The Monster Under My Bed

I was aimlessly staring at the deep cracks in the oak ceiling beams when the large clock on the stairwell behind me struck one. I glanced at the time and date on my laptop. August 11, 2025. 1:11AM. The witching hour.

“You’re eleven minutes off,” I chided the old clock.

The clock didn’t reply, ticking ominously.

The sprawling Gothic Revival mansion packed to the brim with dark wood paneling, curved stained glass arches, and far too many rooms for one person creaked ever so slightly, settling as the night brought cool air from the Pacific.

“Aight. Let’s do just one more tweak,” I muttered, rolling over to my laptop.

My project on using CrawdGPT5 to mass-generate personalized cover letters and resumes to automatically submit them via LinkedIn was still misfiring slightly.

The laptop screen covered in a few fingerprints reflected my tired face as I wiggled the keypad touchpad to wake up the screen.

“Quest,” I narrated wryly. “Locate a well-paying job within an hour or less driving distance of 171 Rossgoyle Road. Reward… paying all of my many bills on time.”

There were indeed many bills piling up.

The inheritance of the aforementioned estate arrived at an opportune time as rent on the Pacific Rim was getting hella expensive and my savings could barely afford me coffee and dollar store ramen.

When Grandpa Archie died and left me the Clifford family semi-decrepit estate built by Alexander Edwardio Clifford in 1861 it felt like a blessing. That was until I realised that Grandpa’s savings accounts were a horrific mess and would only cover the taxes and electricity until September.

The decrepit estate was far too big for one person and featured unusually large and tall doors and vaulted ceiling rooms that seemed to be designed for giants. Selling it or renting the rooms out on Darebnb wasn’t an option as the land was co-owned by some Frontenachii Om. holding corporation and their Seattle lawyer specifically forbade me from doing so when I discussed it with her. My parents didn’t have the cash nor the desire to assist me, busy at a dig in Roraima, Brazil with rather spotty internet.

A single text message I got from Mom was “sort it out”.

I couldn’t complain too much. Free housing, suspiciously low taxes and a driveway through the pine woods that would probably take a thousand years to shovel when winter came.

Compared to the overcrowded student campus at UOFSE, the isolation and potential for endless forest walks provided by the Clifford mansion was… nice.

The nearest neighbour was eight miles down the winding road with postcard-style glacier views. Fifteen minutes down the dense pine forest of Darkbrook valley, the small tourist town of Cascade, Washington provided amenities.

The mansion itself stood perilously close to the edge of Darkfall Valley, blessing me with a view of a misty abyss surrounded by a sixty-mile-wide ring of glacier mountains framing the Olympic Peninsula.

I yawned, eyes drifting from the laptop screen to the stack of semi-unpacked boxes crowding the corner of my bedroom. I inhabited the house since August 8th and was nowhere near claiming it as a home, preoccupied with my grandfather’s funeral and then with looking for work.

The house felt like it belonged to another, long-gone place and time back when artisans crammed as much quirky detail as possible into their work.

The ornate moldings featured carvings of female figures with antlers. The stained glass transoms above each doorway depicted humanoid, red dragons sitting atop piles of treasure surrounded by bowed figures. The entrance hallway art depicted the journey of Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana and friar Gaspar de Carvajal down the Amazon river and their encounter with white pyramids and giant Amazonian women. Three-eyed, skull-headed, antlered stone gargoyles and wood carvings of a similar theme populating the interior and exterior of the estate gave me the creeping sensation of being watched when I passed by them.

As I contemplated whether Francisco de Orellana was really my many-times-great-grandfather or whether that was just a tall tale that Alexander Edwardio Clifford came up with to sell more logs in his mill I heard eerie scratching beneath me.

I frowned, dismissing the noise as the house settling.

Unfortunately for me, it came more insistently. This time, deliberate, rhythmic scratching resonated from beneath my dark, Gothic-columned, four-poster bed.

