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Despite the complete darkness, Jonathan knew he was in a maze. In the same way, he was sure there was a monster in the maze with him, a monster that meant him harm. He had an image of it; small, but only because it was hunched over, with scaly shadows for wings in the edges of his vision, and horrible teeth just out of sight, and glowing, toxic green eyes…
A movement—not behind him or ahead of him, but beside him, and a brush of scales to his skin, and the monster said “Run!” so he did, only to find himself knee deep in thick, grainy water and sinking fast. “Run!” the monster said again, hissed, and Jonathan tried, and in a disconnected way, he was terrified.
The maze turned upward, and he struggled to get up, to get out of the water and follow the path because the only other option was Down. He struggled and struggled but the Up only got further and further away without him.
A boat sailed toward him, meandering through the thick water, glowing orange. The captain smiled down at Jonathan as the boat passed and Jonathan began to drown, choking on the gritty water—it filled his mouth and lungs with cement, and he sank, unable to breathe but unable to die, the permanent escape not an option.
Jonathan sank through endless water and into a supermarket. He was able to breathe around the concrete in his lungs, a thing he was aware of but unable to do anything about. He walked around, looking at the food and cheap supermarket goodies, but everything had turned to wriggling, hissing snakes. He picked one up between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it onto the counter. Behind the cash register, the monster showed his teeth to Jon—a terrifying, sharp thing, this smile. The concrete crept up Jonathan’s throat, and the monster swelled to twice his original size, then three times and four and more, as Jonathan choked and the snakes and the walls closed around them—
The monster smiled, and the scene changed.
They were sitting in Jon’s room, the monster’s shadow wings touching Jon’s posters and flitting over the creases on his bed, and the monster said in the most casual voice, “What do you see?”
“I see you,” Jonathan said, because that was the thing to say.
“No,” said the monster, “You don’t.”
…
Jonathan woke, then; he was on his back, the sheets twisted around him and holding him down just as effectively as chains might. For a terrifying moment, the shadows on his ceiling were the monster’s wings, shifting and spreading and crawling across the surface, toward the edges where ceiling met wall—and it was only after he had scrambled out of bed and hit the light switch that he was able to breathe. It was only once he was standing there, sweating and shaking, that he began his nightly battle against the urge to break down and sob.
“Just a dream,” he said aloud. His weak voice gave no reassurance. Despite that, he repeated himself several times through the shuddering urge to cry – to no avail. Once he was spent, his entire body burnt from the sheer force of it, he rubbed his eyes and checked the time. It was 4:32 AM; the dream had come more quickly than usual this time, as he had only turned out the lights and lay down at 3:56. But this, no matter how unrestful and short it had been, would be the only sleep he would get. There was no falling back to sleep after one of the nightmares, even when the images from his subconscious always slid quickly back into oblivion, losing their details and distinct shapes in mere minutes.
Jonathan needed a distraction. His eyes landed on his schoolbag. No, wouldn’t work, no matter how much work piled up or how low his grades dropped. He wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Computer? Nobody would be online. Books? He had a million, but he had read them all, and he knew that they wouldn’t take his mind from its current state…Music. Music, music—his music never failed him.
Jonathan realized his hands were still shaking when he had great difficulty plugging his headphones into his phone. Sudden rage swelled inside him, at the world and the dreams and himself for being so weak, but he managed not to throw his phone at the wall. Barely.
…
The next day found Jonathan nodding off during physics class—not like the teacher had been making much sense anyway—as per usual. He could not keep his eyes open.
“Jon.” There was a whisper. Jonathan heard it, and thought briefly about responding, but couldn’t muster the energy. “Jon!” He recognized the voice; it belonged to Charles, the boy who sat in front of him. Jonathan forced his eyes to open. The world was fuzzy for a moment before Charles was pulled into focus.
“Did you do your homework? We’re passing it up.”
Homework… “No,” Jonathan said. Charles gave the most exaggerated eye roll he could, which Jonathan thought would have fit a sixth grader much better than a high school junior.
A movement at the classroom door caught Jonathan’s attention. Assuming a classmate was returning from the restroom, Jonathan turned, only to see the door was closed and empty.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision. A sick feeling of not-quite déjà vu took hold of Jonathan’s stomach, but it was impossible for him to not look.
