Archive of Our Own

The year for this particular storm was 1994. Jack McLoughlin was a kid in Cloghan, Ireland, right about that age where monsters under the bed were genuine concerns, and pictures colored by his crayons were just now starting to form true faces on the paper. He lived with his two brothers, two sisters, and two parents, but he always felt a bit too distant from them. There was always something that set him apart, though he didn’t understand what it was until later.

Like most other children, Jack liked fairy tales and stories about magic. His favorite was Peter Pan; his babysitter liked to read it to him when he was in a bad mood. He always remembered the way that J.M. Barrie claimed fairies were born- a baby laughing for the first time, with that laugh breaking into “a thousand pieces.”

Something similar happened during the fateful lightning storm. Just as fairies are born from a child’s first feeling of giggling joy, some creatures are born from a child’s first feeling of terror:

One night, while lightning arced across the sky like flaming arrows fired from the heavens, Jack was shaking under his blankets. Tears spilled down his face like the water tracing down his window, and his tiny fingers covering his eyes only pushed him deeper into the panic. The bang and rumble of the sky, the whistle of the wind, the house trembling like a leaf in the darkness of a power outage -  beneath it all, he had the unsettling feeling that he was not alone. 

There was a monster in that room with him. Not under the bed, reaching its claws up to drag him to hell by the ankles. Not in the closet, staring out with wide and glowing eyes. The monster was not a many-legged, sharp-toothed, blood-spattered, rotten-brained thing, either. It was just a sleeping little seed that was buried deep, deep down in the back of Jack’s brain where his guilt and anger and fear festered. That part of Jack’s mind was a pitch-black space where the sun had been switched off, cold and empty and utterly silent. It was the loneliest place in the world, and it was the only place the monster had ever known. 

The creature had been waiting ever since Jack was born for an alarm to wake it up, for some light to shine down on it and help it grow. Another lightning strike hit - so close to Jack’s home it lit up the sky as if it was day - and it was just perfect for the occasion. Little Jack yelped, yanked the blankets even higher over his face, sobbed a little harder - this was the first time he felt fear and truly understood it, at that tiny age, and this was the spark that broke open the seed and let the monster form a voice.

“Goodnight, Jack,” the monster whispered, voice small and soft and scared just like the child that he was possessing; the darkness was not comfortable to wake up in, and this storm was not a happy place to take in his first breaths. And yet, while Jack brushed off the sound as just a dream, just a soft murmur, the monster felt hope in that moment. Hope to be Jack’s friend, hope to escape the shadows of Jack’s brain. So he dredged up all the strength he had to speak.

“Goodnight, Jack.”

◑◐◑◐◑◐

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, and things just got worse. The monster was immediately aware that his existence was incredibly painful. Not in an edgy, dramatic way, but in a literal sense. The darker parts of the mind are cold and stinging. Worst of all, though, was the loneliness. He couldn’t move, nor speak, nor catch the attention of anyone other than Jack. He could occasionally hear other people, but it was rare, just an echo reverberating through what was otherwise still. Even Jack was barely aware of him, at first. The monster hoped and hoped that things would get better when Jack realized more of his existence, that maybe he could find comfort in something beyond the void that he currently called home. 

That backfired.

The year was 1996. The older brothers of the McLoughlin family were sitting cross-legged in front of the television, a bowl of popcorn shared and spilled between them. Stupid jokes and laughs surrounded them, all eyes fixed on the TV screen, which was currently displaying some cheesy, cheap horror movie featuring blood about as realistic as that from a Halloween shop.

Still young enough to only be half as tall as his brothers at most, Jack wandered into the living room as soon as he smelled the salty and buttery popcorn. All he wanted was to grab a bite, but his brothers immediately tried to usher him out, “It’s a scary movie, bud, you’re gonna get nightmares.”

