Elizabeth Finn: Immortal Protector

But then he was gone. He was gone, but she didn’t know how. He was too big to move fast, but he was just gone. It was like he just poofed and disappeared. Her eyes opened slowly; she was afraid to see what was happening. But when she opened them, the man was still there, and when she saw him, she screamed again, but there was something wrong. He didn’t look the same. He looked scared. He was on his knees, and he was afraid like she was. But there was another man there too, and he was looking at her. His eyes were pretty. She wanted eyes like his. They were shiny, and the color was like the stone in her mommy’s favorite necklace—all brown and green mixed together. He grabbed the monster man’s hair. It looked like it hurt, and the monster cried just like she was crying. When the pretty man pulled his head to the side, the monster was panting like a dog.

The man with the pretty eyes wasn’t fat and ugly like the monster, but he was still stronger, and the monster was scared. He had pretty hair just like he had pretty eyes, and he looked like he was from a magazine. He wore a suit like the businessmen did—just like Principal Anderson at her school did. Ember tried to be small against the wall again. She didn’t know the pretty man, and maybe he would hurt her too. But then she saw something. His teeth were growing. They looked like a cat’s teeth, sharp and pointy, and he touched the pointy part with his tongue, and he smiled at her.

Ember was still panting, but she could breathe again. Her nose was running, and she was crying, but she felt safe. But… Maybe the pretty man would want to kill her too. But maybe he would help her like big people were supposed to do. She just wanted her mommy. His mouth moved to the monster’s neck, and she stopped shaking as bad. She wasn’t as afraid anymore. He was going to hurt the monster, and she felt safe. When his lips touched the monster’s neck, the pretty man looked at her.

His lips pulled back, and his pointy teeth touched the monster’s skin, and when he bit, it sounded like he was crunching through an orange peel. The monster’s eyes got big, and he stared at her. She hated him. He wanted to take her away from her mommy, and she didn’t care that the pretty man was hurting him.

The pretty man tore the monster’s neck like an animal, and he spit the skin across the room. Ember was still shaking and crying, and she wanted to go home, but she felt … safe. His mouth went to the monster’s neck again, and he sucked hard on the man’s skin. The monster’s eyes closed and opened, and his mouth was open like a dead fish. His skin was white, and he looked like a fake body … a dead body. When his breathing got fast, and his eyes started to look different, she knew he was dying. And when he took a quick breath and then didn’t take another, she knew he was gone. He was dead like her grandma, and she didn’t care. Ember curled up in a ball on the floor. She imagined a warm blanket covering her, and she closed her eyes tight.

When she felt a hand touch her skin, she opened her eyes again. The pretty man with his pretty eyes was crouched in front of her with his hand on her knee. He was clean and smelled good—so much better than the basement. He kneeled in front of her, and he was smiling, but his teeth were normal again. His hand felt weird on her skin. It didn’t feel like a real hand; it was just different—too cold, but not really cold.

When she spoke, she gasped at the sound of her voice. She shouldn’t be talking to him. He was a stranger, and even though he was smiling a nice smile, she still didn’t know him. “Are you going to kill me?” She sounded like she had a cold. Her throat hurt, and she was thirsty.

“Not even I could do such a thing.” His voice felt warm in her ears. It purred like a cat, and with a tilt of his head, he talked again. “Tell me your name.”

“Ember Greeley. What’s your name?” She shouldn’t talk to him, but Ember always talked when she shouldn’t, argued with her mom when she knew she would get in trouble, and was naughty even when she’d have to go to her room. Her voice was quieter, and her head was fuzzy, but she didn’t want to stop talking to the man. She was too little to talk to men with weird teeth in dark, smelly basements, but she wanted to talk to him.

“I’m Truman Solomon. It’s good to meet you, Ember. You’re safe. And you’re going to sleep now.” And as she heard his words, her mind went even fuzzier, and her body got tired, and she curled up again. She was safe, and she was going to see her mommy soon.

Seven Years Later

Hands were pulling at her clothes and gripping her body harshly. The hands were always large, dirty, and terrifying. When they touched her, she cringed as though their very contact with her skin might kill her. “Oh, I’m gonna enjoy you.” It was always a far-off echo of a voice that held the promise of nightmares. But the truth of that promise was never realized as wakefulness always managed to rescue Ember before the promise could destroy her.

Ember knew what the man had wanted to do. She could see it in her mind whenever she let herself sink into the awful memories. It left her skin crawling, and she had to choke back the puke that threatened to burst forth. She couldn’t stand to even think of what could have happened to her in that basement, and she also couldn’t stop thinking about it sometimes. She wanted to shut her brain off when the images crept into her mind. Her friends didn’t have to think of these things. Why the hell did she?

Screeching out her terror and waking her mother was how the nightmare always ended. Ember gasped for breath as the long-lost memories roiled beneath the surface of her now seventeen-year-old mind, and when her mom would enter, Ember would be cowered at the head of her full-size bed, feeling small, vulnerable, and terrified.

Her mother, Katherine, had told her once what it had been like when Ember had gone missing. She’d told her of bouncing from one panic attack to another, falling apart in suicidal madness when she stopped moving for even a moment. It was devastating to hear of her mother’s pain, and it had taken a long time for Ember to get past it. Ember was a teenager after all, and it was her job to not care about anything, or so the world thought, but her mother was her everything, and Ember’s abduction had nearly destroyed the woman.

Ember’s own memories were far cloudier, but she would never forget the morning she stumbled from the dilapidated, old home and was rescued by a car passing by. Apparently, the home had been rented by a man who was new in town. No one had known him, and not surprisingly, he was later linked to two unsolved child abductions and murders in the Boston area.

Ember had been rushed to the hospital that morning, and the police had brought her mother. She hadn’t arrived back from playing with her friends the evening before, and Katherine had wasted no time calling the police. Children didn’t go missing in Laconia, New Hampshire. The community was too small, too safe, too … ordinary and simple. When it was discovered that Ember in fact hadn’t even shown up at the ball diamond where her friends were playing, her mother knew with no remaining doubt that her daughter had been taken.

But her mother had clung to hope; didn’t all parents in these situations? And in Katherine’s words, when the call came in that Ember had been found and was alive, she had melted—she apparently very literally sank to the floor of their living room and sobbed as the police officers and detectives watched.

Ember experienced every test no ten-year-old should have to endure just to find she was untouched, aside from a nasty bruise to the side of her face and deeply abraded wrists from the ropes that bound her. Her memory was oddly filled with holes, and moments of clarity became clouded with confusion as the detectives asked question after question of her. She couldn’t possibly have killed the monster, but when asked who did, the cloud settled in and left Ember’s brow wrinkled and confused. No one much cared who killed the man, and in the end, the inquiries faded away much like Ember’s memory had.