Knowing something is not real doesn’t make it not real.

This is the truth she was born to. This, the spoon in her mouth. This, the spark in her soul. This, the edge of her words.

She lives in a world that doesn’t believe her. She lives in two worlds, really. The real and the false. Tangible and intangible. True and imagined.

Except, for her, they are one and the same.

And no one believes her.

She walks down a street. It is the one outside her home. One she has walked too many times to count. One that her feet remember the shape of. One she knows is real- tangible- true. To her. And to everyone else. But there is also the world only she can see. And it is tangible.

What is real? Is it something you can touch? Is it something you can see? Is it something you can imagine? How can you tell when you’re imagining or seeing? How can you know that you’re touching something? How can you say that something is real when it isn’t to anyone else?

They all tell her she sees things that aren’t real. But the things she sees are real to her. And she has seen them be real to others. But no one ever listens.

She walks. One foot in front of the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. Repeat. It is easier that way- to concentrate on what she feels, what the ground is under her feet, what her skin senses in the air, rather than on her eyes and ear. She can navigate an unfamiliar room blind, if she has to. If the vines are too grasping. If the villyvines block out all the light from above. If the eyes are watching her. She closes hers now. They watch, from the villyvines above, from the shadows of trees, from the memories of branches, from the reflections of grasses and bushes. She feels grass brushing her knees but she can differentiate between one world and the other. She can tell somehow that this is the touch of an Everyone World thing, and that is the touch of a Lonely World thing.

It’s not really a lonely world. There are lots of things there. Not people, but animals. Creatures. Not like any she sees in a zoo in Everyone World. Creatures with horns and wings, with scales and feathers, with toothy bills and hungry smiles. They are hungry for her. She can feel it. But they never attack her- never come for her.

No, Lonely World is not lonely.

But she calls it that. Because it makes her lonely in Everyone World. Because no one wants to be around a girl whose eyes dart here, there, everywhere, focusing on things they cannot see. Eyes that sometimes close completely even as she walks down a sidewalk and navigates with ease over its crowded asphalt surface. She’s creepy, they say. Disturbing. Inhuman. Insane.

She stopped taking their medications five years ago.

They blurred her mind. Made her heavy, sleepy, tired. Because one thing about Lonely World, one good thing, is that it makes her feel awake in a way nothing in Everyone World can. When Lonely World is strongest in her eyes, she is light, free, aware. She is a blade made human. She is powerful. She is a goddess.

But no, they tell her. It’s not real. None of it is real.

Force them into me and I will fight you, she replied. I will not take them. I will not be contained. This is me. My life.

She was thirteen then. She owned her medical information. She could make her own choice. It was an easy one. Knives are not meant to be dulled.

When her skin shivers and the echo of her footsteps tells her she is at the corner, she opens her eyes and stops. Leaning against the bus stop. Some of the people know her. They are from her neighborhood, her building. They recognize the crazy Adams girl. They edge away from her.

Some of them are strangers. The girl looks at these carefully, looking for the telltale signs or perceptions that will tell her: they are not of Everyone World. Sometimes, in Lonely World, the creatures will make themselves look human. She thinks it is a game for them. The homunculi- she loves that word, homunculi, so specific and purposeful- do not have the Lonely World feeling when she sees them. She has to watch closely- for a slip in the illusion, for a hand passing through a solid Everyone World wall, for Everyone to not see the homunculi, to not move out of its way. She doesn’t notice any of this now. They’re all solid Everyones, as far as she can tell. Satisfied, she turns away.

Lonely World is strong today. It’s been getting stronger. When she was a child, it was simple things: a tree where others said there wasn’t, a dog with horns and a forked tongue, a zip of movement that no one else detected. They got more pervasive as she aged. The trees became more numerous. Choked with villyvines and dangling with ripe fruit. Sometimes she picks the fruit and eats it. It tastes good in her mouth- fresh and sweet and sharp. She can live on that fruit. Her family tells her she must eat, or she will waste away. So she eats their Everyone World food. It is tasteless and bland after the fruit of the shadow trees. But that fruit is not real. So she’s only imagining that she’s not hungry. Right?

