The Boogeyman's Lullabye

The Sandman

What came out of that closet was something that drove a special few insane.  It was something from absolute darkness, birthed from something wretched and foul and deformed.  'It' was something that no one was ever supposed to see.  'It' was a Monster, in the most obscenely raw definition of the word.  

And it was faced towards me.  

And all that I could do, all that I had been doing since the scratching turned into horrific tearing, since the moaning turned into a hollow, gurgled breathing, since it got closer, was push myself back against the wall my bed pressed against.  The door had been slowly, almost like a chick cracking out of an egg, been popped and broken from the hinges and now hung brokenly open, the Monster standing there and panting, as if the door had taken all of its strength, but I knew that couldn't be right because...because I still had this horrifyingly sure feeling that this, whatever this was, whatever it had done to Michael, it would do to me in a heartbeat.

  And in a moment when I wasn't of much use or bravery, shoved against the wall and full with a fear you couldn't sleep off, a fear you couldn't ignore, the kind of fear that fells men, it was just me, the floor, then this monster that I couldn't for the life of me take my eyes off of.  He was there, hunched, body disfigured in ways I couldn't quite place, a joint too large here and there, spine almost permanently crooked to the point where it almost made an upside-down V, hands hanging before him, she, it with crooked and clawed fingers, skin peeling and scratched and clearly torn at with something that could have been teeth, clothing indistinguishable from this distance, ripped and destroyed, large, breathing erratically.

  Where I could see skin, it was paper-thin, grey, and full of bulging blue veins.  The only thing I could not see was its face.  That was covered in what looked like grey, fractured bone, growing from the center of the top of the head and extending down to the chin where it ended in a jagged line(like teeth, I would think to myself when I could think rationally), curving around the face to cover the ears and ending again, not fading into the skin and just stopping.  There was only one opening inside of it, as if the thing had rammed its face against something to create  some sort of an opening, a diagonal splinter barely an inch wide with splintering cracks shooting off of it like empty veins.

  I didn't know I was crying, feeling a kind of numbing shock that was there because I may very well have died of the intense and completely unfantisized fear suffocating me, just slightly aware that something wet was on my face and dropping down onto my hands.  I wasn't sad, there wasn't much else room left in me after what I was seeing for anything other than terror of the most poignant kind.

And that little moment where it was still and I was still and the only thing moving was a tear on my face and, unaware to either of us, a steadily strengthening trickle of sand that fell from nowhere, suddenly and quite harshly ended.

  The creature let out a howl of such intense agony, a scream of pain from the depths of a raw and destroyed throat, that I swore in that moment it shook the foundations of every home in all of Ireland, and pierced every ear of every child who did not know this kind of pain, and every child who did.  And I still couldn't move, and my mind was screaming but it didn't quite reach my mouth, so I just exhaled long and hard and watched and tears ran down my face.  And it lunged. And my eyes could not, would not shut.  So I saw it all, just as it happened, just as I wish I hadn't.

  He lunged head-first, still making an agonized scream entirely nonhuman and unanimal.  Out of the corner of my eye, there was a quick flash of yellow, of gold, that I may have dismissed had I any mind to do anything at the time.  He, it, whatever this Monster was, I was entirely sure, was about to sink his claws or teeth or something into my face and rip it clean off.  And all I could do was sit there.