Childhood Fears: When I started speaking to Monsters
I’ve been an insomniac for as long as I can remember.
One of my earliest recollections is staring at the partially opened doorway of my bedroom, through the slats of my crib, thinking “I’m not tired.”
No one knew what to do with me. A talkative little girl with a weird imagination too big and vivid for her own good. At a time when ADHD was almost exclusively reserved for boys, and treated by sticking them in a lost cause classroom, I easily became one of those girls who fell through the cracks. I was labeled bright and creative but shy, socially awkward, and prone to daydreaming.
At home I was always bursting at the seams, talking, singing and speculating about any number of things. I embarrassed my mother at four years old when reporter who came to interview me after I won a local art contest. I posed the topic of whether killer bunnies could eat through bone for discussion. Fortunately, I was not quoted on it.
All that to say that during the day, I was probably a lot and so when it came time to go to bed, my parents had no tolerance for the typical games children play to avoid their bedtime, and no experience to realize that maybe I wasn’t as typical as they thought.
When I would come out for the fifth time complaining that I could not sleep, there was no patience for me. There are no monsters. There are no ghosts. Everything is fine. Go to SLEEP!
It’s easy to understand now the absolute depletion a parent experiences with an energetic child. There are more resources now on how to deal with such children.
But as that child, in the 80s and 90s, all I understood was that I was alone in this struggle. My parents thought I was choosing not to sleep. I would have chosen sleep every night if it had been an option.
Childhood Fears: When I started speaking to Monsters
An active mind in the dark is a terrible thing. In an adult it can spiral into past regrets, future anxieties, and recounting every single awkward encounter you’ve ever had.
In a child, those things are all stripped down to their barest form.
Fear.
The darkness is alive and it harbors awful things. Teeth and blood and blades and claws. Sometimes they would just take you away, like the faeries. Leave a changeling in your place, and no one would ever know you gone.
But there were surely also creatures that will bite off your toes if you got them too close to the end of the bed. Little beasts with glowing red eyes that would carve runes into your belly with blackened blades, shred your exposed arms to ribbons, drill holes into your skull and scoop out your brains with rusty spoons.
Every night I lay awake staring at the dim shapes of my room, waiting for them to move, desperate to just fall asleep but fearful that if I did, I would never wake up again. More than once that I imagined my parents finding my mutilated body strewn about my bedroom in the morning when they check on why I hadn’t gotten up for school. The thought gave me a measure of grim comfort. At least then they would know I had been right.
I went on like that for quite a long time, my brain creating worse and worse scenarios every night.
There was one where my eyes, ears and tongue were all cut out as soon as I fell asleep and I would live the rest of my life fully aware but unable to see, hear or speak.
There was the one where I was dragged under the bed and they flayed me and gave my skin to a monster who would wear it to impersonate me, until they could eat my entire family.
There was one that the day of my much-anticipated birthday, the only thing left of me to be discovered in my room was a few of my gnawed bones.
I am not sure my age but I would guess it was seven going on eight or eight going on nine, and I was excited because I had my birthday coming up.
But with that excitement my fear heightened.
It would be a tragedy if I should be eviscerated, my guts used to tie my severed limbs to my white bookshelves, my rainbow coloring pencil sheets so saturated with my blood that they were nearly black, just before my birthday.
I was tired and I wanted to celebrate my birthday party. I wanted to turn eight. Or nine. Maybe even ten.
I had been awake for years. Afraid for years.
No one was going to save me.
“Hey Monsters,” I said into the darkness of my room as I brought my blankets up to my chin. “I don’t know if you’re there. I don’t know if you’re waiting or what you’re waiting for, but it’s my birthday this weekend and if you’re going to get me, could just wait until after that?”
And when I was done with my plea, I felt better. Not great, but better. Well enough to actually close my eyes and sleep.
And when I woke the next morning, I understood something. Either the monsters weren’t all that bad, or they weren’t there at all.
Either way, everything changed. I had not only faced the darkness, I had established a relationship with it. One that only grew over time, as I came to know more about what hid in shadows and waited for me to fall asleep.
I had my birthday party, and another the following year. I slept with my feet pulled up to my chest for three years after watching the IT mini series with Tim Curry. When I was twelve, we moved into a house that may have truly been haunted and I have stories about that I only share with trusted friends.
I grew up and learned of dangers I hadn’t even known existed as a child. Some things might be worse than evisceration or brain scooping. I am still an insomniac although I have tools to deal with it now but I still worry about moving shadows at night.
I still talk to monsters. Now those conversations are written down in notebooks and .doc files and I do it with a desk lamp on so I’m not too afraid. I use words to prize apart the monsters, find out what it is they want and determine if I’m willing to give it to them. Sometimes it turns out that they’re not monsters after all.
Sometimes it turns out that they’re just what happens when little girls are left alone in the dark for too long.
Muse summary
Terra Desmarais’s success as the next big artist in NYC is absolutely inevitable. Her patrons, the associates, Mr. Black, Mr. Silver, and Mr. Green, can practically taste the raw talent dripping from the enigmatic trailer park prodigy’s dollar store paints.
Up and coming pastel artist Cedric Fleck is a lucky discovery of the associates. Rescued from oblivion by Mr Green, put up in a studio by Mr. Silver and paraded around on the arm of Mr. Black should be the dream. But within the steady stream of great press and even better parties, Cedric can’t shake the sense that something is very wrong. He wants to hate the overnight success of Terra Desmarais, but he can’t help but be taken by her earnest obsession art.
As the artists around them crash and burn, and Cedric struggles to break free from the toxic seduction of Mr. Black, Terra is only concerned with her strange and compelling paintings. She seems to want nothing of the fame, the money, the sex or the drugs. As the greed of the associates exposes their true colors, and Terra seems too lost in her art to notice the danger around her, Cedric discovers that inspiration is a living thing, and it is hungry.
About the LCW Allingham
LCW Allingham is an author, editor and artist in the Philadelphia area. Her award winning short fiction is published across various mediums and she is actively putting out more, while she refines several novels. She is the executive editor of Speculation Publications
In 2024 she is releasing MUSE, a horror novella, and LADY, her debut novel.
She is an avid reader and a big fan of interesting rocks. Like, weirdly so.
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