The Lost Daughter of the King of Monster

I'd spent the entire morning glued to the computer, devouring horror stories instead of reviewing my notes for tomorrow's exam. Lately, I couldn't get enough of them: haunted houses, monsters, creatures lurking in the dark. They didn't just not scare me, they drew me in, like shadows whispering my name. Maybe I wasn’t looking for fear—I was looking for proof that monsters existed. A few years ago, at sixteen, I'd managed to save enough to rent a small apartment on the edge of the woods. It was quiet, almost too quiet, except for the occasional row I started when I couldn't stand seeing someone being mistreated. The dean had already warned me once, but I'd left with just a warning and a piece of advice not to do it again. I heard a knock on the window but ignored it, a knock that sounded like something straight out of the stories I’d been devouring all morning. Haunted houses, monsters, shadows whispering my name—except this wasn’t fiction... When I looked behind me, there was a rock on my bed. I peeked out the window and saw two girls and three boys downstairs with rocks in their hands; I immediately recognized them. They were in the same class as me, and one of them had been suspended after I reported him for cheating on a test. I ducked before they could see me. Another rock shattered the window, slamming into the chair where I’d been sitting seconds earlier I froze. My body refused to move, my mind screaming at me to do something... It's true that I can be a bit of a troublemaker sometimes, but I'd never had to deal with someone coming straight to my house looking for me, and they outnumbered me. I thought about calling the police, talking back, doing something, but none of the options felt right. So, I crouched down, went to my laptop on my desk, and put it in my backpack, along with a flashlight, my cell phone, and some snacks and cookies I had hidden in my room. I slipped out the back door, my backpack strapped tightly to my body, and ran into the woods. The air was damp, heavy with pine and silence. Each step crunched on fallen leaves, and I prayed they wouldn't hear me. I slipped into the woods, running until my lungs burned. Minutes stretched into eternity before the treehouse finally appeared, half-hidden in the branches. I hadn't been inside for years, but that night it seemed like the only place left. The house no longer had stairs to climb up, but I had become an expert at climbing, so I climbed up a tree that was next to it and holding on tightly to the branches I managed to reach the tree house, the wood creaking beneath my weight, and stepped into the dark interior. Dust swirled in the beam of my flashlight. From below, voices could be heard among the trees, provocative, questioning. I pressed my back against the wall, clutching the flashlight, and tried to hold my breath. For the first time, the scary stories I loved so much no longer seemed like fiction, especially because these people weren't playing around and definitely didn't just want to scare me; this was something more. I'd been told that the boy who was suspended had received a severe punishment from his parents, a punishment so severe it couldn't even be whispered about. Now terror truly gripped me, but I clung to where I was, hoping nothing would happen. Suddenly, I felt something creak. It wasn't something far away; it was as if the very tree I was standing under had suddenly creaked. I let out a sigh, which I immediately stifled in my hands. I heard a laugh. "Could it be you around here?" a voice said, playful and threatening at the same time. My breathing threatened to become even more labored, but I forced myself not to breathe too heavily. "What are you doing in that old tree?" a girl asked from a distance. "I think she might be here," he replied quickly, but there was a click of teeth in denial. "We can check, it's not like—" The conversation was interrupted by a noise in the distance. It wasn't a describable noise; it sounded like someone stepping on dry leaves, but it wasn't just that. For some reason, it sounded strange. So strange, in fact, that it gave me goosebumps. The sound returned: like footsteps, but heavier, dragging, strange. It wasn't just someone crunching on leaves. It was something else. Something that didn't fit, but that made me feel calm to a certain extent. "Do you hear that? That must be her, we have to follow her," someone said. "You're joking, right? I'm not going back into this forest, it's dangerous," one of the other girls blurted out immediately. They all seemed quite brave when they came to my house to find me, but now they seemed to be starting to get a little scared. I looked up, and through the separate wooden beams of the tree house, rays of moonlight filtered through. I was appreciating that they were distracted by their fear of the forest when I felt the tree where I was standing shake a little. "They have no way to get up unless they had climbing experience," I told myself to convince myself, knowing that wasn't necessarily true. With my hands over my mouth, I closed my eyes, hoping they would give up. I wasn't a coward, but I wasn't brave enough to stand up to five people with powerful family connections who could do whatever they wanted to me and simply disappear without facing any consequences. The tree began to sway as if someone wanted to knock it down, or as if they were trying to move it to confirm it was still there. It was an old tree, and it creaked more and more each time it moved. Now I was even more afraid that the tree would break and I would fall. It was at that precise moment, filled with fear and uncertainty, that I heard creaking and shuffling footsteps again, this time longer than before, with a terrifying, melodic precision. I heard a ringing in my ears that at first sounded distant, but quickly became as if it were coming from inside my head. I felt as if my heart stopped for a second and the air around me vanished. For a brief moment, everything was silent, and then when I returned to reality, my heart was pounding and racing. It wasn’t just footsteps, all my body reacted like it was something else. "s**t" Someone exclaimed. The voices quickly faded away, accompanied by hurried footsteps. Running. I took my hands away from my mouth. Whatever it was that made them go away had saved me another day. The forest was silent again, but I knew it wasn’t empty. Whatever had driven them away hadn’t come for them—I feel it had come for me. And for the first time, I wondered if the monsters I loved so much weren’t just stories, but something else calling me.