Monster In the Closet

There was a door.

It sat at the end of a scuffed-up, rarely-used corridor where the spiders lingered on the walls. The air held a tang to it that smelled like defeat and blood. It was uncomfortably familiar. The musty smell seeping from beneath the door was a friend. The door was not. It was old, splintered, and thick enough to hide any amount of screaming.

It haunted his nightmares.

Elias pressed back into the calloused hand hauling him by the collar and kicked his feet hard against the floor. He would go anywhere but that closet. The cupboard. Outside. Anywhere. The hand pushed harder, twisting in his shirt and pinching the long hair gathering on the young man’s neck. His cheek twinged beneath the ugly, swelling bruise blurring the vision of his right eye as he grimaced.

“P-Pa, I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean-”

“You shut your mouth, boy.” The hand released his collar in favour of his neck. “Think I’m dumb enough to believe that? Think I don’t know what you tried to do?”

“Ma was just-”

“Don’t bring your mother into this. She ain’t done nothing wrong to deserve a monster like you.”

“I didn’t, Pa. I didn’t mean to,” his voice came out as barely more than a whisper. “I was just cold and the blankets-”

His father hauled him upright and between the blissful second his father let go of his neck and the next, Elias had been smacked clean across the cheek. He screamed so loudly his voice snapped. His father had hit an already injured face, drawing no small amount of blood from the already split cheek. A second hit landed on his ear as he desperately tried to protect his eye. His world exploded into shrill ringing and dizziness. Elias reached out to his father, grabbing a handful of the dirty, whiskey-stained shirt.

“P-please. D-don’t. I’m sorry.”

Through the spinning, out-of-focus filter placed on his dark eyes, Elias watched his father raise his hand again.

He was thin. Sickly so. And there were shadows on his face that no other man wore. There was an illness in his eyes that bred a deep hatred toward the world. Elias’s eyes widened. With his sallow skin and sunken eyes, his father looked like the devil.

Ezekiel Cleer was the devil.

And he was looking for the demons in his boy. Manufacturing problems so there was a place he could turn his hatred toward and destroy himself.

“I’m sorry, Pa. I’m s-sorry! I won’t…I won’t do it again! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“You will be.”

The hand on his neck slunk up to the long black hair, grabbing a fistful of it. Without the support of the choking hand on his neck or the wall behind his back, Elias collapsed. Splinters of wood slipped under the skin of his knees as his father dragged him the remaining few feet of the hallway.

“No! Please!”

His father flung the door open, throwing it into the old wall.

The strong hand in his hair tossed him in carelessly.

Elias scrambled to his hands and knees, unable to get any higher from the ground for fear of collapsing again. All he could do was turn around.

Silhouetted in the sickly, yellow light of the doorway stood his father, one hand on the door. Elias swallowed as his lip began to tremble. Tears coursed down his right cheek, his other eye was already too swollen to cry. The tears caught the paltry light and glimmered.

“Pa?” Elias’s young voice trembled. “Pa, you don’t want to do this, do you?”

“No.” A timid smile began to lift Elias’s bloodied lips. “No, I wish I could kill you.”

The door slammed shut in his face. Elias was locked in the darkness.

He sank to his heels, stunned. Warm blood trailed down the side of his neck from his ear, causing him to shiver. The warmth of the home didn’t extend this far. The radiators had been broken long ago and the fire from the hearth was blocked by the length of the corridor. He shivered again, his teeth chattering. That was the cause of all of this. He was cold and grabbed blankets that he shouldn’t have.

Now, he was in the closet.

And the cold was worse than it ever had been.

Each clack of his teeth sent sharp pains through his head. “Pa?” he called. “M-Ma?”

Mustering the last of his strength and adrenaline, Elias began banging on the door, screaming as he did so. Calling out for his father was useless. He’d put him in here. Elias inhaled deeply and began his attempts. Focusing on her name, Elias called out for hours, clinging to the hope that she would arrive. She had before. It was already late. His father would relent and she would come help him. Elias screamed until his throat was raw and the words turned into little more than a hoarse trickle.

Eventually, the soft tap of his mother’s footsteps approached.

“Avilene, don’t you dare help that fucking bastard,” his father said. “He needs to be punished for what he did.” There was something else, a mutter he didn’t catch on account of his suddenly diminished hearing. “He’s not fucking normal, Avilene. You touch him an’ I’ll kill you.”

The footsteps stopped, then faded away.

He lifted a thin, trembling hand to the door.

“Ma?”

Loud silence stuffed itself down his ears. The weak light trickling down the hallway underneath the door extinguished suddenly. His father had walked them off to bed and left him there.

No one was going to help him.

Elias slumped against a pile of old coats thrown to the floor. The longer he sat, the more the pain began to settle in. Every injury throbbed with his heart, none more than his head. It was nauseating but not enough to deter the seizing hunger of his stomach. Soon enough the exhaustion eclipsed even the hunger but the agony radiating from his cheekbone was too insistent. Sleep curled on the perimeter of his thoughts as he stared out into the darkness, watching colors flash in his vision.

Cold air slunk under the door.

There was no escape.

No one was coming to help.

And the worst bit was knowing it was all his fault. Come storm or sun, it was always his fault. There were monsters in the closet, and he was one.