Monica’s covers were yanked up to her eyes as she cowered and stared unblinkingly at the closet door. She could hear it there. It was crying. It was always crying. She was sure of it. She was crying as well, but silently, tears falling but not a sound escaping her trembling lips. Monica was 5 years old. She was crying, along with the thing in her closet. The monster, she called it.
Monica listened to this weeping and sobbing every night. Sometimes, she could smell rotting meat, like when her 15 year old brother Marcus would leave his plate with a half-eaten chicken leg in his room for days and the smell crept through the vents from his room to hers, as he was in the room next door. But this was much worse then old chicken. Much, much worse. However, the smell wasn’t making itself known tonight and she was glad. She always felt like throwing up when she smelt it.
The first time she heard the crying was six months ago, only two weeks after she had moved to this bedroom. Before she had the room next to her parents and this was the storage room but her parents had decided she was too big for her old nursery and moved her here. At first she had been ecstatic, but no longer since the crying began. That first time she had been more curious then frightened. She had risen from her bed and opened the closet door. She couldn’t quite remember what the monster had looked like, since she’d only seen it for about a second. She only knew that it was real bad, and she didn’t like it at all. She supposed she must have screamed then, since her mom ran it a moment later and turned on the light.
The monster disappeared with the darkness. She had broken into hysterics and her mother had held her tightly, rocking her, assuming that Monica had had a nightmare. Monica knew better though. She could still hear, six months later, the crying of the monster in her closet. She wouldn’t open it again though. She knew better. She had been very lucky last time, and this night only herself and her brother, Marcus were home, no mom or dad to come and save her as they were both out at her aunt’s house for drinks and wouldn’t be home till morning.
Should she open it now, she was quite sure; the monster would eat her up, like the wolf in her story book, Little Red Riding Hood. However, as much as she pleaded to be brought back to her old bedroom, her parents left her in the room with the monster, chalking her terrors up to a 5-year-old imagination, and deciding she should face her fears. Her brother Marcus was of the same mind.
Not long past midnight, Marcus was stomping upstairs after watching TV for the past few hours. He could hear crying from his sister’s room. He silently groaned; she cried every night and the sound would carry into his room from the vents. He wanted to just flop onto his bed and fall asleep, but his good big brother instincts took over and he sighed and opened his sister’s door. He saw her huddled in her bed, shaking, her sobs easily heard. She started when he entered the room and he went over to her and put his arm around her without bothering to turn on the light.
“You okay, kid?” Marcus asked his sister.
“N-no,” Monica replied haltingly. Marcus heard her crying again.
“Monica, its okay, I’m here, you don’t need to cry anymore.”
“It’s not me, it’s the monster,” Monica said wide-eyed, staring back at the closet.
“Monica...” Marcus said exasperated until he saw she wasn’t crying. He listened harder and realized indeed, the crying sound did seem to come from the closet. “What the hell-?”
Marcus started towards the closet door when he felt his sister grab onto his leg.
“NO! Don’t open it! It’ll come out! It’s gonna eat you!” Monica shrieked.
“No it won’t, just stand back, okay?” Marcus said pulling her off him and pushing her aside. She moaned and cowered in the corner as Marcus gulped silently. He opened the door. Monica screamed loudly, but he couldn’t hear her. His ears were filled with the thing’s loud moans and sobs, which gradually turned to maniacal laughter. His nose burned with the smell of decay. But what he saw on the floor made his blood run cold.
On the floor was a writhing, shrieking, half-decomposed human body. Part of the skin on its face was rotted away to reveal an evil skeletal grin, its fingers were bare of skin and the body looked bloated, as if it had been underwater for a while. Marcus’ dinner came up then. He spewed yellow chunks all over the already revolting corpse-demon. The corpse’s head turned to face him with popped and oozing blind eyeballs. Marcus tried to run then, but the dead eyes seemed to keep him rooted to the spot. Monica continued to screech, losing her sanity with each second at the sight. She would not remember this later. She wouldn’t remember anything at all.
The corpse’s arm shot out and its boney fingers locked around Marcus' throat, pulled him towards its decaying head. Marcus fainted then, mere inches from the face of death.
Marcus awoke in a cold, dark room. He suddenly realized, though unsure how, that he was in his sister’s closet. But it was different. The walls were bare, and the floor was damp. Suddenly, he recalled a story his friend, Jimmy had told him when he had moved into this house a few years ago, back when Monica still had her old bedroom. He had told him that a boy had died in Marcus’ house a few years back, apparently of murder. The boy had been home alone that night, and when his parents returned, they found him in the closet. The closet was nearly airtight.
There had been water seeping out from the crack under the door. When they opened the door they found the closet half full of water, which washed out with the half-decomposed body of the boy. The police never caught the culprit, never found out how the water got in the closet, and never been able to explain how the body could have decayed so fast.
Jimmy had also told him that he heard people saying a demon had gotten him, and was still there, in the closet, waiting for its next victim. Marcus hadn’t believed him then, and had forgotten about it, until now. He tried to rise, but found himself unable to. Cold terror gripped him and he turned his gaze to his hands but could not see them. He realized the room wasn’t dark; he was blind, like the corpse had been. He clasped his hands together and felt not flesh but the grating of bone, and bloated palms. He tried to scream but only a moan escaped his rotted lips.
He heard his mother screaming and his father sobbing with his sister, all in hysteria, as they lost their minds at the sight of his mangled flesh. Marcus moaned again, and shook, withering, on the floor. He would die there, if he wasn’t dead already, and would be trapped in this closet, until someone else took his place. But, if he would leave when another came, then why could he still hear the other boy’s shrieking? No, that boy was still here, with him, on the floor, and would stay there forever, as would he. But the demon, the demon was laughing, laughing….
Marcus hadn’t been eaten by the monster as Monica had screamed he would be in warning. This, he thought as he began to cry, was much, much worse.