I was about five years old when I first saw it. That night was our first in the new house on Riverwood Street and my first time in a room of my own. I felt like such a grown up with my big bed and a desk with a lamp for all my childhood administrative needs. I felt so grown up that I told Mum that I didn’t need a nightlight anymore, though I did ask her to leave the bedroom door open a sliver to let in some light from the kitchen down the hallway.
The house had fallen silent and I was slipping into sleep when I heard a low creak from the corner of the room in front of me, to the left. I opened my eyes a little, to see if Simon had somehow crept into my room. He hadn’t dealt with the separation as well as I had, and when he’d found out that he’d no longer be sharing a room with me, there had been a lot of tears, and lot of pleading. Half of me wanted to let him stay in my room for the night, and the other half jealously guarded my newfound independence and privacy. Mum put her foot down though, and Simon had to stay in his own room that night.
So, naturally, I expected to see Simon’s shadow in the doorway when I heard that noise. But when I opened my eyes, I didn’t see anything.
Remember: it was mostly dark. The soft kitchen light was still on, still streaming through the crack of the door. Simon wasn’t standing there like I’d expected, so I rolled over, tiredness pulling my eyelids down, making them feel heavier than a thousand pounds, when a thought casually drifted up from my exhausted mind.
The creak came from the other side of the room.
My eyes flew open, but I didn’t dare move.
I was five years old, and I still believed in monsters. If I stayed very still, there was a chance whatever it was would forget me, would simply think I’d disappeared. It was a five year-old’s logic, and it made sense at the time. So, I stayed as still as I could, even though part of me wanted desperately to lift my head just a little to see over the mound of my blankets, and into the dark corner of the room. Something funny happened, though: I started to fall asleep. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before when you think that you’ll stay awake forever, because something is too scary, or too worrying. So you lie there, mind whirring, going in circles, until, in some perverse way, the worrying is like white noise, and you eventually fall asleep. That’s where I was heading. The world was dissolving, and I was taking the first steps down the stairs to sleep.
Then I heard another sound: a short, sharp exhale of breath. It shattered the silence. In the confused, half-asleep state I was in, it reminded me of a horse’s snuffling. I abandoned any thoughts of sleep, and I sat up in bed, now wide-eyed and with a pounding heart. I peered into the darkness of the corner of my room. There was nothing for me to see but pure, impenetrable blackness. But as I kept looking, I felt a sensation that made me break out in goosebumps: it felt like there was something just inside the darkest part of the shadows, something which stared back.
I was paralysed with fear. The rational part of my mind had gone, leaving my entire body frozen. It was as though each of my limbs wanted to fly off in a different direction at the same time, causing the signals from my brain to become congested, leaving me unable to move.
I don’t remember how long I sat there that night, staring at the thing in the corner. I eventually fell asleep (I still don’t understand how I did that) and when I woke up to the sunshine, the first thing I did was to jump out of bed and inspect the corner of the room. There was nothing there.
Except…
I peered closer to the floor and saw a deep, long gouge in the floorboards. There were any number of rational explanations for it: it could have already been there when we moved in, or maybe the movers caused it when they brought in my dresser.
At the time, and to this day, all I could think was that it also looked like it had been carved there intentionally by a long, sharp claw.
I didn’t see the thing in the corner for years after that. The rest of my time in the house of Riverwood Street was monster free, and I had as normal a childhood as anyone. Mum raised us as well as she could on her own (Dad was busy with his new family), and the years went on. I passed through primary school, then high school, and eventually moved away to go to university. Mum cried a lot that day, but I could tell she was proud of me.
Doctor Gabrielle Lawson. The idea of it made me giddy with excitement, even though it was years off at that stage. I imagined the little name badge that would mark me as a doctor, imagined being introduced to new people as ‘Doctor Lawson’. I even bought a stethoscope and had it engraved with ‘Dr Lawson’, which my friends found one night when they were in my room at college for pre-drinks. They teased me so much (and rightly so) that I hid it, forgetting about it until I moved out and found it at the bottom of one of my drawers. By that time, my life was starting to fall apart, the cracks just beginning to appear.
