I stammered.
The boy grabbed me and pulled me close. Unsure of how to comfort him, I let him hold me in an embrace.
“We aren’t the same when it’s done with us.”
“What?”
I never saw him take the knife from the kitchen, but I suppose he’d been in my home for longer than I’d been awake, and he had plenty of opportunity. First thing I felt, which surprised me even in the moment, was that it suddenly became hard to breathe. That was the punctured lung. Felt like the worst pneumonia I’d ever had came over me in the space of five seconds. Just boom, suffocating on your own blood. So much that it spilled over my lips and down my chin. By the time I registered the aching waves of dull agony pulsing out of the spot on my rib cage, I was already slumping back down onto the sofa, sitting there like I was getting ready for a friday night move.
Not that I was helpless. I took maybe two seconds, tops, to accept what had happened. To understand it, and then I was able to drive my heel into his head as he tried climbing up onto me. Weirdly his broken back helped him. He sort of just bent with the blow, but it didn’t actually dislodge him. I had to kick him again to do that. And then I had to stand up and do it again and again, and I think around the fourth or fifth kick I realised I had something of a problem.
The pain didn’t really bother him.
Not when I kicked him in his pulped chest. Not when I stamped on his hand as he tried to push himself back up for the tenth time. Not even when I rolled him over and stamped on his head, struggling to aim my foot through the tears in my eyes. Even after I’d immobilised him, even after I fumbled around and found an old bike helmet, and clubbed his skull until my arm grew sore, he didn’t cry out in pain. He just kept trying to get back up.
“Fuck!” I screamed as seconds turned to minutes, which just kept ticking on. It felt like I was swinging for hours, but in truth I don’t know how long. Eventually I stopped for breath and frantically looked from one corner of the room to another, desperate for the first time in my life to see those horrible long fingers. “Take him!” I cried. “For God’s sake take him back!”
I suspect he’d been waiting and watching, because with very little delay Grenwig finally made his appearance.
Yellow eyes, clustered together like frog spawn, winked at me from a shadow under the table. They seemed self-satisfied, as they always did, but I didn’t care. The mutilated man who lay on the floor continued to bark with wet laughter, pawing at me with broken fingers. I was feeling faint, and my whole right side was burning hot and cold all at once as warm blood began to cool.
“Oh God,” I cried. “Just take him back.”
Grenwig’s hands wasted little time, and that man’s laughter grew only more hysterical as the fingers wrapped around his chest and legs and slowly towed him towards the dark. I felt a brief moment of relief as I hoped this would be the end of my mistake.
But then I felt his arms wrap around my legs.
Even broken, his strength was something special. Trapped in a bear hug, slowly being pulled towards that abyssal shadow, I began to panic. But it was far too little, and far too late. I went feet first. A feeling like nothing else I’d ever had. In the end I was clinging by the tips of my fingers to an impossible ledge. Above me was a sort of opening with no defined beginning or end, and on the other side lay my living room.
I looked down and, for the first time, saw Grenwig as a whole. In hindsight it had been a mistake to think of him as humanoid. I think I’d just decided the boogeyman should look like a man, but what floated in the strange aether beneath me was more akin to a jellyfish, or maybe a spider. I don’t know. It was dark in that void, and yet impossible clear. I could see things in there. More than just Grenwig. It defied dimensions as we understand it. It was both an ocean and a landscape. In the distance, leviathans swam through open space. I’m not even sure I was seeing based on light. When I blinked I still saw everything.
Grenwig found it all hilarious. He had a mouth, and it laughed maniacally as it peeled Alia’s brother from around my waist, leaving me free to kick and pull my way back into reality. As I slid onto the carpet of my living room, his laughter persisted.
As soon as I was out I crawled and rushed to the bathroom where I locked the door and passed out.
Grenwig’s next turn with me lasted two weeks which I think was because I made two requests. One for Alia’s brother to return from the dead, and the other for him to be taken away. Either way, I didn’t begrudge Grenwig’s games. But it did mean I didn’t get another request. I have to wait until next time. Meanwhile I’ve watched the children approach the end of the school year and I find myself wondering if they’ll age out of Grenwig or take him with them into the next teacher’s class. If he leaves them alone, will he terrorise the next lot of kids I teach?
Either way, I think Grenwig will let me double up again and that’s important because if so, I know what I’m going to do. Like I said before, I’m out of here. No more teaching. I’m cashing out. But I’ve decided, after what I did to Alia and her brother, that I can at least take Grenwig with me. He can become a permanent friend, leave the kids the hell alone. I don’t want him following them, or haunting the next bunch to come along.
I’m going to stuff my pockets so full of cash that I can build him and me a playground and he won’t ever have to bother them again.
They have enough to deal with.