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He moved towards me once more, but this time, I couldn’t move backwards, couldn’t escape. My legs were frozen stiff, my feet glued to the ground.

His shrewd eyes narrowed at me, emanating a potent hatred that infiltrated my veins, before he placed the knife on the table beside me and left.

Left.

Just left, as if he hadn’t altered my life irrevocably and took away the person I loved most in the world. As if he hadn’t just shaken the foundations of my entire world.

I shook erratically as I stared down at my mother, barely daring to breathe.

Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

My mother was dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

I heard the sound of my nanny entering the room, her scream of terror, and then the blare of sirens a few minutes later. Someone tried to talk to me, tried to demand answers, but all I could do was point to a picture of my step-dad, trapped in a prison I could never escape from.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

And my world became shrouded in two things—darkness and silence.

I was jerkedout of the memory by the feel of hot breath on my neck. I spun around, my heart racing, to see the monster’s face inches from my own. Its rancid breath brushed across my cheek as its distorted body took another step towards me. Up close, I was able to confirm that the creature trulywasmade out of body parts. Both of its long, spindly legs were constructed almost entirely out of hands of all different shapes, sizes, and colors, the skin red and mottled as if they were constructed of mostly muscle tissue.

Have you ever felt absolute terror before? The type of terror that rendered you immobile, stole the breath from your lungs, and made you shake with fear? Where you knew that you were going to die, yet was helpless to stop it? I felt all of that and more as I stared into the monster’s disgusting, grotesque face. Into the endless abysses that were supposed to be its eyes. Into its red and bloody, sewed up mouth. Into the lifeless faces of Bianaca and myself, hanging gray and limp like macabre puppets, our hands still fused to either palm of the creature.

“Go away!” I screamed in its face. “GO AWAY!”

My final scream seemed to shake the foundations of this entire world. The light illuminating the scene beside me trembled, almost as if we were in the midst of an earthquake. I screamed and screamed and screamed, my hoarse voice reverberating through the nothingness.

Slowly, the thread sewing the creature’s lips began to unravel, one stitch at a time, until I was greeted by the sight of jaundiced yellow teeth, each one sharper than that of a shark’s. The monster fell backwards, stumbling over its abnormally long and gangly legs, and the momentum forced the Bianaca and Beau puppets backwards, flopping like two fishes.

And then the world shattered like thousands of fine particles of glass, and I fell through the darkness.