Things started going downhill in my second year of my undergraduate degree. I was tired, stressed, and wasn’t sleeping. Uni was getting progressively more difficult, the professors were expecting more from me, my social life was in the toilet because I just had no energy for it, and the guy I’d been seeing had one day just stopped talking to me. Out of the blue, just total radio silence. I never did find out what happened there, because with everything that happened soon after, I had so much else to worry about.
I’d been lying in my bed for a few hours, exhausted but still unable to sleep, having gone through all the remedies that I’d heard about through my friends and (of course) the internet. None of them had worked, so I was just lying there, waiting for sleep to sneak up on me and take me away, like it occasionally did when these bouts of sleeplessness struck me. I was in that delirious half-existence between wakefulness and sleep when I heard a noise.
There were no floorboards in my room, just thin, mass-produced carpet, and so the sound was completely different to the low creak of all those years ago. This time, it was a faint shuffling, which sounded a little muted by the carpets and wouldn’t have woken me up if I’d been normal and had been sleeping. All very different to what I’d experienced when I was five, but one thing hadn’t changed: it was coming from the corner of the room.
I instantly came wide awake, knowing somehow that it was back. It was as if the years between now and then had compressed, and all the memories came flooding back as if they had just happened. The creaking sound, the snuffle of breath, the feeling—no, the knowledge—that there had been something in that corner, it all sprung up inside me once again.
It was back. The thing was once again in the corner of my room.
I wanted to move, I really did. I wanted to reach over and turn the light on so I would see there wasn’t actually anything in the corner, there wasn’t a thing standing there watching me, waiting for something, probably hungry for all I knew. But I couldn’t. I was held there, betrayed by my own body, which was refusing to listen to the commands from my brain to fucking MOVE.
Have you ever seen the movie Jumanji? No, not the remake—I mean the original with Robin Williams and Bonnie Hunt. Well, there’s a scene in there where a lion suddenly appears in the big house, after one of the characters makes a bad roll in the game. It comes out of the room, this massive creature with the mane of hair and the long, sharp teeth, and it looks at them for a moment. A growl comes from deep in its throat, and it was like there was a large space in its chest where the sound echoed around a bit, gathering strength before escaping the lion’s maw. You could almost feel the hot breath watching it.
That sound stayed with me ever since I first saw the movie as a kid, and it was the sound I now heard from the corner of my room as I sat frozen on my bed. It broke whatever hold had come over me, and I screamed, flailing my arms and legs wildly while reaching for the bedside lamp. It clicked on, and a warm orange light filled the room.
There was nothing in the corner. But I knew I’d heard that sound.
That was a few years ago. It was around that time that my life really fell off a cliff. I’m currently in a seedy little motel a few hours drive from the city, which stinks like piss and mildew. All I’ve got with me is a phone with a screen so cracked it draws blood when I’m not careful while using it, and this pen and notebook I’m writing in right now.
Let me explain.
A few months after that episode in my dorm room, I dropped out of uni. I wasn’t coping well at the time, but I always thought I’d eventually go back once I’d gotten a few things sorted. But things just got worse. Mum died, and I lost contact with Simon. The last I heard, he had gotten a girl pregnant and was alternating between denying that he was the father, and demanding that she get an abortion.
Eventually, everything got so bad that I had to stop working. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and it was a monumental struggle to get out of bed in the mornings.
On top of all that, the thing in the corner was visiting me every night.
It had ramped up slowly. When I dropped out of uni, it was visiting once every week or so. Just before Mum’s death, it was happening a few times a week. After that, it was happening every night.
