Pat, Pengy & The Thing in the Closet 2010 edition
There’s something in the closet; something with teeth, and a desire to bite.
Pat sits in bed with the lamp on beside her, casting the room in a yellow glow. The quilt is pulled up to her chin and only her fingers with their chipped polish and her wide-eyed stare is visible. Her heart slams a beat inside her throat, dancing a jig upon her uvula that makes her want to puke. She heard it scratching against the wood; heard it scratching, scratching, scratching even through the dense darkness of unconsciousness. The scratching is what woke her. It sounded like Pengy’s claws when he scratches on her bedroom door to be let out or in. And speaking of Pengy, he jumps lithely upon the bed without a sound, and it startles her so much her teeth click together with a snap that rattles her entire jaw. Pengy looks at her with bright, intelligent green eyes and waows.
"You scared me, you stupid cat." Pat hisses, and scratches behind Pengy’s ears. His back arches and his tail curls into a question mark as he closes his eyes and the motor in his throat purrs to life.
His name is Pengy because of the white stripe that starts under his chin and travels down his chest and over his belly. His name is Pengy because when she was a child (not that she’s much older now, 12 isn’t that old) she thought he looked a bit like a penguin and her father, laughing, agreed. Pengy curls into a ball with his paws tucked underneath him as she scratches behind his ears, glancing sideways at her bedroom door. She didn’t remember leaving it open but she must have. How else could he have gotten in? She looks down at Pengy as fresh fear trills down her spine and gooseflesh erupts along her arms.
"Can you open doors now, Pengy?" Pat asks in a whisper. She doesn’t want the thing in the closet to hear her. She doesn’t want it to resume scratching, or worse, begin calling her name. The motor in Pengy’s throat thrums along at a steady pace, reminding her that as long as she keeps scratching Pengy won’t listen to a word she has to say.
Her fingers cease scratching and Pengy’s head tips back as he looks up at her with his big green eyes; I never said stop. He nudges her hand laying in front him with his rough triangle nose but she doesn’t notice; she’s staring across the room at the closet door. The something in the closet has begun to speak. It’s whispering through the crack beneath the door in a foreign tongue she doesn’t recognize, and yet at the same time she knows she’s heard before.
(patefacio ianua mihi , parvulus. patefacio ianua quod permissum mihi sicco.)
Pat yanks the quilt back up, and sends Pengy rolling. He lands on his feet and throws an ugly look at Pat before jumping off the bed. He lands almost silently, but she can hear the muffled thud of his padded feet hitting the wood. For a moment she can’t see Pengy, he’s hidden by the edge of the bed, but he comes back into view as he walks towards the closet, whip-like tail swishing through the air. He pads silently closer as the voice grows stronger.
"No, Pengy!" She exhales breathlessly, dropping the quilt from her face, momentarily forgetting her fear. He doesn’t hear her or he chooses not to listen because he continues walking towards the closet, ears perked forward inquisitively. She crawls on her hands and knees to the edge of her bed.
"Pengy!" She whispers louder, adding a touch of authority. He pauses and tips his head to the side, considering the closet door. "Get back here right now!" She orders urgently as fear nestles itself inside her stomach. The thing in the closet has gotten louder, but the worst part is that it’s starting to make sense now. She can almost understand what its saying and she doesn’t like that. She shouldn’t be able to understand it at all. The only language she knows is English, and what it’s speaking isn’t English, it’s guttural, and somehow poetic.
(Open the door, child. Open the door and let me out.)
Pengy steps tentatively forward once more and Pat throws her legs over the edge of the bed, bare feet striking the wood floor loud enough to make Pengy jump and look over his arched back at her. The voice in the closet goes silent as her feet hit the floor. Everything freezes for a moment, waiting. Through clenched teeth she whispers and points to the space on the floor beside her bare feet, "Get. Over. Here. Now!" She hisses through clenched teeth.
Pengy, who is turned halfway around to face her, merely considers her with those big green eyes, the tip of his tail flopping back and forth; make me, his posture suggests. Fury blends with the fear inside her stomach, boiling the acids like a pot of noodles. She points to the spot beside her once again, angrily, and speaks louder.
