1.
The little girl was blonde and had very blue eyes. She stood on the steps to the house and stared at Mara without expression.

“It lives in the closet,” the little girl said.

“Klara…” her father said. He looked apologetically at Mara. “Please,” he said. “Will you come in?”

Mara followed them inside the house. The house was on the outskirts of town, one of a bewildering array of variously coloured painted homes all tumbling fantastically on top of each other. Public housing, new builds. Inside it was warm and there was a thick carpet. A dream catcher hung near the window.

“It lives in the closet,” the little girl said again. Her eyes were startlingly blue, Mara thought.

“Mrs. Karlsson told us about you,” the father said. He seemed uncomfortable. His wife hovered nearby, silent. “She said you helped her little girl.”

“I do what I can,” Mara said.

“What…What exactly is it that you do?” the mother said. It was the first she spoke.

Mara shrugged.

“You know,” she said.

Which wasn’t an answer, but then the parents didn’t really want answers. They were just desperate for anything at all to stop the screams.

“Do you need anything?” the father said.

“I brought a sleeping bag,” Mara said. “I need to spend the night in Klara’s room.”

“Yes,” the father said. “That’s what Mrs. Karlsson told us.”

Mara nodded.

“I will take a sandwich,” she said. “And a glass of milk.”

It was night. The little girl lay in the bed. Mara lay on the floor on top of her sleeping bag. The sandwich was flounder and rye and the milk was fresh. Mara didn’t eat much usually. She forgot to eat most of the time.

“Does it have a name?” Mara said.

“What?”

“The Thing in the Closet,” Mara said.

Klara gave it some thought.

“No,” she said. “It just lives there.”

“It doesn’t speak to you?”

The little girl gave it some more thought.

“No,” she said. “But it makes scary sounds.”

“All right,” Mara said. “Go to sleep now.”

“I’m scared,” the little girl said suddenly. “I’m scared to go to sleep.”

“I know,” Mara said. “I used to be scared, too.”

She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. The girl didn’t speak again. Eventually her breathing changed.

One by one the sounds stilled around the room. The noise of distant traffic slowed then stopped entirely, and the whisper of the wind ceased its murmur. In the house, the ticking of a clock faded, and the creaking of floorboards upstairs died as the parents went to bed themselves. No water gurgled in the pipes, no television blared beyond the walls. It was night, and the darkness pressed black and heavy against the windows.

In the silence of the room, the closet door creaked.

Mara lay awake and still, her eyes open to the dark.

The door creaked again. The girl on the bed twitched in response.

Mara remembered being afraid. So afraid you couldn’t move, knowing there was a monster in there with you, and there was nowhere to run, and no one to believe you. The closet door creaked open. Then it stopped.

The ghast was there.

Mara lay still. The girl on the bed lay still. She was too scared to move. Mara rolled and crouched and she stared at the ghast.

It stood on the closet threshold. It was a thing out of nightmare, a torn piece of black cloth that grew eerie white eyes. The eyes stared at Mara.

Mara smiled.

“Boo,” she said. The Thing in the Cupboard shuddered. Goosebumps rose on its leathery skin, and Mara saw they were like tiny needles, like the spines on a hedgehog but sharper. The girl whimpered on the bed.

Mara said, “Be still.”

She stood between the girl and the ghast, blocking it.

The ghast stared at Mara out of its white, fungus-like eyes. It seemed uncertain. It undulated. It seemed to suck all light and sound from the room. Mara breathed evenly. She reached slowly, slowly, into her backpack, and extracted an old weathered book.

“Let me read you a story,” she said.

The ghast watched her. Mara opened the book.

It was a children’s book her mother gave her when she was small, and there was nothing in itself significant about it. It was called A Child’s Book of Monsters, by K. Berglund. It was the sort of book parents were meant to read at bedtime to calm scared little children so they would go to sleep. It didn’t work on Mara when Mara had nightmares. When Mara had a monster in the closet all of her own. She turned the first page.

“Once upon a time,” she read. And then she lunged at the ghast.

