This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Grady Hendrix

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

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ISBN-13: 9781662517051 (digital)

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

Cover illustration by Phantom City Creative

I told her on the second date. I hadn’t planned to tell her at all, because I’d learned from experience this wasn’t the kind of thing you told other people, but then she said she wasn’t drinking.

“Cranberry and soda,” she told the bartender.

I’d already ordered a beer.

“You’re not drinking?”

“I’m on antibiotics, but you go ahead.”

The bartender put down my beer, and it felt weird to ignore it, so I tried to sip slow.

“We can go somewhere else,” I said. “I don’t need to finish this.”

“If you needed to finish it, you’d be an alcoholic.”

“Or maybe I don’t want to hurt the bartender’s feelings.”

“What about my feelings?”

“Are they hurt?”

“Now that I know you’re more worried about the bartender’s feelings than mine, they are.”

I liked doing banter with her.

“Let’s start this date over someplace else,” I said.

“Who said this was a date?”

I took a chance.

“It’s actually our second date.”

She had brown eyes, and I found them and held them with mine, and she instinctively looked away; then she looked back, then she stopped moving and looked at me with a very faint smile on her lips. We looked at each other until it was obvious what was going on, and then we looked a little longer.

“Jump Around” came on the playlist and we broke it off. I took another sip of my beer.

“Is that some alpha-male move?” she asked around her straw. “Extended eye contact to assert dominance?”

“I saw it on the Discovery Channel,” I said. “Did it work? Do you feel like prey?”

We had such good banter. We both volunteered at the same Samaritans hotline, and I’d always thought we’d have good banter, but a crisis hotline wasn’t the place to find out, so I’d invited her out for coffee to complain about Reggie, our idiotic shift supervisor. He kept on being an idiot, so tonight I invited her out again. She already had her master’s in social work, while I was in my third year. We were both from small towns upstate. It was like we’d been waiting for each other to appear all our lives.

Despite my best efforts, my beer was almost gone, and she’d been sucking ice for the last little while. I wanted to keep this going, so I asked if she liked bubble tea.

“Hate it with a passion,” she said.

“Then let’s go back to Uncommon Grounds,” I suggested. That was where we’d had our first date. This was our second. It felt like the beginning of something. “We can come back here when you’re off antibiotics.”

“Look,” she said, and turned her knees away from me and toward the bar, “I’m not on antibiotics. That’s just what I say to people when they take me to a bar. I don’t drink, but then everyone wants to know why, and it gets awkward and I don’t want to get into it.”

“What do you tell them on the second date?” I asked. “Do you just say you have a chronic infection?”

“There usually isn’t a second date,” she said.

“Then what do you call this?”

I saw she was about to switch back to banter, and then her eyes flicked up to my eyes, then dropped back to her fingers, which were on the bar, picking apart her straw wrapper.

“I don’t drink because my dad was an addict,” she said. “My tenth Christmas he smoked the present money, and I guess he felt guilty, because he broke into our neighbors’ house and stole all their presents. The neighbors figured it out when they saw me and my sister riding their bicycles. They didn’t press charges, but my mom threw him out. That’s why I moved here. I got sick of walking by him passed out in the park. He used to come up to me when I was out with friends and ask for money. He’s why I don’t drink. And that’s why there usually isn’t a second date. I’m too complicated.”

She made air quotes around “complicated,” and I could tell she’d already written us off. I saw her face changing into the unreadable expression she wore at Samaritans. She had shown me who she was, and now she was shutting down because she knew what came next. So I decided to tell her the thing I didn’t like to talk about.

“When I was six,” I said, “my dad killed my mom.”

“This isn’t a competition,” she said, eyes still on her fingers tearing apart her straw paper.

“I barely remember either of them,” I said, forging ahead. “I remember her voice reading to me, I remember how her shampoo smelled, I remember that his fingernails were always black because he was a driveway mechanic. It’s all flashes, though, except for the night it happened. I remember every second of that.”

She was watching me now.

“I don’t know what woke me up,” I said. “I must have heard something in my sleep because I woke up breathing hard, my heart pounding. I didn’t call anyone. I just sat there in the dark, scared the way only a kid can be scared. They told me later that by the time I woke up they’re pretty sure she was already dead. After a long time, my dad came in. He flipped on the light and sat on my bed. He didn’t have any blood on him, but his eyes were crazy—spaced out and intense at the same time. The thing I remember the most is that he’d shaved off his mustache. That naked upper lip made him look like a stranger to me. Then he told me a bunch of crazy shit.”

