In one foul swoop, he shows me what they do and tells me why in a motion picture in my mind.
I’m a small child in some city, holding my mother's hand. This large crowd of people surrounds us, just a forest of legs at eye level all around me. There's a lot of action and excitement. My sense is that this is some celebration, perhaps the Fourth of July, but this may have just entered my mind because I spy the American flag somewhere in the setting. I'm looking around, curious but cautious, holding my mother's hand tight.
Then, out of nowhere, the tone of the crowd suddenly changes. Its like a dramatic drop in temperature. Panic blasts through everyone like a shockwave, infects everyone in some chain reaction. People are rushing around in terror. They're trying to get away from him. I don't know if someone screams it or I just somehow know it, but its the horrid Goblin Man they're afraid of. He's coming. He's close.
And that’s when I see him with my own eyes. It's hard to explain, too, but in an instant I see two different images of him. In a way its almost as if I'm getting both images simultaneously, with one super-imposed over the other, but the one image is a concoction, and that seems clear to me. Its just a clever cover.
In his artificial image he's some super-hero or super-villain. He is a well-built, muscular man in a corny, green and yellow costume with a cape and mask. It almost looks real, but something about it seems off, doesn't seem right somehow. Its almost like some crafty, rich and vivid cartoon running across the real landscape. If you manage to pierce through that image, though -- if you manage to see through the deceiving mask -- what you find is a very real, obviously inhuman creature. You find this being like a three-dimensional gray silhouette. His head is like a tear-drop, like an inverted egg, on a spindly gray body, but his eyes, for some reason, are absent from my memory. Perhaps I was just unable to gather the courage to look at them.
He comes bolting down a flight of curved steps leading out of a big, gray, stone building that looks a lot like Lincoln memorial, only it seems to have only three pillars. The cartoon image is gone completely by the time he reaches the ground and he takes off full tilt, cutting a path through the crowd of chaos. By the time I realize he's heading straight towards me its far too late to do anything. An awesome terror seizes me as he lifts me up off the ground with his hands, as my grip slips free of my mother's security. I scream bloody murder but my cries for her are lost in the cacophony of the crowd. Tears bleed out my wide eyes. My hand reaches for her unseen hand to grip, but I know the futility. I watch as she quickly disappears, her image shrinking and drowning away in a treacherous sea of foreign bodies. All this as the Goblin Man slings me onto his shoulders, giving me a piggy-back ride, and tries and calm me. He says that its okay that he's taken me. Its his right because he's my real daddy.
Then I wake up. I open my eyes in a flash.
The Goblin Man is at my bedside, motionless, staring out of the darkness of the room and into me as he so often does at night. He was putting dreams in my head again. Lights flash and flicker just outside my bedroom window, spilling out across his features. Like strobe lights or police sirens. I sit up quickly, run down the steps of the bunk bed and out my bedroom door. I don't look back. I dart to the immediate right, push open the door to my parent's bedroom and stop a foot from my mother's resting body. In the twilight of the morning, I call out to her in frantic whispers, approaching her now in measured steps, begging her to wake up, to please wake up, to hear me, help me, save me, to believe me.
Finally, she hears me. She wakes up in a panic, sits up and looks at me in utter confusion. She takes a minute, looks around, looks at the clock. Her hand goes to her forehead, she uses a finger to rub an eye. Groggily, her voice revealing that she's uncertain as to whether she should be annoyed or alarmed, she asks me what is wrong. I tell her somebody is in my room. She asks who, who is in my room, and I tell her that it is the Goblin Man. That he was giving me bad dreams.
Her tone changes, everything about her changes from worry to anger. She tells me I'm getting too old for this. With a frustrated sigh, she says that its just a bad dream, a nightmare. No, I tell her, I try so desperately to explain: he's not a bad dream, he was giving me bad dreams. She sighs again, this time with her face back in her pillow. She tells me, finally, with reluctance, to crawl in bed with her, but that I've got to go to sleep, and so I ball myself into the fetal position beside her and beneath the comfort of the covers. Protect me, please, don't let him get me.
