Page 20 of Below the Shadow of the City

I’m a victim of my own cognitive dissonance. I have fully stepped from reality into some sort of dystopian fantasy. There are things in this room that are still real. I count them to ground myself. I tap my feet on the linoleum floor and feel the soles of my feet hit the tiles. I listen to the sound of the dryer, still tumbling on like nothing has changed. I count my fingers on each hand by tapping each fingertip against my thumb. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Each inhale goes steadily through my nose and shudders out my mouth.

No overpriced Upper West Side psychologist or self-proclaimed mental health influencer has adequate coping mechanisms for this sort of scenario.

“What the fuck,” I mutter the only words that come to mind.

“Sigrid, please,” now that the panic has worn off it clearly is “Adam’s” voice, but it’s coming from this thing. “If you shut the door and leave you’ll be better off.” If I shut the door and leave I’ll spend my entire life wondering exactly what happened down here tonight. I weigh my risks, I could get true answers, despite how horrifying they could be, or I could live forever with the mystery.

“Step out into the light,” I say like a petulant teenager and cross my arms over my chest to stop my hands from shaking.

“Seriously, I don’t think this is a good idea,” his voice is as nervous as mine.

“Can you please show yourself?” My heart is pounding, and the waiting is becoming unbearable.

“Sigrid—”

“Just come out,” I tighten my fingers around my arms to hold myself steady.

“Do you really want me to?” He’s incredibly unsure, and truthfully, so am I. I’ve painted this facade of faux confidence because if I let my emotions overtake me at this moment I would be out of the laundry room and halfway up the stairs screaming.

“Jesus Christ, yes. Rip the damn bandaid off!” I step back from the doorframe and he steps into the laundry room. And I have confirmation of my greatest fears.

He is, for lack of a better term, a monster. Visually, he is the exact thing kids conjure up when they imagine something living under their bed or in their closet.

Massive would be an understatement to describe his size. He’s tall, seven foot something, and covered in dark brown fur and rippling muscles. A tail swishes gently back and forth on the floor. His face has something that looks like a mix of a muzzle and a snout with protruding white fangs, and two dark horns curl from his skull. He has a heavy brow furrowing atop two otherworldly blue eyes. They soften when they meet mine.

My first thought is complete horror, sheer disbelief at what’s standing before me. My second is something even more terrifying, shit, he’s kind of hot. I’m getting tossed around in waves of emotion, everything ranging from fear, relief, lust, and so many other things my brain can’t wrap itself around.

I’m silent for far too long, he’s standing sheepishly in the doorway, ducking his head and leaning one arm against the frame.

“I knew this was a horrible idea,” he says quietly. I’m not scared anymore, not of him, I need to process it all. I need to know if he knew it was me in the alleyway, and if he’s been stalking me. Did he know we’d meet that first night down here? Did I reveal too much of myself to him? And despite all of this, I need to know, does he feel the same way about me that I’ve felt for these last few weeks?

“No—no it’s not. I just…sorry. How? Uh, where did you…god, I don’t know, I’m sorry. I can’t think straight.” I am vomiting out nonsense words as the air in the room is suddenly stifling, “I have to go.”

CHAPTER 9

THURSDAY, LATE SEPTEMBER

Hours have passed since I fled the basement, I keep picturing him standing there, looming. Every time I shut my eyes I see him, I consider checking under my bed with a flashlight. It’s physically impossible. People, moreover creatures, like him don’t exist. He’s a Frankenstein-esque amalgamation of every monster story I’ve heard, and a mix of every beast that haunts an abandoned castle in a fairy tale. And yet, I texted him six hours ago.

When sleep finally does find me I dream about him, like he’s some mystical being that’s possessed my every thought. I replay our meeting, I attempt to link our past conversations to his face. And when I wake up with sticky dampness between my legs, I realize I must have had a dream attaching his monstrous form to the voice that rendered me undone multiple times over.

There’s an inevitability I have to face eventually. I have woven thoughts together in my mind but they quickly become unraveled. Thinking anything remotely coherent has been an impossibility, but there are facts and truths I can organize. I scramble for a notebook I shoved in my nightstand when I thought I’d be getting into dream journaling. There are pages full of random artsy poems I’d scribbled down, a drawing of a horse wearing pants from when Perrie and I debated on how they’d wear them, and some doodles that I’d mindlessly sketched when on hold with the cable company. Feverishly, I flip to a blank page and begin a list.

Fact 1: “Adam” is a creature of some sorts. A terrifying beast-like thing.

Fact 2: such creatures like him exist (?)

Fact 3: his voice alone made me come undone completely.

Fact 4: he’s definitely hot, and it’s messing with me how hot he is. Because, on a biological level, I’m probably not supposed to find him hot.

Fact 5: up until seeing him in real life I was swiftly falling for him, and I’m mostly terrified of that.

The realizations ping pong in my brain. How am I supposed to come to terms with all this? How am I supposed to tell anyone about him? I’m a logical person. I have to think through all this logically. He lives…somewhere nearby, I guess? Does he dwell in the basement? Do other people know of his existence? Is he even real?

“Hey Margo, yeah, I finally met the mystery hottie. He’s a monster. Yeah, covered in fur, giant fangs, tail, horns sticking out. The works, you know. Anyways, I think I want to fuck him even more now.”

I go through each of the facts one by one as I reconcile with them. “Adam” and the alley monster are one in the same, and even if he was stalking me, he obviously meant no harm. And I’d been doing plenty of stalking him on my own. So, at a minimum we’re even.