“Come on, Bobby. How come I always have to do it?”
I could hear the weight that my brother put against the pause button on the controller of his NES. The controller made that click sound that was somewhere between breaking and annoyed. It was the sound that let me know that Bobby was just about done with my whining and would stop talking and start shouting. Bobby, for the most part, had been trying to be patient lately. He was dating some girl who was really into good Christian values and just being kind to people. Bobby was really trying to follow her example, but I was, apparently, really good at pushing his buttons.
“Because, oh brother of mine, you need to toughen up, or this world is going to eat you alive.”
I felt a sudden burst of fear.
Being eaten alive was exactly why I was afraid to go downstairs and do what needed to be done.
Bobby laughed, “Not literally, kiddo. I mean, like, if kids at school learn that my twelve-year-old brother is still afraid of the dark, they’d never let him live it down. He’d be a social outcast, unwelcome anywhere. I leave the job of turning off all the lights to you for that very reason.”
I looked at the open door as if I could already feel the eyes of the thing that hunted me and despaired.
The house we lived in had been my mother’s childhood home. She had lived here with her two older sisters until she went off to follow our dad when he joined the Navy, a year before Bobby had been born. When Grandma had died suddenly, Dad having beat her into the grave by six months after a motorcycle accident, she had generously left the house to whichever daughter wanted it. Our aunts had their own homes by that point, and the two-story home, free and clear with no leans on it, had seemed like a dream.
The first night we had been alone in the house, their mother having to work late most nights, she told us that before they went to bed, she expected all the lights to be off downstairs.
“I won’t have my power bill up over the roof because you guys are trying to light the whole neighborhood.”
I had been assigned the task of turning off the lights before bed since that very night. This task had been handed down by Bobby almost at once. He got away with this because A- he was the oldest and B- because mom worked five to six nights a week to pay for bills and taxes on the property. This meant that most nights it was just the two of us in the house, and Bobby was in charge when it was. As such, Bobby usually gave methe chores he didn’t want, and that included turning off the lights.
“Come on, Bobby,” I tried again, but my brother wouldn’t budge.
“Don’t start, kid. You need to get over this, and the only way to do it is to do it, know what I mean?”
I didn’t, but nodded anyway.
I took the stairs like a palsied old man, watching as the landing got closer and closer.
I switched the light off beside the stairs and began.
The lights, as it turned out, had to be turned off in a certain order. If you didn’t turn off the stair lights first and the lights by the basement last, they would all come back on again. Neither of them understood why, but I attributed it to the thing that lived in the dark after the lights went out. I had named it Mr. V for some reason, and even I didn’t know why. I supposed he had to be called something, and that was as good a name for my nemesis as any. Bobby just thought it was some faulty wiring and told me that if I meant to get the job done then that’s how it would have to be.
You could leave the stair light on, the ones on the stairs. In fact, it was advised so you could find your way back. Sometimes it was the best way to find your way back from the depths, and I had used that light as a lighthouse more than once. I went into the foyer and turned the lights off, went to the mud room, and turned the lights off, but made sure to leave the porch light on so Mom could find the lock when she got home. Mr. V didn’t care about the porch light, it seemed, and that was good because Mr. V could have a temper when he wanted to.
The first couple of nights, Bobby had gone with me. As long as Bobby was with me, nothing ever seemed to happen. We’d gone room to room before walking casually back to the stairs and up to our rooms. Whatever Mr. V was, he didn’t bother big kids, or maybe it was just kids who didn’t believe in him. I still don’t know, but it was always different when I was by myself.
I turned the lights off in the dining room slowly, finishing with the switch by the door so I could turn my back on the room and walk out. This was part of the game too, and it seemed to make it better if whatever it was didn’t see you seeing it. Sometimes the dining room would be empty when I turned the light off, but sometimes I would see a figure standing in the dark space when I was done. Sometimes it was standing behind the chair at the head of the table, sometimes it was standing by the window, but it was always looking at me. It was never close, like the horror movies me and Bobby sometimes watched when mom worked late. It was never just right in front of me, ready to grab me when the lights went off, but it was still closer than I would have liked.
As I walked towards the living room, I could almost feel the eyes of Mr. V on my neck, and it made me shudder.
I looked at the leather couch that Mom had brought from the apartment, her only addition to her mother’s furniture, and felt a pang of guilt as I saw the scratches across the back. That hadn’t been my fault, not really, but I had caused it. The pastor at church said that people had to take accountability for their actions, and I was man enough to admit that this had been my fault. I had broken the rules, and I had to pay the price.
It had all started very subtly. I would notice little things once the lights went out, and I would make note of them for later. The shadow man was one, Mr. V. Then there was the way the shadows lengthened and twisted sometimes when the lights were off. The whole downstairs took on a kind of puffy, unreal look after dark, and I had seen it swell or shrink depending on its wants. I still wasn’t really afraid of Mr. V, still didn’t really believe in him, but I was afraid of the dark, and that made it easy to tell myself that anything could be living in it.
Even this mysterious Mr. V.