There. Shadow wings licking at the off white wall, tingeing it in a sick shade of green, with toxic eyes and sharp teeth—the monster. He caught Jonathan’s eyes and smiled.
Jonathan couldn’t breathe. He leaned forward and, unable to take his eyes off the monster, whispered, “Charles, do you see that?”
Charles turned. “What?”
Jonathan gestured with his chin, eyes fixed.
“Derb’s stupid poster? It’s always been there.”
“No—” Jonathan stopped himself, but only because the monster was floating closer. Jonathan shrank in his seat, trying not to gulp in the air, as terrified as he was. Charles glanced back and gave Jonathan a weird look, but only returned to taking notes when Jonathan did not react to him. Jonathan was focused on the monster, who sat himself casually on Jon’s desk; Jon had pulled his hands away like the desk had been lava.
“Only you can see me,” the monster said, his grin sharp and dangerous. “Only you can hear me. Oh, don’t try to get help—it’s much too late for you.”
A sort of static had filled Jon’s head. One word circled there: monster, monster, monster, monster, monster, monster, monster, monster…monster…monster…
…
The monster spent his first days in silence, using his mere presence to terrorize Jon into distraction. He sat on Jonathan’s shoulders, and forced his head down and twisted and pulled Jonathan’s hair, making him hunch and slump and wince. He breathed heavily near Jonathan’s ear, too, though that was just uncomfortable. It was worse when he began to speak; he whispered terrors, day and night, describing, first, gruesome murders in intense detail, before moving on to graphic depictions of tortures, and then suicides.
Jonathan, for his part, had not spoken back to the monster yet; he was afraid to. That’s what the monster seemed to be waiting for. Every time Jonathan looked at him with less fear—which was happening more frequently—the monster seemed to literally bubble with excitement. That was, well, pretty creepy. The monster seemed to try his hardest to get Jonathan to respond to him verbally, going so far as insulting Jonathan’s mother.
Jonathan kept his silence at that, not wanting to give the monster the satisfaction; he even managed to stay quiet when the monster laughed to himself the first time, a horrible sound.
“I just realized,” the monster said, through breathless little giggles, leaning harder onto Jonathan’s head. Jonathan let his face be forced down, since he was on the bus and nearly home. “…That I’ve been assigned to you for five months! That’s the most time I’ve ever put into one little human.” The monster pinched Jonathan’s cheek, and when his small, sharp fingers left Jonathan’s skin, it felt burned under the surface. “Just shows how much I like you, Jonathan Morgan Combs. I even know your full name!”
The bus rolled to a stop at Jonathan’s street. He struggled to his feet, despite the monster’s opposing force, and trudged down the bus’s steps.
“I don’t know yours,” Jonathan said as the bus pulled away. The monster didn’t respond. Jonathan thought he might not have heard, and, apprehensive, glanced over his shoulder, already regretting the impulsive words. He was shocked to see the monster had let go of his shoulders and was floating behind him. A genuine smile, just for a moment, lit the monster’s face, before it morphed into something more predatory, hungrier, sharper, like Jonathan had seen before, but the transformation still gave Jonathan goose bumps. He stopped walking.
“No,” said the monster. “No, my assignments never know my name—I’ve had a few made up for me, though. But they never last this long, either.” He seemed to deliberate for a moment. “…My name,” he said, then, “is not important. What is important is this story I have about—”
Figuring he was already fucked up for speaking to monster anyway, Jonathan latched onto a new topic for possible answers. This wasn’t the first time Jonathan had asked why me? But it was the first time he had heard anything about ‘assignments’.
“You…called me an assignment,” Jonathan interrupted, feeling himself growing braver as he spoke. “Explain that.”
The monster blinked at Jonathan, this time looking shocked. His mouth was even left ajar from when he was speaking. “It—it’s my j-job,” the monster stuttered out, and it was the first time that Jonathan had seen him look anything but terrifying for more than a split second. “I, you know, get assigned to people, and I haunt them.”
“Why?”
“Why?” the monster echoed, confused. “Well, uh. I was offered the job after I killed my parents and myself—”
Well, that only confirmed Jonathan’s suspicions that the monster’s gruesome tales were probably nonfiction. He shook his head. “No, I meant, what’s the point? You haunt people and terrorize them, but then what?” Though he feared he could guess.
The monster grinned, and suddenly his toxic eyes were glowing and catlike, his shadow wings flickering out. “Telling you would spoil it,” he said, and Jonathan remembered to be very, very afraid.
