Understandably, reading this as a middle schooler shook me to my core. I realized that my experience was not a dream, as I had convinced myself, but a real event, where the creature could influence what happened in the world. The day was a blur, and it seemed that nobody else had seen the newspaper article. A week went by, and my fear diminished more and more as nothing happened. Then, that night, it happened again.
I saw the light from under my closet door. I willed myself to wake up, convinced that it was all a nightmare. When nothing happened, I got out of bed and ran to the door, but it seemed to be locked from the outside. I yelled for my parents, but it was as if the sound was swallowed up by the presence of the light. I ran for my bed, defeated and terrified, and threw the covers over my head. As I saw the lights go out, I froze, in that state of sleep paralysis again, hoping that the covers would be enough to save me. Beneath my blankets, I could barely hear the scuttling, but it was clearly still there. Then the worst thing that could’ve happened became real. The covers were being pulled off of me, exposing me to the freezing dark of my room. I did not see the creature as it was pulling off the covers, but once it started opening its ever-present book, I saw the red light shining from it, illuminating the face of this disturbingly made creature. I was stuck, staring into the eyes of the storyteller, just waiting for him to begin reading, knowing what was coming next. “You thought that I, was only a dream, a nightmare where despite your best attempts, you could not scream; The days went by, you slept protected by a simple locked door, I awaited, hidden away beneath the very floor;” The book was slammed shut, throwing me back into darkness. The scuttling grew towards my bed, and the creature climbed up, and with his face an inch away from mine said, “Young child, if you should sleep tonight, the souls of the damned shall come up, and take flight.”
He then scuttled back to my closet, and shut the door, and I felt his presence leaving. As what happened last time, I sat in my bed, wanting to be relieved of this hell. This time, it was only 2 weeks after that night’s events when a newspaper article came out about a very disturbing death. It was another child, bitten in half by an unknown creature. This time however, there was no blood trail to the closet, there was a trail to a huge hole in the floor. The investigators were baffled, since the bedroom was on the second story, yet there was no hole on the first floor. It was as if the hole was a portal, sending whatever went in it into an endless dark abyss. There was, however, another pool of blood with the 8 handprints surrounding it, and in writing above it, “Closer and closer I come, hidden away from the wrath of the sun”. The most disturbing thing, without a doubt, was the fact that this all occurred in the next town over. The two occurrences created a line that perfectly pointed to my town on a map.
As the days went by, I got a more severe sense of anxiety, knowing that one of these days, he would return. I tried getting people to let me sleep at their house, but somehow there was always an excuse to keep it from happening. People noticed that I was beginning to break down, and they kept asking what was wrong, but I felt that telling them what happened would violate some rule and make the situation worse, so I said I was just having sleeping problems, which was partly true.
After about a week, as I was going to bed, I felt that tonight would be the night that he came back. I tried to prepare myself, but the experience that night was by far the most traumatizing by far. I saw the lights from the closet, and I froze, trying to steel myself for what would happen next. The lights went out, and the darkness felt so much more full than in the past. The sound of the door opening was even louder than it had been. The scuttling, by far the worst part, sounded much angrier and determined than in the past. It came up to the bed again, and this time, the storyteller immediately climbed onto my bed. He then opened the book, and the color was so much brighter. The entire experience seemed more alive, more real, as if the storyteller’s connection to reality was somehow stronger. “You tried to thwart my return, but it cannot delay the damned from being burned.” He brought his face closer to mine, and since his presence felt so much stronger, I could finally smell him. I truly wish I hadn’t. He smelled of rotting corpses and burned plastic, all combined with the strongest smell of mold I have ever smelled. I could feel bile starting to come up through my throat, but it stopped, held back by some unseen force. After several moments of silence, the storyteller said “Young child, three times I have visited you, pray that I don’t visit you again.” And he crawled off my bed, scurrying back to the closet. And the moment it shut, I leaned off the bed and relieved myself of my dinner. I just sat there, contemplating his words. Sadly, I didn’t know how to keep him from coming, so I just told myself that I had to suck it up, and hopefully he would not return.