“Like what?” she asked.

She’d turned her knees back toward me again.

“He told me that he was very sorry, but the boogeyman had taken Mom away.”

“Jesus,” she breathed.

“People were going to think he’d done it, though, so he needed to go. He told me that I had to be careful and leave all the lights on after he left or the boogeyman might get me too. Then he stood up, walked out of my room, got in our car, and I never saw him again. He left me all alone in that house with every single light burning.”

“With her body?”

“They figure he put her body in the trunk and hid it someplace. When the sun came up, I went next door and told the neighbors, and the police arrested him down in Georgia, headed for Florida, apparently. He never told anyone where he’d buried her.”

Sometimes people asked if that bothered me. It did. Sometimes people asked why he did it, as if there might be some logical explanation for why a husband would murder his wife and then tell his six-year-old son that the boogeyman did it. There wasn’t.

I never told people the other things my dad told me that night, because they were even crazier. I never told them my dad said the boogeyman got Mom because she stepped out of bed without turning the light on first. I never told them that for the rest of my life I’ve never once gotten out of bed in the dark.

I’ve read enough about domestic homicide to know that every perpetrator blames his victim. Like every perpetrator, my dad had a big elaborate fantasy about his sad little crime. His involved the boogeyman, only he didn’t call it “the boogeyman.” He called it “the Ankle Snatcher.” I didn’t tell Tess any of that, though. She didn’t need to know exactly how batshit my genetic inheritance was.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “Foster care?”

“Uncle David and Auntie June,” I said. “My mom’s brother and his wife. They’re my real parents. They took me in, kept me out of trouble. I worked hard in school—I liked the idea of making a difference—and that’s how I wound up here, telling you my story.”

She looked at me—a long, slow look that took me all in—and I could see her adjusting expectations, making calculations. If I’d had another beer in front of me, I would have drunk half of it then, and I’d probably have ordered another five after she walked out.

Then she said, “We don’t have to turn into them. We can be our own people.”

Half an hour later we were at my place.

It was as good as first times can be, which isn’t very, but there was the promise that next time would be better, and the time after that would be better still. It felt like we were starting something that might go on a long time.

Then she got out of bed to pee without turning on the light.

Panic flared in my chest as her bare feet hit the floor, and I rolled over to snap on the bedside lamp. But then a miracle happened: I saw her glowing in the dark.

Where the streetlight came in the window and touched her pale skin, it glowed. A sleeve of ink—mostly hares and snakes and lizards—wrapped around her right arm, all the way up to her shoulder, and another sleeve coiled down her left leg. It made her arm and leg look like they were dissolving into the dark. A single mole marked the hollow of her throat. Her long black hair was shaved on one side, and it made her look like some kind of barbarian queen. She looked down at me with eyes that were the darkest, deepest things in the room.

I couldn’t turn on the lamp and ruin a sight like that.

“What?” she asked, and I could tell she was self-conscious. I could tell she was about to make some sarcastic comment, and I wasn’t ready for that.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said.

A rush of different emotions flickered through the muscles of her face, and before any one of them could settle, she sat back down on the bed and gave me a kiss that felt like it had no bottom. The barbell in her tongue clicked lightly across my teeth.

She pulled back an inch, met my eyes, then moved her lips to my ear, her small breasts pressed against my collarbone.

“You’re a good man,” she whispered.

Then she was off the bed, walking out of the room. At the door, she threw me a look over one shoulder, and I wondered where she had learned to do that so perfectly. Then she disappeared into the darkness, and a few seconds later I heard her pee hit the porcelain.

I suddenly became extremely aware of myself. I was in bed in my first apartment without a roommate. I had a job helping people, and I was listening to a girl I liked pee in my bathroom, and she was smart and savage and breathtaking, and she thought I was a good man. I felt like my real life had finally begun. I felt like an adult.

The toilet flushed, and I knew that when Tess got back from the bathroom I wanted to feel how smooth her skin was again and I wanted to feel as much of it as possible across as much of my skin as possible, and I wanted to be inside her. I wanted to taste her. I wanted her to taste me.

