Monsters by Karly Foland

Don't breathe. Lock your eyes on it as you reach for the light, millimetre by grueling millimetre. It's there, it's there, it's...click...gone.

Night after night, fitful sleep plagues you as a figure of shadow and ink stalks your dreams.  Your eyes snap open and your pulse pounds through your bloodstream like drums of war. A living nightmare stands before you, lies next to you, but utters no words, no sounds. But in its unbroken gaze you sense longing. It flickers out as the light flickers on. Then returns again.  And again. Each visit you think, It's real this time, I'm awake. Someone, something, is next to me, it's real. I feel it. But it's never real, they say. The textbooks call them hypnagogic hallucinations. A neurologist acknowledges your case is unique and vows to get to the bottom of it, but doesn't. 

You lament to your mother, but for years she's dismissive. Then cagey. Then, after too much wine, declares to your searching, bloodshot eyes, It was me or you. Slumped over the table, her snores drown out your rifling through dusty boxes in the attic. Your skin reddens and itches from the sickly pink insulation, but relief comes when your fingertips graze a black, velvet cover. The book crackles as it opens and your skin tingles as if an invisible hand slid ice down your spine.

Pictographs hint at answers cloaked by ancient scripts and crumbling pages. Inkblots coalesce into a creature prowling the margins. Page after page, it emerges from the blackness and nestles itself next to a sleeping woman. It drags her out of frame. Paint from both figures drips down the fore edge and mingles together. Bile rises in your throat and you slam the book shut.

Your mother grimaces as she dries the water you dumped over her head. She spots the book and appears to age twenty years in seconds. She sputters out an inevitable confession. 

I pierced the Penumbra years before I had you. And for years I was alone there. Somber, matte colors leeched from every strange surface and stuck to me like grotesque honey.  Paradoxes of shadow and geometry warped my sense of reality. For such an unsettling place, I slipped into it easily. Then, one night, so did they.

They came from the Umbra, the darkest recesses of our multi-layered reality. For hundreds of years, they considered our world of light and color to be a myth, so they sought to take me back as proof. I fled and never returned. But they hunted me here. At night. Light repelled them, but they slithered back through every dark fissure between our worlds. Then you, such a colicky thing, awoke me as much as they did. The sleeplessness drove me mad.

One night, they watched me rock you. You particularly entranced one, so I struck a deal with it. Let me sleep. Study you instead.

Your fists slam on the table like hammers. You'd scream if your throat hadn't closed up in horror. As if she'd long expected this reaction, she's unmoved and continues. 

I tried to stop it. This dark book is over four hundred years old. It should've had answers. But the visits...and abductions...had stopped by its writing, on their own, and no one knew why. I learned a civil war broke out in the Umbra, which halted their expeditions. They're now embarking on a new era of exploration. And expansion. 

She loosens the buttons near her throat and gulps down more wine from the open bottle on the table. 

The Umbra is small. They need to colonize our world. But they can't survive in our light. Not this generation. But the next maybe could...were it a co-mingling of our kinds... 

Her eyes dart around the room avoiding the daggers from yours. You eke out a guttural whisper accusing her of trading your freedom, your body, for hers. You see the battle raging within her – guilt over her betrayal and defense of her survival. The bottle slips from her grasp and shatters on the floor. She falls out of her chair and unleashes sobs that deteriorate into a sickening gurgling. Then nothing. A bloodied shard skitters across the floor as her blood oozes into the wine already staining the cracked linoleum.

You sway and stare at a series of divots in the wood table courtesy of your baby teeth. Even then, the monster tormented you but your nightly wails fell on willfully deaf ears.

You remain under the safety of the florescent kitchen lights until morning, when you stumble past her body and never think of her again.

Years and thousands of dollars spent on generators pass. The trauma burrows deeply enough that disbelief and complacency set in. Procrastination of maintenance leads to disrepair until a once-in-a-century tempest knocks it all out. The darkness you avoided for so long crashes into you like a wave and you convulse as it seeps into every pore. 

Thunder cracks and the monster of your youth materializes. It's close. Closer. You lunge for the flashlight on your nightstand and banish it. Your heart drops when the beam blinks in and out. With each agonizing return to darkness, it closes in until it grips your wrist and pries the flashlight from your hand. Unidentifiable parts of it wrap around you and bind you to it. Somehow you intuit lamentations over the years it lost with you, and its yearning for you sits like a hot coal in your chest. Chunks of your room fall away like melting paint revealing the Penumbra that has always lurked behind your walls. You gag at the deformed landscape drenched in stifling taupe shadows and begrudgingly bury your head into your monster. Its embrace tightens, transmitting reassurance that the beautiful gloom of the Umbra awaits you.

Your mother's bargain nears completion. As the darkness envelops you, its voice, like a panther's purr, caresses your ears for the first time. Our children will inherit the Earth.