The wardrobe monster

I was six the first time I heard it.
Wardrobes always commanded respect to me, those huge spaces, so dark, from which I could see all sort of thing being taken out and in which all sort of things disappeared in, if I have to give credit to my mother, who sometimes practically disappeared herself inside one for coming out later with empty hands and a surly expression.,
But I never feared them, not until that night.
I remember I was half asleep when I heard a sort of grumbling coming from the wardrobe. And, between the grumbling, I could make some words.
-Open the door, open it. I want to get out and rip your guts apart, I want to tear your heart so I can eat it. You ´d have to open the door, sooner or later, and then I will clamber over you.
Even if they were only grunts, I could feel a dreadful smile behind them, a smile oh so full of sharp and yellowish teeth. I clearly saw the open and slobbering mouth from which those sounds came.
So I screamed. I screamed with all my soul, covering my head with the blanket s of my bed, until a blast of light proclaimed that my mother has arrived to the room. I crept out of my shelter, my eyes all out of orbit and all of me a heap of incoherent sobbing, until, by a huge amount of patient caressing, my mother was able to quiet me enough as for telling her what happened.
As I described to her the growls and threats, her face begun to show a relieved expression over the worried one in which she had bent to me before. She assured me that there was nothing in the wardrobe, and she even made an attempt to open it for showing me, but, at my hysterical yells, she chose to lock it.
- See? It won’t get out now.
When she was totally convinced that I felt better, she printed a sweet kiss in my forehead and left, knocking the light out.
There weren’t any more noises coming from the wardrobe, that night. But there were the next night. And the following one, and the another.
- I will go out one night, when you’re all asleep, and I will rip your eyes from their sockets, and I will drink your blood, just wait and see.
My parents begun to worry with the screams that invariably went night after night, and for a little while they took me to sleep in their room. I listened their rhythmic breathing, with my eyes fixed in their own wardrobe, but this kept silent. The monster still was locked up in my room, waiting for me.
In the mornings, although, I had no other choice but opening it for taking my clothes, and even if the first time I did I went rigid with fear, ready to feel it’s claws piercing through my body, nothing ever happened. I even emptied the wardrobe, with the security that I would find it crouching in one corner, but I never found it.
This monster seemed to hate light...
That night, the speech was quite different.
- Open, open now if you dare, without your father around and without sun’s light. I will pull up your head with a single bite.
Every night I locked the wardrobe and kept the key under my pillow.
Every night the monster threatened me, unable to get free.
Years went by, and my wardrobe wasn’t ever unlocked after sunset. I get used to the growls, feeling safe with the key in my hands. I went through childhood to youth, till I met my to-be wife.
I had been with other girls before, but I never took them to my house at night. Not with that thing waiting in the wardrobe,
My parents, whom always wanted to live near the seashore, gave us the house as a wedding present... or, to be true, they sold it to me for a more than reasonable price. My old room turned into my studio, and my wife and me moved to my parent’s room.
Every night I went to my studio when my wife went to bed (she had to wake up too early for work, and tended to get asleep in front of the tv), and listened the monster, but it seemed to have changed with the years, too. It’s voice didn’t seem as formidable as before, to me, nor could I find a grin behind it. It kept on threatening, but it didn’t frightened me as much as before.
Now I felt... pity? Nostalgia?
We had a baby, Daniel, who slept with us his first three years of life. Then we moved him to the room which occupied my brother, so long time ago.
Everything was smooth, we were happy.
Until one night, in which I was rummaging around my studio and heard nothing. I waited and waited, but no sound came from the wardrobe. Nor the following night, nor the next to that one.
A week later, at night, taking advantage of my wife and my son being on visiting my mother-in-law, for the first time in thirty years I took out the key and opened the wardrobe.
There was the monster.
It had the size of a recent born kitten, and it was trembling like a leaf, and, staring at me with enormous and scared red eyes, it told me in an almost inaudible voice:
- I will tear you apart with my claws... I´ll eat your heart.
And, while saying this, tears fell from eyes that if long time ago may had be as bright as flames, now were as vanishing embers.
The I did the only thing I could do. I covered it’s body, trembling and helpless as one of a baby bird, under my pullover, and took it to my son’s room, getting it in the wardrobe and locking it inside.
Since that night, as much as I expected, Daniel begun to cry every single night.
I listened to him, thinking in those wardrobe’s monsters that couldn’t harm any adult, whom, with the years, had locked their own monsters in their souls and minds. They could do nothing, except extinguishing and dying.
The first night in which my son cried, it was me who went to see what was the matter. And, even if I don’t doubt about him when he said that growls threatened him from the wardrobe, I heard something quite different.
I heard a soft whisper that said “thank you... thank you”.