She emerged out of my dark doorway, and I noticed how fragile her collarbone was, and how her hips curved so perfectly into her thighs, and I noticed that she walked with her shoulders slightly hunched, like she was expecting someone to yell at her. I promised then and there to do everything in my power to protect her from all the assholes of this world. Everything her dad did to her, I’d make up for it for the rest of our lives together.

She planted her foot like she was about to jump back into bed, and I opened my arms for her to land, and her eyes went wide.

“Ah!” she said, pushing out a big breath.

She fell backward and landed on her ass with a big meaty slap that shook the walls. I sat up, confused. In the dark, I saw her staring down at her left leg. It was stretched out stiff in front of her, and she was looking at something that didn’t make any sense.

A hand had her by the ankle.

A hand coming out from under my bed.

A man’s hand.

I threw myself onto my knees and went for the lamp beside the bed, but the hand flexed and slid back into the darkness under my bed, taking Tess with it. Her ass slid along the floor with a rubbery squeak and she screamed, partly from fear and partly from the friction burn. It was so loud it made my back teeth vibrate.

Everything happened fast. It had her left leg under the bed up to her midthigh. She planted her right foot against the side of my mattress and braced herself and pushed. My mattress slid backward, but she stayed in place.

I reached for her shoulders.

“Tess!” I said, loud, to get her attention.

She looked up and grabbed my arms, and even as her fingers wrapped around my forearms, I felt her muscles go tight as the hand tried harder to pull her under my bed. It would have made more sense to get off and stand behind her and pull, but not once did it occur to me to set a bare foot on those floorboards. I’m ashamed of that now.

Tess’s eyes were blurry with shock, and I didn’t know what to say to her, because there was a man under my bed and I didn’t know how long he’d been there or what he wanted. All I knew was that I couldn’t let him drag her under there with him. She looked down.

“No,” Tess said, and I saw where she was looking.

The man’s other hand had come out of the darkness and snatched at her right ankle, the one braced against the mattress. Its wrist tendons strained as he tried to drag that leg under the bed too, and I kept trying to lift her up, to get her on top of the mattress, and I wondered if I should bite those fingers around her ankle because the human jaw can apply 150 pounds of pressure, enough to snap a finger in two—thanks, Discovery Channel.

I didn’t get a chance. Because that was when a third hand shot out from under my bed and snatched  her left leg at the knee, and two more squirmed out of the dark to snatch her right ankle braced against my bed, and a sixth grabbed on to her right thigh, and how many people were under my bed?

People like you and me, son, we have to be careful of the Ankle Snatcher.

The hands twined around her calf and pried her foot off my mattress and dragged her right leg under my bed. For a second her entire body shook with strain; then she went slack, and the hands yanked her toward them hard. She slid and bumped over the floor, disappearing up to her waist. I threw myself onto my stomach and leaned down, wrapping my arms around her shoulders, and she stopped.

I felt them pulling her under, and I tightened every muscle I had and held on. Tess was a human rope in a horrible game of tug-of-war I had to win. I would not let these hands have her. They pulled. I pulled. Tess grunted. We were at a standstill.

Then I saw them, from my upside-down point of view, floating out of the darkness under my bed, a forest of hands, reaching for me. The fingers of the closest one grazed my face, and it was warm and alive and I couldn’t help it. I jerked away. I let go.

It all happened so fast. Tess slipped out of my hands, and she grabbed my shoulders and held on, but the hands were all over her, covering her stomach and sides and pulling her under, and I had to get away, and she didn’t stand a chance.

I heard the hollow coconut whack of the back of her skull smacking into the wood, and her eyes lost focus. Hands swarmed over her body, dragging her under my bed, and first her belly button disappeared, then her nipples, then her collarbones, then the mole at the hollow of her throat.

Her eyes snapped back into focus, and she grabbed the edge of my mattress, like she wanted to do a pull-up, but the hands covered her shoulders, wrapped themselves around her arms, and dragged her away. Her eyes were full of betrayal, focused on me now, and I wondered if she thought I had planned this, and I wanted to tell her I didn’t have anything to do with this, that I didn’t know what was going on, that it wasn’t my fault.

It’s not my fault, son. I tried to warn her.

The last thing she said, right before her eyes slipped beneath the edge of my bed, as the hands covered her face, was my name.

“Marcus!” she shouted.

The end of my name cut off, like something pushed her jaw shut; then her head was gone, and I saw those pale fingers twining in her hair, and then there was no one on my bedroom floor.

