Chapter 1: Roy
I come down to the kitchen for breakfast on a Saturday morning. My mom and my sister are already up, and they look exhausted. My mom asks, "Did you sleep alright?"
"Yeah," says I.
"Even after you woke up?"
"...I woke up?"
Sometime in the middle of night, I had started screaming. My mom rushed into my room and found me sitting up in bed, screaming, "ROY! ROY! ROY! ROY!" She did her best to calm me down while shooing away my pissed-off sister who had stormed in to find out what the fuck was going on with me. She asked me who Roy was, but I would only say that he was "a bad man." I didn't say anything but "Roy is a bad man."
I'm shocked as they're telling me all of this. And they're surprised that I don't remember - but then again, I'm the sound sleeper of the house who can doze through lightning storms. We write it off as some weird nightmare that I don't remember.
Years later, I'm off at my first year of college. My mom sends me a videotape in the mail; she didn't mention it before I had left, as in "Hey, keep your eye on the mailbox" or anything. I press play, and it's my mom taking a video camera through our house. She was moving, and sent the tape as one last walk through of the now-empty house before she left. It was sweet and a little tear-jerking, until she said, "So, here's something you might find interesting," when she approached a closet in her bedroom.
This closet, aside from being the hiding place for all the Xmas gifts, was also always packed full of old luggage and other odds and ends. You could only go three feet in before you would have to start climbing on things to go farther. She goes in with the camera and I see that there are purple crayon drawings on the wall, down at the height where a small child would draw. There are random scribbles, some stick figures, something that may have been a dog. I was already puzzled, because I had no memory of ever playing in this closet and I don't know how I would have drawn on the walls when they were, in my mind, always covered.
Then the camera comes to a word on the wall.
ROY
And my mom must not have remembered that night. She said on the tape, "Roy...I wonder who Roy is."