…
Jonathan’s mother was a night nurse at the nearest hospital, which was still nearly an hour away in good traffic conditions. Because of their opposite schedules, Jonathan didn’t actually see much of his mom. Occasionally, like tonight, they managed to sit down to dinner together before Alice had to rush off to the hospital for her first shift.
Jonathan was on edge as he set the table for the two of them; the monster had taken one of his brief absences, and Jonathan knew he could return at any moment, in any number of ways. But he found himself more apprehensive than scared; he knew all that the monster would do was try to startle him, and was, beyond that, rather harmless, though creepy.
His mom brought the pan of rice and chicken into the dining area with hand towels and set it in the middle of the table, and they sat.
“How are you, Sweet?” Alice said. “I feel like we haven’t talked in weeks.”
Jonathan gave a half shrug. She served him a piece of chicken breast and too much rice. “Alright,” he said.
“I looked at your grades online,” she continued. “I saw you brought your physics up to a C.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. “I turned in all the homework I missed.”
“So have you been sleeping better?”
Jonathan shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and chewed, thinking this over. He was slightly surprised that he was able to give her a truthful answer: “Yeah, sort of.”
Alice smiled. She toasted Jonathan with her glass of water. “Good.”
…
Jonathan woke from the same nightmare as always, the dream as familiar as his own hands and face, but found that he felt hollow rather than terrified and ready to cry, as he always had before. He watched the shadows shifting on the ceiling, and listened to his own steady breathing, an alien sound. Jonathan’s nights had gotten progressively more restful since he had started talking to the monster—it was almost like a reward system, Jonathan reflected, a sick and twisted reward system. But he wasn’t going to complain.
He closed his eyes and began to drift again, when his sense stood on high alert and his heart rate quickened. The monster. He didn’t want to look, but turned his head and opened his eyes anyway. Toxic green glowed at him, looking slightly worried.
“I don’t get it,” the monster murmured. “The dreams are gradually affecting you less. That’s never happened before. Hmmm.” He leaned his chin on his hands. “Maybe I waited too long to make my appearance in your real life?”
Jonathan exhaled, nervous. He didn’t reply to the monster; only blinked at him and wondered if he would continue talking or flounce off.
“But I couldn’t help it!” the monster went on, explaining himself now, almost whining. “Did you know you were originally my first assignment? Boss reassigned me at the last minute.” He sighed, and at that moment, he didn’t look anything like the monster he was, despite his toxic eyes and unearthly sharp teeth and the shadow wings flitting about behind him, scales catching the low light and seeming half-tangible. “I was just curious about you.”
“’Kay,” Jonathan mumbled, not sure what the monster was trying to do by explaining himself.
“The thing is,” the monster continued, “that you’re just not…special. So I don’t get why you’re special.”
“Thanks?”
“No, no,” said the monster. “It’s like…your file keeps coming up. Boss kept saying I had to get good enough before he’d assign me to you—like he was reminding himself, too. I just….don’t know why.” He studied Jonathan’s face. Jonathan blinked at him. They spent a moment in a staring contest, and then the monster’s wings flickered and Jonathan couldn’t suppress the reflexive shiver.
The monster grinned at this. His teeth seemed to glimmer. “Do I scare you?”
Jonathan did not answer. He turned his head away and burrowed into the blankets and pillows. The monster frowned.
“I’m going to have to work harder.”
…
The monster drifted through Jonathan’s computer, his face pensive. Jonathan leaned back in his desk chair.
“You’re gonna mess up the hard drive again,” he said. “Get out.”
The monster showed the tips of his sharp teeth, a parody of a smile, green eyes flashing. “I can do worse than that this time,” he threatened.
Jonathan lifted his eyebrows, unimpressed.
“Really,” the monster insisted. “I could mess you up with a computer.”
“The only thing you could do to my grades is make them better,” Jonathan laughed, “and that would be doing me a favor.”
The monster frowned, and his shadow wings twitched against Jonathan’s computer screen, and the internet pages he had been loading glitched. Then the entire screen went black.
Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Mature,” he said. “Real mature.”
“You stopped fearing me,” the monster whined, reaching out and clawing at Jonathan’s face with his small fingers. Jonathan’s skin registered their sharp touch like ice, but they left behind a burning. “I’ve tried everything that’s worked on my previous assignments, and even if it works the first time, you’re like—immune, after that!”
