Every night, Jeremiah asked whether he really, really had to go to bed. Had he been left alone to tuck himself in, he might still have asked the same question, all the while knowing what answer he was to receive. Still, it never hurt to ask, and Jeremiah always liked to be sure that there were no other options or bargains to be made. He would have taken them, if he could.
A tousle of the hair, and then a sigh. “Yes, Jeremiah, please do-not make a fuss. 8:00 is bedtime- every night the same. What about that do you find hard to accept?” His father was an older man with fully grey hair and sallow, shrunken eyes. His mother once said that Father had been “marvelously dashing” as a young man; she liked to tell how Father had swept her off her feet when she was but a girl. But Jeremiah did not see this, for in the eight years (eight and a half, he would proudly say) in which he had known Father, all the life had crept out of him and he had become almost a corpse. Certainly, he was nothing like the handsome fellow that Mother described, and if Jeremiah knew enough to be honest, he might say that he had always been quite afraid of Father.
Jeremiah laid his head back on his many pillows as his father pulled the blankets under his chin. “May you leave the light on, Sir, please?” Jeremiah hated going to bed, but he hated the dousing of the candles most of all. He was the only one in the whole house who knew that night-time was when the monsters came. His mother and father did not believe him when he spoke of it, though he had tried many times. Even the old maid who was always telling him fanciful tales about magick and pirates and things told him to “Hush” when it came time for bed. She liked to say that he was too old to believe in monsters in the night, and that the Good Lord (whoever he was) would protect Jeremiah while he slept. But though Jeremiah tried his hardest not to believe, he found the monsters existed just the same.
Father huffed, and a dab of spittle flew from his cracked mouth. Jeremiah could not see where it had gone. “We’ll not waste the candles for some childish fancy,” Father reminded him sternly. “One day soon, you’ll wake up a man and realize that all your worrying was for naught.” Taking a deep breath, his father extinguished the last of the room’s faint light; more spittle ushered in the blackness. His heavy footsteps creaked ominously as he abandoned the darkness of the room. Jeremiah knew his father to be a proud man, all but incapable of affection, and so he resigned himself to watching sullenly as his father pulled the door closed behind him.
“Not the door!” Jeremiah whispered softly, too softly for Father to hear, lest he be angered further. The house was silent for a moment, enough so that the click of the door snapping into place in its frame could be heard by all. Jeremiah sat up rigidly in his bed, covers still tight about his chin, and scooted until his back was firmly against his pillows. He listened closely as Father’s footsteps resumed, making their way down the long hall, past other empty bedrooms, and down the stairs. His heart beat loudly in his chest; the house was silent for another long moment, and then as Jeremiah knew it would, the creeping of the monsters began.
A ghostly wind set about the house at once, dragging the braches of a large oak so that they crashed loudly through the night air. The branches themselves seemed to reach with long fingers into the window, pushing enormous shadows across the floor like spiders across moonlit webs. A breeze slithered through a crack in the wall and chilled the room; Jeremiah’s teeth chattered protests against the dark. The heavy wooden door of his closet groaned as it swung eerily on its hinges back and forth, back and forth.
Elsewhere in the house, Jeremiah could hear the faint whispers of ghouls moving through the walls, stalking the living with endless death. He tried desperately, every night, to make out the words, but the whispering would soon be drowned out by the angry mutterings of his own mother and father, which sounded nightly at precisely eight-o’clock. The first night the sounds began, Jeremiah had hardly believed that his parents could be truly to blame: he had never heard them speak that way, so devoid of any love or warm feeling. However, in a fit of bravery, Jeremiah had snuck down the creaky stairs and witnessed Father striking Mother with a bare fist. He, Jeremiah had cried out for her- but she had screamed at him, crying, to return to bed.
A dull thud shook the walls of the room, and the voice of his Mother cried out in pain. He felt constantly sorry for her, and likewise ashamed that he could not protect her, but he knew his father would not suffer interference. On that first night, he had fled to his room and hidden within the darkness of his closet, but Father had come eventually- Jeremiah still had a scar. He had learned that night to stay in his room, to face the monsters alone, and to leave his parents to their struggles. He wished only for a sword, as in the old maid’s story about the flying boy who fought pirates and many other great evils. He would rescue Mother; what he would with Father, he did not quite know.
Jeremiah’s mind wandered back to the monsters that roamed the house during this same time every night. He knew his parents were otherwise occupied but still could not understand how they remained unaware of the dangers at hand. Sometimes, in a fit of hopefulness and childish naïveté, he wondered why his parents did not rush into the room, frightened and desperate to protect him. He thought perhaps the monsters that lived in his house were only visible to children, and that only children could hear them and feel their dreadful touch. Thinking this made goose-pimples crawl up his arms like tiny ants, but even when he scratched at them until his arms were pink, the ants did not go away. He pulled up his legs and hugged them close to his chest, lost in thoughts of his once-dashing father enacting some daring rescue plan right before his eyes. And then it was too late, because the Monster was there.
Jeremiah did not know how the he (or it, he couldn’t be sure) came so silently in through the window, which was often left shut because his father found it so difficult to open. And Jeremiah did not know why he came through the window every night, to sit there in the dark, most often saying nothing. Still, his presence was both a blessing and a curse: the latter because he was a monster, perhaps even the Chief Monster, and he gave Jeremiah a terrible fright; the former, because the Monster had proved himself so far against the nature of monsters by hurting neither Jeremiah nor his parents. Once, the maid had awoken to find a bleeding bite-mark on her wrist which Jeremiah knew came from Him, but she had brushed aside the story and blamed a spider instead.