She wonders what will happen when Lonely World takes over. Sometimes it seems like the world- Everyone World, that is- loses its hold over her. Sometimes when she talks to people, she has to repeat herself three or four times before they hear her. Sometimes her mom doesn’t notice when she doesn’t go to school. Sometimes the school doesn’t notice either.

It’s easier in the woods. Behind her house, there are acres of wild forest, waiting to be cut down and repurposed for homes and boats and furniture. The insatiable advance of Everyone. She believes that Everyone will not destroy the world, or the wild. But they will change it.

For now, though, it’s hers.

In the forest, Everyone World fades into Lonely World. She can lose herself in the dangerous beauty of Lonely World and not worry about running into an Everyone World thing. She can play stalking games with the eyes of Lonely World. They hunt her, or she hunts them. She’s never been able to figure out which.

One time she cut herself on a thorn that was Lonely World, she was sure.

One time she went home with a muddy pawprint on her shirt. She knew it was Real, to Everyone, because her mom wanted to know how it had gotten there and why it looked like nothing from Everyone World. She said she painted it on.

Sometimes lying is easier than honesty.

That is another truth. But not one she was born to. That, she had to learn on her own.

But what if she only thought she was lying? What if the lie wasn’t real, because she only thought the pawprint came from a drakken, and had imagined the whole encounter? What if she had REALLY painted it on herself after all? What then?

She smiles now, remembering. Hours spent roaming the forest. Eating orange zimberries, blue desmen, red-and-white bleeding hearts, black bark from a shadow tree. Playing with horndogs and piskies and gobblenoses and treerunners, swinging from villyvines and hiding from walkers.

The walkers were the worst and the best part of the Lonely World. Worst, because they were the most terrifying. Best, because they were the most beautiful.

The walkers, so named by an eight-year-old version of herself, seemed caught halfway between liquid and flesh. They wore the colors of night- darkest indigo, dismal burgundy, charred green, deepest black. They changed forms, too- now a fox-shape, now a bird-shape, now a mouse-shape, now a human-shape. And they wanted her. It was a deep hunger, an old hunger, one that had lasted eternities and would outlast her by ages more, if she did not go to them. What sort of hunger it was, she doesn’t know. They might want her to stay in Lonely World. They might want her soul, in which case she is fine, because she doesn’t have one- a soul, that is. They might want to eat her, in which case she is (probably) safe.

After all, the walkers aren’t real.

In Lonely World, she is a knife.

The walkers are shadow.

She loves them as much as she fears them.

There are two walkers here now. She climbs on the bus and they follow. Creeping through the windows. Shivering down walls and across floors and over laps until they form two cohesive shadows on the floor, shadows shaped like small birds.

A man swings his foot through the indigo walker. It dissipates and reforms.

She wonders if such passings-through hurt the walkers. She is too afraid to ask. Both of the walkers, and of the people around her. Everyone do not react well if Someone is talking to thin air.

Right now, it feels as if the walkers might actually talk back.

She cannot seem to draw her eyes away from them.

The inky pits in their faces are aimed unerringly at her.

She has a scar on her knee from either a walker or a stone. Mom says it was a stone. Stones, after all, are real. Walkers are not. Therefore, it could not have been a walker who hurt her.

Sometimes it feels like the only thing tying her to Everyone World is fear.

A man sits down in her seat, halfway on her lap. She yelps and moves aside, glaring. He doesn’t seem to notice her. Or react in any way, actually.

No.

What if-

She gets off the bus. The sun is going down. She is supposed to be home right now. She squints through a cloud of pollen, probably from a patch of nearby koryn flowers, judging by the vibrant purple color, to see her watch. Eight thirty-one. She is supposed to be home at eight-thirty. Her doctors, her parents, they don’t trust her to be out on her own. Your hallucinations are too dangerous, they say. You see things that aren’t there. It’s not safe to be out at night.

She doesn’t tell them that the villyvines are everywhere, and they are luminescent. Along with most of the other plants in Lonely World. She does not need the sun of Everyone World to see. Night is not dark, to her. Night is beautiful.

She watches the bus disappear into a patch of white-leaved snowtrees and turns away- into the building she has come to visit.