Jack should have asked them for a snack and left, but like most oblivious kindergarteners, he considered himself to be very mature, and wanted to be cool like his older siblings. So, with a rising stubbornness, he plopped down on the rug next to them, shoveling a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

It didn’t take long for him to realize his mistake. His baby-blue eyes were wide and starting to tear up at the sights and sounds of a B-movie massacre. The plot was definitely absurd, and even Jack already understood it was dumb. But the noises of squelching flesh and blood were still awful, and he knew the movie would haunt his dreams despite his brothers’ laughter. Even so, he tried to keep a straight face the entire time. No matter how scared he was, he was intent on convincing his siblings he was just as grown-up as them.

The credits rolling up the screen at the end of the movie felt like permission to sigh in relief and run back to his room, grabbing one last bite of popcorn before he sought out refuge among his stuffed animals. 

The monster was shifting, in the back of Jack’s head, during all of this. Fear fed him, giving him power to pull himself further from his empty home and closer to the surface world. His view was still mostly dark, but a light was starting to dimly wake ahead, sort of like a projector warming up from across the room. He could even imagine the softness of the stuffies and the light rise and fall of Jack’s chest, though it seemed far away and dreamy.

And as Jack shook in childlike fear, the monster spoke in a voice that was meant to be reassuring. “You’ll be okay…”

It came out more like a croak, tired and sickly, and the sheer suddenness of this voice echoing in his skull was enough to make Jack’s ears ring. A shiver ran down his spine and he sat up, dropping his teddy bear and searching all around the room for a source. But he knew the sound came from inside himself, unheard by the rest of the world, and he felt… heavy. Dizzy. Claustrophobia hit him, the knowledge of two entities in one shuddering space making him far more than uneasy.

“Jack?” That voice rang out again, so much like his own, and the boy covered his mouth, even gripping on tightly enough to know his jaw wasn’t moving. “Can you hear me, Jack?”

The monster saw more of the light as his host’s fear grew, less like a fading classroom projector and more like… sitting in the back of a movie theatre. Surrounded by the same old darkness, yes, but he could hear the world outside, he could see what Jack saw unfolding in front of him. If the monster focused enough, he could even feel the real world, and the physical pain of the shadow faded from him.

But that wasn’t an answer, was it?

“Can you hear me?”

The monster could feel Jack’s jaw starting to move, to respond, and he knew his host heard him. But before the next words could even get out, a knock came on the door.

Despite his terror, Jack forced himself to stand, pulling the door open a little too aggressively with his shot nerves. Harshly enough, in fact, that his older brother stepped back and raised his hands, as if in surrender. He frowned at the shaken look on Jack’s face. “Aw, man, I told you not to watch that movie with us… are you okay?”

Relief washed over the youngest at the sight of family; he sighed and wrapped his shaking arms around his brother. 

But as Jack’s worry faded, so did the monster’s view. Pain and cold tore at it’s very being as it was dragged back down into the empty void it called home. The feeling was like drowning, being yanked into a suffocating void far from the sun. It tried to resist, tried to stay in the theatre, in the forefront of the host’s mind, but there was nothing the monster could do. He was thrown into silence again, all alone.

He got a taste of the awful truth. To make himself heard, to earn relief from the pain, to give himself a taste of freedom in the light outside, the monster would have to be selfish. Jack would have to be afraid and alone, a sacrifice in his place.

He didn’t want to accept that, not yet.

◑◐◑◐◑◐

The year was 1997, and Jack was getting worse and worse at ignoring the monster in his head. Which only made things more troublesome for him, as the more frustration and fear Jack felt, and the more negative attention the monster received, the more power the creature seemed to gain as well.

Every time the monster had an opportunity to speak, it’d try to be as kind as it could. At best, a gentle, cautious “can we be friends?” At worst, “let me out, let me out, let me out” repeated for hours on end.