My mattress suddenly heaved to one side, and I slammed my hands down hard, digging my fingers into it, clinging on for my life. I didn’t want it to start bucking and spill me to the floor. I didn’t want to be down there where the Ankle Snatcher lived. A scream built up inside my chest; then my mattress stopped moving.

It trembled. The metal legs of my bed slid across the floor a few inches; then it settled down to an uneven shaking. I thought about what was under me, just on the other side of this mattress, and I wondered how many hands this thing had. I heard little high-pitched whimpers in my bedroom, and I realized they were coming from me.

What was in my apartment? How many people were under my bed?

But I knew it wasn’t people. It was the Ankle Snatcher.

My whimpers were the only noise in my room, and then crackling, bony pops joined them, coming from under my mattress, like someone stepping on Bubble Wrap. No, they were coarser than that. They had a crunch to them, like someone crushing seashells, and seashells were hard because they had calcium in them, another fact courtesy of the Discovery Channel, and the muffled crunches continued, and I remembered what else had calcium in it. Bones.

After a while the mattress stopped shaking, and everything went quiet. It was cold in my room, or maybe I was cold, and I slid my feet under my blanket, but that didn’t seem to help. I think I was in shock. I tried to control my shivering because I didn’t want the Ankle Snatcher to know I was there. But it knew. It just couldn’t come up here. It played by the rules. As long as I stayed off the floor, I was safe. I guess I could have turned on the bedside lamp and run, but right then nothing in the world could have gotten me to set foot off my bed.

Something under my mattress ripped a thick piece of cloth in half, and then came a juicy sucking sound like a toilet being plunged. I knew right away. The image just popped into my mind. They’d had a bunch of shows on Discovery about giant squid. I thought about those masses of squirming tentacles surrounding its hooked beak. A hooked beak for tearing and eating. Beneath me something ripped again. The wet, plunging, sucking sounds started again.

It had crushed Tess’s body with its mass of hands, and now they were tearing off chunks of muscle and shoveling them into its maw. There wouldn’t be a body left for anyone to find. Just like my mom.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop it!”

But the Ankle Snatcher went right on wolfing her down.

Maybe I could have run when it was preoccupied with feeding, but part of me felt like I had to wait until it was done with Tess. I owed her that much. At a time like this, she shouldn’t have to be alone.

It fed for hours as my room turned gray and the sky got brighter than the streetlight. Eventually I heard traffic, and someone shouted at someone else, and I heard a garbage truck go by. After a while the noises stopped coming from under my bed, and I knew Tess was gone.

I talked to a lot of people after I went to live with Uncle David and Auntie June. I saw three different kinds of therapists and went to a summer program for kids who’d experienced trauma, and every single one of them told me two things: my father was a liar, and I was not going to grow up to be like him.

Turned out they were wrong on both counts.

I huddled on my mattress like a shipwreck survivor on a raft. The smell was what finally got me to move. My windows were closed, and as the room got warmer, something sweet and fishy and flyblown began to thicken the air until it felt like hairy fingers were forcing their way down my throat, and I knew I was going to be sick. I switched on the bedside lamp, even though it was daylight, and I leaped as far as I could, landing near my bedroom door with a thump that shook the walls. I ran-limped naked to the bathroom and just made it, falling to my knees in front of the commode as I threw up everything inside me, over and over and over again until I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out.

I had to get out of my apartment. Putting on clothes seemed pointless, putting on shoes seemed pointless, but I managed to do both. My phone was in the bedroom, so I left it behind. I got outside and walked away fast, and with every step, one thought rang through my skull, over and over again:

My dad was right.

My dad was right.

My dad was right.

But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was a delusion. Maybe what I’d inherited from him wasn’t a monster under the bed. Maybe I’d inherited some leftover murderous spoor, clinging to the folds of my brain, a genetic kill switch that had finally closed, and the Ankle Snatcher, and everything I’d seen or heard or smelled since last night, was a delusion prepped by my dad when I was six years old, etched into my DNA.

I didn’t feel murder in me, but I couldn’t trust myself, so I stopped and examined my hands. They weren’t cut or swollen or bruised as if I’d beaten the woman I loved to death the night before. I examined my reflection in a restaurant window and didn’t see any blood, but maybe I’d blanked out taking a shower. I felt my hair. It was dry.