The ghast screeched in pain and outrage. Its needle-sharp fins protruded. Its eyes bulged. The little girl in the bed screamed too. The scream shattered the silence of the night. The needles hurt Mara, scratching her skin. She grabbed the ghast by its leathery neck. It fought and wriggled in her hand, changing shape, trying to flee. It was an old coat, it was a black feathery thing, it was an inky blot in which two white eyes shone like reflections. Mara held on and dragged it out of the closet. She shoved it onto the open book. She smeared the ghast against the pages.

She pushed.

The screams stopped abruptly. The closet was empty. In the book, a black-and-white illustration showed a monster in a few deft strokes.

Mara shut the book.

The door to the bedroom banged open.

The father stood with the light behind him.

They always came in, even though Mara always told them not to.

“Shhh,” she said. “She’s asleep.”

The father came into the room, the mother hovering in the rectangle of light behind him. She came in too.

The little girl was asleep in the bed. Her breathing was regular and even. Mara slipped the book back into her backpack. She rolled up her sleeping bag. She stood up.

She said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my money now.”

 
2.
Mara didn’t bother trying for a taxi. She didn’t mind walking. It was deep night and only the Erikssons’ house had a light behind one of the windows, and then it winked out as Klara’s parents went back to sleep. The houses were dark and sleeping all around her. The streetlights glowed but only managed to deepen the dark. It was cold. The trains weren’t running. A few cars swooshed past on the road, their lights glowing eerily in the mist.

Bushes and trees grew in profusion and she could hear the sound of running water. She followed the train tracks to the city. Seagulls cried overhead and she could smell the fresh, clean smell of the ocean. There were scratches on her arms from where the ghast cut her but they were fading as she walked, fading like a bad dream. She’d tried to hold down a job before. She waited tables for a week and then didn’t bother turning up again. She cleaned in a youth hostel for a while. She did some filing in an office and then walked out one lunchtime and never came back. She was usually behind on her rent.

The book felt heavy in her backpack.

The houses thinned and then she crossed running water and was back on cobbled stone and the city rose before her. Mara liked the city. She walked through quiet streets, with only the occasional drunk or a cleaner or a police officer passing her by, like ghosts in the night, and she walked until she found Gunnar’s.

It was tucked away on a side alley behind a row of closed shops. She pushed the heavy black door and went inside and shut it behind her. The lighting was dim and only a few drinkers were scattered around the room. Gunnar’s was a place for people who liked to drink alone. Mara went up to the bar and sat down. Gunnar stood behind the bar. He looked at Mara.

“Bad night?” he said.

“All nights are bad nights,” Mara said.

“Not here,” Gunnar said, and Mara almost smiled. He brought her a shot glass of akvavit. Mara drank it. It warmed her up.

“You ever have nightmares, Gunnar?” she said.

He shook his head.

“Never,” he said.

“Not even as a child?”

“I had a very happy childhood,” Gunnar said.

He poured her another drink.

Mara thought of the apartment she grew up in. She had a cat but then the cat died. She remembered her parents arguing in low voices in the dark. Remembered her bedroom, and the window that looked out onto the traffic. At night, she could hear the cars whooshing past. She found them comforting. It all started when the cat died, maybe it was that. She could hear it prowling around the apartment even when it wasn’t there. Then one night the streetlight outside went out and no one came to fix it, and it got dark.

It was then that the ghast in the wardrobe first appeared.

She’d finished her drink, she realised. A slow warmth spread through her. It made it easier to sleep. She looked around her at the solitary drinkers, their faces obscured by shadows. Lone candles flickered on the low tables.

Or maybe the ghast had been there all along, just waiting for its moment. Ebbing slowly out of darkness in the deep recesses of her wardrobe, an ageless thing, older than anyone she knew. Congealing slowly. Getting stronger. Biding its time.

“One more,” she said to Gunnar. Gunnar was always open. There had to be a place for those awake at night to go to. For those who couldn’t sleep, because bad things came when you slept.

Gunnar poured her another drink.