Something… alive and annoying was trying to claw its way across the floor from underneath.

Great. Juuuust what I needed. Some kind of wild animal had found its way inside the old, massive, decrepit estate with more entry points than I could count.

I moved on the bed, tiredly praying one last time for the noise to be just a figment of my sleep-deprived imagination.

The scratching paused for a split second, then resumed.

Oh, you picked the wrong mansion to invade tonight, buddy, I thought as I reached for the bedside table. I’ve got a large broom somewhere and the animal control number one Goodle search away!

My fingers closed around my X-TORC tablet, the brick of a phone-tablet, waterproof and drop-proof. I ordered the tablet from Gbay as I was prone to dropping things out of my hands when distracted and managed to smash my previous phone screen into a glitchy dark spiderweb at the start of summer.

Most importantly, the workman’s tablet had an industrial-grade LED dual flashlight that, according to the marketing description, illuminated a power line a hundred feet in the air.

Let’s see if you’re Team Mouse, Squirrel, Raccoon, or Possum. Place your bets now! Drumroll…

I pressed the orange flashlight button, aiming it toward the floor as I leaned over.

The two 50’000-lumens triangles on the back of the device ignited with the intensity of a small sun, filling the room with harsh white light.

“FUCK, what the fuck?! That’s so bright!” a female voice yelped.

The first thing I saw was the antlers. I dropped the tablet onto the thing sticking out halfway from under my bed when I heard it speak.

“Ackk!” The antlered girl cried out as the brick of a device landed on her forehead.

I reached down and picked up the tablet, my face slack at my unexpected bedroom invader.

Two long, spindly arms shot out from beneath the bed frame, rubbing furiously at the black forehead dotted with silver stars. Black mane composed from dark feathers splayed across the floor. More fur populated an elongated face that gradually transitioned from a dog-like, void-black nose to star-like silver freckles along gray-black cheeks, large, fluffy ears and forehead. Jet-black feathers with violet and blue iridescent edges populated her head and shoulders.

Worst of all, black antlers, yes, actual goddamn antlers stretched out from her head, covered in the same violet-blue-silver stardust flickers.

As the thing rubbed its forehead, I simply stared, struggling to process what I was seeing.

The alien on my floor had the general shape of a woman, but her face was elongated, almost like a cross between an elk skull and a dog’s head. Large, muscular hands with spindly, long fingers that ended in Vantablack claws covered tightly shut eyes struggling to block out the blinding light.

My brain crashed, rebooted, and then presented me with a single shocking thought: Cryptids are fucking real.

Then another thought followed: One million dollars.The James Randi Foundation. The paranormal challenge. Proof of supernatural beings. A million-dollar prize.

My fingers fumbled with the X-TORC, switching from flashlight to camera mode. The triangles winked away, leaving us in the dim, pale glow of my laptop.

“Slayer, dude, you trying to burn away my retinas?” the cryptid groaned, slowly uncovering her eyes. They were large and silver, glowing blue from within, currently featuring an unmistakably annoyed look. Her sharp, exposed teeth were glowing too, sort of like phosphorus dials on an old watch.

Either this was a genuine fucking cryptid and I’d just won the lottery to cover all of my bills or this… was some kind of a stupid prank by an ass who just broke into my home dressed in all black makeup, glowing paint and an elk skull.

The second conclusion put a bit of a damper on my million dollar merriment.

I started snapping photos, the flash going off in rapid succession. She hissed, once again blinded.

I glanced at the screen and then my brain skittered sideways into the abyss.

The display wasn’t showing the sparkly alien, antlered skull beast. Instead, each photo showed a massive black dog lying on its back, paws covering its face from the light, eyes flashing silver-red.

The enormous dog reminded me of a Black Shuck, aka the harbinger of disaster from the book of monsters my grandfather had read to me long ago, illustrated with the kind of creepy art that guaranteed children nightmares.

I looked wildly between the tablet screen and the actual creature.