Jonathan shut his laptop.
“I was floating through that!”
“And I was trying to watch YouTube, and now neither of us are happy,” Jonathan said. “And you aren’t a very scary monster in reality. You’re too nice and harmless.” What Jonathan failed to mention was how much of an expert the monster was in dreams.
The monster understood that, anyway, and lit up. His teeth seemed to grow longer as his grin grew wider. “No, my specialty is nightmares,” he agreed, and giggled. “Remember how fucked up I’d gotten you on those night terrors?”
“Well, they don’t work anymore!” Jonathan snapped, feeling defensive. He remembered too clearly, the sleepless nights of helpless sobbing. He stood abruptly and slammed his chair against the desk. He stormed across the room and snatched a pillow from his bed and swung it with all his might through the monster, who had trailed behind him to the other side of the room. It passed through the monster, making him shudder. The pillow came away with odd, stringy bits of the monster’s shadow wings clinging to it like leeches. “All you are is a nuisance, and you suck at your job!”
The monster wrapped his skinny arms around himself. “I don’t suck at my job,” he said, petulant. “I’m actually pretty good! I earned my teeth, and eyes, and wings!”
“You had to earn your eyes? What, were you blind?”
“No! They were just eyes, and now they’re…glowy eyes. You know. Creepy.” As if to prove his point, the monster’s green eyes flashed.
Jonathan did know. He had vivid images of the monster’s glowing toxic eyes staring at him, wide and floating in the dark. He dropped his pillow and sank to the floor beside it. “Well, either way,” he said, his brief and intense anger fading into something hollow, “I have a pretty good idea, but you know, what’s….what’s the point? I’ve just got to bore you. I don’t react. Why don’t you ask your boss to reassign you?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” the monster said, taking Jonathan’s cue and letting go of his defensive stance. He sank to the ground in front of Jonathan and rested his sharp chin on Jonathan’s knee. Now, he just looked weary. “Believe me, I’ve tried, but you don’t get to quit this job. So…until you’re dead, you’re stuck with me.”
“Right,” Jonathan said. “Great.”
…
Jonathan woke with a start, cold, and blinked at the unfamiliar scene of the living room at midnight. He realized that he must have fallen asleep while clicking through the channels to find a show for background noise; the house was often too quiet, and the television was playing some show about house redecoration in silence.
But when he tried to get up—to turn off the television, or brush his teeth or go to his room, or something—he found that he couldn’t move. Something heavy was holding him down, but there was nothing there, only pricks of ice at his wrist—oh. The monster.
Jonathan exhaled, trying to calm his rising heartbeat. This is just his revenge, he told himself, for when I insulted his abilities earlier today. He probably wants me to take it back.
But he couldn’t move his mouth to speak.
Something scaly brushed against his neck. He shuddered, his mind flashing to the old dreams, and he had to bite back the remembered panic. The monster was nothing to be afraid of, he knew that now—the monster was only messing with him. He shut his eyes, tried to force himself to be calm, but it just wouldn’t happen. When he opened his eyes again, the monster was above him, his face a snarl; Jonathan felt the monster’s sharp knees pressing, one into his ribcage, the other into his stomach. He could feel the monster’s fingers more clearly now, coiled tightly around his wrists.
“I’m really sorry,” the monster said, voice low and growling, not sounding sorry in the least, “but you have to die and the old me just wasn’t cutting it.”
Jonathan noticed, randomly, the differences now; the monster’s eyes had lost their toxic green, now only black cat-like slits surrounded by a sickly grey which was nearly black itself. The scales on his shadow wings shone more prominently than ever before, spread out behind the monster like sprawling fans. The scales made the shadow wings seem to twist and writhe as though made of snakes.
The monster grinned. His small, sharp fingers—no, claws, Jonathan thought wildly, how could he ever have assumed those were fingers—released Jonathan’s wrists and pressed into his chest, directly over his frantically beating heart, and dug in, excruciatingly slowly.
He’s going to dig out my heart, Jonathan thought, take it out and eat it, swallow it whole, oh god—and he was unable to stop the monster. He was helpless. He was the mealworm.
Jonathan found he could speak. He surprised himself by talking rather than screaming. “I’m sorry I said you suck at your job.” Please stop.
