Chapter 33 The Night My Monster Left Me
The Night My Monster Left Me
The door creaks open at midnight. I click off the flashlight I had trained on my book. I could use the lamp, but it’s a habit I can’t break from sharing rooms for so long.
Expensive black shoes cross the threshold with a barely audible creak, and I hold my breath.
David. The smell of alcohol accompanies him, mixing with his cologne.
He closes the door and crosses over to my desk, settling down into the chair.
"Evie," he says quietly. I can’t make out his features in the darkness to ascertain what he’s doing here. "You were a beautiful child when you came here, but as you get older," he lets out a low whistle.
The hairs on the back of my neck and arms stick up like needles. Alarm rings in my ears, or is that my heartbeat?
He never does this at night. It’s always during the day between when he picks me up from school and when Jean comes home.
"I dream of you when I’m at work," he says in a faraway voice as if he’s dreaming of me now.
"How perfect, how innocent you are, packaged in such a perfec…" he doesn’t go on. David never says much during our alone times. He’s not vulgar like that.
He always shows me what he wants with his hands and body, directing me.
Then he pushes out of the chair and stands in the middle of the room. I hear him unzip and know what he wants. It’s hard to breathe.
Nighttime is when I’m safe. To have him come in here and ruin that, it hurts. It shreds my insides and I almost want to fight back.
But I’ll be eighteen in a couple months. Is the fight worth it, when the end is so close I can taste it? David and Jean plan to help me get into college. I have the grades, even if I don’t have the extracurriculars.
Pushing back the covers, I slowly make my way out of bed and cross over to him.
David’s hand tangles in my hair, touching me with reverence before he gives me a small push.
I drop down to my knees. My mind has already stolen away to think about the book I’m reading.
Jane Eyre. How her friend Heather Burns had her hair cut off in front of the entire orphanage and Jane had hers chopped off as well, in solidarity.
I wish I had a friend like that.
My mind is completely occupied while I go through the motions that have now become as automatic as brushing my teeth.
A deep, guttural roar erupts through the dark room with such force that I scramble backward until I hit the desk. The top corner nails the back of my skull with a sharp crack. All the air is sucked from my lungs as my vision turns dark for a second before clearing.
My chest tightens in fear and shame as I feel Shadow's indignation draw near me.
A gravelly voice dug up from the pits of hell fills the room. "What is this?"
The room is darker, as if Shadow is everywhere at once.
I hear David shuffle in the darkness.
Then Shadow’s voice is in my ear. "Evie. I felt—I felt the same thing I’ve been feeling from you in the daylight hours when I cannot come to you. And this? This is what has been happening?"
The words are frozen on my tongue, no, lower. In my heart. They stick there, unmovable.
"Evie?" David slurs. He stumbles blindly in the darkness, likely searching for an answer to the surreal scene playing out before him.
The room is suddenly alight with Shadow's wrath, a red lightning storm inside the shadows. His tentacles stretch toward David like an angry black sea serpent until they wrap around him, whipping him up into the air like a rag doll.
David gasps in pain as the coils slither and tighten around his throat. His face turns blue, eyes bulging in desperation as he vainly attempts to break free from its vise-like grip.
I’m unable to move or speak. My heart pounds in my chest, my hands trembling at my sides.
"Please," David croaks, his eyes bulging as Shadow continues to strangle him. "Please."
"You’ve hurt her. You’ve been hurting her."
I feel emotions radiate from Shadow, rage, pain, and disbelief, but the one that hurts most of all is betrayal. I kept this from him all these years.
I can’t take it anymore. I get to my feet, rushing toward them, tears streaming down my face.
"No, no, no," I plead, grabbing onto Shadow’s tendrils. They’re cold to the touch, but I ignore the chill spreading through my body. "Don't do it! Don't ruin what I've worked so hard for!"
Even as I try to stop Shadow, guilt and shame wash over me like a tidal wave. I allowed this to happen. I let David take advantage of me because I believed it would be the best deal I’d get.
"Why?" Shadow roars at me. My hair flies back.