On the floor: a naked furry girl with fucking antlers. On my screen: demonic black dog, captured with each brilliant flash.

“Ash! Stahhhp blinding me already, fuck!” she hissed, swatting at the phone.

Her claws managed to dislodge the tablet from my hand and it dropped on her face again with a thwack of reinforced, two-inch thick plastic meeting flesh for a second time.

“Motherffff…!” A string of creative profanities followed as she clutched at her face. “What the ever-loving fu…!?”

She squirmed fully out from under the bed, one hand still rubbing at her face while the other pushed against the hardwood floor. As she rose, I scrambled backward until I hit the headboard.

She was fucking tall, easily seven feet, maybe more, revealed to me in all her cryptid glory as she straightened to her full height, antlers looming overhead. Her body was alien and feminine, with curves that might have been attractive if they weren’t attached to something that looked like it had walked straight out of a creepypasta.

Her ankles were raised off the ground in a digitigrade anatomy quirk found in deer or dogs, paws tipped with wicked black claws clicking against the wooden floor as she moved about.

“Motherfucking OW!” she continued in a voice completely at odds with her monstrous appearance, sounding like a twenty-something girl who’d just been smacked in the face twice by industrial equipment. “What did you just drop on me, you knob?”

I pressed myself further into the headboard, staring at the eldritch horror that was now agitatedly hissing and hopping from one foot to the other, defeated by a phone.

“A tablet?” She finally stopped whimpering and hopping after a minute. She bent down to pick up my tablet, spinning the device in her pointy claws, glowing silver eyes flickering in the dark. “Was this thing made to survive the nuclear apocalypse or something? Why the ever-loving fuck is it so thicc?”

“What are you, some kind of a runaway SCP?” I finally let out.

“Eh?”

“A euclid class humanoid creature,” I voiced, struggling to sound like I wasn’t batshit terrified.

She didn’t look as spooky-slenderman under the bed. Slenderwoman?

“Still a nerd, hum?” She tilted her skull-like head like a dog, pure white, sharp, glowing canines glinting as she smiled.

“Do we… know each other?” I squinted at her, calculating how quickly I could escape through the door down the stairwell if she decided to lunge for my throat.

“Come on Ash,” she huffed, stepping closer and sliding the tablet onto the bed. “You don’t remember your bestie… Shady?”

“Shady…” I repeated, my heart stopping.

The name ignited a plethora of long-suppressed memories.

My childhood. Games in the forest behind the mansion. Building cardboard citadels, fighting with stick swords and telling ghost stories in the library under a blanket fort illuminated by harvested Christmas lights.

But those games had been with a… friend that could not possibly exist.

A friend my parents had been very concerned about.

“You can’t be real,” I choked. “You were my imaginary friend, Starshade. Shit… guess I’m having another psychotic episode, huh? Thought I was over them years ago.”

Glowing eyes widened, then narrowed into slits. “Imaginary? Are you fucking kidding me? What the shit did they do to you?”

“They… Put me on antipsychotic pills so I could get better and stop ranting about you to the other, less insane children,” I crossed my arms. “You know I haven’t thought about you in like 13 years. Maybe more! Guess I gotta call Dr. Marsgrove and ask her to renew my prescription, huh?”

“Who the fuck is Doctor Marsgrove?” Shady demanded.

“My… therapist from Seattle. My parents took me to her after I kept ranting about my best friend with antlers who lives in the woods behind Grandpa’s house.”

Shady’s jaw fell open, revealing even more sharp, glowing teeth. “They took you to a shrink because of ME? Fucking hell, Ash, das’ tough.”

I nodded.

“So what, this effin’ quack convinced you I was all in your head? That the girl who taught you how to climb the giant oak next to the cliffside and showed you fae circles was just some figment of your imagination?”

“Yes,” I said.

I attempted to ignore the hallucination. It was hard. Shady was an incredibly imposing presence, nothing like my lanky, thin, fuzzy 9-year-old bestie.