She tells me that there's nothing to be afraid of, I tell her there is. When she asks me what was so scary about the Goblin Man, I tell her that he took me away from her. That he said that he was my real daddy. She laughs, and its like a knife she slices deep, deep into my soul and it twists and twists. First she tells me that I don't really believe that, then she asks me, ''You don't really believe that, do you?''
I lie. I say no.
After some silence, I tell her that he's still here, still in my room, and then she asks if I want her to go in there with me, as if this is what I'd been after all along or something. Pumped with adrenaline, I shake my head no. What good would it be for her to go into my room? He would certainly get her, too. She tells me to just relax and stay with her. He's not there, he's gone now. How does she know? She says that it was just a bad dream and now the dream's over and so I should just go back to sleep. ''But what if he comes back?'' I ask her, but she assures me that he won’t come back, but even if he did, its just a dream and dreams can’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
I look in my mother’s open doorway just in time to see him go bolting out of my room, pass the frame of the open door and take off down the hallway. Take off, that is, towards the room of my two younger sisters. Eyes wide in fear, I jerk beside her in bed. What the hell is he going to do with my sisters? I somehow knew he wouldn't kill them, but he seemed worse than death. Him, all of them, they seemed worse than anything and everything. Mom, she snapped at me when I jerked in bed and told me to calm down. I wanted to tell her that he was probably going to do the same thing to my sisters he did to me. I wanted to tell her that maybe she was next, but I knew saying it aloud wouldn't be of any use, so I'm quiet after that.
There's nothing left to do. Nowhere left to run.
She's falling asleep, drifting off. Gone. I'm wide awake, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, eyes open and watchful beneath the covers. I don't want to look out from beneath them, but I need to, so I do. And there he is, at the foot of the bed. He's right there, at the foot of my mother's bed, just standing there by the thick wooden pole at the end, just watching us. I whisper, ''Mom,'' but there's no answer.
I pull the covers over my head.
I’m a small child in some city, holding my mother's hand. This large crowd of people surrounds us, just a forest of legs at eye level all around me. There's a lot of action and excitement. My sense is that this is some celebration, perhaps the Fourth of July, but this may have just entered my mind because I spy the American flag somewhere in the setting. I'm looking around, curious but cautious, holding my mother's hand tight.
Then, out of nowhere, the tone of the crowd suddenly changes. Its like a dramatic drop in temperature. Panic blasts through everyone like a shockwave, infects everyone in some chain reaction. People are rushing around in terror. They're trying to get away from him. I don't know if someone screams it or I just somehow know it, but its the horrid Goblin Man they're afraid of. He's coming. He's close.
And that’s when I see him with my own eyes. It's hard to explain, too, but in an instant I see two different images of him. In a way its almost as if I'm getting both images simultaneously, with one super-imposed over the other, but the one image is a concoction, and that seems clear to me. Its just a clever cover.
In his artificial image he's some super-hero or super-villain. He is a well-built, muscular man in a corny, green and yellow costume with a cape and mask. It almost looks real, but something about it seems off, doesn't seem right somehow. Its almost like some crafty, rich and vivid cartoon running across the real landscape. If you manage to pierce through that image, though -- if you manage to see through the deceiving mask -- what you find is a very real, obviously inhuman creature. You find this being like a three-dimensional gray silhouette. His head is like a tear-drop, like an inverted egg, on a spindly gray body, but his eyes, for some reason, are absent from my memory. Perhaps I was just unable to gather the courage to look at them.