This kindness was not taken very well, though you can’t blame Jack for that. He tried to get a hold of books on monsters, sneaking through the dark wood shelves of the library and using his clumsy little fingers to scoop up any books with covers that he could identify well enough. He attempted to flip through them cover-to-cover until he got dizzy, struggling to read many of the words at his age, and never seeing anything quite right. It didn’t help that he got in trouble on the rare occasions that he got caught reading them, as his churchgoing parents weren’t very happy to see their seven year old feebly tumbling through tomes and horror tales about monstrous cryptids and dark myths. When he tried to find documentaries or movies to help, they just scared him worse. The only thing left he had to turn to was the church, which put vividly disturbing images of possession and pigs in his mind- he was now certain that the monster was a demon from hell, because that croaking voice creeping around in his mind was definitely no angel.

At least, he told himself, the monster can’t do anything but talk. Right? Wrong.

Jack was reading a worn-down library copy of a guide to mythology, a book the librarian told him to look at after seeing his strange reading history. In order to avoid his parents’ questioning, he had the book hidden under his covers and illuminated by a kids’ hand-crank flashlight at half past midnight. He didn’t even bother trying to read those foreign names and terms, instead focusing on the variety of old and new illustrations scattered throughout every page of the book. He ignored every page that had some hairy, big-toothed beast in it, flipped past the scaly lizard-like creatures and blood-sucking vampires. None of those were right; he decided that he just needed to find a page with no stupid pictures, preferably a page with that funny little word his pastor helped him define and write in washable marker so he wouldn’t forget how it’s spelled: “p-o-s-s-e-s-s-i-o-n.”  Once he found a good page, he planned to tell his older sister and ask her to narrate the page out loud so he could understand.

That never worked out. Instead, he nearly jolted out of bed after unintentionally flipping to a full-page spread featuring disgustingly realistic art of a distorted, freakish monster face that seemed to hungrily stare him down. Almost humanoid, but not quite.

It caught him off guard. He was ready to shut the book, hide it away inside his pillowcase, and go to sleep before the nightmares took hold on his mind. But his body kept turning the pages, no matter how much he wanted to just be done.

The creature in his head was the pilot, now.

It didn’t intend to possess him strongly enough to take control of the body, but the fear caught Jack in its hold and didn’t let go. The monster flipped through a few more pages before realizing how much control he suddenly had- he wanted to jump and run and play with sheer celebration! But instead he just pushed away the covers and stood at the side of the bed. The pain he usually felt all around him still settled as a stinging feeling over and inside him, but it was not as bad as the darkness, not by any means.

“Th-that’s so…. oh, wow,” he mumbled, scratchy words forced out into the real world, just like a real boy, all while Jack watched from inside his own body in horror. Now he was the audience, the quiet one, pushed to the background, dragged down to the depths he had never been in before. But the monster was too lost in the euphoria of newfound freedom that it didn’t care how Jack felt. 

First, he ran his hands across the blankets, feeling how soft they were, how the mattress squeaked a bit and slightly dipped under the weight of his shaking bones. Then, he walked around the room, each step a clumsy one, almost toppling over every time - he wasn’t used to being the one with a physical form. The night light by the floor flickered as the monster walked past it, but he didn’t notice, drawn to the wooden desk and tracing the corner to feel the edge.

Jack watched in terror as this continued for another five minutes, and then the monster grabbed a stuffed animal, nuzzled comfortably against it, held it tight, and rocked himself to sleep. He had some control now. The tables were turning in his favor.

◑◐◑◐◑◐

The year was still 1997. 

It was peaceful, really. 

The sky was blue, like the boy’s irises; a storm approached in the distance, but it wasn’t there yet. Casting uneven shadows, the trees stretched upwards like giants trying to snatch clouds from the heavens. The monster was in control of the shared body for one of the longest times so far in his life, and he dug his tiny, pale fingers slowly into the playground gravel beneath him. Miraculously, his skin barely stung, his bones only ached a little bit. He knew his host was trapped in darkness, in the back of his mind where the monster usually resided, but that didn’t matter right now. This moment in time… this was all that mattered. 

