The Jabagar

A young woman is home for the holidays. But lying in your childhood bed might bring back your childhood monster…

I hate coming home for the holidays. I hate my parent’s house. I hate that they haven’t changed my childhood bedroom from a little girl’s pink princess fantasy. 

Laying here in my squeaky twin bed, legs hanging over the side, watching the gnarled tree’s shadow scratching at the far wall. 

Funny, I used to think it was the Jabagar’s hand. 

See, that’s why I hate this room. I lay here and I think about all my childhood monsters. 

Dad was the one to tell me about the Jabagar. It was a joke, I think. 

I remember him smiling as he told me to pretend to sleep. The Jabagar didn’t hurt little girls who were asleep. Even if they were just pretending. 

And I started having these nightmares when I was ten or eleven. A squeak of a doorknob turning down on the end of the hallway, the clump clump clump of the Jabagar’s cloven hooves on the carpet. 

I’d watch the black line between my door and doorway widen until it was a gaping void and the creature standing in it that I couldn’t see.  

That’s when I’d pretend to sleep. 

The Jabagar would enter, sometimes I could see his shadow creeping along the edge of the room through the slits in my closed eyes, see the shiny lips stretched into a smile. And those long sharp fingers would start at the foot of my sparkly pink comforter and trace up my leg and––what was that? 

A door knob squeaking? 

Well door knobs are squeaky, that doesn’t mean––it’s just a person walking down the hall to the bathroom. It’s an old house. They won’t stop at my room, why would they stop at my room? It’s not the Jabagar––I’m not scared. I’ll stay awake this time. Because it’s not the Jabagar. It’s not. Normal people––normal adults stay awake if they want to. 

I pull my comforter to my chin and I slit my eyelids watching that black line between door and doorway. 

But it won’t open. I hate this place. I hate this house. I hate I hate it I hate it. The Jabagar isn’t re––“Dad?” 

But Dad just smiles at me, moving to close my door. “Go back to sleep.”