I had spent weeks running up the stairs as I fled the kitchen for the living room. I had never felt anything grab at my ankles or claw at my shirt, but it had always felt like a close thing. The week before the incident had been a bad one. I had felt a sense of foreboding hanging over the dark rooms, and it was making its way into my dreams. Sometimes when I dreamed, I would run through endless corridors, the shadow man chasing as I fled. It was weird to be on the cusp of eleven and feel like I might be on the verge of having a breakdown, but I was getting there. I had tried to explain this to my mom, but she just said that Bobby was in charge, and it sounded like he was trying to help me. Bobby was relentless when it came to ridding me of my fear of the dark. He told me how the other kids would pick on me if I went into middle school with this fear, how no one would want to be my friend, and that hadn’t helped my anxiety.
That night, when I come downstairs, Bobby was already asleep and I really didn’t want to turn off the lights by myself. I had turned off the lights in the foyer with a shaky hand, but when I turned to the dinning room, I saw the shadow man, Mr. V, lurking by the doorway and my legs had started to shake. The man was looking at me, staring into me with his nonexistent eyes, and as he watched, I backed away. I was slowly backing up, making my way towards the stairs, and when I dashed up them, I closed the door to my room and locked the knob. I climbed into bed and covered up, closing my eyes tight as I heard something terrible happening downstairs. Crashing, bashing, furniture being turned over, and all of it because I had been too scared to turn off the lights.
My mother had woken us up when she got in, yelling for us to get downstairs.
I had still been awake and had suspected what we would find.
“What the hell did you guys do? All the lights are on, the house is destroyed, I want some answers!”
As the two of us looked over the destruction, we saw she wasn’t wrong. Neither of us could come up with a good enough explanation, and our mother had set us to clean it up as she got ready for bed. The house looked like a tornado had been through it. Books were thrown off shelves, the couch was cut and ripped, the end table was turned over, and the whole room was just an unholy mess. Bobby had complained about it, even cornering me after Mom had gone to bed and asking why I had trashed the house? He hadn’t been awake to hear the destruction, but I had. I knew I hadn’t done this, and I knew Bobby hadn’t done it, so unless my mom had come home early to trash the house, it had to be Mr. V.
After that, I had been more diligent about getting the lights off, and as long as I pretended not to see Mr. V, he never bothered me.
I shut the lights off in the living room, the mended slash lost in the dark, and headed for the kitchen. The dishes were in the drying rack, the sink gleaming after Bobby had wiped it out, and the chairs were all pushed in around the table. I turned to look, marking my escape route as I prepared to make a run for it, and shuddered as I saw the dark head peeking out from the door to the den. It was waiting for me, waiting for me to turn the lights off, and my hands shook as my finger hovered over the switch.
I hoped I had the strength to do it again, and when I pulled it down, I immediately took off.
I heard something come out of the den, but I was already running through the door to the living room. I bumped something with my hip as I passed by the couch, slowing a little as I made for the stairs. It wasn’t the first time I had bumped something, but it wasn’t the pain that had slowed me. The side of the china cabinet had felt like Play-Doh, not quite solid, and it only reminded me that once the lights were out, it was different down here.
When the lights were on, this was where me and Bobby sat and watched cartoons or MTV after school.
When the lights were on, this was where me and mom sat on the couch on Sundays and watched Lifetime.
When the lights were off, however, the landscape was something else, a place that I had no control over.
I could see the stairs, the light casting long fingers down into the dark, but as I got close, my greatest fear was realized.
Until then, I could tell myself that it was all in my head. I could tell myself that this was just my imagination playing tricks on me and that it would pass once I was Bobby’s age. I could come up with a thousand excuses for my fears when I was safe in my bed, the monster downstairs, but as something grabbed my leg, I knew that the excuses were nothing but a paper shield.
The thing that grabbed me wasn’t a hole beneath the couch or a toy that had been left out.
The grip was iron, the claws were sharp, and when I turned back to look, I wished I hadn’t.
The sight of that pitch-black face undulating in the semi-darkness of my living room was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. The mouth was full of gnashing teeth, the eyes were like spiral circles drawn by an uncreative child, and I screamed in terror as I kicked at the thing with my free leg. It took the first kick between the eyes, but the second made the grip loosen some, and the third finally found me able to yank my leg free. I felt the claws scratch across my flesh, leaving four long marks, but I didn’t care.
I was running up the stairs on all fours, and when I came to the top, I looked down and saw the thing sitting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me. It didn’t seem to care that it hadn’t caught me, it didn’t seem to care that I had escaped. The look in those black on black eyes, let me know that, eventually, it would get me.
Tomorrow was another day.
“What happened?”
I turned, cowered as a new figure rose up from the dark hallway, screaming again as I became sure I was about to die.
I almost cried when I heard Bobby’s familiar voice.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I tried to tell him, but I couldn’t properly articulate what I had experienced.
It remained one of the scariest events in my life.
Mom called the cops when she got home, but they never found anything. She made Bobby turn off the lights after that, and I don’t remember going downstairs after dark much after that. Eventually I started to doubt it had ever happened, but the four long scars on my leg made it hard to completely discredit. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but I’ve recently started dreaming about it and it made me remember that scary time in the early nineties.
So if your kids tell you that there might be something watching them from the shadows, don’t take it lightly.
Who knows when your kiddos might find their own Mr. V lurking in the shadows.