It’s a church. She doesn’t remember the name. The congregation is mostly locals, people down on their luck and looking for any source of meaning in their life. She finds them terribly hypocritical. Her mom and dad come here. She asked them once how they believe that their God was any more real than what she saw, if they had never seen Him or heard His voice or felt His touch?

Their answer had ensured she would not ask that again. Ever.

But the church building itself- oh, that she loves.

It is beautiful in the way Lonely World is. Proud and independent, yet desperate for something it can never have. It knows what it is and offers no apology- not for the shabby paint, not for the faulty HVAC system, not for the atonal organ, not for the austere grace of its architecture. She considers the designer of this church greater than any other architect. They are all about grand size, grand scale, ebullience, magnificence. No one sees the beauty in sparsity. No one sees the allure of honesty.

Inside the church, Lonely World is even stronger than it is outside. She has long suspected that Lonely World pushes harder into places its Everyone World counterparts are kept out- buildings, subways, vehicles. The church has always had a greater concentration of Lonely World creatures than anywhere else. And in a church, no one cares if you talk to thin air.

The walkers follow her inside. The darkest red imaginable. The purest indigo possible.

Possible being a relative term.

She stops at a pew halfway up the aisle and moves all the way over by the wall. A shadow tree swallows half the pew. She curls into its twisted roots. The villyvines shift and cover her, until only a sliver of the church is visible. She supposes she must look strange to Everyone, but other than her, the church is empty.

She has never felt closer to Lonely World than this. Never felt more like Everyone World can just fade away. Never been so sharp and hard. Never been so faded and intangible.

If ever the walkers are going to speak to her, it will be now.

She opens her eyes- she hadn’t noticed they were closed until now- and realizes that the walkers are in front of her. The red one is shaped like a massive bird, all vicious, fast, sleek lines. The indigo one has taken the shape of a wolf. It bares its teeth and snarls. The bird lets out an unearthly shriek.

She doesn’t move. They won’t hurt her. She believes it.

She pushes the villyvines aside and climbs out of the shadow tree’s roots. She steps toward the red walker and reaches out a hand.

It eyes her with one empty eye and turns its back. The movement is the opposite of a dismissal.

She climbs onto its back.

With another shriek, it opens its massive wings and launches into the air. She feels a stab of fear as she goes crashing toward the roof- but it is unfounded. She feels a curious tingling, and then they are through, and suddenly she sees all of Everyone World and all of Lonely World, layered together.

Shadow trees soaring through homes.

Villyvines coating condos.

Forktongues roaming in alleys.

Desmen growing in the streets.

She flew on a plane once, when she was nine, before Lonely World got really strong. The memory was one she had cherished.

She throws it away now.

She sees the world more clearly now.

She is a knife. And knives are not meant to be dull. They are meant to cut things- to sever. Not themselves. Worlds.

When the words of the walker explode into her mind, she realizes that the walkers’ voices have lived inside her for her entire life. That is another truth: the walkers have always spoken. She was just not ready to listen.

She listens now.

What are you so afraid of?

Everyone World always tries to tie her down.

It coats her mind in drugs and lulls her to sleep. It whispers lies in her ears and teaches her she’s crazy. It raises her in fear of being labeled insane. It conditions her to believe that there is a difference between real and not- that the two are somehow opposites.

It will not remember her when she goes.

I am already mostly gone.

She is a knife. She feels her own edges and turns them on herself.

Everyone World- has no hold over her.

She rides the walker. Buildings and cars and roads and power lines and people- they all fade away. And when she looks down, her own skin is fading too. It is vanishing before her very eyes. And on the inside, she has no organs, no ribs, no heart, no brain. Inside she is Walker.

And below her, Lonely World is all that is left.

Briefly, she wonders: How was she born with one foot in each world?

But then she knows it doesn’t matter.

Because she has chosen, now. She is not afraid. Everyone World has no hold over her.

There are two ways of knowing. There is one by which other people tell you something so many times over that you believe it to be true. It becomes an immutable part of your mind. It becomes a truth that is only true because it can’t not be true.

Then there is the other way. In which you know something because you feel it. It is scarce. And powerful. Much more so than its counterpart.