My dad was right.

I never saw my dad again after he left our house that night. I didn’t even know him outside that one memory of him sitting on my bed, upper lip raw, telling me all his crazy shit. I’d never visited him in prison. I knew he was originally sentenced to McCormick Correctional, but in the nineteen years since, they’d probably moved him a bunch of times. I wondered why I cared, and then I realized a part of my brain thought I should find him, ask him what the hell this thing was, demand that he explain the Ankle Snatcher to me in a way that made sense.

Anger made me breathe fast and high inside my chest. I forced myself to stop. I stood on a corner and took slow, deep breaths, held them for a five-count, and let them out again. I did that over and over until I felt like I was under control. Until I felt like I could face this thing head-on.

Whatever the Ankle Snatcher was, my dad had told me everything I needed to know when I was six. It lived under your bed. If you got out of bed after dark without turning on the light, it would snatch you up by the ankles, and then it would drag you under the bed and then—

I thought about the noises it had wrung out of Tess.

Where it took you, how it appeared and disappeared, why it targeted my dad and me—those were interesting questions, but they didn’t help me right now. I knew the important things: I knew that if it could touch us, we could touch it. And I knew where it would be tonight.

I thought about fire, but I didn’t want to burn the building down. I could shoot it, but the background check took three days in this state. If I had my phone I could look up personal security stores and see what I could take home today: Tasers, pepper spray, stun guns. Maybe a clerk who loved the Second Amendment more than his liability insurance would sell me something under the counter.

But all that was a fantasy. I didn’t need fantasies. I needed a plan, which was how I wound up in the hardware store, walking up and down the aisles, looking for something to kill the monster under my bed. Forty-five minutes later I walked out with three heavy bags. One held six bottles of lighter fluid and two electric lighters. One held a pair of home fire extinguishers. It would be fire, after all. Fuck my building.

I didn’t feel the bags banging against my legs as I planned and discarded scenarios and realized that I would have to step out of bed in the dark to make the Ankle Snatcher appear, which meant I would need to be fast. I’d have an electric lighter in one hand and another taped to my forearm. I’d wear my backpack on my front and put all the lighter fluid inside. As soon as it grabbed me, I’d drop to the floor and spray lighter fluid under the bed, light it up, and keep spraying, hoping I could kill it before it dragged me into its burning maw.

In the third bag I had everything I needed to screw six handles into the floor. I’d hold on to these or brace my feet against them to gain some extra time. They’d give me a fighting chance. I felt good. I felt like I was going down a path that had one destination. The sun was going down. This would be over soon.

The police were waiting outside my building. Two uniformed officers got out of their parked cruiser when they saw me coming up the sidewalk, the one getting out of the passenger side putting on his hat, the one getting out of the driver’s side hitching up his heavy equipment belt.

“You live here?” the younger one asked.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Are you Marcus Needham in 6C?”

“Yeah?”

I stood there, loaded down with my bags full of hardware for killing the boogeyman, and I felt ridiculous. The younger cop told me that Tess’s roommate had reported her missing. She’d known Tess was going out on a date with me.

“You haven’t heard from her all day?” the younger one asked.

His partner looked out of breath from walking around the hood of their car. He looked like he needed to sit down.

“We spent the night together,” I said, lowering my voice, feeling like people were watching from every window on the block. “Then we had coffee this morning, and she went home. She said she didn’t want to shower here. It was only our second date.”

The winded cop looked like he was going to have a coronary. He and his partner kept exchanging looks. I realized they could see right through my hardware-store bags.

“We’d appreciate it if you let us come upstairs and look around,” the younger cop said. “That way, we tell the roommate she’s not here, then we figure out how to contact her. Probably she went to another location and didn’t notify anyone. Maybe she had another date?”

“I’d rather not do that,” I said.

“Do what?” he asked, making me say it.

“Let you inside,” I said. I tried to make it sound better. “I haven’t cleaned up.”

That made it sound worse. The sick-looking cop mumbled something, keeping his bloodshot eyes on the door of my building, and the younger cop nodded and got right down to business.

“We’ve already talked to your downstairs neighbors, who reported a noise disturbance last night, saying it sounded like a woman in distress. It was consistent with the location of your apartment. So we’re going to get access one way or another.”

“Let me help you with your bags,” the tired-looking cop said.

I didn’t know how to keep them out anymore.

