Charlie didn’t like it when the lights went out.
The bed was warm and cozy, sure, but that was just because Mommy tucked the blankets tight around him every evening when she kissed him goodnight. He didn’t have a problem with that part. In fact, he quite enjoyed it. But then she would turn the lights out.
And he would come out.
It didn’t matter that Charlie had busted into his parents room yelling and screaming and begging to stay with them every night for three weeks. They didn’t understand that he was there. When they checked over Charlie’s room, looking under the bed and in the closet, he wasn’t there.
He was never there. Unless Charlie was alone.
He always came out of the closest. But when Father pulled open the closet door with a startling jerk that flung goosebumps up Charlie’s arm and a trickle of urine down his leg, it was empty each and every time.
Regardless of how many times he came bursting into his parents room with his throat sore and his eyes red, or how many times they took him back to his room and checked it over, it was always empty. He would always disappear when his parents were around.
Charlie begged and pleaded, tears streaming from his eyes, as his mother wrapped the covers around him like a hot dog. “Stay with me Mommy.”
But she just looked at him with adoring love in her eyes and kissed him goodnight. How she could offer such a look while subsequently dooming Charlie to him was a mystery for older kids to puzzle over. Then she turned off the light and closed the door.
“Stupid ass-head,” Charlie muttered.
He knew he didn’t mean it. He understood she loved him and knew that he had just used a bad word, a word that neither Mother or Father would condone. She just didn’t understand. He was real. The man with the long fingers and crooked nose who lived in the closet wasn’t just a figment of Charlie’s imagination and he had proof.
Charlie wasn’t the only person to be visited.
Jenny McCoggin had told Charlie all about the man in the closest. Sitting on the swing set, legs too sore to pump anymore after another failed attempt to go over the top bar, Jenny had whispered to him. “Do you know about the Crow-Man?”
Charlie had never heard of him before. Yet the name evoked a deep horror within him. The pit of his stomach was a concrete slab. When Charlie finally shook his head in reply, his throat too dry to speak, she continued.
“The Crow-Man only comes out at night. He lives in the closets of the town. Only, you can’t see him if you don’t know what he looks like.” Charlie wanted to beg her to stop talking but his lips wouldn’t part. He signaled her to halt with his eyes but Jenny wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her gaze had become fixed on her finger nails as she violently picked at them. “See, he’s really ugly. Really, really ugly. He has these long fingers that look like the talons of a crow, all hard and black. His nose is bent all the wrong way like it was broken time and time again. His hair is all scraggly like a scarecrow.”
She pumped her legs involuntarily. Eyes staring into the middle distance, her finger nails forgotten. “My parents can’t see him. They never listen to me when he comes.” She paused to pick up a rock from between her feet. “He’s been coming more lately.”
Charlie sat watching her. Dumbfounded. Afraid. Jenny tossed the rock across the playground towards the woods that flanked the school. Then she jumped down from her swing, feet kicking up pebbles as she ran from the swing set. Charlie watched her climb up the jungle gym, her small body hurtling upwards with impressive speed.
If he had known that was the last time he would ever see her he would of hugged her. She didn’t come to school the next day.
That’s when he started coming.
The Crow-Man came the night after Jenny went missing and he kept coming back night after night. Each time he would stay longer. At first he just stayed inside the closet. Charlie almost didn’t notice him that first night. He just stood behind the door breathing heavily, each breath sounding like a laugh. Charlie ran screaming into his parents room where he spent the night.
The next night the Crow-Man opened the closet door a little, one elongated finger reaching around to scratch against the wood paneling. Again Charlie retreated to his parents bedroom, but already it was clear they were getting tired of this new behavior. As it continued night after night they began to make changes to what shows he was allowed to watch, what video games he could play. Not that any of their new rules made a difference at night.
Last night the Crow-Man opened the door entirely and glided into the corner of the room. He stood there with arms crossed against his waist watching Charlie with a sickening grin that showed even in the darkness.
He didn’t mean to tell his friends about the Crow-Man. He had promised himself he wouldn’t. The secret would end with Charlie. But the words came out when he wasn’t thinking about them. “Do you know about the Crow-Man? Jenny McCoggin told me about him. She said he gets his name on account of his fingers. They’re all long and like the talons of a crow. Only I don’t think that’s true for me. Maybe it was for Jenny. I don’t think he has only one form.”
And just like that, the he passed on the legend to his friends as Jenny had first passed it to him.
“He’s been coming closer lately.”
Now Charlie could hear the sound of the closet door opening from where he hid under the blankets. He wanted to scream for his parents, “Come save me!” But they were getting tired of being woken up to look for invisible monsters. They would probably pretend to be sleeping if they weren’t already. Waking them up would only further their building vitriol.
The Crow-Man made no sound when it moved. No foot falls to announce its progression into the room. No signal of which way it was coming from. It would’ve make no sound at all, if it wasn’t for those long fingers dragging across the wall. Charlie didn’t trust that noise. Its fingers were so long it could easily reach across the room and scratch the far wall to trick Charlie out of hiding.