She gritted her teeth, spun the tablet around and snapped a selfie while sticking out her tongue to the side, the flash illuminating her face. Then, she squinted at the screen to examine the photo before tossing it at my chest. “Photographic evidence, bitch.”

I caught the tablet and looked down at the screen. The photo showed the same massive black dog from before, but this time with its tongue lolling out in a demonic grin.

“Why are you a dog?” I asked, flipping through the photos of the Black Shuck.

“Your human-made jank-ass cameras don’t capture my stunning beauty, don’t you remember?” She grinned.

I switched the camera to video mode. It showed a dog standing on its hind legs pawing at the front of the bed. I looked back at Shady who was now leaning against the bed.

“Is this a digital thing? What about chemical-based cameras from the 90s?” I asked.

“Same thing.” She shrugged. “In fact, I look like a big dog to most humans.”

“Except for me?”

“You’re Ash,” she said as if that explained anything.

“Meaning what?” I outputted after a minute of silent staring. “Why can I see you? Am I a wizard? Where’s my owl, Shades?”

Starshade chortled. “You wish, nerd. Though I’d pay good money to see you in Hogwarts robes. You’d prolly look like a depressed bat. Def’ got a… uhhh… Snape vibe going on. Should really wash your hair more often.”

“Oh, piss off, I’ll have you know I’d make an excellent Ravencaw!” I said, then immediately regretted engaging with this hallucination who couldn’t even spell Bogwarts correctly. “Wait, why am I arguing about fictional magical school houses with my fictional friend?”

“Rude.” She sat on the bed, making it creak. A tail covered in dark feathers tipped with silver stars and iridescent edges swayed back and forth.

“I recall you being skinnier, smaller, and wearing a dress,” I said. “No giant-ass antlers either.”

“It’s called growing up, Ashy. You’re bigger in… some parts too.” She leered down at me.

“If you’re real,” I challenged, “then why did you disappear for thirteen years only to show up under my bed like some discount boogeyman?”

“Discount?” She clutched her chest in mock offense. “I’ll have you know I’m a premium boogeyman. Top shelf. The Macallan 325-year of things that go bump in the night!”

I couldn’t help the snort that fled my mouth. “Answer the damn question.”

Shady sighed. Her antlers drooped slightly, casting unnerving, wobbling, long shadows on the ceiling. “I… didn’t disappear. You did. Your parents packed you up one summer and never brought you back again. Quite sadge really. I’ve been checking on this place every summer, yet you never came. Till today. Seeing your red jank-ass car in the driveway was the top event of my evening!”

I opened my mouth and closed it. It sounded like she wasn’t entirely honest. How did I know this? No idea.

More memories bubbled up out of my worn-out, swampy, extra-foggy psyche.

Grade 4. When I wouldn’t shut up about my bestie… the dark, alien Princess from Omnithornia. Parents driving me to a psychiatrist in Seattle. Getting prescribed antipsychotics which made me feel drowsy and confused for a decade.

Wait. Proof. I had proof. Photographic evidence.

I grabbed my tablet and sent the photo of Shade-dog to my friend from Eastern Europe who was currently online on Telegram. Dax replied pretty quickly.

[Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: sup A. You got a dog?

[AshLawd ಠ_ಠ]: Uhhh… I guess. She was hiding under my bed at the Clifford estate.

[Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: sheet, das a big doggaww. What breed?

[AshLawd ಠ_ಠ]: fuck if i know man

[Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: cool beans, gib her many pets 4 me

Warm breath tickled the back of my neck. Shady moved unnervingly close, large, deep, silver eyes peering at my phone. “See that reply? I’m totes max-real!”

A real dog maybe. Did my hallucinations extend to text messages? Also, why did she sound like she had a California Valley-girl accent?

“Seriously, why were you under my bed?” I went on the offensive.

Shady suddenly became very interested in examining her claws. “No reason.”