She climbed the steep narrow stairs to her apartment. The apartment was in darkness. Mara staggered in and shut the door with her foot. At first the ghast tormented her, appearing silently, night after night.

She would wake up, her heart beating fast, filled with terror. She’d hear the door creak. If she dared open her eyes, she saw a shadow, stood in the dark recesses of the wardrobe. She would lie in her bed, frozen in fear.

And every night the ghast grew larger and became more solid.

More there.

She didn’t want to think about that. She wasn’t scared of Things Under the Bed or Things in the Cupboard. Hadn’t been for a long time. She went to bed. Her old wardrobe stood in the corner. As Mara dozed off, she thought she heard the door creak, but it was probably just the wind.

 
3.
When she woke up again it was midday and the grey sun filtered into the room through the frost on the window. Mara brushed her teeth from last night’s bad taste. She counted the money. It was enough to pay her rent, at least.

It was as she was getting dressed that she noticed the wardrobe door was slightly ajar. Or perhaps she had noticed it all along, had noticed it as soon as she opened her eyes, but had studiously pretended to ignore it, to go about her waking routine, as though nothing had been disturbed.

She approached the wardrobe and pulled the door open in one quick, vicious motion.

There was nothing inside, of course, but her clothes. She hadn’t expected there to be.

Then she glanced down and saw, with a sigh of irritation, an off-white envelope lying on the floor of the wardrobe. She seldom got mail. She did not recall this letter.

She picked it up, turned it one side and the other. It bore the impersonal, franked postage mark of a bank. The bank was the same one as she had her account in. Its offices occupied a new fifty-storey building in town that you could see at night from a distance, because of the big glowing sign on top of it that said Nordbank.

Mara opened the envelope. An impersonal letter told her she owed the bank money. It was a large amount, she thought.

She knew she was behind but not that much.

She was afraid of the bank.

She wanted to throw the letter in the bin but she knew she couldn’t.

The queue shuffled forward slowly. Grey light pressed against the floor-to-ceiling glass. Mara’s head throbbed with last night’s bad dream and vodka. Finally it was her turn.

“Yes,” the teller said. She was an efficient woman with perfectly arranged hair. She tapped keys on a keyboard, efficiently. “It says you owe the bank two and a half thousand.”

“But this must be a mistake,” Mara said. She felt desperate.

“This is what it says,” the teller said.

“But it can’t be.”

She knew it could be. She just didn’t want to believe it.

“You could speak to the borrowings and loans department,” the teller said.

“How do I do that?” Mara said.

“You must make an appointment,” the teller said.

“How do I make an appointment?” Mara said.

The teller frowned. She typed on keys, efficiently.

“Your account has been flagged,” she said.

“Flagged?” Mara said.

“Yes,” the teller said.

Mara’s headache got worse. The light felt unreal, the people behind her in the queue, patiently waiting their turn, seemed ghostly pale.

“Can I speak to someone?” Mara said.

“You are speaking to someone,” the teller said.

“Someone else, please,” Mara said.

“All of our agents are currently busy,” the teller said.

“I could come back,” Mara said. “Why is it flagged?”

The teller shrugged.

“It’s from upstairs.”

“I don’t have two and a half grand,” Mara said.

“Then you must make a suitable repayment arrangement,” the teller said.

“Can I do that?” Mara said.

“You will have to speak to someone upstairs,” the teller said.

“Can I speak to someone upstairs?” Mara said.

“All of our appointment slots are currently booked,” the teller said.

“Screw this,” Mara said.

The teller glared disapprovingly; but Mara already left.

The little boy was blond and had watery blue eyes, on the cusp of tears. He hugged a teddy bear.

“It lives under the bed,” he said.

The mother stood close behind him.

“Please,” she said. “Would you come in?”

Mara followed them inside. It was a nice apartment in a nice part of town. Expensive paintings hung on the wall. The carpet was thick. It was the sort of place that had a maid somewhere, who cleaned the carpets and dusted the pictures on the walls.

“It lives under the bed,” the little boy said again, and then he started to cry.