The scrapping wood sound was drawing closer now, though, just off to the right of Charlie’s bed. It sounded like it was right next to him. The blanket obscured his vision but he thought he saw a shadow there next to the bed.
A shadow reaching out.
Charlie threw the covers off as he scrambled to the left side of the bed. He landed on his knees with a painful thud. He bit his lip to stop himself from crying out. It seemed the most important thing in the world, even though the thud when he hit the floor already gave away his position. Scared to do so, but more scared of not knowing where the Crow-Man was, he peeked over the bed.
There was nothing there.
In fact, there was no one in his room at all he realized as he looked around. The Crow-Man wasn’t there. Just his action figures and his alarm clock, dirty clothes scattered about and crayon art hanging on the walls.
But the closet door was open. Charlie made sure each night to close it before crawling into bed as if that might in someway prevent the Crow-Man’s appearance, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Hiss.
Charlie’s bowels clenched into a tight ball. Where did that come from? The room was empty. Calm. Quiet. Charlie listened for the noise again. It took effort to listen as all he could hear was his heart pounding in his chest like a cannon.
Hiss.
There. It sounded like it was coming from…above him.
Charlie looked up and there he was.
Crouched on the ceiling the Crow-Man’s feet held him up as he stretched out those disgusting, tentacle like fingers of his. His stringy hair fell across his misshapen nose, the only clear evidence than the law of gravity still applied to the appalling fiend.
Before Charlie could react the Crow-Man’s legs pushed off of the ceiling and he sprung straight at Charlie.
Without thinking Charlie dove forward and leapt the corner of the bed. Behind him the Crow-Man disappeared through the floor where Charlie had been only milliseconds before. Charlie’s feet hit the ground almost silently. A perfect landing.
Except for the gnarled hand that shot out from under the bed,
long fingers wrapping around Charlie’s ankle, bringing his body down under him. Pain flared through his jaw as it connected with the floor. He felt a tooth puncture his lip, the copper taste of blood suddenly overwhelming his senses and rattling his brain.
Charlie kicked at the arm with his free leg. His hands tried to dig into the wood floor, fingernails bending, breaking, leaving red streaks across the floor as he desperately fought to pull himself free of the monstrous grip that restrained him. It wasn’t working. The Crow-Man was pulling him under the bed with it. Charlie’s legs, now under the bed entirely, felt like they were dangling off the side of a cliff.
Panic sunk in and he kicked wildly. He couldn’t even hit the Crow-Man. Every kick faltered in thin air. It was useless. Then suddenly his foot caught something soft and squishy and broke through it in a gush of liquid that soaked his foot in a sticky wetness. All at once the grip on his other leg loosened and he squirmed free.
Pushing, one arm against his bed the other on the floor, he pulled his legs up from that nothing space under his bed and ran. He pulled the door to his room wide open and sprinted out into the hallway. He felt a flood of relief wash over him. He didn’t know if the Crow-Man was limited to his bedroom but he had never seen him outside of it. Still, he didn’t let himself relax. There was more he didn’t know about the Crow-Man than stuff he did.
Charlie’s room was on the second floor just to the left of the stairs. His parents bedroom was at the right end of the hall. As he began to dash through the hallway he opened his mouth to scream for his parents. He no longer cared whether they’d be mad. The blood trickling from his lip would earn parental concern regardless whether they believed his story or not.
But when he tried to scream no words came out. No sound came out at all. It felt as if he was stuck underwater, his words bubbling away from him. Then he noticed it wasn’t just his scream that was silent but everything. He couldn’t hear the creaks and groans of the house settling or even his own footsteps. It was like he was on the TV and somebody pressed mute. Tears strung at his eyes, he wiped at them in a frenzy of clumsy movements.
He was passing the stairs. The washroom was just up ahead then after that was the safety and security of his parents room. The one place he felt sure the Crow-Man wouldn’t go. One moment he was racing to the safety of his parents. The next he was tumbling down those stairs.
The Crow-Man had leapt through the wall on Charlie’s right. Its body crashed into Charlie and sent him flying. Charlie’s head smashed against a step and the world went fuzzy. He didn’t notice all the other pains as his plummeting body crashed silently to the floor.
Charlie lay sprawled out on his stomach at the bottom of the stairs, his head spinning like he just got off the roundabout at school. It was a struggle to turn himself over onto his back. At first he didn’t understand why. Then he understood and wished he hadn’t. One of his legs was twisted all the wrong way. A shard of jagged white stuck out of a gushing red hole in the other. He tried to scream but all that came out was liquidy vomit.
The house looked eerily empty in the night as if no one lived there. Only the photos on the wall gave Charlie any sense that life continued in that liminal space.
The Crow-Man was nowhere in sight. Where was he?