They found her purse and her jacket on the couch, her clothes in the bedroom. The stuff I’d bought from the hardware store didn’t help. They arrested me like it was a foregone conclusion.

“No, wait!” I said. “Just wait until dark. Just let me do this one thing. Please!”

They put me face down on the floor and cuffed my hands behind my back.

“Son,” the cop said, “stop struggling. You’re making it worse.”

The fight went out of me. After all, I’d been struggling my entire life, and where had that gotten me? I’d wound up in the same place as my dad.

I waited in this room. I waited in that room. I couldn’t think clearly enough to make decisions, but there were no more decisions to make. Someone else told me where to go and what to sign. I must have given my name and date of birth a hundred times, but there was never an interrogation. They never asked me a single question about Tess or what happened last night. They had no interest in me or anything I had to say. I wasn’t a person. I was a crime.

Every time they left me alone, my lungs filled with panic and I started to drown. I had to take deep breaths and hold them for a five-count, and every time it took more of them for my heart rate to go back to normal. The holding cell smelled like BO. There weren’t any windows. I didn’t know what time it was. But I was grateful they never turned out the lights. I was grateful the bed was a concrete block rising out of the floor. Nothing could hide under that.

My public defender talked to me about sentences and plea bargains and this many years and that many years. I tried to tell him I didn’t do it, but he waited until I had talked myself out and then asked if I was taking any medication. He asked about my history of drug use. He seemed sad that the strongest drug I took was beer.

They hadn’t found Tess’s body, but they found her hair in my sheets and her DNA under my bed. I assumed when they said “DNA,” they meant “blood.” They found one of her fingernails broken off in the wooden frame of my box spring, like she’d been trying to claw her way out. They found a fragment of her tooth embedded in a floorboard. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

I didn’t want to think about any of it.

What I did think about were the beds. I panicked when they took me out of the bright holding cell with its concrete-block bed and drove me to a place lined in linoleum with a narrow platform attached to the wall. After they turned out the lights, I thought about getting up in the middle of the night and letting the Ankle Snatcher take me the way it had taken Tess. It had an eye-for-an-eye symmetry to it, but in the end I was too scared of the pain.

Uncle David and Auntie June came right away. They wanted to see me, but the thought of talking to them scared me too much, so I refused their visit. They sat in the courtroom, though, their faces begging me to reach out to them, to acknowledge them, to let them help me. All my life they’d helped me. They’d made sure I never felt like a survivor, or a burden, or an afterthought, and they didn’t do it out of guilt or duty—they did it out of love. None of their love mattered. Everything they’d done for me had been wiped away, and I was my father’s son again, sitting on that bed, six years old. Everything that had happened between then and now was just a waste of time. I wouldn’t look at them after the first day.

They sentenced me to thirty years.

I was glad. This punishment evened things out with Tess. She had come to my place and died, and I would be punished for it. It had a primal playground logic to it. They told me I’d serve it out in McCormick Correctional. That had a logic to it too.

After all these years, I was finally going to see my dad.

They drove me upstate in a white van with two other guys who ignored me. All I could think about was what kind of bed I would have. I hoped it was the concrete block again.

We drove past check-cashing places and yellow plastic banners with big red letters advertising PERFUMES and MATTRE$$ SALE. We drove past signs for Dollar Generals and churches and then past FOR LEASE and AVAILABLE, and finally we came to a gray maze of chain-link fence surrounding what looked like an elementary school drowning in coils of silver barbed wire spilling everywhere.

They processed us in. The three of us stood in a line that felt like it never moved, in an anonymous hall buffed shiny from one wall to the other. Then we stood in a line again in a room with orange plastic chairs bolted to the linoleum. Then we stood in a line again in a cinder block room painted bright blue where they issued us beige scrubs and slippers. Every room smelled like they had fire-hosed it down with all-in-one sanitizer.

Nineteen years ago, my dad had stood in these exact same rooms.

Different people asked me my name and date of birth in different rooms, and finally a woman who looked like she sold condos at the beach, except for the badge hanging around her neck, read a lot of different written statements at me. I had to sign the bottom of each one. She told me I’d be in intake for a month while they made sure I didn’t have COVID. As she got up to go, I cleared my throat and said, “My dad was sentenced here a long time ago. How do I find out if he’s still around?”