“Starshade…”

“Fine! I was going to scare the absolute bejesus out of you as a welcome home prank,” she admitted, then added, cheeks flashing with silver sparks. “Except, I fell asleep like an idiot cus you weren’t coming up, just typedy-typing on your laptop downstairs. Finally heard you moving above me on the bed, woke up, made noises climbing out and got blinded and smacked in the face… twice.”

“You a nocturnal critter or something?”

“What? No! M’ crepuscular!”

That’s a word I haven’t heard in ages. “You’re creepy alright.”

“It means I’m most active at twilight, dumbass.” She rolled her eyes.

“I knew that,” I fired back.

“Sure, Mr. Electrical Engineering graduate,” she snorted.

I squinted at her. “How do you even know about my diploma and car color?”

“Social media exists, duh. Your Instagram n’ LinkedIn profile are public. ‘Ashcroft Clifford - future electrical engineer, caffeine addict, occasional existential crisis haver.’ I even liked all of your recent photos.”

“Which photos?” I asked incredulously.

“Liiike the one where you’re sitting on your car hood in front of the SF bridge tryin’ to look all cool wearing dark shades and not nerdy.”

“You have… social media? What do you even post? ‘Today’s forest aesthetic: dead squirrel and mysterious glowing mushrooms’? Whoever even let you on the internet?”

“I let myself on the internet. Anyone can sign up for Instagram. Darkbrook Public Library has a computer lab that’s pretty easy to sneak into at 12 AM.”

I suddenly pictured the ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ meme, as I imagined a security guard noticing Starshade using the computer lab via the camera feed.

“So you’ve been lurking around Darkbrook for over a decade, breaking into libraries, and waiting for me to come back?”

“I don’t ‘lurk’, dude. I ‘maintain a strategic presence.’”

I pictured Starshade hunched comically over a small library computer in the dead of night, massive antlers barely clearing the ceiling, claws click-clacking against the human-sized keyboard as she scrolled through my Instagram, liking random pics.

“So you’ve been stalking me online?”

“Not the whole time. Only like… sometimes,” she stated with a shifty, guilty-looking expression.

“Why?”

“To keep track of my bestie.” She stretched out on the bed, one lanky hand grabbing at my thigh and petting softly. “I missed you, dude. Come on, tell me how much you missed me!”

She felt warm and soft. Inhumanly so. Furry, slightly sparkly hands with jet-black paw pads. I looked at her through the phone’s screen. A massive black dog was lying across the bed, one paw on my thigh. I reached out and prodded an antler that didn’t exist in the viewfinder. Shady let out a soft ‘burr’ noise.

“Fuck my life. Are… cryptids real or do I need to call my psychiatrist tomorrow,” I muttered mostly to myself, rubbing my face tiredly.

“Ashy stahhhp askin’ dum’ questions and lie down. I wanna cuddle. You know, like, old times in our blanket fort?”

How could she possibly be real? The absurdity of a massive cryptid demanding cuddles only made me lean towards the hypothesis that I was completely insane.

Occam’s razor suggested that my grandfather left a dog in the house and my overworked, sleep-deprived mind was hallucinating or dreaming up this whole batshit crazy conversation.

“Shade, seriously what the fuck are you? Some kind of deer-person?”

“I’m whatevs you want me to be, Ashy.”

“That’s not an answer, damn it! Are you a local-born monstress or a space alien? Is Omnithornia real?”

“Like, chairs are real, right?” She yawned. “But if I close my eyes… no chairs.”

“That’s not how reality works.”

“Bold of you to assume how reality works,” she said, and then reached out and pulled me down into her embrace.

“Hey, you can’t just…”

“Dibs,” she announced, settling her silver star-dusted fuzz against my side.

“What?”

“Princess law. I called dibs on you ages ago. Very binding.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“Can’t prove it isn’t.” She wiggled against me, smooshing me deeper into her embrace. “Tha paperwork is in ‘nother di… uhrm, other forest.”