"Come here, now!" Pat says.
Pengy pads his way over to her and weaves around her legs, arching his back and flicking his question mark tail; don’t be mad, I was only kidding. She bends down and picks him up then crawls back into bed, throwing the quilt over both of them. Pengy climbs upon her belly and pokes his head out from under the quilt and waows once. She scratches behind his ears as his tail flits across her belly and the motor purrs to life once more.
The thing in the closet begins scratching at the door again. Pat hums quietly to herself as she scratches behind Pengy’s ears, listening to his sounds of contentment. The charm works and after a while she can no longer hear the thing scratching at the door anymore.
It won’t last though. It always comes back.
She lies that way with Pengy on her chest purring, feeling the motor in his throat thrum against her own chest as she scratches behind his ears. His furry warmth causes her eyes lids to dip into unconsciousness as the sun begins winking over the horizon. Sleep tugs at her eye lashes as she fights to stay awake, but she’s losing as her hand slips from behind Pengy’s ears and falls limp at her side. Pengy looks at her with dull consideration for a moment before resting his head upon his paws and closing his eyes.
The thing in the closet has gone silent, for now.
Pat stands inside the doorway of her new bedroom holding a box of clothes, on top of which Pengy sits with his tail curled around his paws. She smiles at the emptiness of the room staring back at her; it isn’t familiar and that makes it welcome. Her bed frame sits on the far wall facing the only window looking down at the front walk. There are no curtains or shades to hide the pre-winter light shining through the square panes. Beside the window sits a simple wooden desk painted white. There’s a glass cover on top under which pictures may be placed for safe keeping and viewing. The walls are bare white and the floor is carpeted in slate and cardboard boxes. She walks over to the bed and sets the oblong box down upon the bare mattress. Pengy jumps down and begins sniffing out his favorite spot. Pat turns from the box to face the closet and a shiver runs down her spine. The door doesn’t look much different from the one in her old room. Same white paint, same brass doorknob, but this is a different room. There’s nothing in there, Pat tells herself as she walks over to the door. Her hand hesitates above the doorknob (but suppose it travels) and then she grabs it and turns it fiercely to dispel the maddening thought, and opens the door to reveal a stark naked closet with a shelf up top and a rack upon which to hang clothes. Pat laughs nervously to herself and Pengy winds himself around her ankles, waowing his own laughter; silly Pat, there’s no monsters in this closet. She bends down and rubs a hand along his back which he arches in response.
"We’ve got a lot of unpacking to do, Peng." Pat said.
He looks up at her with his green-orb eyes; what do you mean ‘we,’ you’re on your own pal. He stalks off towards the window and leaps upon the ledge where he sits with his tail swinging back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. Pat shakes her head as she goes over to the box and begins unpacking.
At five o’clock Pat has unpacked everything that belongs to her and officially claimed her room. Her bed is made up with her plaid comforter, her clothes are hung in her closet (which is currently open), her desk supplies have been shoved in one of the three drawers, and her alarm clock sits beside her bed on the end table; the only thing that remains are the pictures to be put under the glass on her desk. She’ll save that for after dinner.
Pat walks passed the bathroom on her right (her bathroom which she’ll set up later as well) and down the short hallway to her mother’s room. The door is open halfway and Pat sticks her head in cautiously. Her mother is nowhere to be seen and that momentarily frightens her.
"Mom?" She calls as she enters the room, pushing the door inward slowly.
There’s a gargling noise from the master bathroom and Pat walks over to the open door. Dolores Stenson stands at the sink with an orange pill bottle open on the counter. Pat can’t read the label but she knows it must be one of the drugs prescribe by the doctor. Dolores swallows her pills and looks at her daughter with basset hound eyes. She’s aged much too fast in the intervening years and Pat knows it but she’s powerless to stop it. Where her lively, beautiful mother once stood with her raven-colored hair and bouncing grey eyes now stands a woman whose hair has begun to gray rapidly at the roots and whose face has lined with age most people don’t achieve until they’re sixty-five.