“The house is awfully loud to-night,” He said chillingly, in a dead voice. “I was trying to read, but I could not hold even a thought. And I knew you would be awake.” He said the last part very quietly, almost as if to himself, the way the Monster often spoke. His fangs moved dangerously about his mouth, and his blood-red eyes glinted in the faint moonlight which sometimes sprinkled into the room with the stars.
“You hear them, too?” Jeremiah did not know what else to say, so he stopped mid-sentence, thinking hard. Perhaps it is such that monsters have superior hearing, he decided in his head. And perhaps I am part monster, and that is why I too may hear the noise. He would have asked the Monster about his thoughts on the matter, but he knew from past experience that He did not often answer questions. That was why Jeremiah knew him only as the Monster, and not by any proper name, which He had elected not to give. So Jeremiah kept his thoughts to himself and sat silently, as he had learned from Father to do, and he waited for the Monster to speak again.
A crash from the down-stairs shattered the air and shook the house again. A swirl of voices, both Father and Mother, broke through the air. Jeremiah, though trying to be brave, jumped in spite of himself and then bit his lip. The Monster in the window shook his head, but said nothing still. The house slowly quieted once more, until Jeremiah could hear only the fainted murmur of voices from below, although he could not make out the words.
The Monster shook his head again. “Those people downstairs,” he said coldly, “are unconscionable.” Jeremiah just stared blankly, not knowing what it meant. He was afraid of the Monster and afraid of His voice, and he was too afraid to say so. He would rather, perhaps, not have spoken at all, except that He was watching him now, waiting for him to speak.
“Those are Mother and Father,” Jeremiah explained. And then hurriedly, “They don’t mean it. They do love each other, really.” And me, he wanted to say, because he liked to believe it, but he did not know whether the Monster would be offended at such talk. It must be very lonely to be a monster, he thought, and felt very profound.
The Monster was giving him a queer look that made Jeremiah want to cover himself with his blankets and hide. In the darkness of the room, his ice-white skin seemed to exude its own light, like a real ghost. “I saw your Mother yesterday,” the Monster said softly. “She looked ill- do you know why?” Jeremiah was too young to understand the thick sadness that layered the Monster’s voice, but he understood that perhaps something was not quite right.
“Yes.” Jeremiah said softly, ashamed. He had awoken yesterday to find his Mother’s face purpled around the eyes, her cheeks red and swollen like a cherry. She would not answer him when he had asked why she looked so; his Father merely told him that the she had taken ill during the night and would be better soon- a lie, Jeremiah was sure. He said none of this to the Monster, for Jeremiah suspected that he might know it all anyway, and more besides. The Monster seemed often to know a great deal more than Jeremiah himself- perhaps He was old enough to understand things, the way Jeremiah never seemed to be.
“I’m afraid,” Jeremiah admitted bravely. “I want Mother.” He swung his legs over the side of his bed and threw off the covers. The Monster was beside him in an instant, his frozen hand pushing Jeremiah gently back into bed. Jeremiah looked up into His face, his fears redoubled. He began to tremble, from the tips of his ears to the nails on his toes, though whether it was from fear itself or the sudden cold, he could not have said.
Gently, the Monster swept the boy back into his bed, throwing the covers over him and then quickly releasing him and walking back to the window. He stood silently for a long moment, bathed in the moonlight of the night sky, until perhaps a cloud obscured the light, and he was thrown once more into darkness. “Don’t go down there just now,” he warned. “There are worse things in this house than I.”
Jeremiah’s thoughts turned suddenly, easily, to his Father; the man’s sallow, shrunken eyes glowed in the darkness of his mind. He shrank back into his pillows, feeling a childish hysteria building in his veins.
“Do you love them?”
Jeremiah looked up at the Monster with saucer-round eyes. “I love Mother,” he said automatically. The sallow face of his Father still hung before his eyes. He had to think longer about it; the Monster gave him time.
“I love Father, too.” He whispered. “But I don’t think Father loves me.”
The Monster nodded once, curtly, and then turned to face Jeremiah in his bed. “Would you die for them?” His fangs glinted in the moonlight.
Jeremiah looked fearfully into the eyes of the Monster and gulped loudly. He didn’t want to answer the question- and then suddenly the Monster was chuckling softly and turning away, like the question didn’t matter. Like the question would never matter.
“It’s getting late; you should sleep,” The Monster stared still out the open window, all but lost in his own tranquility. In a soft and gentle voice, the likes of which had never dripped out of the Monster before, he began to sing in a soft baritone.
“Tout le monde est sage,
Dans le voisinage,
Il est l’heure d’aller dormir
Le sommeil va bientot venire…”
Jeremiah did not hear the last words of the song, for he fell rather abruptly into the deepest of sleeps. The song resonated throughout his dreams, tenderly scarring his soul and committing the unfamiliar tune to memory. He could not have known that night, but many years afterward he would sing that song to his own children in a house very far away, and he would not remember where he had learned the words. He knew nothing of this, or anything else that night, except peace. And he did not hear the sliding-shut of the window as the Monster crept out into the night.
*****
When Jeremiah awoke the next morning, his Father was dead in the living room chair, a bottle of whiskey still in his hand. The authorities were summoned, but they could make nothing of the strange marks about the man’s neck, or the fact that his body had been drained of blood. Mother, whose face looked more blotchy and terrible than it had on the day before, shed no tears as she packed her things, and Jeremiah’s. They left the town that same day, and once his Mother’s bruises began to fade she became quite a happy and loving person, the way her husband had never allowed. She took Jeremiah to a small town very far away, and all was well.
