Midnight crawls into my lifeless eyes.
I sit on my bed, abandoned by sleep.
Every joint in my limbs feels broken,
locking me in place.
My breath trapped in the hands of the shadows.
A monster sits at the edge of my bed,
adorned with a sharp, toothy grin.
Its abyssal eyes threaten me,
With the desire to tear my flesh apart oozing out of it
It feeds on the fear flooding my mind
it'll consume that first,
and then devour me.
- Grace Larson.
With a stifled cry, a ten-year-old girl crouching down under the bed while a big silhouette is clutching a bloodied metallic pipe. She sees only the lower half of the pipe, the man's boots and his grey trousers.
There are blood marks on both his trousers and boots.
He stands perfectly still in the doorframe, the calm before the storm, on the bed, a woman wails, her voice filled with dread and primal fear.
The man started walking toward the bed with lazy, deliberate steps, dragging the metallic pipe behind him, to the child the screeching noise of the pipe and the woman's cries felt like end of the world.
He stopped right in front of the bed; the metallic pipe had disappeared from the child's sight as he lifted it.
The woman's cries swelled into guttural screams, mangling two words between the wet smashing sounds of the pipe landing on her body.
"N-No please!
No!"
They were the only words she could manage.
The child hid under the bed, listening to this horror.
She shrank down, clamping her hands over her ears and squeezing her eyes shut, a helpless whimper escaping her lips.
Suddenly the beatings stopped; dread coiled like a snake in the child's stomach; she knew what was coming.
Praying she was wrong, she raised her eyes.
To her horror, the man had bowed down, he grinned at her, a wide, ear to ear rictus, his eyes wide and psychotic.
on the bed, the woman released a scream more piercing than any before
"Not her! She's just a child! Please"
The child's breath grew heavier with every second that felt like an hour; tears filled in those tiny marble-like eyes, nothing but pure fear in them.
The man's hand reached for her, deforming into monstrous claws in the child's vision coming right for her throat.
A scream of ultimate terror erupted from the child just as the hand was about to grasp her-
Grace jolted awake with a scream echoing in the room, breath caught in her throat, gasping.
Grace was sweating profusely,
"Oh my god. Not again Gracie..." She whispered to herself.
"Geez" Riley woke up too, with a jolt.
"God, I'm so sorry Riley... It-"
Grace began, "Yeah, a monster, i know" Riley mumbled in an annoyed, sleep thick voice.
"It's the same damn dream you get whenever you have something to stress about.
What did it do this time? Did it finally kill the woman?"
"Oh worse" Grace gasped. "It came for me this time."
"What?" Riley asked, her eyebrows scrunching together.
She was a little more awake now, "Oh, did you finally see that bastard's face? Tell me you did. I'm gonna find him and beat the shit outta him for ruining our sleep like this for years now" She grumbled, getting up and filling a glass of water for her big sister.
Grace drank the water while Riley rubbed her back.
"You okay now?" She asked in a gentler tone.
"Yes, i think so. Thanks Riley. And sorry, I can't remember his face..." Grace said, her voice still gloomy.
"Oh, it's alright." Riley sighed. "Look, Grace, I know you're worried about starting the university late, but I'll be right there with you! We're just in different classes, but we'll be together on campus. You have me!"
Riley tried to comfort her with all the encouragement and positivity she could gather in the middle of the night.
Grace, now loosened up and feeling much better, chuckled lightly.
It was funny seeing her little sister; the one who used to ramble on about her favorite show, the twilight series, now trying to be the grown up.
"Yeah, I'll be counting on you, baby sister!"
Riley cringed and fell back onto the bed; her smile erased "Ew, please. I'm 18 already. I'm going back to sleep."
While Riley slipped back into a deep sleep, her breath steady, but grace's mind chose to do something else, it ran a marathon of thoughts.
These violent dreams had become a part of her life. A repetitive feature for almost a decade emerged whenever she felt even slightly stressed.
The 11-year-old Grace couldn't sleep without getting night terrors; it had affected a kid so deeply that she developed a crippling sleep anxiety. Nicole, as a desperate parent, had no choice but to take her to the doctor.