She knows that Lonely World is not real. Because Everyone says so.

But Everyone is gone.

And she knows Lonely World is as real as anything gets.

Big girls aren’t afraid of monsters.

That’s what Mommy says, with a smile, whenever Takky talks about the monster. Takky isn’t her real name. It’s what the monster calls her, but even though it’s a monster name, she still likes it better than Angel.

Mommy’s smile is so bright it hurts. And stretched. Takky doesn’t think it matches other people’s smiles, but that’s okay. She’s Mommy. She can smile funny if she wants, because she is The Queen Of Everything.

“You’re a big girl, Angel,” Mommy says. “You’re just imagining things. There is no such thing as a monster under the bed.”

So Takky goes back to her room and turns out the lights by throwing a shoe at the switch from her bed, like always.

I’m here to help you, the monster whispers. They’re going to hurt you, don’t you know? They’re bad.

“They’re not,” Takky whispers. Soft, so Mommy and Daddy won’t hear. “They’re good. You’re the bad one.”

I’m here to help you, it repeats, in a whispery form of communication that really can’t be described as speaking. They’ve been lying to you. Let me show you.

It occurs to Takky for the first time to wonder why it doesn’t just drag her out of her bed. She asks.

Because I’m trapped, it says. They’ve trapped me in your fear. I can’t come out in the light.

Takky doesn’t quite get what it’s saying, which annoys her, because even though she’s only eight she usually understands adults. Either other adults are really dumb, or they’re pretending to be dumb so she feels smarter, or the monster is just way smarter than anyone she knows. The middle option is best- it’s something she can fix.

She gets the basics, though. The bed is safe, and with the lights out, the floor is not.

***

The monster talks less and less as she gets older. It seems to be finally realizing that she’s never going to come to it. Never going to give up her safe bed. Never going to forget and put a foot on the floor in the middle of the night when it could grab her.

Takky eventually stops being afraid of it.

Mommy’s smile gets more stretched out every year.

***

“Takky,” Mommy sings as she walks by Takky's room. “Today is your tenth birthday.”

(Two years can feel like an eternity to a child.)

Takky checks that the curtains are open before she climbs out of bed. The monster doesn’t talk anymore. Or skitter out across the floor at night. But Takky never looks under the bed skirt and she knows it’s still there. Habits are difficult to break.

But it’s her birthday, so she gets out of bed.

Happy birthday, Takky. The liquid voice creeps out from under the bed like an oil slick and up into her ears. Takky shakes her head hard. She had almost forgotten the sensation. It isn’t as unpleasant as she remembers, just… different.

“Why are you talking now?” she asks quietly, hunting for her favorite socks. They are green with blue and orange polka dots, and fuzzy, perfect for February birthday girls.

To warn you. It’s your birthday. They’re going to use you today.

“Who are?” Takky asks, even though she knows. The monster always warns her about the same thing.

Sure enough: Your parents. Except they’re not really your parents.

Takky ignores this, pulls on her left sock, and continues looking for the other. “What do you look like?”

It is a question that has haunted her for years. She thinks that seeing the monster will make it better. Or worse. 

Lift the bedskirt and see.

She eyes the bedskirt, one foot in a sock and the other on the cold wood floor, still wearing her pilled Cinderella pajama pants and her Girl Power T-shirt that she sleeps in. The bedskirt has been on the bed for as long as she can remember. It’s a prison holding the monster in.

But not really. The monster said it was light that kept it hidden, not the skirt.

She grabs the finger-pointer-on-a-stick that she got at the book fair last year and huddles over on the floor, reaching out and lifting the bedskirt.

The monster looks back at her.

It is not at all like she imagined.

There is no gaping mouth full of gnashing teeth. There are no beady red eyes or claws or fangs. The monster is- legs.

That’s all Takky can see. All of its legs. Long and black and glistening, like beetle shells, and sinister. She claps her free hand to her mouth and watches them move as it turns. There is a weird logic to the movement, like it should be stumbling and tripping over itself but barely avoids collisions and leg tangles at the last second, over and over again. 

She can’t see a pattern but she knows one is in there somewhere.

Its body is long and hard like its legs- the monster looks kind of like a giant insect. Its head is bulbous but not large, with quivering antennae and two brilliantly blue human eyes.