“Mrs. Eriksson told me about you,” the mother said. She was very self-controlled. “She says you did wonders with her little girl.”

“I’ll spend the night in…” She faltered. What was the little boy’s name?

“In Lucas’s room,” she said. “I brought a sleeping bag.”

The mother nodded.

“It lives under the—” the boy started to say.

“I know where it lives, Lucas,” Mara said.

She hefted her bag and went into the boy’s room. There was a stuffed elephant on the bed.

“I’ll take a sandwich,” she called through the open door. Then she spread out her sleeping bag on the floor and made herself comfortable.

In the night the room was dark and all was quiet but for the boy.

He said, “How come you can see them?”

Mara was startled.

“How do you know I can?” she said.

“I heard. I know Klara.”

“Klara?”

“Klara Eriksson,” the boy said.

“Oh, her.”

“She said you put her monster in a book.”

“Well,” Mara said. Considering. “That’s where monsters belong, isn’t it? In a book.”

“But how come you—?”

“You need to go to sleep, Lucas.”

“But I don’t want to.”

Mara sighed. It was late and she was tired.

“Please go to sleep,” she said.

“But then it comes,” the boy said.

“I know.”

“I can hear it even now.”

Mara listened. She couldn’t hear anything.

“Bake, bake, little cake,” she sang. The boy laughed, surprised. He yawned. Mara kept singing. Slowly the boy’s breath grew even. Mara closed her eyes. Night pressed down on her.

She fell asleep.

 
4.
Something shuffled.

Something moved.

Something heavy dragged itself, slowly, slowly, from the deep well of shadows under the bed.

Mara lay paralysed. The fear gripped her then, sitting on her chest like a beast, taking her breath from her. She thrashed and fought but couldn’t get up. Couldn’t open her eyes.

She couldn’t see it. But she could hear it. Slithering, dragging itself out. It knew she was there. A claw scraped against the floor, the sound as light as a feather. Maws slobbered wet with drool.

Wake up, Mara, she willed herself. Wake up!

The child on the bed was lying frozen just like her. It was his ghast, his fear that was crawling out of the darkness. And yet it was hers, too.

If only she could reach the book. If only she could move. It was so close, ready to wield, inside her backpack. Full of monsters faded with the years. Captured and pinned like insects. The thing under the bed said, Mara…

She recognised her own, old fear in it.

She started to scream.

“What in the world!” the boy’s mother said. Mara couldn’t even remember her name. Svensson or Johansson, she thought.

“You’re worse than Lucas,” the mother said.

The boy sat on the bed with his legs dangling over the dark space under the bed. He was cradling his toy elephant. The lights were on. The ghast was gone.

Mara nodded. She picked up her backpack.

“Sorry, Lucas,” she said on her way out.

“Do you think it will come back?” he said.

Mara looked back at him.

She said, “I think it never left.”

She walked through quiet city streets. The Nordbank sign glowed eerie in the sky over the city. Mara thought about her ghast. That time her parents were still fighting. When the light outside went out. When the darkness thickened. When she first heard the creak of the wardrobe door.

She hated it. She feared it. But then, one day, in the middle of the night…

She woke up.

The ghast stood there, staring at her. It had grown fat and enormous from all the nights that it fed on her fear. Its white sightless eyes shone like moons in a dark sky. Its mouth opened and closed, masticating. It purred.

“You don’t scare me,” Mara said.

She took a small step, and then another. The ghast just stood there. Mara grabbed the first thing she could find. A Child’s Book of Monsters. It was still new then. She’d just got it. Her mother bought it for her in a bookstore near the palace.

Mara hit the ghast with it.

The ghast looked surprised. Perhaps, in all the time there had been ghasts, no child had thought to hit them with a book. Or perhaps they did, and it made no difference. But Mara hit it with fury, with all the pent-up fear and rage—about the way her parents hissed at each other, about the broken light outside, about the girls at school who called her names. 

Whatever it was, the ghast felt it. She knew it did. It fell back from her. It tried to withdraw deeper into the wardrobe. But Mara wouldn’t let it.

