Seeing Is Believing ✔️

The closet door yawned open, a portal to the viscous dark of childhood nightmares. That gulf of monster-laden shadows thrust against the threshold clambering for an escape into Izzy's room beyond, but try as it might that shadow took no viable form and remained bound in the casement of the unlit closet.

Izzy – born Elizabeth, but self-proclaimed Izzy – did not fear the open door. She never had really, not like her stupid brother Jake. He cowered beneath his covers if his closet door was left even slightly ajar, and when that proved too little protection for him, he would run whining to mom and dad for help. Izzy knew better. The closet posed no danger. Not in and of itself. "No Fear," had been her motto for as long as she could remember.

She had realized years ago that closet monsters were not real, only some mass hysteria spread from child to child like the flu or the chicken pox, only lacking in reality similar to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and God.

Izzy had a strong, independent mind for a girl of a mere nine years of age. Her belief relied on the proof of sight, and with that burden unmet, myths both of childhood and adulthood fell away into her personal trash bin of her perceived falsehoods.

She could remember the moment that she had lost her faith. She had been seven when her father had set her down after her grandfather's "passing." She hated that phrase even then. It did nothing to soften the blow – merely tried to mask the pain of the ugly reality, one that she needed to face. Still, her father had set her down and had explained to her how when a good person dies, they ascend to heaven and there their soul finds eternal peace. Izzy had asked how he knew that they were at peace, and he had quoted from the family Bible as his evidence, like he had many times before that night. That not holding with her way of thinking, Izzy pushed, asking if her father had ever heard back from someone after they died to hear their version of events. He had explained that wasn't how belief worked, and that it didn't require confirmation via ghostly visitations, but Izzy didn't buy it. Without a direct visitation the whole affair came up no dice for her.

Yet tonight, something new pulsed in the dark of the room. No, that wasn't quite right. It pulsed in the dim light of her room. Like closet monsters, Izzy had never felt a fear of the dark either. She slept quite peacefully within that abyss. Jake's late night visits to his parents' room in efforts to escape his closet monster, however, had led to the recent purchase of brand new nightlights that were now spread throughout the house, shining like dim emergency beacons through the foyer and halls. They illuminated Jake's room and cast aside his delusions of boogeymen, which perhaps was for the best, but her parents had taken it a step too far. They had installed a nightlight in the far corner of Izzy's room as well, vanquishing the dark that she had once found so comforting. Now her room writhed with tangled webs of shadows, alive in a way that they had never been in the completeness of the previous dark.

Cra-snap!

Izzy jumped beneath her covers. That sound was new and dreadful, as if the very walls of her room were cracking open, spilling forth fresh shadows cast not by the pale illumination of the nightlight, but by some inner force of their own. They burst forth from some violent darkness existing in a place beyond her known truths – something creeping forth from her trash bin of falsehoods.

She opened her mouth to speak, to call out for her father, but no words came. For once she needed help, and yet now she could not ask for it.

That unfamiliar death grip took hold, squeezing tight and wrenching her insides. She tried again, but still could not find her voice. Only a small squeak escaped her lips.

How could she let herself be so paralyzed? "No fear," she reminded herself. She had to take action. She lowered her blankets ever so slowly and peered out into the shadow-filled room.