Takky shivers as the eyes meet hers. If it weren’t for the rest of it, she could be looking at her own eyes in the mirror-

They’re going to eat you, Takky, the monster says, and this time, she hears the urgency in its voice. The honesty.

“You’re not lying, are you?” she whispers, looking at her own eyes in the monster’s face.

No. I have never lied to you.

What are you?

I am you.

Takky pauses. That can’t be right. She talked in its voice. The same weird, oozy, drippy voice. And the monster can’t be her. That’s ridiculous.

But maybe it thinks it is. She nods her head. That makes more sense. It’s like the play-pretend games in the park, when she plays a fairy for so long that she almost believes she is one until Mommy comes to take her home. Of course the monster has pretended to be a girl like Takky. Why would it want to look like a bug?

You won’t hurt me. Will you?

No. I’ve never wanted to hurt you.

Come out.

I can’t.

I can help you.

Takky reaches out, takes a deep breath, and extends her hand under the bed.

The monster slowly, slowly, puts its own sharp-edged foot forward, and places it in her palm.

It’s cool and hard, and not slimy at all, like she was half expecting.

Come out.

I can help you.

Takky draws the monster, one leg at a time, out from under her bed.

It stands in her room. It’s not all that tall. The same height as Takky, actually, a fact which pleases her to no end. (Ten-year-olds, after all, consider it quite an accomplishment to be taller than another child.)

She stands facing the monster, looking at her blue eyes in its black and mouthless face.

What are you?

She isn’t really expecting a different answer.

I’m your strength.

Why did you stay under the bed all the time? Doesn’t the light hurt you?

It was never the light. It was always our fear.

Our fear.

Takky takes the monster’s hand and turns to look at the mirror.

They stand there, side by side, identical eyes looking out of such different bodies. Takky gets a sudden urge to turn and hug the monster.

It’s not an easy hug. There are too many legs in the way, and its body is hard- not at all like the soft way Mommy and Daddy’s bodies curve to fit hers when she hugs them. But it feels just as right.

Takky closes her eyes.

The monster dissolves, not slowly but all at once, spreading over her skin and sinking, sinking. She thinks that its blackness will stain her skin but it doesn’t. It sinks into her and fades like the Crayola marker drawings she did on the back fence, slipping away until it’s gone.

Takky breathes. The monster was right. It was her all along. She can feel it inside her now- a small shape hiding deep inside, echoing her movements. She can feel its anger, its fear, and suddenly she knows why it was always so afraid of Mommy and Daddy.

Mommy with her stretched-out smile and shivered eyes.

Daddy with his looming shoulders and his voice that makes her teeth ache.

But they’re Mommy and Daddy. They wouldn’t hurt her.

Suffused with the monster’s doubt and trying to hide it, Takky goes downstairs and climbs into her place at the kitchen table, looking for Mommy and the skillet they always use for Birthday Pancakes With Chocolate Chips. But there is no skillet and no pancake mix, and Mommy is smiling a more stretched-out smile than ever. It seems to take up half her face.

Takky smiles back and takes a drink of water, while inside her, the monster-figure grows.

“Mommy,” she says. “Where are the pancakes?”

“We’re doing something a little different today, dear,” Mommy says vaguely. Takky sees that, for some reason, there is a tarp spread across the floor on the other side of the kitchen island, between the sink and the oven. It crinkles when Mommy steps across it to pick up something sharp from the sink.

“David,” Mommy calls, her dark, dark eyes never leaving Takky’s. “David, come down, it’s time. Our meal is finally old enough.”

Meal.

Old enough.

Inside Takky, the monster howls. She can hear it, and it’s the little voice in the back of her head that she ignores. Go go run they’re going to eat you run run-

Takky keeps her face smiling and her blue monster eyes blank, but the she thinks it’s true. She’s ten now. She saw on TV that predators like young prey best, because it’s softer and sweeter, but not too young, or they’re too small to be worth it.

“Mommy, what’s for breakfast?” Takky asks. She has to know.