She stopped gathering her stuff and said, “Your inmate guide can answer that in the morning.”

That night I slept in a holding cell. My bed was a platform attached to the wall again. I had to be very, very careful to keep my hands and feet from hanging over the side.

Breakfast was a Styrofoam tray with a fruit cup, a packet of rice puffs, two slices of white bread, and a pat of margarine. A corrections officer took me to a square room too small for all the folding tables and plastic chairs stacked inside. A big meaty guy sat at one of them with his hands folded in front of him. He looked like he could be the cousin of the sick-looking cop who had arrested me.

The CO opened the door and the guy stood up.

“Needham,” the CO said.

Sad Face gestured to the chair across from him, all formal, like we were suddenly in a Jane Austen movie. I sat down and he sat down and got busy arranging a bunch of worn pamphlets and photocopies on the table in front of him. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble was gray. He had a weak chin and heavy jowls. We both wore the same beige scrubs.

“I’m Louis,” he said, and his watery eyes crawled all over my face. He was the first person in months to look me in the eyes. “I’ll be your inmate guide. It’s a program they got to ease people into life inside. Right now you’re in quarantine for thirty days, but most of your tests came back negative, so they’re letting you see me. Marcus Needham, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m going to be telling you things you could read yourself,” he said, gesturing to the paperwork. “But by law they have to verbally inform you, and they don’t have the staff for that, so they get more experienced inmates to do it for free.”

“Okay,” I said.

I got ready for him to pick up the first photocopy and start reading at me, like the woman yesterday, but instead he said, “Your father’s Tony Needham, right?”

I blinked.

“Yeah,” I said, not prepared for an actual conversation. “You know him?”

Louis leaned forward a little.

“I knew him when he was here. He got sent down to Kirkland about ten years ago. They’ve got him in maximum security.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Behavioral issues,” he said. “Your dad’s cellmate died. So they locked your dad in the Max Unit and threw away the key.”

“How’d he die?” I asked.

Louis affected a shrug.

“Did my dad kill him?” I asked.

“Did you kill your girlfriend?”

After three months of no one being interested in me, this sudden attention made me feel light-headed.

“Your dad says it’s not too bad at Kirkland,” Louis said. “The beds there are poured concrete slabs. No space underneath for anything to hide.”

My vision rippled like I was going to be sick.

“You feel me?” Louis asked, then cocked his head to one side, studying my reaction.

He couldn’t be talking about what it sounded like he was talking about. I was projecting. I was confused.

“Your daddy is a great man,” Louis said. “He’s still doing good work, from what we hear. My regret is we couldn’t do anything about the Ankle Snatcher before it got to you.”

My mouth felt dry, and everything inside my stomach felt hot and liquid. I felt too full.

“What?” I asked, and an acid burp came out that stank like rotten guts.

Louis wiggled forward in his seat, leaned in real close, right into my belch.

“You’ve seen it,” he insisted. “That’s why you’re here. We read about you in the papers. The Ankle Snatcher did it. The boogeyman underneath your bed.”

I felt too weak and feverish to argue, but I might have made a little sound. My stomach felt like it was going to explode.

“Your daddy’s cellmate was Ernest Rojas,” Louis said. “He was an okay guy, but one morning the count came up short. No Ernest. At first they thought he’d escaped, but when they searched the cell, they found blood under the bed. A lot of blood. Like all his blood. That got your daddy sent to Kirkland. They’re real mad he won’t tell them what he did with Ernest’s body, but us inmates know. You and me know. The Ankle Snatcher got him.”

Relief flooded through me. My stomach stopped churning. My face must have looked like I’d found salvation, because Louis lit up like a street preacher.

“You think you’re alone?” he asked. “You think you and your daddy are the only ones? Before they sent him to Kirkland, your daddy was writing to a guy in Vacaville who was in there because of the Ankle Snatcher too. Out in Utah, a guy named Jerry Warren lost his wife to the Thing in the Closet. We’ve heard about Mr. Walks in the Halls from a guy named Dustin Keeler in Dallas, but we don’t have many details yet. They live in our closets and under our beds, and after dark they come out when we break the rules. We’re serving time for the boogeymen’s crimes.”

His words hit me like a cold shower, and I woke up. This all fit together too neatly. It sounded too polished, like a story these men rehearsed every night in their cells. My stomach turned to acid slush again.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said.