The diagnosis had been a tidy, perfect bow on top of the box of horrors.
A psychologist with a gentle smile had offered a theory to Nicole while Grace sat across her on the chair, miserable.
Grace had been through immense trauma- the car accident that killed her father, her young mind fragmented by the event could not process the true horror.
So, he suggested that it might have created a symbolic horror instead. A monster representing fear and loss. It was a common coping mechanism to make sense of the senseless.
It was a safe story to live comfortably with, Nicole held on to it, answered Grace's questions with it, for her doubts and shadows of monster dancing in her eyes, it was a great shield.
But for some reason, grace's flesh never truly believed it. The dreams carried the texture nothing like a symbol, the scent of rotten blood, clinging to the back of her throat upon waking up.
All of it was very specific, the scraping noise of the metallic pipe on the floorboards, the smashing noises on the raw flesh, the screams...
A symbol was an idea but this? This had everything, all five senses and a profound certainty that felt like a memory.
Nicole's voice would soften trying to gentle the truth by saying
"it's the accident honey, take your pills" but Grace noticed how Nicole's hands shook, a variation of emotions flashing through her eyes, sympathy, fear, anxiety all mixed up, specifically when she once mentioned the man's grey trousers.
The details that felt most real to Grace were the very ones that made her mother's smile tighten into rigid, perfect line, as if holding back a scream.
And for Grace, this was the crack in her perfect world. A deep, rooted fear that the truth was buried just beneath the surface of her memory.
A part of her knew that if she clawed at it hard enough, she could uncover it, but a larger, more terrified part wasn't sure she could survive what she found.
And so, life went on. On the surface, it was more than good. Petoskey was a peaceful small town with an extremely low crime rate, and Grace had grown up safe.
She completed high school there, made a couple of loyal friends, and shared an extremely warm relationship with her mother, Nicole Larson.
Together, they ran "Larson's Oven," a bakery where they baked bread every morning.
The townspeople loved the mother-daughter duo, and their bread would often sell out before 9 AM.
In the afternoons, Grace and her mother would chitchat, often joined by neighbors like Mrs. Bradley and Mrs. Bowman. Afterward, they would clean up and prepare desserts for the evening, just in time for Riley to return from school.
It was a life designed to not have a single thing to worry about.
Spiraling through these thoughts in the dark, Grace grew intensely homesick, missing that simpler, anxiety-free environment.
She missed it, but a more immediate worry pressed in on her; her first day of university; she never thought she would attend.
Her mom, Nicole, had always been fiercely against it for both her and Riley, never even letting them leave town without a cloud of anxiety, the reason for which only Nicole knew.
But this past month, a shift occurred.
Nicole had become more on-edge, yet was suddenly adamant, convincing them both to attend, and specifically to enroll in the engineering major.
Again, the reason was a secret she kept locked away. Nicole was so insistent that both girls had finally given in.
Riley was secretly thrilled, as some of her friends were already at that Michigan university, so she relented quickly. But for Grace? She stopped studying two years ago. She'd lost all her academic momentum and was terrified.
Honestly, the life she had in Petoskey was more than anything she could have ever asked for…
Yet, beneath the fear, a strange excitement hummed. She'd seen those romantic web series with Riley, after all.
Her eyes closed without her realizing this time, her mind drifting from nightmares to daydreams, thoughts of her first day, new experiences, a different life, and new people… she'd get to live all of it.
'I hope the universe will be kind to me for one more day.'
That was her final thought before she finally, peacefully, dozed off.
But as sleep claimed Grace, a single, ominous question hung in the air, unanswered and heavy;
Was it truly a good thing that Nicole had sent her daughters away? Or, in a desperate attempt to protect them, had she just pushed them right into the lion's den, delivering the long-awaited tender flesh of Grace Larson to the very jaws that had been hunting for it for a decade?
The secrets, after all, were woven too tightly to stay buried.
They would now come out, whether asked for or not. They demanded to be unearthed.