“Jack?”

The monster lifted his eyes, Jack’s eyes, and saw a kid above him. Shoulder-length auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a smattering of freckles on top of skin three shades darker than his own. The monster’s first thought was confusion; their hair was long like most of the girls he saw, but their clothes and face more like something he’d only seen on boys his age. But there were more important things to worry about than that, he wouldn’t ask.

“Um, Jack? You know words, right?” the kid asked again, tilting their head with more sass than the monster expected to see. 

Around Jack’s parents and older siblings, the monster would pretend to be his host, not revealing the secret for fear of getting in some sort of trouble, like those exorcisms Jack talked about and watched in the movies that scared him. But this was a kid his age, right? It could be different. He could… make a friend. His first friend.

The monster took a deep, nervous breath, shaking his head back and forth while Jack screamed and shuddered in the back of his head. “N-no. Not Jack, I m-mean.”

“Well, Not-Jack, that teacher lady said you’re Jack. I didn’ know ‘cause you’re new here.”

The monster hesitated. He didn’t plan this far ahead in explanations. “Um… yeah. Moved from Cloghan… sometimes I’m Jack. S-sometimes I’m… me.”

In bewilderment, the kid just stared ahead. After a brief intermission, where the monster grew more and more panicked over whether or not he’d made a mistake, the stranger just shrugged and sat down beside him. “Uh.. welcome to Ballycumber! I’m Sheridan Coil. What’s your name, then, Not-Jack?” They pronounced every syllable of their own name in a meticulous manner, as if making sure the monster remembered it dearly. They seemed like they were trying to be as adult as possible, imitating someone older than them but not getting it quite right. 

“Um… no.” “Didn’t your parents give you one?” they muttered, grumbling like they thought Jack’s parents were stupid. Or maybe they just thought the monster was stupid.

Sigh. “My… my p-parents don’t talk to me...? They just talk to, um, Jack.” 

Sheridan didn’t question that any further, perhaps not wanting to look like they were missing something obvious. “Oh. Well, we need to give you a name. Maybe something to do with your eyes.”

“My eyes?” the creature asked, letting his chin rest on his closed fist in contemplation. He was starting to realize this was the longest conversation he’d had so far in his life, and he was intent on making it last as far as it could. A name. A new name and a new friend.

“Yeah. I’ve never seen eyes like ‘em, why are they turning black at the edges? It looks like someone’s drawn on them with a marker.” Sheridan was very casual about all this, at least compared to Jack, who had previously seen the black in his own eyes during a particularly tough round of possession, and screamed with all his strength. It looked like ink dripping into water, the veins at the edges of his eyes growing darker and pushing further and further towards his irises. 

He just shrugged in response to their question.

They were very matter-of-fact, like no one had ever seen the sky but them, as they spoke. “Okay then, how about Night? Since they’re turning black, and the sky turns black.” 

But the monster immediately shook his head, drawing his legs closer to him and starting to scratch nervously at his skin. He did not want to be known like that, ever. He was suddenly far too aware of Jack’s voice crying out in the back of his mind, of each and every muscle and bone in this body not belonging to him. “No. No, s-sorry, I’m scared of the dark. Don’t like it.”

Sheridan didn’t mind, humming in thought and gently pulling the monster’s hands away from the skin he was tearing up with his nails. “How about Knight, then? Spelled other ways, y’know. Like a knight in shining armor, the good guy in the fairy tales.”

The idea of being called anything good made him sit up straighter, eyes wide and bright like the stars. “You… you really think so?” 

He already loved the name with his whole heart, a smile plastered on his borrowed face. He now wanted nothing more than to be a knight, a hero, shining and powerful and loved and known. 

Sheridan nodded, reaching out their hand for the other to take, feeling every knuckle and angle between them. “Mhm! Nice to meet you, Knight.”