"What?" He mother croaks impatiently.
"I was just wondering if you wanted supper." Pat replies timidly, gazing off at the wall. She can’t bear to look at her mother this way.
"No, now leave me alone. I need to sleep." Dolores says capping her bottle of pills. She starts to put them away in the medicine cabinet then, thinking better of it, takes them with her. She flicks off the bathroom light and crawls into bed. Pat watches from the doorway, wanting to say something, knowing it’s best just to keep her silence. Dolores crawls under the covers (her bed is made but the rest of the room is littered with unpacked boxes) and shoos her daughter with a blind hand.
"If you’re hungry go make a pizza." Dolores says groggily. The pills are all ready beginning to have an effect. This has been the perpetual state of her mother for the last six years.
"Ok." Pat responds meekly and turns off the light as she leaves. She closes her mother’s bedroom door slowly and Pengy pads over to her from across the hall. Pat stoops to pick him up, placing him atop her shoulders where he crouches like a tiger, and heads downstairs.
In the kitchen she transfers him from her shoulders to the counter where he sits with his tail curled around his paws. She raises her finger to her lips in a Shhhh gesture and opens up the cabinet above both their heads. She pulls down a bag of cat treats and Pengy’s eyes brighten as he waows quietly. Pat smiles as she opens the re-sealable package and the smell of dried fish wafts from the bag. Her nose wrinkles as she pulls out two dried X-shaped treats and hands them to Pengy. He nips them from her palm with acute precision, his rough tongue reminding her of a gravel road.
Pengy crunches down the two treats in a matter of seconds and looks at Pat, more please. Pat reaches into the bag and pulls out two more, she holds them away from his nose as she leans in to talk.
"This is it, this is all you get, so enjoy them." She says as Pengy nudges her curled fist with his nose in dog-like behavior. "You’re so grabby." Pat says chuckling to herself as she opens her palm and Pengy gobbles down the last two treats. She re-seals the bag and puts it back in the cabinet, closing the door on its squeaky hinges slowly. Silence is a state her mother prefers, and Pat intends to keep it that way.
Instead of pizza she takes a macaroni meal from the freezer, pulls it out of the box, punches holes in the plastic cover with her fork, and pops it into the microwave for a minute and thirty seconds. She leans against the counter and waits for the timer to ding. The kitchen is nothing more than a square alcove off the entryway leading into the larger living/dining room. The wooden floor is slick enough for her to slide over in her sock feet like a professional skater. There’s no dinner table, only a bar that acts like a window into the living room. She can see through the patio door on the far wall to the man-made pond out back and wonders if there’s fish inside it for Pengy to catch.
The microwave dings and Pat pulls out her dinner; she rips the cover back and steam issues from the bubbling macaroni in a cloud. With her macaroni in one hand and Pengy under the other arm Pat walks into the living room, turns the TV on low, and eats her dinner while Pengy sits beside her, watching the fork from the plastic tray to her mouth.
Pat sets the empty microwavable tray aside with her plastic fork, pulls Pengy into her lap, and stares enraptured as images flash by on the muted TV, absently stroking the soft, silky fur at the top of Pengy’s head. All around them the house is silent as Pat barely breathes, falling into an unconscious stupor. After a while her head begins to loll forward, her chin resting up her chest. Pat jerks awake, startling herself and Pengy, who turns his head back around to give her an impatient stare; seriously?
“Sorry, Peng; I guess it’s time for bed.” Pat says yanking a cream colored afghan off the back of the couch, laying down, and pulling it over the both of them. She is just long enough to still fit under the whole blanket, but in another year her toes will stick out and she’ll be cold when she wears this blanket. Pengy lies curled into a little ball of furnace heat upon her flat chest. He opens one eye halfway as she pulls the blanket over them, and then goes back to sleep, or at least feigning it. They fall asleep that way as the muted TV acts as a nightlight keeping the monsters in the dark at bay.
