Penumbra

Under the bed, there was a cobweb planet of darkness--waiting in the sallow shadows. The hellish sun was sinking well below the horizon when an airglow monster arched its back and peeked it’s head out from beyond the abyss of the netherworld. It had awaited putridly, underground, for the perfect moment to become silhouette and saturnine once more. 

Being a colossal creature of the blue hour, it had to stay hidden until all the humans---especially the adults, were in a cocoon of chasmic bottomless sleep. Only then, could it mount offal and thus feed. 

Tonight, in particular, it was searching--searching for a pockmarked dimension in which it could devour and consume with little yield or torque. 

To do so, quietly and without an alarm, was a feat in of itself.

The barren bedroom twitched with nightfall and the apparent absence of light. The monster, who was a tarantula of the night--looked out from the bed frame and spied on the halo of nothingness that sat heavily in its spiderweb periphery. It had black coal eyes like a crow and a body that was halftone and cimmerian. A shroud of night camouflaged its true visage and covered its dusky presence.

Although it had been warned--by the umbra monsters that came before it--it had been spotted by a human, the previous night before. The interloper was a young child by the name of Soleil.

At midnight on the dot--when the moon was phantasmagoria in the sky and the supernatural world became quite thin and penetrable; it had been seen and momentarily detected.

Crawling on all fours, up and down the bedroom walls, it took cover. Suddenly, it stopped in its tracks when it saw two large eyes wobble and look on. It was the unwavering, Sol trying to decipher what kind of creature it was. The monster was peary and pixel, like the afterbirth of a mental image. As it looked more myth than reality, the child squinted its almond eyes to make sure of its existence and to make sure what he was seeing was neither human nor ghost.

Sol was a child who had light sunspots dappled on its face, with tiny hands, and a pink mouth to match, with rich, dark moor skin. The child had been quivering when the monster silently turned its head to stare in at him. Sol clung to an unsmiling teddy bear, whose ears cradled his dimpled chin and whose eyes were cross-stitched and sunken with slanted, chewed-on buttons.

Upon caterwaul, the little human was taken away by a much older-looking human. The adult entered and looked around--searching under the bed--lifting and scrutinizing the wall behind the curtains--in between and inside the locked toy basins. And when the child continued to cry--screaming for its dear life--the adult comforted him; smoothing down hair and kissing the child's forehead. It was only when the two disappeared down the dark hallway, hand-in-hand--did the monster shuffle back unto the walls and crawl up and down with spindly legs like the creature of habit it was.

The fact remained that last night, it had not eaten. The monster’s feast was interrupted when the child who had not yet begun to dream, awoke so abruptly. If the little human did not dream or have nightmares-- it meant no food for the penumbra and that left the monster, hostile.

In the inky backdrop, the monster’s casted shadow towered over the empty bed. To the naked eye, the monster's shape was warped, quite thin and attenuated, but in actuality--it was a thick specter of illusion, bending the idea of matter and the theory of materiality.

It was twilight when it finally stretched down from the walls and walked out into the open. It skulked around the room, with melancholia and danced in the aphotic semi-darkness--with both a hearty restlessness and growing hungriness that felt like a ritual. The monster soon grew weary and began to inaudibly doubt. When would it get to feed and on whom, upon? The monster became sullen and dreary with the mere sodden thought.

The monster looked like an impressionist rendering, well-stroked, and nicely painted when it walked--attempting to model humans. A somber skeleton spiral, entangled and neverending with heavenly body sculpt. Its silhouette leaked unto the hardwood floors and it darkened the windows and flowing curtains. It was slouching when the door finally squeaked open in what seemed like the matrix or a dilated process of slow motion. 

The monster quickly dashed back under the bed and curled in around itself like a crepuscular snake. There was an echo of yawning. Then suddenly, the rhythmic splash of tiny feet, befalling the bare ground. 

The monster counted all of Sol’s bijou toes, all ten in total, from the narrow perspective underneath the bed. They were expertly hidden among the stillness of the darkroom but still somehow, they managed to stick out--cleanly and distinct.

Again, the child clung to an old scrim of his ratty, beloved teddy bear. But this time, he was not quivering. 

He called out “Mara!” and only mildly stuttered.

The monster was confused and so, the child called out again, questioning the shroud of its presence.

“Is there a mara in here?” The child ducked his head around, bending and angling his neck--in order to assess the entire landscape of the cerulean room. 

“If there is one--I-I’m not afraid.”

The monster escaped from the bed and latched unto the magnet hook off the popcorn ceiling. A vestige shadow puppet trickled in its wake--leaving adumbration to plunge down and eclipse one half of the child’s moon-shaped face.