When she grabbed hold of it, it felt smooth and insubstantial, like sealskin or cobwebs, and it was hard to catch. The ghast thrashed between her hands. It tried to fight her but she held on tight.

And then it tried to flee.

It took her by surprise. It wriggled out of her grasp and left the safety of the wardrobe and emerged into her room, and it seemed smaller now, and even lost.

She lunged for it, and the book fell to the floor as she reached for the ghast and almost had it. For just a moment it was in her hands, she had caught it, and she knew then that she had a power over it, and that she could pull it back and banish it.

Then she tripped on a squeaky unicorn and fell, and the ghast slipped from her hands and slithered onto the windowsill. The window had been left very slightly open. The ghast looked back at her with its white button eyes, and then it slipped out of the room, as quiet as a shadow, and vanished into the night beyond.

Mara stood in the quiet bedroom, breathing hard, and watched the night. Then she picked up the book and shut the window. And there was never a ghast in her wardrobe again.

But that was years ago, she thought. Since then she had always trapped and imprisoned the ghasts in the book. Only her one was still out there, somewhere. Missing in the waking world.

As she approached Gunnar’s she noticed the night was not as lonely as it usually was. There were more figures out at this time. A police officer walked past and behind her came two shambling shadows, one furry and small and one that was like a centipede with feathers. The police officer seemed unaware of them. Only Mara saw.

She saw them more and more now as she walked. Under an awning, a thing like a formless teddy bear was wrapped tightly around a sleeping homeless boy. A troll stood behind the man in the petrol station, both of them watching TV. A group of tiny gnomes stood in a ring around a drunk girl, back from the clubs, throwing up in an alley between buildings.

Had they always been there? She thought. Hiding in the shadows behind their dreamers? And all this time, when she was going on her jobs, she never noticed, never thought to ask?

She came to Gunnar’s. When she came in she sat at the bar, and Gunnar poured her a drink without being asked. Mara looked around her, at the silent drinkers, their faces hidden in shadow. She saw them now. Perhaps she knew all along. They leaned into the candlelight and she saw their faces, things out of nightmares, yellow eyes shining in the glare. Banished here, she thought. She downed her drink and Gunnar poured her another.

She looked at him then. The melted-wax face, the eyes like white mould.

And she thought of Gunnar a few nights ago, saying, I never have nightmares.

No wonder, when you were one all along.

“Bad night?” Gunnar said.

“Aren’t they all?” Mara said.

They watched her, the ghasts. Hungrily, avidly. Lost.

“I have to go,” Mara said.

 
5.
She raced the sunrise. Dawn brightened the cobbled streets and shone from the canals, and it erased the nightmares, wiping them clean like chalk on a blackboard. When she opened the door to her apartment at the top of the stairs, unread mail pooled at her feet and she picked it up, seeing the stamps with Official Notice and Demand for Payment and Unpaid Bill and Do Not Ignore!

She collapsed on her bed but she couldn’t sleep.

Last Notice, the last letter said. She tore it up. Then she tried to call the bank.

What could she tell them? she wondered. She picked up the phone. Got through at last to a woman who could have well been the same one she last spoke to.

“It is not good you have avoided our letters,” the woman said.

“I just need time,” Mara said. “I can pay.”

“Can you?” There was just a hint of belligerence in the woman’s voice.

“No,” Mara admitted.

“You must make an appointment to discuss your situation,” the woman said. “Make arrangements. A payment plan, perhaps.”

“Can’t you do it?” Mara said.

“It all goes upstairs,” the woman said.

Mara could hear keyboard keys clacking. At last the woman named a time.

“Why so late?” Mara said.

“It says on your form you work nights,” the woman said.

“Well, yes,” Mara said. “But…”

Banks only opened during office hours, didn’t they? She wasn’t going to pick an argument. She said thanks and hung up. She spent the morning collecting paperwork. Receipts, accounts, ledgers. Whatever she could find. Her parents had left her a small amount of money when they died. But it soon ran out.

She slept fitfully. She kept jerking awake. When night mercifully settled again she got up, made a pot of coffee, then set out once again into the dark.