Around midnight Pat awakens from a deep slumber to find Pengy sleeping curled upon her chest. She’s grateful for the warmth of his furry body because the room is freezing cold. Pat rubs sleep from her eyes and looks around. The TV is blank but she could swear she fell asleep with it on. Her eye automatically moves to the right where the patio door has been left open, admitting October chill. Pat sits up suddenly and Pengy rolls to the floor with an angry waow. He lands on his feet and looks up at Pat; what was that for? But her attention is locked on the patio door and the moonlight filtering in through the glass. She knows she never opened that door.
With quiet deliberation Pat moves over the wooden floor in her sock feet, gliding rather than walking, and stands inside the door, peering out. Pengy stands in between her legs, curious eyes peering into the dark, and his tail swishing back and forth in agitation.
"Hello?" She calls timidly, suddenly very afraid and very certain that she’ll receive a response.
Something under the water in the pond gurgles in response. Pat shivers not from cold but terror as she remembers the voice of the thing in the closet. Pengy darts outside from between Pat’s legs and before she can reach out and grab his tail he’s gone into the dark. Without another thought Pat follows him through the dew stained grass towards the edge of the pond.
"Pengy!" Pat whispers as a breeze grazes over her bare skin. No response from the cat or the pond. Cautiously Pat approaches the edge of the pond; the tall grass hides the muddy edge of the water and the moonlight glints off its still surface, making it that much harder to see anything. There’s no sound from the night-bugs, no sound from the pond, no sound from Pengy, and that scares Pat the most. She leans out over the water’s edge.
There’s a face beneath the surface of the water, distorted by the moonlight, but she can make it out clearly enough, it’s the face of a man. His skin is grey and bloated and his mouth opens in a yaw of bubbles as his decaying fingers reach through the water to grab her. Pat screams and stumbles backwards, her feet slide out from beneath her and she lands with a thud upon the dewy ground. The man in the water is climbing up the muddy bank for her, she can hear his body slipping and sliding for purchase in the mud. He growls in frustration as Pat turns around and runs for the house at a sprint.
She slams the patio door shut and locks it, panting heavily. Pengy appears outside the window and scratches upon the glass with his paw. Panic slams home inside Pat’s chest as she fumbles for the lock. Finally she manages it and yanks the door open.
"Get in here, stupid!" She hisses breathlessly at Pengy as he darts inside. Pat re-locks the door and backs away from it slowly, waiting for the face of the man to appear at the door but he never does. She stands in the combination living/dining room for a long time before she finally assumes nothing is going to happen. Those seconds are the longest of her life as she waits for the impossible.
Pat collapses in the middle of the floor and Pengy pads over to her and rubs along her back before climbing into her lap. She runs a hand over his silky fur, wraps her arms around him, and pulls him into a tight hug, burying her face in his neck.
"You stupid, stupid cat; don’t ever do that to me again!"
Pengy waows in response; I’m sorry, I love you. Pat cradles him in her arms and carries him upstairs to her bedroom. She shuts the door firmly behind her and crawls into bed. With Pengy lying on her chest she glances over at the closet which is now shut. I don’t remember closing it; she says to herself and suppresses a shiver. Just when she thinks she couldn’t possibly go to sleep she does.
After a warm shower the next morning Pat has almost forgotten the horror from the night before; she’s all ready begun convincing herself it was a nightmare. She takes a bowl of Kix cereal upstairs to her room and sits down at her desk. It’s time to put the pictures under the glass. From the top drawer to her right she extracts a manila envelope. Pat lifts the tab and dumps out a slew of crumpled and faded pictures next to her cereal bowl. She tosses the envelope aside and begins flipping the pictures over and sorting through them. Her fingers stop above the picture of a happy young man holding a plump baby in a diaper. With trembling fingers Pat lifts the photo from the desk for a closer look.
In the picture the man has a full of head of brown hair and dancing eyes. He’s smiling at the baby who has her chubby arms wrapped around his neck in a tight embrace. Pat can almost hear the laughter between the two of them stuck in their perfect, picturesque moment; a moment that will never end in which they will both remain eternally happy wrapped in one another’s arms.