“What other forest?” I demanded.

“Night, Ashykinss.” She yawned unnaturally wide like a cat, jaws sliding open to a 120-degree angle and then snapping shut like a bear trap. “Try not to dream ‘bout War-Gunner fityy thousandfff n’ python codery or watevses.”

“What’s wrong with Python and War-Gunner?”

“Nawthing,” she expressed sassily. “I’ll be in your dreams, judging you. Extra hard. Like always.”

Like… always. In my dreams?! What?

Her breath evened out.

What the fuck?

My thoughts careened sideways as I stared at her ridiculously curvy body, struggling to rationalize what was happening to me.

If Dr. Marsgrove’s words were to be believed, this was a psychotic break. Just like the ones I used to have as a kid when I saw lanky, faceless ghosts in the Arizona desert. The stress of unemployment slathered in sleep deprivation and baked in an empty mansion culminated in a mental health speedrun.

The problem with such theory was that Shady felt too god-damned real. She wasn’t transparent, didn’t give off a constant, deeply unnerving, gut-twisting feeling that occurred when I was about to hallucinate something fucked up.

The weight of her arm across my chest was inescapably solid. The soft fuzz of her body and the rise and fall of her breath were far too persistent.

The flickering, glowing stardust within the fuzz that looked like distant star constellations, shimmering violet on the left and blue on the right was definitely surreal, yet calming which usually wasn’t the case with my hallucinations.

Maybe this was… Carbon monoxide poisoning?Heating systems way out of date that my grandfather didn’t bother to update. I should really check the CO detectors. Wait. Does this house even have CO detectors? I didn’t see any. Fuck. If I survive the night, I’ll definitely buy some.Then again, maybe… I am asleep and this is an overly elaborate dream.

I glanced at my laptop sitting on the bedside table. The screen was still on, CrawdGPT burning away tokens. The code looked legible.

The clock in the right corner said [1:27 AM].

I stared at it. The numbers didn’t wobble.

[1:28 AM].

My dreams weren’t this granular and definitely did not portray clocks properly. Also, I felt the individual threads of my worn, gray t-shirt and smelled a very faint pine scent clinging to Shady’s sparkly fur. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked on, eleven minutes ahead. Nope. Too much coherent detail for a dream.

Or… Starshady’s real. A genuine supernatural entity that only I can see for some reason. Either I am special in a cosmic-horror-protagonist way, or…

“Duuudeeee, shhhhhhhhh,” Shady mumbled into my neck. “Tryin’ to freakin’ sleep. Staph saying my nameee like you need smthing. You don’t need nothin’, am here to protek you.”

“I… did not say your name,” I rebutted, frowning.

“You thought it, spiced with ticking-worry. No worry tick-tick-tick-thinkagery. Only rest now. Sss… distracting when I’m tryin’ to sleep. So freakin’ tired. Been awake too freakin’ long.” She ranted in a half-asleep voice.

What is she even planning to protect me from?

“From nothing. It’s fine. Everything is fine now. Relax.”

I did not relax.

“How can you even hear my thoughts?” I attempted to shift a bit further away, but her tail coiled even tighter around me.

“Brrrain hooks catch onto stray thoughts.”

“What?!”

She failed to reply, seemingly asleep.

Hypothesis, what? Five? Yeah, five.Starshady is some kind of an extraterrestrial entity. Maybe…

An alien scout, sent to Earth from some distant planet to study human behaviour through prolonged observation. Yes. That makes sense. Such would definitely explain the familiarity with human pop culture, Instagram stalking and Garry Cotter references. Maybe she was like the aliens from the Third Stone From The Sun TV show… Fumbling through human social conventions while harvesting intelligence for an intergalactic survey? Surely, no genuine self-respecting cryptid would make Bogwarts jokes!

