“And you, you knew the hand of a devil / And you, kept us awake with wolves teeth”

— “Heartbeats” by The Knife

I can’t see a thing.

I stand perfectly still in the pitch black. My fingers close around my phone inside my purse. I don’t dare breathe.

It’s the wiring. That’s what I tell myself. This building is cute, full of character, but it was originally built in the 1940s, which means the electrical is ancient. This exact thing happened a few times last winter. The whole floor went dark for twenty minutes while the super cursed up a storm in Portuguese down in the basement.

It’s the wiring. It must be the wiring. Please, oh please, let it be the wiring.

I finally find my phone and try to wake it up, but I guess Megan Thee Stallion consumed the last of my battery, because the glow doesn’t come.

It’s okay. I’m fine. I just need to find the breaker box. It’s in the hallway closet, behind me and to the left. I know my apartment in the dark, because I’ve mapped every inch of it in my head, because I was terrified of exactly this kind of moment, because that’s what I do: I prepare for the worst so I never have to live through it again.

I take one step backward⁠—

—and a leather-gloved hand clamps over my mouth from behind.

I scream into the palm, but no sound gets out. My phone drops and hits the floor with a dull thunk.

I bite down on the leather as hard as I can, but for all the good it does, I might as well be a toothless little kitten. My teeth barely dent it. I throw my elbow back and connect with something—ribs, maybe; testicles, preferably—and hear a male grunt. That’s all I get.

Then an arm locks around my waist and I’m lifted clean off my feet. I kick out wildly, my bare heel cracking against a shin, but it doesn’t matter. He’s bigger and faster and it’s not even close. I lose before the fight has even really begun.

He slings me backward. The impact as I hit the wall knocks the air out of me. Both my wrists are instantly pinned above my head in one huge hand. The other gloved palm stays pressed tight over my mouth.

I can’t move, but I try anyway. I wrench my arms, twist my hips, drive my knee up, but he’s got his weight against me and I’m going nowhere fast. Every direction I push, he’s already there. It’s not even a struggle for him. His whole body is languid and loose.

My lungs hurt like hell. I’m sucking air through my nose in fast, shallow bursts, but it’s not helping. The panic is so total and so complete that my vision whites out at the edges, even though there’s nothing to see in the dark.

I stop fighting.

A new kind of darkness claims me.

The darkness of my mind.

The darkness of my past.

The darkness of The Night The Fear Was Born.

I’m not in my apartment anymore.

I’m in a dorm room. It’s dank and small, the way all dorm rooms are. A radiator is clanking. The blinds are closed but crooked. Only a tiny sliver of moonlight sneaks in.

His weight… In this story, that’s what comes first. That’s always what comes first. Not his face. Never his face. I can’t see his face. It’s the weight, pressing me facedown into that narrow twin mattress. The foam topper doesn’t help. I can feel the metal bar of the bed frame through all of it.

The radiator clanks. My hands are pinned.

No.

No.

No!

There’s a crack in the ceiling. I find it with my eyes and I hold onto it. A thin, jagged line running from the light fixture to the corner of the room. I trace it back and forth and back and forth and back and forth while it all happens.

That crack is the thing I remember most clearly. More than the pain. A crack in the ceiling of a dorm room on the third floor of a building they tore down two years later to build a new student center.

I hope they jackhammered every inch of it.

The crack.

The weight.

The radiator.

My own breathing, loud and wrong. His breathing, louder and worse.

At some point, my eyes fall to the side. I saw a sock on the floor by the door. Just one, gray with a pink toe. I’d been looking for its match all week. I spotted it from the bed while he was on top of me and I thought, with perfect clarity, Oh, there it is.

Then nothing. Gaps. Time folded over itself and swallowed the rest.

I let it all go and I locked the door behind it.

I might’ve stayed in that memory forever, if it weren’t for one sentence that drags me back. A single sentence, three little words, whispered—no, rasped—no, purred in my ear, the darkest purr I’ve ever heard. It’s bitter chocolate and glinting knife edges; it’s broken streetlights and starless nights; it’s twisted and liquid and crooning and wrong, so wrong, because in one word, he opens all my locks and slides back all my deadbolts and unhooks all my chains and throws open all my doors, all of them, every last one of them, so that The Fear I’ve spent five years running from can take one step out into reality, look around, and grin its wicked, wicked grin.

The man in the darkness with his hand over my mouth puts his lips to my ear and whispers, “Hello, little fox.”

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