Her parents, loving and reassuring, expected this phase almost with delight as they reminisce what it was like being kids themselves. "Simply shadows playing tricks," they told her underestimating how true their words were. The tricks the shadows played were not the kind any would wish to witness, nor need to attach their own imagination to. Surely a few nights in the familiar safe environment of her parent's bed would put things at ease. Which it did until they sent her back to her room, confident that all was well.
When her teachers reported that she was sleeping in school because the monsters kept her awake, her father bravely traded sleeping arrangements to show once and for all that it was nothing. Now, he won't enter the room without a gun. He still recalls how the room's door was shut securely, and the window blocked. The entire room was pitch black. Still, he awoke in the middle of the night to see the light cast on a wall in the shape of a door as if the closet on the opposing wall had open, but defying logic the closet had not changed nor was it equipped with any lights.
Shadows, he witnessed, entered the walls from this door of light, ignoring him entirely. They darted about the room randomly with such unnatural movements unlike any animal or being would move. As the room's walls filled to capacity, they became more monstrous, posturing at first then attacking each other with unrealistic frenzy. No matter how many died, never mind the mechanics of how a shadow dies, more came out to replace them as the victors feasted on torn limbs.
Just letting their daughter's stories influence his dreams, his wife had commented. He had expected shadowy monsters, and his stressed mind had delivered with the creativity far greater than their child's. She smiled blissfully as she took it upon herself to be the brave one of the family. It was the last time anyone would see her smile, so beautiful and sweet. She was wrong about her husband. His mind had be completely relaxed before the visions. The next night, he kept both his daughter and himself awake till the late hours, unable to control his shaking as his wife now stayed alone, unprotected, in their daughter's room.
She no longer doubted her family that night, as she saw the same events transpire, but she wasn't as brave as she thought. She was the only one to turn on the light to find that these shadows were not so easily dispelled. Her husband and child, still awake in the next room, never even heard her screams as the monsters focused their attentions on her.
The next morning, the last morning before that room was barricaded, her husband averted the suspicious glances of the doctors now tending to his weak and bruised wife. The police took their reports with the casual reassurance one gives to any lunatic covering up for his crimes. How he convinced his daughter to agree, they were not sure yet. It was the images his wife drew, now completely mute, that made the authorities not even want to deal with the case.