A single tear slips from Pat’s eye and escapes down her cheek. She wipes it away absently as Pengy jumps upon the desk next to the photos and crouches there eyeing her cereal bowl. Pat doesn’t notice him; she’s caught up in the memory of the man in the photo.
She doesn’t remember the day the photograph was taken but she remembers the man in the photo, she should, he’s her father. She remembers the same happy young man who always wore blue jeans, flannel shirts, and steel-toed boots. She remembers how he always smelled like diesel when he came home from work; she never knew exactly what he did, something with machines, but she loved that smell. It was the gaseous, suffocating scent of hard work; it was the smell of her father, the last thing she would ever have to remember him by. She remembers how she could wrap her arms around his middle, bury her face in his shirt, and smell the diesel on his clothes until she was dizzy with the strength of it. Most of all she remembers the way she would curl up on his chest like Pengy does to her and listen to the beat of his heart on Sunday afternoons when the race was on. Best of all she remembers how he’d lean in and kiss her forehead goodnight and right before he’d leave he’d whisper "I love you" inside her ear, and she’d giggle and kiss his forehead and whisper back, "I love you too, Daddy."
Now all she has is this photograph, this still frame of a moment long ago, a moment she doesn’t even remember, and the hundreds of others lying scattered upon her desk; pictures of a life that no longer feels like her own, pictures that portray the life of someone else, a stranger; someone happy who got to live those moments and who smiled that much but it certainly wasn’t her. Pat couldn’t have lived that life, not when she felt so alone now.
The tears are streaming down her face now, she can’t hold them back, a dam has broken somewhere inside her and she can’t plaster it up fast enough to stop the leakage. Pengy sits up in alarm, watching her cry over her pictures, tear drops falling upon the happy faces smiling up at her.
She always thought he was happy until he took his own life, leaving no note, no trace, and no explanation for the sudden suicide. He looks happy in her pictures and she prefers to remember him that way, to think that he died happy, that maybe there was a good reason he drove through a guardrail and over a cliff to the jagged rocks and crashing waves below. Pat shivers; her entire body feels cold and dead at the thought of her father driving off a cliff. Pengy rubs his face along her arm and Pat wipes the tears from her eyes with her palms.
"I’m sorry, Peng, I just miss him sometimes."
Pengy waows, me too. Pat slides the pictures, one by one, reverently under the glass cover on her desk. There’s no reason she should hide them anymore. This is a new house, a new life, a new chance, even if the same old monster keeps haunting her.
Dolores staggers into her daughter’s room late that evening, not bothering to knock, she just barges in. Pat looks up from her place sitting on the bed as if she’s been caught in the act of doing something naughty. Her mother’s face is tear-stained and blotchy, with spots of color resting high on her cheekbones. She enters the room apologetically until she sees the pictures staring up from under the glass. Her face twists in rage.
Pat climbs off the bed. Pengy stands up too, his tail swishing back and forth in alarm; they’re both tensing for a fight.
"They’re mine." Pat replies quietly, defensively. Pengy crouches upon the bed, staring hard at Dolores Stenson, the fur upon his back standing straight up.
Dolores looks at her in disgust. "They are not. Get rid of them. Get rid of him."
"No." It’s a simple negation, but it ignites a volley of vicious verbal arrows from her mother.
"I said get rid of them! I don’t want to see them in this house anymore! Get rid of them!" She screams and lifts up a corner of the glass, pulling several pictures out and throwing them upon the floor. Pat rushes forward and shoves her mother backward towards the door, away from the pictures.
"They’re mine and I’m going to keep them!" She shouts desperately, trying to make her mother understand that she needs them; she needs to remember her father this way, not the way he looked before they closed the coffin lid.
