All The Way Down

She dreams she is falling—shrouded in darkness, tumbling toward a sea of swamp-green water. It isn’t the fall that she’s afraid of, but whatever might be lurking beneath the surface. Scaly hands reaching up to grab her; arms that go all the way down, deeper, deeper. 

She wakes with that fear, her heart thumping a quarter-beat quicker than any heart is supposed to, and listens to the humming darkness of her bedroom. Her shirt is drenched as if she’d made a splash after all. And even now, awake, as far from that water as she will ever be, she can feel herself drowning in it. 

She snaps on the bedside lamp. The shadows of her bedroom scurry like cockroaches and settle in the hallway beyond the door. She grips the sheets on the edge of the bed, her breath coming in sharp, painful gasps. She knows, just knows, that those awful hands are prowling beneath the bed, waiting to pull her down into that sea. 

She braces for long, inhuman fingers to wrap around her ankles.

Nothing.

She drops to her knees and flings up the bed skirt.

Nothing still.

But it has to be here somewhere.

She’s on her feet in an arrhythmic heartbeat, side-eyeing the closet. Any second, it will creak open and spill death all around her. She creeps over to it, careful, on tiptoes, and peeks inside without fully opening the door. 

Maybe it’s in there, hiding in the back corner, biding its time. 

The lamp doesn’t offer enough light for her to see all the way inside, every nook and cranny. She doesn’t think it’s in there, but she has to be sure—has to has to has to—or else it can sneak right out when she goes back to sleep and pull her down into its abyss.

She braces herself again and yanks on the closet door with such force that her messy hair shivers in its wind. She observes the space inside, pushing and pulling clothes hangers every which way, until she’s convinced that nothing, no monster, is in there. 

She closes the door with a sigh of temporary relief, letting a fraction of her tension go. Her heart is still racing and she’s blowing out more air than she’s drawing in, but at least, for now, she is safe.

A soft rain patters outside of her window like a dripping faucet and not a sea, thank Christ. No monster can survive in a puddle that size, she decides, not the ones who pull you under—the ones who show their teeth. She sits on the foot of the bed and tries to breathe through the panic, gulping air and trying to convince herself that there’s nothing at all to be afraid of. 

Except for the darkness that she banished to the hallway.

The darkness that is eager to wrap its suffocating arms around her room.

The darkness that something—some hideous, beastly thing—is lurking inside of.

Watching.

Waiting. 

She can see it. Not its scales or its teeth or its glossy black eyes, but its shape pressed against the wall in the hallway. It’s a trick, she tells herself, just a trick of the darkness and nothing else, but it’s there, isn’t it? And it’s lumbering towards her. 

Her breathing is faster than ever—so fast that she’s worried she might run out of breath altogether, collapse dead onto her bedroom floor. A merciful death compared to the one she’s about to receive, to be sure. 

Soon, those elastic arms will stretch across the hall and into her bedroom and the last thing she’ll ever see are disgusting hands spreading over her face—then, briefly, the darkness that comes after.

The infinite kind.

She springs from her bed and throws her shoulder into the door, slamming it closed and turning the lock. It’s out there. She can hear the snarl forming deep in its belly; can feel it closing in like walls around her, its inescapable grip tightening around her throat. 

She backs away slowly, cautiously, her legs forgetting how to move, how to support the rest of her body. They tremble, threaten to buckle underneath her with every step until they’re pressed against the wall by the window sill. 

She could open the window and bolt, take off into the night, but what of its darkness? It’s raining out, which means clouds, which, too, means that there will be no stars or moon to light the world. To save her. The monster could be anywhere out there and she’d be none the wiser. 

And there’s that puddle beneath the window. It looks small, small enough that it has to be safe, but what if it’s a trap? What if it only appears small to her now, but it opens up like a sea, like a mouth, to swallow her once her feet are inside? That’s how it planned to get her all along, she’s sure of it. It’s why she had the dream in the first place. 

The doorknob jerks to the right, then the left—slow, then desperate. She knows the lock isn’t going to hold the monster back. 

The door trembles, rattling so hard that the hinges groan, the wood cracking like splintering bone.

Her bones will break just the same.

She sinks to the floor, her back pressed against the wall, knees drawn tight to her chest. She wails in hiccuping sobs as her breath skips and sputters. She’s never been less in control.

She can’t watch the door.

She can’t face the monster.

But she knows it’s coming in. 

It was always coming in.