“We think there’s a couple dozen of us,” Louis said, knowing he was losing me, getting more intense. “We help each other. It’s too late for us. We aren’t ever getting out, but we can protect our families on the outside, the kids who don’t visit—we can keep them safe. We work together. We learn their rules. We lure them out. Then we kill them. It’s dangerous work, and there’ve been some accidents, but the prisons cover it up because they don’t understand how inmates can disappear. Think of how that’d look if word got around? We messed it up before, and after your daddy got sent away, we thought we’d never get another crack at the Ankle Snatcher. Now you’re here and we can try again. Trust me. You’re not alone.”

I stood up, stomach sloshing, and went to the door, hoping I could hold everything inside.

“Don’t be scared,” Louis said behind me. “They want you to be scared. We got a psychiatrist in here for possession with intent to distribute, but he’s real smart. He thinks it’s generational. He thinks maybe your grandparents, a few jumps back, maybe your great-grandfather, made something up to scare his kids, but when that kid grew up, it never went away. But we can make them go away. We can hurt them. We can kill them.”

I pounded on the door.

“Marcus, don’t run from your responsibility,” he said.

I was not like these men. I was not like my father. I was not delusional. I took actual responsibility for my actual crime.

“You can’t hide from the boogeymen,” he said, and his voice sounded closer.

I pounded on the door so hard I thought I’d break my hand. I heard keys in the lock. The door opened. I pushed past the CO and ran. I couldn’t stand hearing my dad’s delusions coming out of this lunatic’s mouth. I needed to get away.

They put me in solitary for a week, but that was okay. There was no bed in solitary. Just a plastic mattress on the floor.

I lost my right to have another inmate guide. Eventually they came and got me and took me to sit down across from that woman again. She told me I had negative character traits and an antisocial personality, but I could redeem myself. She told me that what I made of my time there was up to me. It reminded me of how they talked at that summer program.

Your father did this terrible thing, not you. You don’t have to be like him. What you make of your life is up to you.

They were wrong then, but they weren’t wrong now. I was going to keep my head down. I was going to do my time and accept my punishment for what I’d done to Tess. In quarantine I’d thought about the things Louis had said. I’d thought about them a lot. All these men were too weak to accept responsibility for what they’d done, but not me. I wasn’t going to hide behind a sick fantasy that it was a monster under my bed who had killed Tess. I wasn’t going to think about the crunching sounds. I wasn’t going to think about all those hands coming out of the dark and dragging her away.

I was going to do my time. I was going to accept responsibility. I was going to redeem myself.

The woman told me it was time to get cycled into the general population. She told me it was time to get taken to the cell where I’d live until I was a middle-aged man. When I came out, I’d be older than my dad when he went in.

They marched me through noisy galleries that echoed with shouting men until we arrived at a metal door painted that pale green you only get in institutions. It was locked open. There was a man lounging on the bed, long and lean and bored.

On the bunk bed.

“You get top bunk,” he said. “And don’t give me any shit. The light bulb hurts my eyes.”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself go inside. The CO gave me a shove.

“Please don’t make me,” I said.

Because if I was on the top bunk, everything in the entire cell was underneath my bed. How long would it be before my cellmate got up in the middle of the night with the lights off? I remembered Ernest Rojas. I remembered my dad getting sent to Kirkland. I felt myself sliding down an icy slope, my life out of control, picking up speed, and at the bottom were a dead cellmate and a maximum security unit and years added to my sentence and solitary confinement for the rest of my life—or until I couldn’t take being alone anymore and I got out of bed in the dark and let the Ankle Snatcher have me.

“You’re scaring the new guy, Albert,” the CO said.

Albert smiled, but before he could say anything, I started talking.

“Please, Albert,” I pleaded, “let me have the bottom bunk. You don’t want to be on the bottom. My dad’s Tony Needham. Do you remember him? Do you remember his cellmate? I don’t want that to happen to you. Please!”

Albert started laughing, and the CO smiled and shook his head, and I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t let this happen, because I knew it was true. It was all true.

I wanted to do it over. Please let me do it again, let me do it all over again, and I would find Louis and ask for his help, but it was too late. That was the real joke. It wasn’t even me. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do any of it. It wasn’t me.

It was the Ankle Snatcher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grady Hendrix is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Horrorstör, and more. He is also a screenwriter and the author of the Bram Stoker Award–winning Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction.