Have you ever heard the idea of spirit guides or divine protectors? How about the idea of long deceased family members watching over you and guiding you through life? I’m sure you have, I mean haven’t we all?
Well mines, different.
For the longest time I assumed I was the only one who could see it, no one else I had mentioned it to had any clue of what I was speaking of. Friends and parents just assumed it was a childish fantasy or the desperate desire to see and experience the spiritual realm. Others thought me crazy, I’m not crazy, I know that sounds like something a crazy person would say but someone else saw it. That thing, my guide if you were to call it that, is not an angel. It’s a monster. It wasn’t until I reached the age of twenty two that someone else finally noticed it. For the past twenty one years I was the only one who spotted the damn thing lurking around, watching me.
It all started the day I was born, I wasn’t meant to live past childbirth something wanted me dead and has been trying ever since. My birth was unpleasant especially for my mother, upon finally giving birth she watched the doctors cut the umbilical cord from around my neck and rush me off away from her waiting arms. I was essentially dead, strangled to the point I no longer sucked in the bleached air. After around half an hour they wheeled me back in to the room in what I can only assume to be an incubator of sorts. If not for the technology of modern day I would likely have been dead. Like all people I don’t remember that day, that is except for one thing, a voice, the first true voice I heard only moments before my heart restarted.
I no longer know what it said and truthfully I don’t think I want to know what it said when it chose me. However I remember the sound like wheezing breaths mixed with a sickly gurgling of puss and blood, it plagues me every night and has for the past twenty two years. Skip ahead to my second year of stolen life and once more death came for me. Being the adventurous and curious kid I was I suckled a marble like a bonbon, of course this was incredibly dangerous. From what I know the marble had become lodged in my throat and my frantic parents tried everything to free the glass orb slowly draining the life from their child before them from my throat.
They tried everything even going as far as pushing their fingers into my throat in a vain attempt to make me puke the marble out, only to watch it slide deeper down. Until unexpectedly I spat it out without issue. To this day they are still bewildered by the miracle I performed but it wasn’t me, I know it wasn’t because that’s when I first saw it. Not fully, I think that was it’s decision as to not scare the living daylight from me. No I saw it’s hands on my shoulders, long bony fingers curled down gently tapping my tender flesh with prodigious claws, grey skin stretched tightly across the scrawny bones. I don’t know why but it calmed me rather than scaring me, possibly due to my lack of glimpsing the creature.
Time passed relatively safe no close calls or near death experiences surrounded me. An odd disturbance did happen on my third birthday but it’s completely coincidental. I guess I should explain this rather than bypassing it; on my third birthday, thirty first of October only one child knocked on our door to trick or treat. One child was unusual back then but not uncommon yet the strangest part was what he said to my parents when they asked where the other children were, the boy around five or six simply pointed to the roof just near the chimney which was now highlighted by the full moon and said. “The strange man on the roof is scaring them away.” Of course no parent wants to hear this from anyone so logically my dad checked the roof. He found nothing of course which only made things worse causing them to blatantly ignore the doors rings later that night.
The next couple of years passed relatively safely with no real close calls or near death experiences nor any suspicious instances. That was until one autumn morning, me and my sister (three years older than me and born on Friday the thirteenth) were going to primary school on the bus with mum. I was sucking on a sweet: those red and white swirly ones that are hard boiled and taste of strawberry and cream. Anyway as I was saying I was sucking on one of those and suddenly death saw his chance again through choking. As the sweet flew down my throat and lodged itself I lunged forward trying to spit it out as my eyes began to water. My sister panicked slapping my back furiously as my mum rose pulling me up to smack my back.
