Darkest Corner

The Darkest Corner

By: Brandon Zarycki

“Mommy, Mommy!” 

Her Mother came running into her little girl's bedroom in the middle of the night.

“What’s wrong baby girl?” Her Mother asked as she quickly flicked on the bedroom light in one quick movement. Light filled the tiny, pink painted walls and for a second blinded both of their eyes until they adjusted to the sudden burst of light.

“I saw a ghost.” The little girl cried as she sat straight up clutching her Frozen inspired blanket. “It was standing over there,” she said, pointing to the darkest area in the room.

The Mother realizing that there wasn’t in fact an intruder about to snatch her daughter out into the night never to see her again, which were her first thoughts as she woke to the screams of her four year old daughter. The Mother walked over to her bed, sat down and wrapped her arms around her trembling daughter's shoulders.

“I think you were just having a nightmare baby girl,” she whispered in her calmest, soothest Mother voice. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

The little girl eventually fell back to sleep that night and wouldn’t have another nightmare about the ghost standing in the corner of her bedroom for the rest of the night. Or the following night. Or the night after that. But she would see the ghost again. And again. And again. Some nights the little girl's Father would come into his daughter's room. Quickly hit the light switch and sit down on the bed and soothe his daughter's cries. But more often than not the little girls Mother would be the one to come in and say, “there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

As the years passed, the little girls Mother and Father were quietly growing more and more concerned about their daughters' night terrors. Although the nightmares had steadily continued over the years, it never seemed to affect their daughters' behaviour during the day. She had been a sweet, sometimes shy little girl the first time the ghost had appeared in her dreams. No one could have possibly known the anguish she was going through when sleeping. But as the years passed the frequency in which the ghost that the little girl saw standing in the dark spot of her room, or to her Mother and Father the night terrors, kept growing. By the time the little girl became not so little anymore, her Mother had gotten so used to waking up in the middle of the night, usually between 3:30am and 4:15am, that there were mornings where she could not even remember if she had gotten up during the night. It had become something they had done hundreds of times. She had done it so often that her body would just go into autopilot at the first sound of her daughter's screams. Sit up, open bedroom door, walk down the hall, open second door on her right. Then when she had entered her daughters room she would automatically reach her left arm straight out to the side at shoulder length and be on her daughters bed rocking her back to sleep before the little girl's Mother even realized what she had done. 

The Mother and Father had always just assumed that their little girl would eventually grow out for this phase of her life. That she would start to realize that there was no such thing as ghosts. That the older their daughter got, the more these silly sort of ideas would slip away like faded memories. That when she would finally realize that the ghost is actually just a nightmare, the quicker she would get back to fully rested nights. But that never happened. As the night terrors went from monthly occurrences, to weekly, to which now seemed almost nightly, the now not-so-little girl’s problems were more than just bad dreams. After sitting down as a family and deciding what they should do in order to help, the Mother and the Father chose to take their daughter to the Children’s Hospital in the city. The girl suggested maybe going for a priest or an exorcism, but the next day they drove out to the city and had tests done to hopefully find a cure to their sleeping problems. 

Four hours after arriving at McMaster Children’s Hospital, the Mother, The Father and their little girl, who will always remain a little girl to them, were sitting in the office of the Head of Brain Surgery. “It has unfortunately reached the point where it is completely inoperable.”

Like the times where the Mother would find herself sleep walking down the hall to her daughter's room during a night terror episode, she found herself walking down the hospital hallway in a daze after finding out her little girl would never grow to be a Mother herself. That they could perhaps get lucky and the Mother would be able to see her little girl become a young adult. That night the little girl went to bed and slept through the entire night. Even though she still firmly believed in seeing the ghost in her room, the unknown creature did not appear in the darkest corner of her room ever again. The little girl would indeed become a young adult and the memories of the ghost who caused so many sleepless nights for the entire family. But the time came when the Mother and the Father no longer had a child. There were still nights when she would find herself waking up to the phantom screams coming from her daughters room.

The Mother sat straight up in bed and looked at the alarm clock on her night table. It read 3:45am. She slowly nudged her husband awake who had been peacefully sleeping next to her.

“What’s wrong?” he said sitting up after noticing the concerned look on his wifes face.

“She was telling the truth.” Before he could ask what she was talking about, he followed his wife's eyes to his little girl standing in the darkest corner of their bedroom.

The End.