"I do not know this world, yet I've suffered the
greatest pains it has to offer."
~R~
________________________________________
He used to say that the beauty of life was its mystery, that everything that came our way as we lived, was meant to be. His hands would gently brush my hair, his reflection caught in the old vanity mirror as I peered up at him.
When he finished, he'd place a kiss on the top of my head and say,
"Look, Cherry, you are as you were meant to be."
What a load of bullshit that was. A comforting lie. Nothing was ever as it should be. Not after he left that night. The night everything changed, the night that wasn't special except for its looming silence.
I never heard Debby Boone's You Light Up My Life drifting into my room, as it always did around midnight, soothing me to sleep. I hadn't heard it that night.
A nightmare had awakened me, a jolt in the dark. My heart was pounding, but I knew exactly where to go for comfort. Padre's bedroom.
The sound of his voice, always so steady, always so sure, would calm me. I needed to hear him. To feel safe again.
It wasn't long before I realized my door was locked. A different lock. Not that it mattered. Padre had began teaching me to pick locks since my little fingers could properly grasp objects. A disc tumbler? Easy.
I didn't think much of it, another challenge for me to get better. But the quiet felt different that night.. heavier, thicker... almost as if the darkness itself had a weight. Time moved slowly, stretching, dragging on for what felt like eternity.
Who would have guessed that night would mark the start of many long, restless nights?
I moved quickly through the hallway, but with each step, something felt wrong.
A gnawing unease grew. I didn't know why I hesitated at his door, but I stopped anyway. My hand hovering over the brass doorknob.
Then, out of nowhere, a scream... sharp, high-pitched, and filled with raw terror... tore through the house, slicing through me like a jagged knife.
I froze, instinctively stepping back. My foot caught on the carpet, and I stumbled, falling hard against the cold floor.
My heart, which was a steady rhythm, started to pound like a war drum in my chest.
It wasn't just any scream. It was agony spilling into the air, an echo of something... someone... being ripped apart.
I swallowed hard and forced my trembling hand forward, gripping the doorknob. It was slick. No, not slick... wet. My breath hitched. Slowly, I pulled my hand back, and the dim hallway light glinted off the crimson smear now staining my palm.
Blood.
My pulse roared in my ears, drowning out the howling wind outside. But I had to move. I had to go inside.
It took a moment to collect myself, my heart hammering in my chest. I scrambled to my feet, my legs unsteady as I stumbled toward the door.
The scream still echoed in my mind, the dread growing sharper with each passing second. Without thinking, I threw the door open and rushed inside.
"Padre..." I called out, but there was no answer.
Silence. Silence and more silence.
"Padre…" I called again, but nothing. The emptiness swallowed my words.
I had crawled into his bed countless nights, he always made sure there was at least a little light... enough so I could see, enough to make me feel safe.
I didn't feel safe... all I could feel was the suffocating blackness. Something was wrong... deeply wrong. The room was unnaturally dark.
Yet, His voice came to me compelling...
"Never show fear in the face of darkness."
Those words, once so comforting, now feel like a hollow echo.
I moved forward, my hands trembling, brushing along the walls until I found the light switch. It clicked on.
The harsh brightness cut through the dark like a knife, blinding me temporarily and when I could finally see...
The sight that greeted me made the world tilt.
There he was. Padre. The man who had always been my pillar, my protector. Now, he lay on the floor, a pool of blood surrounding him. His once strong body... broken.
His eyes, once full of life, drained of all color. His limbs, once full of motion, now cold and stiff.
His chest had been torn open, his ribcage splayed apart as if something had clawed through him. Blood soaked his white undershirt, spreading out like a grotesque halo beneath him.
But it wasn't just blood.
Dark veins... black as ink, as if poisoned by something beyond this world, crawled from the corners of his unseeing eyes, spreading like cracked marble down his pale skin. They branched out from his fingers, his toes, his lips, like the roots of some malevolent entity had taken hold of him from the inside out.
His mouth hung open, his final breath forever stolen. And his eyes? They were wide. Wide and bloodshot, but not empty.
Despite the glowing flickering bulb above me there was still darkness. Not the kind that came with the absence of light, but something deeper. Something with life.
