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“Kid? Kid! Where the hell’d you go?”
The man’s harsh voice echoed off the twisty, turny rock faces and she squished herself flat to the ground, trying to stay as quiet as possible. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if he found her (she would be going back soon enough anyway) but she wanted the freedom to do what she wanted for just a little while longer.
It was hard to remember the times before the constant night and the constant cold and the fussy adults who had found her crying in a pit of gravel and hadn’t stopped telling her what to do since.
Don't touch that.
Don’t go over there.
Don’t wander off.
Don’t bother him, he’s busy.
Shut up! Quit cryin’ or the monsters will find us and then you’ll really have something to cry about.
She didn’t like it.
She had hazy memories from before getting lost here of other adults, and they also sometimes told her what to do or what not to do, but they were much nicer about it. They would give her something else to do, or would distract her in some way, or would say not now, not yet , which meant that she would be allowed to do whatever it was, she just had to be patient.
If one of the ladies had been calling for her, she probably would have stood up and gone back to them straight away. She would have been dragging her feet and trying her best to get them to let her keep exploring, or to go exploring with her, but she would have gone back.
Maybe even if it had been the man with the funny hat.
Not this man.
This man she did not like.
He was loud, and he was mean, and he tended to drag her around or slap her hands when she wasn’t moving fast enough or doing what he wanted.
Sometimes she wished one of the monsters would eat him.
Sometimes the ladies did, too. (They told her this in very quiet whispers once.)
She liked the nice lady the best, and not just because she was nice (although that did help). The nice lady would play with her and tell her stories and comb through her hair with her long fingers and sometimes even braid it. It reminded her of before, and that would sometimes make her sad that she couldn’t remember as well as she used to (what if someone was looking for her and she forgot them and they couldn’t find her because of it?), but then the nice lady would hug her close and tell her not to worry and comfort her until she felt better.
“God dammit .”
The man’s voice was farther away now and she wiggled in place excitedly before standing up and dashing in the opposite direction.
Formless pink and yellow lights danced overhead and she pretended she was chasing them. They were far, far, far up in the sky, like rainbow-colored stars that danced around in the night, and she knew she couldn’t actually play with them, but they didn’t seem dangerous either, like the adults thought they were.
The dangerous things always came from the rocks and the caves and the canyons, oozing and crawling and sneaking up out of the deep dark shadows to chase them and tear at them.
Where she was now had none of those. Instead, it was flat, flat ground covered in lumpy little pillars of rock that were about as tall as her own nose. Running between them was like running through a maze, except she could see where she was going, and she could see the adults better than they could see her.
Or, she could have, if she hadn’t run quite so far off.
She could see the mean man storming off and thought it best to stay out of his way completely. When she was ready to go back, she would try to find the other adults first.
She took a deep breath of the cold night air and wondered if it ever snowed here. It hadn’t yet, but it also sometimes didn’t snow for ages and ages before, even when she really wanted it to.
Maybe she could ask—
Something… hissed, or maybe slithered, or maybe sighed, somewhere in the rock maze.
She whipped her head around. She couldn’t see anything, so… whatever it is couldn’t be very big, could it?
She scrunched up her face and balled up her fists. She was not scared of the dark, or of the little skittery slithery squishy things that crept around in it.
And… maybe it was friendly!
Surely not everything could be mean and scary. And, after all, hadn’t she been something little that had sat around making noise before someone else had found her?
Maybe it was another kid her age!
Yes! Yes, that had to be it!
Monsters were never little, and this was little, so maybe it was a bug or maybe it was a new friend!
Emboldened, now, she tried to figure out what direction the noise had come from. The little pillars of rock were very fun to play in, but they were good at bouncing sounds around in the wrong directions.
They were also, it turned out, good at bouncing her around in the wrong directions.
She had run in so many circles now that she had lost track of where she started, where the noise was, and where the mean man had gone. As she caught her breath, she put her hands on her hips, and tried to think what to do next.
“Hello?” she called, softly.
Something shifted abruptly, just to her right, and she jumped. There was a small clatter of rocks and she could hear something moving away.
She ran after it, calling, “Wait! Come back!”
It kept running, and she kept chasing, until she came to the edge of the pillar field and she found herself at the base of a big cliff that had a thin slit of darkness slashed into the bottom of it. That drew her up short and she wrung her hands together in the fabric of her long shirt as she looked at it.
Dark caves were where monsters liked to hide, but… whatever she had been chasing hadn’t chased her and therefore couldn’t be a monster, because monsters always chased. And… maybe if they were little like she was, they didn’t know that monsters hid in the caves.