I can’t speak for a moment. "I did what I had to do." I hurl the words at him like I don’t care what he thinks. Like I’m not dying inside at having him find out I’m more a horror show than he’ll ever be.
"Why didn’t you tell me?"
"Because this is my life. You can’t save me from it!" I yell back, hot tears streaming down my face.
Instead of my explanation calming him, Shadow’s eyes turn crimson as his wrath takes over. His attention turns back to David, and time slows to a molasses crawl. More lights flash, his insides a lightning storm.
"Then I’ll punish." He growls.
The tendrils wrapped around David’s neck and limbs tighten then yank.
"Shadow, no!"
The sound of skin and tendon ripping accompanies the spray of blood as Shadow rips David apart.
A hot splash hits me in the face as my heart fully stops in my chest.
I barely register the footsteps until the door opens and Jean stands there in her robe.
David is everywhere in the room. His blood, painting the walls and windows. Chunks of him littering the floor.
The whites of Jean’s eyes blaze in the low light, growing brighter and brighter until she opens her mouth. She screams and never stops.
I meet Shadow’s eyes, and I’m shocked to register apology and regret in his monstrous gaze.
Unable to move or breathe as he comes to me, a tendril slides down my face, cleaning it of blood. He seems to be drinking me in with his white misty eyes as if it’s the last time he’ll see me. He leans in and kisses my cheek with lips I’ve never been able to properly see.
And then he’s gone.
Four years. Four years since the cops escorted a hysterical Jean away.
Last I heard, she was still receiving treatment in a care facility that specialized in psychotic breaks.
The cops told me she never stopped babbling or screaming about monsters.
Even in her sleep, she murmured about shadows and blood.
About the monster under the bed goring her husband.
I’d been crammed back into a group home and appointed therapy, but I wouldn’t talk. I was already suspected of having something to do with David’s grisly murder, so it wouldn’t help things to confess I was glad he was dead.
The nature of David’s violent near explosion of limbs and body parts stumped the cops. They concluded it was some sort of animal attack, but none of them really believed it. Their whispers and scared sideways glances let me know they’d seen enough to believe in more than what meets the eye.
The therapist spoke to me like she knew what I was going through, about how I must see the blood every time I close my eyes. She was wrong. That’s not what stuck to my bones.
The horror of the situation that burrowed and scratched its way under my skin was the disappointment radiating off Shadow as he discovered the secret I’d kept. That I’d been complicit in David’s desires.
Shadow didn't come back. I couldn’t explain that I did it to protect myself, to help myself. I couldn’t scream or yell at him that he wasn’t always around, and I couldn’t always wait for him to save me.
That I wasn’t ashamed for wanting a stable home, and that I refused to regret securing that for myself.
That I didn’t need him to save me. Though I can’t deny the immense relief I felt at David being disposed of. An invisible weight inside me lightened with his death.
The years of wondering, contemplating, and theories of why Shadow abandoned me were torture far beyond having to suck any guy’s dick.
Was Shadow disappointed in me? Did he despise me? Did the heart-eating monster from under my bed find me grotesque?
Aging out of the system and being on my own only gave me more opportunities to judge myself through Shadow's eyes. My mind constantly created assumptions and criticisms, leaving me sick and numb with self-condemnation.
I eventually got to the point where I didn’t think of his abandonment every minute of the day.
I stopped checking under my bed, or the beds at the houses I cleaned.
But his absence caused something to rot inside of me.
As time went on, it continued to grow, festering like an open wound that refused to heal.
The isolation and loneliness clamped down on me until I was barely breathing.
Until the night I decided to visit the dive bar down the street from my apartment and find an unsuspecting victim. A man to touch me where I didn’t want it. To invoke unpleasant, confusing sexual feelings in the hopes my savior would come.
It might not work. It might put me in more danger than I had planned for, but I didn’t fucking care anymore. I couldn’t live with this open wound on my own anymore. I’d get Shadow back by any means, even monstrous ones.
It worked.
And now he’s here, holding my neighbors captive with the same rage he exhibited toward my foster father, and I find myself instantly soaked between my thighs, unrepentant and hungry for violence and the monster who holds me close and licks the blood off my skin.