He comes bolting down a flight of curved steps leading out of a big, gray, stone building that looks a lot like Lincoln memorial, only it seems to have only three pillars. The cartoon image is gone completely by the time he reaches the ground and he takes off full tilt, cutting a path through the crowd of chaos. By the time I realize he's heading straight towards me its far too late to do anything. An awesome terror seizes me as he lifts me up off the ground with his hands, as my grip slips free of my mother's security. I scream bloody murder but my cries for her are lost in the cacophony of the crowd. Tears bleed out my wide eyes. My hand reaches for her unseen hand to grip, but I know the futility. I watch as she quickly disappears, her image shrinking and drowning away in a treacherous sea of foreign bodies. All this as the Goblin Man slings me onto his shoulders, giving me a piggy-back ride, and tries and calm me. He says that its okay that he's taken me. Its his right because he's my real daddy.
Then I wake up. I open my eyes in a flash.
The Goblin Man is at my bedside, motionless, staring out of the darkness of the room and into me as he so often does at night. He was putting dreams in my head again. Lights flash and flicker just outside my bedroom window, spilling out across his features. Like strobe lights or police sirens. I sit up quickly, run down the steps of the bunk bed and out my bedroom door. I don't look back. I dart to the immediate right, push open the door to my parent's bedroom and stop a foot from my mother's resting body. In the twilight of the morning, I call out to her in frantic whispers, approaching her now in measured steps, begging her to wake up, to please wake up, to hear me, help me, save me, to believe me.
Finally, she hears me. She wakes up in a panic, sits up and looks at me in utter confusion. She takes a minute, looks around, looks at the clock. Her hand goes to her forehead, she uses a finger to rub an eye. Groggily, her voice revealing that she's uncertain as to whether she should be annoyed or alarmed, she asks me what is wrong. I tell her somebody is in my room. She asks who, who is in my room, and I tell her that it is the Goblin Man. That he was giving me bad dreams.
Her tone changes, everything about her changes from worry to anger. She tells me I'm getting too old for this. With a frustrated sigh, she says that its just a bad dream, a nightmare. No, I tell her, I try so desperately to explain: he's not a bad dream, he was giving me bad dreams. She sighs again, this time with her face back in her pillow. She tells me, finally, with reluctance, to crawl in bed with her, but that I've got to go to sleep, and so I ball myself into the fetal position beside her and beneath the comfort of the covers. Protect me, please, don't let him get me.
She tells me that there's nothing to be afraid of, I tell her there is. When she asks me what was so scary about the Goblin Man, I tell her that he took me away from her. That he said that he was my real daddy. She laughs, and its like a knife she slices deep, deep into my soul and it twists and twists. First she tells me that I don't really believe that, then she asks me, ''You don't really believe that, do you?''
I lie. I say no.
After some silence, I tell her that he's still here, still in my room, and then she asks if I want her to go in there with me, as if this is what I'd been after all along or something. Pumped with adrenaline, I shake my head no. What good would it be for her to go into my room? He would certainly get her, too. She tells me to just relax and stay with her. He's not there, he's gone now. How does she know? She says that it was just a bad dream and now the dream's over and so I should just go back to sleep. ''But what if he comes back?'' I ask her, but she assures me that he won’t come back, but even if he did, its just a dream and dreams can’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
I look in my mother’s open doorway just in time to see him go bolting out of my room, pass the frame of the open door and take off down the hallway. Take off, that is, towards the room of my two younger sisters. Eyes wide in fear, I jerk beside her in bed. What the hell is he going to do with my sisters? I somehow knew he wouldn't kill them, but he seemed worse than death. Him, all of them, they seemed worse than anything and everything. Mom, she snapped at me when I jerked in bed and told me to calm down. I wanted to tell her that he was probably going to do the same thing to my sisters he did to me. I wanted to tell her that maybe she was next, but I knew saying it aloud wouldn't be of any use, so I'm quiet after that.
There's nothing left to do. Nowhere left to run.
She's falling asleep, drifting off. Gone. I'm wide awake, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, eyes open and watchful beneath the covers. I don't want to look out from beneath them, but I need to, so I do. And there he is, at the foot of the bed. He's right there, at the foot of my mother's bed, just standing there by the thick wooden pole at the end, just watching us. I whisper, ''Mom,'' but there's no answer.
I pull the covers over my head.
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