Dolores hits the door and looks at Pat, stunned, but only for a moment. She steps forward and pulls her arm back and slaps her daughter across the face. Pat’s head is rocked sideways and her cheek stings where her mother hit her. Pengy leaps from the bed hissing and attacks Dolores’ ankles. She screeches and kicks her foot out at him but he dodges it and lies upon the floor, out of her reach, hissing. Dolores picks up the pictures she removed from under the desk and tears them into pieces. Pat watches in abject horror as her mother drops the pieces and stalks from the room.
Pat falls to her knees and shuffles the pieces around until she can make sense of them. One of them is the picture of her father and herself as a plump baby with their arms around one another. The smile on her father’s face has been torn in half. Even with tape the pictures could never be repaired. With one hand Pat swipes the pieces into disarray once more. She doesn’t want to look at that half-smile if she doesn’t have to.
Pengy’s still lying crouched upon the floor, watching the door for Dolores’ possible return. Pat covers her face in her hands and cries, the sobs wracking her tiny frame. After a moment Pengy leaves his defensive position and goes to comfort Pat. His body magnetizes to hers as he rubs his head along her arm. Pat removes her hands from her face and looks at her best friend through a watery haze. She laughs at him once, and then pulls him into a tight embrace. Pat is the only one Pengy will tolerate this from. Even before her father’s death, Pengy would never let another person hug him this way, only Pat. Before he died, Kevin, Pat’s father, insisted that the only reason Pengy let Pat hug him that way was because she’d done it since she was a baby and Pengy was a kitten.
Pat cradles Pengy in her arms and absently strokes his fur as she stares at the floor where the picture pieces lie mocking her, willing her emotions back inside her control. Her face stings from where her mother hit her. That’s never happened before. Pat can handle the silence; she can handle her mother’s need for it, she even understands it. Pat prefers silence. She’s tuned into the sounds of the world more that way. But she can’t handle this, this anger, this betrayal; she’s staring hard at the pictures her mother tore into pieces, no, the memories her mother tore into pieces. And like that her emotions are no longer under her control. She squeezes Pengy too tightly, crushing him to her chest. His claws dig into her flesh, but Pat hardly feels it.
Something scratches at the closet door. Both Pat and Pengy’s heads snap up in response. The fear trilling down Pat’s spine causes her to tighten her grip even more on Pengy, who can’t take it anymore, and wiggles free, using his claws viciously. He leaves light cuts and scrapes along Pat’s arms. The pain of his claws digging into her skin makes her momentarily forget the sound of something scratching at the door. She looks down at her arms to examine the damage and that’s when the sound comes again. It’s a light scratching, barely discernible; could even be Pat’s imagination, and probably is.
Something scratches at the closet door again, this time louder, more insistent; it’s not a part of Pat’s imagination. Pat and Pengy stare at the closet door for a moment before Pengy breaks the ensuing silence by padding towards it. Pat reaches out to snatch him back but she’s too late. Pengy stops just shy of the door and the world wavers for a moment as the absolute silence suffocates. In the next second something solid thuds against the door sending Pengy skittering backwards, hissing, and Pat’s eyes widen in horror. The thing on the other side thuds against the door again, this time harder. Pat hears the wood begin to splinter and sees where it has all ready started to bow outward. Terror immobilizes her where she kneels before the torn photographs. The next thud cracks a hole in the door and the thing in her closet growls. Every hair on Pat’s body stands at attention at the growl because not only was it feral but it was unmistakably human. Two rotting, decaying fingers poke through the hole and grip the edges of the wood. The thing pulls back and takes with it a handful of the door.
Pat watches in terrible wonder as three fingers appear in the widening hole and pull more of the door away. She watches the process unfold until the thing behind the door can fit its fist through the hole. As it remodels her bedroom door it whispers to her from the other side and at first she can’t comprehend its foreign tongue but after a while it starts to make sense. She can’t move, she’s immobilized by fear, and Pengy stands off to the side, crouched, hissing and spitting like a rabid cat.
"Adeo mihi precious. Adeo mihi. Adeo vestri vinco. Adeo vestri Monasteriense."
(Come to me, precious. Come to me. Come to your master. Come to your monster.)