The Nordbank neon shone over the city. As Mara walked she saw the shadows come alive with small nightmares, congealing in dark passageways and under bus stop benches, in the ring of dark beyond a streetlamp, in the doorways of closed shops. She kept walking and the ghasts watched her pass and said nothing.

Mara came to the bank. The front was dark but a lighted arrow glowed white and directed her to a side entrance, and to a bank of lifts that stood humming and dark like refrigerators in the nighttime.

Mara pressed the button and the lift hummed. The doors swung open and she stepped inside. The doors closed. Mara felt entombed inside the lift. The light was bright and the piped music made the hairs on her arms stand up. She stood there biting down until her teeth hurt.

The lift pinged.

The doors slid open.

Mara stepped into a long dark corridor.

She wanted desperately to open her eyes but her eyes were open. The corridor stretched ahead of her into darkness. She shivered. A light came on overhead then, a bright fluorescent light, and it erased all shadows. She took a step and another light came on, ahead.

She walked down the corridor. It lengthened away into the dark. The lights followed her steps.

She could hear nothing. Nothing at all.

Wake up, Mara, she told herself. Wake up!

But she was awake.

A door. She saw it, in the distance. Then it was just there.

An ordinary door, to an ordinary office.

She knocked.

“Come in.”

She hesitated on the doorstep. Then she turned the handle and went inside.

“Hello, Mara.”

Her ghast sat behind a large oak desk. The lights of the city shone behind it, far down below.

The ghast had taken form and shape since she’d last seen it. It wore a banker’s suit. It wore a tie. It was still fuzzy under the suit. Its face kept flickering. It said blandly, “You look well.”

“You can speak now,” Mara said.

“I had time to learn,” the ghast said. “Trapped here in the world of adults.”

She could hear the loathing and the longing in its voice then.

“I was so scared of you,” she said.

“As well you should have been!”

It grew then, became a pool of shadow that stretched and distorted its features. It was angry.

“I was a child’s nightmare,” the ghast said. “But you couldn’t let me be. Now look at me.” It screamed, the sound like a terrible screech in a void. “Look at me!”

She looked. The ghast was everything she feared. The rent, arrears. The debt, the letters from the bank. All the terrible grown-up things only adults had to deal with. All the things she never could. All the grown-up terrible things.

“You’re my nightmare,” she whispered.

“I was always yours.”

She went to it, slowly. She stood in front of the desk.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The ghast screamed. “What use is sorry!”

She didn’t have her book and, besides, what use was a child’s book of monsters in a bank? She reached across the desk. The ghast writhed, suit and tie vanishing back into its roiling flesh. It was made out of shadows and cobwebs. Mara held it. She pulled it close. It was like a cat in her arms, clawing and mewling and struggling to break free, and she held it the way a child holds a cat, wanting to hug it so hard that they might smother it to death.

“I’ll pay my bills,” Mara said. “I’ll get a real job. I’ll wash the dishes and not stay out too late. I’ll be…” She choked on the words. The ghast struggled in vain in her arms.

“I’ll be a grown-up,” Mara whispered.

The ghast ceased struggling. It was limp in her arms. Nothing was left of its suit, its tie, and the office itself seemed empty but for the view, and the solid oak desk seemed to fade to barely an outline. Mara walked out of there, along the corridor, which was now ordinarily short, and down the lift with its canned plastic music. She walked home, not stopping at Gunnar’s, and she saw the people who hurried by and how each of them had their own childhood ghasts following mutely behind them, shadows one could never be rid of, no matter how much one forgot.

She climbed the narrow stairs to her apartment and carried the ghast into her childhood bedroom. It shivered in her arms.

“Hush, now,” Mara said.

She placed the ghast gently in her old wardrobe. It scuttled into the comforting dark.

Mara lay in the bed. She was suddenly very, very tired.

It was a good kind of tired.

She closed her eyes.

The door of the wardrobe creaked.

Mara smiled.

“Good night,” she said.

And then, at last, she fell asleep.

© 2023 Lavie Tidhar