Charlie tried to stand but it was no use. Anytime his leg started to lift off the floor it would shift. The little white piece would catch the skin around it and he would scream. But that same underwater feeling suffocated his voice before it reached his ears.
If he couldn’t walk he would have to crawl. He begun dragging himself backwards towards the kitchen, trying as hard as he could to keep his legs in the same partially bent position to reduce the biting shock of pain. It was slow going. If he moved too fast then his foot would catch on the ground and his leg would start to straighten out in agony.
In the kitchen he took out a knife from the drawer, one of those big ones Mommy used to cut meat with. It looked huge in his tiny hands. He touched the edge of it. Ow! It was sharp, too.
Charlie rested his back against the counter. It hurt to be awake. He hoped he wasn’t, but he knew better. He was scared and his pants felt wet. His legs were a constant pain and he was starting to feel the ache in the places where he connected with the stairs. It was nice leaning against a solid object, though, as it made it easier to stay still and his vantage point allowed him to watch the doorway. His hand tightened around the handle of the knife. Any minute the Crow-Man would come rushing through and he meant to be ready for it.
As the minutes ticked by, the clock on the wall screaming every second in that horrifying tick-tock tick-tock, Charlie’s eyes started to close. Slowly at first, one lid falling gently over the eye to flick back open in a desperate attempt to watch the door. The Crow-Man wasn’t coming and that was, somehow, more frightening. His right eye closed. Then his left. He was swimming in a sea of red water and as his arms started to fail him he realized it wasn’t water at all. It was blood. He was sinking to the bottom. The blood filling his lungs as he tried to breathe, struggled to get back to the surface. Hands wrapped tightly around his throat from behind. The blood was no longer rushing down his throat but it was even harder to breathe. Those hands choking the life out of him.
Charlie awoke with a start, both eyes flying open. The doorway was still empty. But he still couldn’t breathe. The hands were still wrapped around his throat.
Long, narrow hands.
Charlie slashed at his own throat with the knife in his hand. It sliced through his face, leaving a long gash from lip to chin, before it caught one of those sickly fingers. The knife sliced through the finger with shocking ease as if it had no bones. The digit fell twitching to the floor. The hands let go of his neck and Charlie pushed himself forward, forgetting about his legs.
He screamed out in pain yet again, still silent, as the weight of his torso was forced onto his twisted-leg. He folded over in pain. His head smacked against the kitchen floor, the white tiles already stained red from his punctured leg and a dozen other wounds he hadn’t yet taken stock of.
Behind him there coming out of the counter were those two disgustingly long arms, the fingers slithering towards him like snakes. As Charlie watched, hand gripping tighter around the knife, the Crow-Man stood up. Half-in, half-out of the counter he rose, the image of every childhood nightmare given flesh. There was a hole the size of Charlie’s foot in its face, black ooze leaking out to fall in splatters against the counter top.
Charlie pulled himself backwards. Adrenalin futilely pumped through his system in a sad attempt to numb the pain. He crossed through the doorway into the lobby as the Crow-Man disappeared back down into the counter. Charlie froze, waiting for the Crow-Man’s next strike.
In that moment of stillness hands grabbed him from beneath the floor and pulled him down. He was sinking through the floor! He tried to slash out at its hands again. The knife struck the floor as he was pulled through and stuck. It was yanked violently out of his hand, clattering against the floor above.
Charlie was now in the basement. The Crow-Man held him tightly against its chest. He could feel the creature land on the hard packed dirt that was the basement’s floor. Then they were shooting up. Up through the floor back into the foyer, up through the ceiling into the dusty old attic. Up through the roof, into the sky.
Up and up they went. Charlie watched as they passed his tree fort, passed through the clouds. They were up so high that under different circumstances Charlie would have felt like a bird. It was the feeling he was trying to achieve whenever he attempted to go over the bar on the swing set, like he had that afternoon with Jenny McCoggin. It should have been everything he wanted.
But not now.
Not with it.
The Crow-Man spun him around to stare into his eyes. The gaping hole that was the Crow-Man’s face still leaked that black pus he had seen earlier. But now there was something new leaking out, rays of colorful light like a neighbor’s TV seen through a window. It leaned closer to him until their faces met. Charlie tried to pull his head away but it was too strong. He tried to bite at its face but his teeth couldn’t catch anything.
A red light spilled crimson rays across his eyes, making it hard to see. He felt like he was running inside that light, no longer a part of his body. There was no body anymore, only light and sitting at the end of that light with her legs folded underneath her was Jenny McCoggin.
Tears streaming down her cheeks.
The Crow-Man dropped the lifeless corpse of the child, no longer home to the innocent soul that tasted so sweet. It dove downwards much faster than any object in motion should move and landed on the tree fort. It perched like a crow on the edge of the wooden boards to watch the body of the boy crash through the roof of the house.
To watch the lights flicker on in the upstairs room.
And to feed off the delicious screams that followed.
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