Possessed by the voice of the thing behind the door Pat begins crawling towards the door where it continues to peel away the wood to reveal its face. She’s chilled to the bone with terror, but that voice, those words offer a sedative comfort to her brain that insists she’s safe.
"Bonus parvulus. Bonus pet. Adeo mihi. Adeo vestri abbas."
(Good child. Good pet. Come to me. Come to your father.)
Pat’s mindless crawl towards the door ceases upon the last word as she stares through the hole into the darkness on the other side of the closet. She can’t see anything in there, and has almost convinced herself she never saw anything tear a hole in the door; it was there when she moved in. There is nothing but silence from the thing on the other side. Silence in the bedroom where Pat is down on her hands and knees. Silence as Pengy rubs against Pat’s thigh and she looks back at him just as the thing on the other side of the door barrels through screaming. Pat turns towards its alien voice in time to see the face of her father climbing through the hole.
His skin is green and dirt runs from the corners of his eyes like tears. His face is cracked on the right cheek and above his temple where the glass from the Ford’s windshield cut him on the night he died. She can see the white of his cheekbone and skull beneath where the skin has rotted away. His teeth are yellow mossy graves in his mouth and some have fallen out completely. Her father wriggles his way out through the hole in the door like a worm through dirt. Pat screams like a siren as his hands clutch for the hair hanging around her face, his torso wriggled halfway out of the hole.
Pengy hisses, his back arching as his ears lay flat, and jumps towards the monster worming its way out of the door. His needle-point teeth sink into the decaying meat of her father’s arm and the monster roars. Blood black as mud oozes from the puncture wounds in the corpse’s arm and burns Pengy’s whiskers off. The cat screeches through his hold on the monster’s arm even as it flings him around like a rag doll. The monster pulls Pengy from its arm with his other hand and throws him against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Pat is vaguely aware of the dull thump Pengy’s soft body makes as it hits the wall. She has just lost her life-long best friend in a matter of seconds and there’s no time to consider his passing.
She scrambles backwards and the monster recommences its murderous crawl out the door. The monster that looks so much like Pat’s father makes one final push and climbs through the hole. Pat scrambles backwards on her butt and hands but the monster moves with alarming speed and is on top of her before she can scream.
Pat does scream but only for a second as her father’s hands wrap around her throat, choking with incredible strength for a corpse. She can smell the stench of decay for only a moment but that moment is more than enough. It makes tears spring from her eyes, blurring her perception of the monster’s face before her. It’s wild, animal eyes bore into hers. It looks like her father on the outside, a dead version of him, but on the inside there is nothing left of her father. She gathers all this in the second before its fingers encase her throat and understanding clicks into place like a door slamming shut.
Dolores’ silence after her husband’s death permeated the thick walls of their house until she couldn’t take it anymore. So she moved herself and her daughter into a townhouse across town to get away from the memories and the silence but it didn’t make a difference. The silence and memories traveled with, like the photographs. Only her daughter, the child that resembled her father, continued to exist through the silence, the only constant. Dolores couldn’t handle looking into her daughter’s face and seeing her husband so she shut herself in her room, downed the doctors prescribed pills, and slept. Time thickened with the silence and the monster fed on the distance growing between mother and daughter until it had formed a body of its own hiding in Pat’s closet; a manifestation of the rage burning between them. The monster wasn’t really her father but his absence, the silence where he once existed, the void that now would always be hollow; a silence that would always need to be filled.
Pat stares into the face of her father and the world wavers before her. Black wings flutter at the edges of her vision and she knows those wings belong to death. She also knows the silence that follows in her death, the hollow place where she once existed will fester into something inhuman that merely resembles, merely mocks the reality of her now. She will become that which she has feared scratching at the closet door (or climbing from the pond). She will become the monster in her mother’s closet. Through the denseness of death comes a voice she recognizes as the voice she confused for the voice of the monster.
"Adeo mihi parvulus. Adeo mihi meus pet. Adeo nex."
Come to me child. Come to me my pet. Come to death.
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
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