The monster paused. Jonathan’s chest throbbed where the claws were buried. He imagined blood welling up around them, and staining them red forever.
“Too little, too late,” the monster growled, and began again, faster, with more force, and Jonathan whimpered—
…
A dream.
Jonathan woke, terrified again for the first time in nearly two months. He was unprepared for the shuddering tears that gripped him, and he rolled over in bed, in an attempt at silence, lest the monster should hear and know of his victory. The image of the monster’s face from his dream—the wrong one, with the black eyes and the sneer—was burned into his mind’s eye, and Jonathan could not get it to leave.
Jonathan lay in bed for hours, expecting the monster to make his appearance, and waiting for him so that he could prove the dream wrong.
The monster did not show up.
…
Something glittered in the corner of Jonathan’s vision, something green, and he whipped his head around to see. Rather than facing the monster, he saw that the glittering had only been his mother’s emerald ring, on the middle finger of her right hand, which rested on the steering wheel. She was driving him home from school early; he had called her, sick.
“Jonathan?” Alice lifted her hand from the wheel and brushed Jonathan’s blond hair from his eyes. He watched the emerald, almost wary for his realization of how similar its color was to the monster’s eyes’.
“Are you feeling any better?”
“No,” he managed. She put the back of her hand against his forehead. He tried not to flinch.
“You’re burning up,” Alice said. “My poor baby. Try to shut your eyes, and we’ll be home soon. I’ll go buy you some medicine from the pharmacy for your fever.”
“Okay,” Jonathan said, but he didn’t close his eyes; that was always worse, because his imagination ran wild and threw around images of the monster with horribly empty eyes, or covered in blood, or worse—guts and gore. In the few weeks since the dreams had started anew, he had been on high alert. When the monster had first disappeared, Jonathan had expected the worst sort of prank, anticipated it, and then—later—began to fear everything that startled him. Not to mention that his senses had played tricks on him, like with his mother’s ring; half caught glimpses in his peripheral vision of shifting shadows were always wings, or glimmers of teeth, eyes, scales…
Jonathan had returned to not sleeping in order to avoid the nightmares. He’d also eaten very little, for all food had lost any appeal it might have once had, and the drive to do anything at all had been consumed by fear.
Jonathan didn’t know how long he could live like this, with his life so completely and utterly tied with the monster.
He set his forehead against the passenger door’s window, hoping it would be cooler than his forehead, but it wasn’t. Jonathan watched the stores and houses pass under a screen of rolling heat. It was impossible not to think of the monster.
Jonathan wondered, vaguely, through slit eyes and a pounding head, how he had managed to underestimate the monster so thoroughly.
His mother eased into the driveway. Jonathan stumbled out of the car, pulling his bag out behind him.
“Honey, I won’t be long at the store.” Alice leaned out the window as Jonathan trailed around the front of the car toward the front door.
“’Kay,” he said. Something occurred to him, and he turned around, taking one last good look at his mom, smiling at him from the car. “Bye. I love you.”
Alice looked faintly surprised to hear this, but smiled warmly. “I love you too, Jon.”
He watched her leave, and then unlocked the front door. He shed his bag, his jacket, and his headphones in his bedroom, then stepped into the bathroom. He washed his face with cold water. It did nothing to make him feel better, but then, he hadn’t actually expected it to. When he lifted his face from the towel, the monster was hovering behind his reflection in the mirror, looking normal as opposed to how he had in Jonathan’s latest string of nightmares.
“Are you ready yet?” the monster asked.
“Tell me your name first.” Jonathan dropped the towel and gripped the counter.
The monster laughed, short and humorless. “You’ll laugh.”
“Tell me anyway.”
The monster glanced down. “Sock.”
Jonathan gaped. “Seriously?” he laughed. Sock scowled.
“Fine,” Jonathan chocked back the rest of the laughter. “Yes, fine. I’m ready now.”
Sock beamed—absolutely beamed—and all the traces of the monster that had terrorized Jonathan disappeared. The teeth, the eyes, the wings—with that beaming smile, Sock was just a regular kid with ridiculous hair and bright eyes. Seeing that expression, Jonathan felt that he could have been floating.
“I’ll explain everything on the other side,” Sock promised. “And I mean everything.”
Jonathan pulled open the drawer beneath the sink. He slipped in a hand and closed his fingers over the blade. His answering smile was unsure, but his hands were not. “See you there,” he replied.
End