Page 2 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

LYSSA

T he voice returns the next night, and the night after that.

Faint, questioning whisper on the wind, but a constant, gentle presence.

It is the first thing I listen for when I wake and the last thing I hear before exhaustion finally claims me.

The nights blur into a single, waking dream where the only real thing is the sound of my mother calling to me from just beyond the trees.

Sleep becomes a stranger. My meals go cold on their plate, the bland taste of boiled vegetables turning to ash in my mouth.

The familiar rhythms of the village—the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, the chatter of women at the well, the laughter of children playing in the muddy street—fade into a dull, meaningless drone.

My world has shrunk to the four walls of this room and the vast, beckoning darkness of the forest. I am a ship adrift, and her voice is the only lighthouse in a world gone dark.

Clara watches me with worried eyes. She leaves a bowl of hot stew on my bedside table, her hands lingering on my forehead as if checking for a fever.

“You’re fading, Lyssa,” she says. “You look right through me when I speak. It’s like you’re not even here anymore.”

I want to reassure her, to lie and say I’m just tired, but the words won’t form.

How can I explain that I’m listening for a ghost?

That her voice, so solid and real, is just noise that gets in the way of the only sound that matters?

She would think I’ve finally gone mad. Sometimes, in the deepest hours of the night when the house is still and my own reflection in the windowpane looks like a stranger, I think she might be right.

I spend hours pressed against the glass, my breath fogging the view of the skeletal trees.

Is this grief? Has my sorrow finally become so vast it has learned how to speak?

I press the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see bursts of color, trying to force the sound away, but it’s no use.

The voice is woven into the very fabric of the night.

On the fifth night since I first whispered back, the voice changes.

It’s no longer just my name, a simple, haunting call.

Tonight, it sings. A lullaby, soft and sweet, the same one my mother used to sing to quiet my childhood fears.

It’s a melody so deeply buried in my memory that hearing it now leaves me gasping with a pain that is half-grief, half-wonder.

Hush now, little one, the moon is high,

The stars are watching from the sky…

Tears stream down my face, hot and silent. This is too much. Too real to be a trick of the wind or a phantom of my own broken mind. The wind cannot remember a lullaby. My own grief, vast as it is, could not conjure a melody so perfectly. It’s her. She’s out there, somehow, and she is singing to me.

My resolve, worn thin by sleepless nights and the constant ache of longing, finally shatters.

I can’t live like this anymore, a prisoner in my own home, caught between the world of the living and the world of a ghost. I have to know.

Even if the truth destroys me, it has to be better than this torturous uncertainty.

My movements are slow, deliberate, as if I’m in a trance.

My trembling hands find the old oil lantern on my dresser, the one we haven’t used since father could afford tallow candles.

The flint sparks, a tiny star in the oppressive darkness of the room, and the wick catches, casting a warm, flickering glow that pushes the shadows back. The light feels like courage.

I don’t bother with shoes. The cold of the floorboards against my bare feet is a sharp, grounding sensation, a reminder that I am still alive, still part of this physical world, at least for now.

My nightdress is thin, offering no protection from the mountain’s chill, but I don’t feel it.

There is a fire now, a desperate, burning need that eclipses all other sensations.

I unlatch the door to my room, the soft click of the mechanism sounding like a gunshot in the silent house. I move through the sleeping home like a ghost myself, down the narrow stairs, past the kitchen where the phantom scent of my mother’s baking still lingers on the coldest nights.

The main door groans in protest as I pull it open, the sound a mournful sigh that seems to echo the ache in my own soul. Cold night air rushes in to greet me, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth and the promise of answers.

The lantern light cuts a trembling, golden path across the frosted ground. Beyond its glow, the forest waits, a wall of impenetrable black. The voice is stronger out here, clearer, weaving through the trees like a silver thread, pulling me forward.

Come now, little one, don’t you cry,

Mother’s here to sing you a lullaby…

My bare feet touch the frozen earth, and I don’t flinch.

The pain is distant, unimportant. I take a step, then another, leaving the warm, familiar world of the village behind.

The lantern sways in my hand, its light a fragile shield against the immense, waiting darkness.

I am barefoot and shaking, armed with nothing but a flickering flame and a love that refuses to die.

I follow the voice. I walk into the woods.