She should get them out. It would be the brave thing to do.
“Hey,” she called out, not moving. “That’s where monsters live!”
No sound came from the dark crack.
“You can come out! We can be friends!”
Still nothing.
She bit her lip. She didn’t want to go into the dark, but… she wouldn’t want to be left alone there if she was scared.
She crept closer, slowly, one tiny step after another, until she reached the rock and ducked just slightly to take one step into the darkness.
She felt a lot less brave now that she couldn’t see what was in front of her.
“Um… h-hello?”
One small, faint, point of light popped into existence in the dark, followed by a second, and a third, and then even more. She sucked in a breath and stumbled backwards away from what, now, she knew surely had to be a monster, as the lights lunged toward her with a rattling screech.
As she turned to run, her foot caught on the hem of the long shirt she wore and she tripped, falling hard on the rough stone ground. Her knees and her hand scraped hard, but she didn’t have time to worry about the stinging pain as the growl of the monster got closer. She flipped herself over and threw a hand up as a bundle of inky black and shiny swarmed up over her legs toward her face.
She had wanted to push it off, or to slap it away, but she didn’t see it had opened its mouth, and didn’t have time to react before its teeth sliced down into her hand and something just as sharp sliced through the space behind her eyes.
The world went utterly, completely dark and she screamed.
Something else screamed, too.
She slapped at it with her free hand, trying to get it off, trying to get it to let go. Her bitten hand pulled free from the teeth with a gross and painful pop, and she fell sideways, curling around it on the ground, crying in pain.
Dimly, she realized she was thinking about the adults and then running through the pillars and then wanting a friend, and then a new mess of sadness bloomed in her mind as she thought about how very not-a-friend this had turned out to be.
And then she was… confused?
No, no… she wasn’t confused.
She was sad and she was scared and she was hurting and she…
She hadn’t been eaten yet.
The thing was still on her; she could feel its weight pressing down on her legs and stomach, but it hadn’t eaten her after biting her the first time.
She blinked, furiously, trying to see it, but the world stayed stubbornly black.
“Go away! ” she wailed between sobbing hiccups. She wanted to smack whatever it was, but didn’t want her other hand to get bitten, too.
She felt confused again, and then afraid again—the fear of being chased by something bigger than herself that she knew wanted to eat her. Except it wasn’t… quite right?
Now she was confused. And scared and still in a lot of pain. Her hand and shirt were very wet.
The thing on her shifted, and slid to the slide, dropping onto the ground with a goopy plop. She whimpered and hoped it would leave and hoped then maybe one of the adults would find her.
Instead, she heard it creep closer.
Thoughts flickered by again—chasing the sound through the pillars, being alone, getting her hair combed, a warm sunshiny day and a pond and…
Why was she thinking this?
Something trilled, right next to her face, and she flinched backwards as much as she could while laying on the ground like a curled up bug.
Through the wet on her hand, she felt something new and slimy, and the pain in her hand changed from something sharp to something dull and tingly.
She keened in fear and then a long, long moment passed in silence except for her own crying.
Was it still there?
She pawed at the air and her hand found the creature. It wasn’t as slimy or as gooey as she expected it to be, instead it was warm and smooth. Something long and noodly wrapped around her hand and up her wrist. Another quiet trill came from it and her own memories flurried by so fast she couldn’t keep track of what she was thinking except that her head hurt and she wished she could see.
Had anyone heard her scream?
[ fear ]
“What?” she croaked.
Another confused tangle of emotions bubbled up before something behind her eyes burned and she started screaming again.
[ FEARFEAR, quiet, hide ]
After the new pain ebbed away, she blinked and squinted through a haze of tears to see a dozen faintly glowing eyes, set in a rippling grey and black head, inches from her own.
She startled and screamed and scrambled up and away from the creature, and it scrambled backwards away from her.
A lot of thoughts happened at once—she was thinking, again, of what a friend was; she was thinking, again, of hiding from the adults; she was thinking the nighttime was a lot less dark than it had been before; and she was thinking about how neither her nor the little creature had properly run away from the other.
She didn’t really know what to think of it all.
She might have been curious, she thought.
Or she might have been confused. Or scared. Or lonely.
Well...
She knew she was all of those.
Could little monsters also get lonely?
“Wh… what are you?” she asked, with a voice made thick from her crying.
One little tendril reached out from the creature and delicately curled around her hand again.
[ curiosity ] flickered stronger through her mind.
Maybe this was a monster, but… maybe it could also be her friend.