I could feel the weight of a presence. I knew something had been there. Something had watched him die.
A shudder wracked through me. I felt I wasn't alone.
I swayed, my knees threatening to give out beneath me. The room spun, but I refused to fall. My hand shot out, grasping blindly, until my fingers met the sharp edge of the wooden dresser beside Padre's bed. My nails dug into the grain as I steadied myself, my breaths shallow, ragged.
Then...
A sound came.
A deep, guttural crack. Like bones snapping in quick succession, layer upon layer of something brittle being broken apart.
It was followed by a rasping inhale, not of lungs, but something hollow, something struggling to mimic breath.
I turned my head toward the far end of the room, where thick curtains hung heavy against the window. Shadows draped unnaturally across the wall... too thick, too black, too alive.
It was there. Hidden between the folds of the fabric, a shape that didn't belong, that twisted and bent with the shifting dark.
Then, it moved.
A single step forward. Slow. Deliberate.
The floor didn't creak beneath it. There was no weight to it, no presence... yet I could feel it pressing against me, wrapping around my throat like an unseen hand. My breath stilled, my body locked in place, muscles frozen mid-quake.
Was it fear? No. No. No. It was something much worse.
It felt like the air had grown heavier, pressing into my skin, like smoke, like possession.
And then, I saw them.
Two glowing green orbs, hovering in the dark, slitted like a serpent's but too deep, too intelligent. They flickered, shifting between the fabric of reality and nightmare, narrowing as if peering into me, through me.
Judging. Choosing.
The room pulsed, the light flickering, and for a moment, I swore I could see more. A tangle of unnaturally long limbs, folding in on themselves, clinging together like something trying to hold itself together.
Its body was fragmented, shifting... never one shape, never one form. It was something not meant to be seen, something that should have remained unnoticed.
But now, it was looking at me.
The pressure tightened around my throat. A cold, unseen grip, not squeezing but stealing. Taking the breath straight from my lungs, as if it didn't need to choke me... just erase my ability to exist.
If I had died that night, I would have gladly accepted fate.
My vision blurred at the edges, black creeping in, and for the first time, I felt it. A burning flame, consuming... overwhelming, threatening to destroy me. To destroy everything.
I felt it... inside me.
Then.
It flinched.
Those green eyes widened, darting to the side, as if sensing something beyond this room, beyond me. And just like that, the weight lifted, the grip released. My body collapsed against the dresser, a breathless, gasping heap.
The shadows recoiled, twisting back into the folds of the curtains like ink being sucked into paper. The glowing eyes were the last thing to go, flickering once... twice... before vanishing entirely.
And then, nothing.
Just silence.
Just me, on the floor, the ghost of its presence still wrapped around my throat.
My heart lurched, the world spinning around me. How had this happened? I had come to him for comfort, but what I found instead was devastation... The warmth I thought I would find had turned to ice, and in its place was only an overwhelming shiver of silence and despair.
There was no solace in the fact that I had survived. No relief in drawing breath while he lay cold and lifeless. If anything, the weight of my existence felt heavier... like I had been spared, but at a cost I couldn't yet understand.
I couldn't scream. I couldn't cry. Not because I didn't want to, but because I knew that no matter how loud I shouted, no one would come. The one person who could have made this all better was gone.
Suddenly, as if the world itself could feel my sorrow, the weather outside shifted. The wind howled, pushing the windows open with a force that sent chills down my spine. The storm crashed against the house... angry, relentless.
The air turned cold, biting, as rain lashed against the glass. Thunder cracked, filling the room with its deafening roar, and the flashes of lightning illuminated the scene before me. The world outside mirrored my inner chaos.
It was then that the full weight of reality hit me. This... this was my nightmare now. There would be no waking up from it. I would carry this with me for the rest of my life.
I fell to my knees, my chest tight, my breath ragged as I gasped for air. My body shook uncontrollably, the cold seeping into my bones.
I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. My throat was tight with grief, my tongue heavy with the weight of what I had just witnessed.
In that moment, my world stopped. It was just me and the wreckage of my past.. my father, the man I had once believed in, now a lifeless form on the floor. His death was the event that had shaped everything that came after.
I had thought that was my end, the breaking point. Little did I know, it was only the beginning.