“Ashyy….” Shady whined into my side. “I’m not an alien or cryptid. I’m your bestsstieee. Ughhhhh. Stop thinking so loouuud.”

The statement snapped something inside me, like a lightbulb coming on, like a key turning in a long-unused, rusted lock to slide open an old door I hadn’t looked behind in forever.

“You’re thinking too loud!Pipe down!” A small, skinny, nine or maybe seven-year-old Starshady stated, waving her dark hands about. She was wearing a black dress dotted with silver stars, antlers short nubs poking through her wild, feathery mane. “My brain hooks are like… invisible fishing lines. They float around looking for thoughts to grab onto.”“Well, don’t grab onto me.”“I can’t always control it. It’s like… breathing for me, you kno’? Liiiike, you are thinking about your grandma’s chocolate chip cookies now extra hard.”I was indeed thinking about the cookies. “What do you want me to do about this? I am not a magical princess like you, Shady.”“Hrmmmmm… frig. True. Okkay. Step one. Think about nothing at all.”“How?”“Dunno.”“Wow. So helpful.”“Ah, ah! I know! I got it. Me and you are going to split your mind in two.” Shady brought her hands together then pulled them apart with a click of her tongue. “Da’ front thinks about random nonsense. Da’ back thinks ‘bout secret stuff you want to do. Dis’ way we can play games without me hooking all the thoughts outta you and ruining the fun!”

The memory became brighter, more solid. It was connected to other memories of Shady smacking me with her tail whip-style, forcing me to split my mind again and again.

“Two minds!” She declared “Architect and Champion! We gottaw separate ‘dem extra hard! Keep at it!”

I closed my eyes tightly, attempting to summon the mental gymnastics routine mastered by my younger self.

Architect / Champion

Backmind / Frontmind

“Like separatin’ tha’ egg whites from yolk!” Smol Shady bobbed atop a pine stump. “Champion thinks of attackin’ me one way while Architect does the real hidden thinkery! Fret not, I’ll pry some stuffses apart with mah hooks in yo head. It’ll help ya along, but you gots to be the one who divides your thinkery in halfses!”

The memory made me feel warm, like I was sitting by the fire under the stars with Shady long, long ago. I started by taking deep breaths while thinking of summer afternoons in a blanket fort in my grandfather’s grand library.

A giant tree featuring sparkly violet-blue leaves. Sunlight breaking through the glass and metal roof. Shady’s hands on mine.“Divide soul by zero,” her voice whispering, dark claws tightening around my temples.

So many strange, fun times which my psychiatrist tagged as “dissociative episodes brought on by childhood trauma”.

Except I didn’t have any trauma. Just a childhood best friend who could read my thoughts.

“Divide soul by zero,” I whispered to myself, filling the front of my mind with white noise. Like TV static mixed with random elevator music. Meaningless fuzz. Behind such, somewhere far and incredibly deep my thoughts continued the deep assessment of the situation.

Hypothesis Six:Mind reading magic is REAL. Shady and I split my mind more than thirteen years ago. Now I could use this skill to… protect myself from things like her. Sus creatures that went bump in the night and could read human thoughts.How many of them were out there? How much other stuff that I saw as a kid was real?

Two patterns of completely separate thought. Two minds. It was unexpectedly simple. It was as if my brain was simply waiting for permission to split itself in twain once again. Muscle memory of madness.

Like learning to ride a bike, the mind-splitting skill snapped back into existence.

[Can you hear me? Shady? Starshady? Shadi-oh?] I thought at the creature smooshing me while keeping the thought in the Architect-backend of my mind.

No response came.

[Testing. Testing. One, two… three. Starshady is a giant dork who prolly practices dramatic entrances in the mirror!]

Again, nothing.

Great success!

Shady’s cozy warmth enveloped me like a living blanket. I fought to keep my eyes open, a billion more questions and hypotheticals swirling in the back of my mind, but exhaustion won out.

Tomorrow… Everything would definitely make sense…Tomorrow.