I couldn’t sleep alone, so I started inviting random guys from Tinder to sleep over. We had sex, of course, but I wasn’t into it, because it was just something I had to do to ensure I didn’t have to sleep alone. For a while, that actually worked, and my nights weren’t so terrifying. Then, one night, Ross—a guy I’d hooked up with a few times—came over. Everything seemed normal: we had dinner, watched a movie, had sex, and then fell asleep. No thing in the corner.
When I woke up, it was still mostly dark, other than the light from the streetlamp that had snuck in through the gaps in the blinds. The clock said 3:06 AM, and Ross was sitting up in bed, a look of confusion on his face.
I asked him what was wrong as he got out of bed, his eyes fixed on the darkest corner of the room, and he was about to reply when he suddenly disappeared. All I heard was a grunt, a little Guh—, and that was it. I called out to him, but there was no answer.
You can probably guess where this is going.
I heard a little clunk sound from the corner, like someone
(something)
had just nudged the wall slightly. A small sound, but I knew what it was. I didn’t need a light to tell me what my instincts were already screaming at me.
I started calling Ross’s name, hoping he was just playing some kind of trick on me, that he would come out of the shadows at any second with a stupid grin on his face. I’d yell at him and probably throw a pillow or something at him, but inside I knew I’d feel only relief. But that never happened. My voice sounded weak in the small room, and it eventually trailed off as the realisation set in. I never saw Ross again after that, but I did hear something that haunts me to this day.
There was a wet ripping sound, like someone was in the corner peeling the skin from an orange, and then the awful, thick, and unmistakable crunch of bones breaking.
I didn’t bother with the lights this time. I just ran out of the house and into the night.
It’s been about two weeks since then, and I haven’t gone back. I’ve been staying in motels, a new one every night. Part of me hopes that by doing this I’ll somehow outrun it, but I know that’s not true. Plus, I’m not exactly rich; I’m going to run out of money soon.
I’m not sleeping at night anymore. I sometimes get an hour or two of broken sleep at midday, but most of the time I’m living a hellish existence, wandering around like a zombie in some low-budget horror film. To fill the time, I’ve started to write. I went down to the nearby newsagent and bought a packet of Papermate ballpoint pens and a composition notebook. The pages were thicker and felt a little nicer than the other thin-papered notebooks they were selling.
At first, I just wrote random sentences that went nowhere, little fragments of thoughts that were drifting through my sleep-deprived brain. But then I found myself writing the story of the thing in the corner. It was cathartic, like I was getting something out of my system. I cried for a few hours when I got to the point where Mum died, and so I didn’t write any more about that.
But as helpful as the writing has been, something doesn’t feel right. It’s like I’m in the ocean and suddenly I’m alone, all the other people have disappeared, and the boats have gone back to shore. I see a shadow in the water, but there’s nowhere for me to run, nowhere to hide.
I can feel the thing from the corner getting closer every day. Today, it feels very close. That’s understandable, given that I’m writing this after the sun has set, when the shadows are getting larger and everything is becoming quiet. I’ve got the TV on in the background to help me feel like there are other people in the room, but that’s a cheap trick that won’t fool anyone, least of all me.
Maybe it’s behind me right now, free at last from the confines of the shadows in the corner. Maybe it’s reaching out towards me, extending a hand, or claws. Maybe that’s what I feel on my shoulder right now, the light touch of impossibly sharp talons that can slice the skin from my bones.
Maybe. But I can’t look. I couldn’t possibly do that. Because if I look and I see there’s a shadow standing behind me in this empty motel while I sit writing at this cheap, flimsy desk, then I’ll lose my mind. It hasn’t ever truly gone away even after all these years, ever since that first night in the brand-new house on Riverwood Street. I tried staying still that night, and it didn’t work, but maybe this time will be different.
So I’ll stay here, and I’ll keep writing, keeping the rest of me as still as possible. Maybe I’ll still be here writing my incoherent story when the sun comes up, and I’ll realise that the thing from the corner has left me alone. Maybe it will take pity on me and the scrap of a life that I have left. Maybe I’ll be fine.
Maybe.
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