She nods again. “It first started with scratches on my window.” She makes a clawing motion with her little hand. “Then it came into my room. But it didn’t walk. It crawled on the walls.”
“What did it look like?”
“A black blob with red eyes.”
I glance up at the parents. They both look stunned to hear this description. Maybe they hadn’t asked for a description.
I flip a page in my notepad, trying not to let my hands shake. “Emma, when you woke up… was your tooth still there under the pillow?”
She shakes her head slowly. “No. It was gone.”
I glance at her mom. She shrugs, pressing her lips together before saying, “We checked, too. The tooth was missing. We didn’t take the tooth.”
“You said there was no money, either.”
“Right. No tooth and no money. Just a nightmare.”
Emma sits on the couch. “It was cold when I woke up. My breath was making smoke.”
I glance at Paxton beside me. Her eyebrows shoot up.
The tooth was taken. No money was left. The whole magical process went haywire.
Something intervened.
I consult my notes. “You said it crawled and had red eyes?”
Emma nods enthusiastically.
“Could you draw it?” I ask, turning to a blank page and holding out my pen.
Emma bites her lip, then nods. “No pen. Let me get some crayons.”
When she trots off toward the kitchen, skipping, Paxton whispers in my ear: “Red eyes. That’s nightmare fuel.”
Yeah. A monster or worse. Maybe even a demon.
I keep that last part to myself.
3.
Emma returns with a crayon in each hand: one black, one red. She settles cross-legged on the living room floor and gets to work, her tongue poking out in fierce concentration.
Paxton and I exchange a glance as she draws in silence. The crayons make a soft scratching sound across the paper. Karen leans in from the loveseat, her posture tense.
Emma draws first a lopsided head with almond-shaped eyes colored in red, a mouth full of jagged, uneven triangles—teeth, and lots of them.
When she’s finished, she places my notepad on the glass coffee table, face up. Her hand lingers there for a second as she pulls her stuffed koala closer to her chest. “That’s what I saw,” she says quietly, like saying it out loud might make it real again.
Karen leans closer and gasps, hands covering her mouth. “Oh my God. I had no idea how terrible...”
“I told you, Mom. Lots of teeth.”
I lean closer, ready to take a picture of the drawing and send it to Mom, but before I can do anything, something shifts in the room, subtle but unmistakable. The air grows heavier, like we’ve just stepped inside a storm that hasn’t broken yet.
I straighten, scanning the ceiling. “Did the lights flicker just now?”
“No,” Karen says, voice tight.