The child walked with his white, puffy nightrobe trailing--careful not to make a sound as he crawled into bed like a nestling insect. He wrapped the animal skin sheets around his neck so tightly--it looked like the big, bad wolf had him by the throat and wouldn't let go.

The monster’s tenebre anatomy stippled and obstructed the point source of the windows for a short moment. The room was pitch black and--then it was gloaming with false zodiacal light. The monster was moving so fast, it looked like a moody apparition or a crater rotating in a melting dimension. Sol watched with little to no hesitation. His lips parted but nothing and no sound dribbled or ran out.

The room was distilled with lunar monochromacy. The night lamp in the room was off to the side and unlit; the bulb was broken. The moon was orbiting and the mirror image of the monster walked in slow motion. The monster slunk over to the floor and projected a prehensible twilight tail. The child watched--his heart pounding, abnormally out of his flesh chest. The monster was silent--a mass of nocturnal orbs gathering. 

The monster settled--and waited in silence.

The child’s knee bent into the solitude of a fetal position. He tried to close his eyes but he could not, fall asleep--not with the penumbra watching. Crunching the bed sheets and choking his teddy bear--he hoped he was protected by an unseen tutelary.

After an exchange of hazy stares for what felt like hours--the child made eyes with what he assumed was the monster’s eyeshadowy tincture pupils.

“Are you bad or good?” he asked quizzically.

The monster didn’t answer but it didn't matter. Outside, the wind picked up with an ominous shuffle and the windows began to shudder.

Sol reached out his hand--they were trembling but in a way, oddly determined. The monster’s energy nearly absorbed him. Almost like a doppelganger, the monster’s shadow matched him--placing a phantom whiteout over the line art of the child’s fingers and small hands. Their blackish rendezvous was a momentary shift; invoking a starquake. The moon undulated and the child shifted--sharply pulling his hands away. 

The gravitational pull in the room was heavy and the child felt the weight or something unseen, unravel, and toll. The monster pulled back identically, watching the child's movement--deliberately waiting for him to slumber.

The child stared back at the monster until his eyes became shadowed and murky, and until he was unable to keep them forcibly open. He recited a meek prayer and shifted his eyes back to the shadow of the monster.

“I’ve decided that you’re good,” Sol muttered softly before falling victim to the onslaught of sleep. And then just like a candle, he was out--splayed out on his bed, pillow, and sheets.

The monster was patient. Careful and pedantic--always aware of the child’s possible stirring. The child’s inertia was like a rare pearl--fattening in the pouch of his clam sack bed. The monster almost wanted to take in the entirety of the experience--to watch over the child and study him more deeply but it was getting hungrier and more ravenous by the minute.

All at once, in a single flash--the monster jumped up from the floor and perched on the ribcage of Sol’s chest. The penumbra was not so heavy so the child did not wake--in fact, he did not even know what, at all was at stake. 

The monster could feel Sol vividly dreaming--his nightmares becoming fully-fledged, ripened and seasoned---and mara could feel the dreamworld swelling like an ulcer in the child's body and mind. The monster reached in--with the ingress of an x-ray and began to feed. Its unshaded profile began to melt in--enveloped within the guise and cloak of the darkness.

A slant of light spurred, burning the monster's shadow and leaking the monster’s feeding miasma trail that eked out of the bedroom, through the slit under the door. The monster could hear adult humans moaning and snoring--were they stirring?

The monster’s celestial body resumed sucking and the jet-black nightmares of the child, Sol, bleeds a meteor cloud into the damp atmosphere. The monster stared in at the child’s angelic face and open mouth and watched the child sleepily mutter--obfuscating and forming the name, mara in his teeth and lips.

The monster forced itself to detach and let go--for if it fed for too long--the nightmares would possess and roam--and attack the human body host from which it sprout.

After feeding, the monster slinks away into a recessed hole under the surface of the child’s bed. It savors the sour-plum taste of Sol’s phobias and spiderwebbed dreams. The monster obnubilates with a sort of shame-pride shade, recoiling back to the underworld from whence it came--beneath the dollish bed frame. The dimension shifts and Sol switches his sleeping position from his side to his back.

It is pitch-black in the room--suddenly and completely, Acheronian. Sol sleeps through to the rest of the night--unbothered and for the most part--without any dreams or waking nightmares.

Tomorrow night, the penumbra will return as planned--where it will, no doubt feed again.

For the child, Sol, the monster has left, leaving no visible tracking trace. The sun will rise in the morning and his parents will think he has had a horrible dream or at the very least, made up an elaborate story or imaginary friend.

For the monster, Mara, the astronomical object that thrives in the rheum shadows, the hunt for dreams and nightmares--is always worth the wait.