“You,” Mommy says, her smile stretching and stretching until her face splits open. Takky flips off the chair and scrambles backwards as Mommy’s eyes go away and her spine cracks and in the space of a few seconds, she doesn’t look very human anymore. She’s too tall and too angled and her arms have too many elbows and and her nails are too sharp and long, like claws.

That’s when Takky knows that Mommy is the real monster.

Her monster is huge inside her now, flailing its many legs, looking out of its eyes in Takky’s face with anger, fear, panic.

Takky steps forward as Mommy shrugs out of her human skin and grabs the knife out of Mommy’s hand and shoves the shining blade into Mommy’s chest.

Mommy lets out an unearthly shriek that Takky’s monster echoes, except Mommy is shrieking in pain and rage and the Takky-monster is shrieking with relief. Takky feels the monster growing still and pulls out the knife and stabs it back in, and again, feeling the monster’s strength surging in her arms.

Mommy falls to the floor in a pool of black blood.

Takky looks upstairs. She can hear Daddy-monster scrambling around, roaring with rage, his voice now a hundred times worse than it was before. Her teeth hurt and her bones ache.

Clutching the knife, Takky runs outside and into the snowy woods around their cabin.

The Takky-monster is full-size now, living just inside her skin. Takky can feel that it’s as big as she is now. That the monster’s edges are indistinguishable from her own. Somehow she and the monster are the same thing, and she looks down at the black liquid on the blade of the knife and on her hand and spattered down her front, and smiles.

She is ten years old. She’s a big girl. She’s not afraid of monsters anymore.

Because I am one.

The flicker people- humans- they place so much value on the power and truth of dreams. They never stop to think about what might be hidden in the darker things their minds summon at night.

I walk their streets and eat their food, flirt and laugh and cry with them, but I am not of them, and I think they can tell. They always move on sooner or later. I think I have been alone for so long that I have forgotten what it is to feel love. If I ever knew to begin with. Memory stretches out behind me, and the things I do not use begin to fade.

I am the nothing man.

When I want it, when I choose, I can sink into nothing, become darkness that creeps between houses and around doorframes. It is the easiest way to travel- fast and silent and so, so simple. They almost stop mattering when I'm here. I almost stop seeing the lights of their dreams, the darks of their nightmares.

I am the shadow man.

There are some of them who dream so furiously that I can feelsee the lights from far, far away. They don't realize when I come, of course, but I stand in their dreams and watch hopes of a future that will probably never come to be. Those people's lights are so strong, though, that they'll lead the way to a future. Maybe not the one in the dream. But the light of a dream is a powerful thing, enough to brighten the way to a future, enough to summon me through space and time.

I am the dreamer's man.

Both of the above are redundant, come to think of it. Space and time, I mean. They don't really apply to me. I have only the vaguest idea of what they mean, but I see the effect on the flicker people. Their lives- there and gone in a heartbeat, lasting an eternity, it doesn't matter. They are caught up in a current in the ocean that is Time, and I am a far, far larger denizen than they. But that doesn't mean I can't step into their current and let them sweep me along for however long I want.

I am the eternal man.

They don't seem to realize that their nightmares aren't of them. That they don't make them up. That dreams are false, lying things, spun of fragile ice-webs that melt in the harsh light of what they call reality. Not that they have no power- oh, no. They are rebuilt over and over every night and every moment alone. Glowing, sparkling, burning brightly while they last. But they're still false. Not like nightmares. My children, my beauties, my perfect monsters.

I am the honest man.

They're dark compared to dreams. Little clots of antilight. Black holes in miniature. That is why dreams and nightmares are different, I think. Dreams are things born of a human mind but they are things that emit, that give out, that project their images on a consciousness. Nightmares... they pull, they suck. They splay the deepest, darkest truths out from the depths of one's mind where one has hidden them and across the inner eye in vivid and terrifying detail. Sometimes disguised. Sometimes hidden beneath layers and layers of meaning. The truth is only there when one is brave enough to strip away all the layers of what they are and find the bare bleached bones of one's psyche. And that is what my perfect monsters try to make you do. They're little truth-seekers. Terrifying, dark and deadly, sallying forth with unconquerable power, because of course their power comes not from me but from the mind of whomever they find to draw from.

I am the nightmare man.