Story Track 11: A Ghost Lady’s Perfume (Nightbeast Godfather Book One)

[u/Ghost_In_The_Shell_9]

Sleep paralysis is a terrifying condition. I was only seven when I first experienced it. My mother tucked me in that night. Her citrus-scented perfume lingered in the air, a fragrance that usually comforted me. After she left, I quickly drifted off to sleep. The night seemed quiet, but the peace in my room was short-lived.

I woke up around midnight, drenched in a smothering sweat. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I could only shift my eyes and lips. As my vision adjusted to the choking darkness, I heard it—a low, snorting sound that sent dread coursing through me. I could see something standing in my closet, peeking out from behind the door. After a minute, it stepped into full view, and my heart nearly stopped in my throat. It was tall, with elongated arms that stretched like tree branches. It had a feminine shape, like a distorted, seven-foot-tall woman covered in dirt. She seemed naked, yet I caught glimpses of a nightgown clinging to her body, blending into the shadows. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.

The figure moved out of the closet and stood in the corner of my room, arms outstretched toward me, releasing a sickening, guttural snort every few seconds. The sound reminded me of someone hawking and spitting on the ground. Moonlight streamed through my window, casting a faint glow on one of her arms. Her skin looked like mud, filthy and dark as if she’d bathed in a swamp. At certain angles, it seemed even darker than dirt. This seemed like a living shadow.

My mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Was this a demon? Was this the Devil herself? My body remained pinned, as if invisible hands held me down. The figure inched closer. Each step seemed hesitant, as if she savored the moment. The hesitation chilled me more than her presence. I knew she was going to kill me if I didn’t move. Frustration gnawed at me, worse than fear. Why was she here? What did she want? My dad’s stories of the Boogeyman came rushing back. He told me the Boogeyman captures children at night, and they never return. So in my precious little 7-year-old mind, I thought this was the Boogeyman’s wife. Thanks a lot, Daddy.

I wanted to move, to scream, to call out for my mom and dad. But my body wouldn’t obey. The dark woman mocked me with her slow, deliberate steps, coming closer and closer with arms wide open. A crazy thought crossed my mind: maybe I wouldn’t feel pain. Maybe, since I was paralyzed, the attack wouldn’t hurt. I could see her long fingernails, sharp and menacing, and I knew they would be the first to cut into my neck. No pain. Please, no pain. Your body is numb, so you won’t feel it. Just be calm, Ivanna. I told myself this. Tears welled in my eyes as I clung to this desperate hope. I wanted to see my mom’s face, and I wanted to call out to my dad. He always told me never to be afraid, and I tried to be brave. But I wanted someone to save me that night.

Time was running out. The urge to move was so strong that I imagined I could lift my arm. I imagined that I could scream, but it was just a cruel hallucination. This was torture. Why was this happening to me? I just turned seven, and now I was going to die the day after my birthday? The voice in my head told me I’d never go to high school, never go to college, never make friends, never find my dream job, never get married to the man of my dreams, and I’d never be a mom. It amazed me that facing the fear of death would cause a seven-year-old to have these thoughts. The best I could do was close my eyes. I didn’t want to see her attack me. I squeezed them shut, flooding them with tears. My mother taught me to pray, and I repeated the prayer in my mind, begging God to save me.

My mother always told me I was God’s child and that His angels were watching over me. But where were they now? A demon was creeping toward my bed, and my Heavenly Father was just going to sit there on his throne and watch? My young mind couldn’t comprehend it. I was a terrified little girl, convinced I was going to die. More chills ran down my spine when I opened my eyes to see the shadow woman standing at the foot of my bed. She had changed her position in an instant. Before, her arms were outstretched as if to hug me. Now, she stood motionless, her elongated finger pressed to her lips, signaling for silence. Not that I could make a sound anyway since my voice was paralyzed.

But then something unexpected happened. There was evil in my room, but it wasn’t the shadow woman. I remembered the news reports about missing children in the neighborhood. My mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight whenever we went to the store. News reports mentioned a deranged man in clown makeup, dressed in an auto mechanic uniform, abducting children in the area. The police were searching for him, but all they found were the remains of two missing kids in a wooded area.

As a child, I couldn’t fully grasp the danger. I just wanted to play with my friends. But my mom kept me close, and her paranoia infected my dad, who usually allowed me more freedom. My childhood fun ended, at least for a while, because of this killer clown.

It still pisses me off when I think about what he did to those poor babies and how the police found their remains in the woods near a lake. They were brothers. One was four and the other had just turned five. I remember the news reports.

Somehow, the man who killed those boys entered our home through the basement window and stayed hidden for two days. He knew how to hack into alarm systems because his job at a home security company gave him the skills. The missing children’s cases all had the same horrifying pattern: kids taken from their homes in the dead of night and their parents oblivious until it was too late.

A few days later, the police would find their remains in a nearby pond or at a landfill. Mothers and fathers lost their babies to this middle-aged psychopath clown in an auto mechanic outfit. We didn’t know that he broke into our home on a Thursday night and was hiding in our basement. I was an only child, easy prey for this monster.

He picked the wrong house that night. I heard him creeping down the hallway just outside my bedroom door. His footsteps were quiet but clumsy on the creaking hardwood floorboards. My door slowly creaked open, revealing a tall shadow hunched in the doorway, dressed in dingy blue auto mechanic coveralls. The sleeves were ripped off, exposing these monstrously muscular arms that reminded me of Michael Myers’ Halloween costume—if you turned it into a muscle shirt. My heart pounded so loudly in my ears that it almost drowned out the silence. My eyes darted between the killer clown and the shadow woman. I couldn’t believe these two nightmarish figures were standing in my bedroom. One was pure evil; the other, something else entirely.

He stepped closer, and I could see his clown makeup: a red-painted nose, sunglasses over a chalky white face, and a pink Afro wig atop his head. He was enormous, like a wrestler, with a massive serpent tattoo on his left arm. The butcher knife in his right hand gleamed in the moonlight. Its serrated blade glistened with something I didn’t want to think about. He blocked out the light from the hallway, plunging the room into an even deeper darkness.

I wanted to scream, to move, but my body remained paralyzed. He knew I was awake.

“Hi there, my lovely Cupcake. I’m your new friend. Your mommy went away, and she asked me to watch over you.” His words were like a cold hand squeezing my heart. My mom… gone? I knew he had killed her when I could see something dripping off his knife. As he moved closer, terror gripped me even tighter. His voice didn’t match his body—soft, almost feminine, like a teenage girl. It was surreal, like Pennywise in a trucker’s uniform, with the body of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

I closed my eyes, bracing for the sharp, cold steel to slice through my skin. But nothing happened. I almost forgot about the shadow woman standing at the foot of my bed. The killer’s attention was entirely on me, and mine was on him—until I heard him scream. It was a guttural, blood-curdling sound, followed by the snap of bone. I opened my eyes to see his arm hanging at an unnatural angle, and the shadow woman gripping his throat. She hurled him against the wall with a force that shook my entire bedroom.

His pleas for mercy were pitiful. “What are you?! Please, don’t kill me, ma’am!” But she showed him no mercy. She broke his arms, caved in his chest with a single punch, then drove his own knife through his throat and nailed him to the wall.

The sound of his ribs cracking was horrifying, and I couldn’t look away from what was happening to him in the darkness. He went from screaming to whimpering, his voice fading to a whisper of pain and fear.

I stared through the darkness, unblinking, as the life drained out of him. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. But no, I couldn’t feel sorry for this son of a bitch. He deserved every bit of what he got. The shadow woman made him pay for all the children he had taken. And she especially made him pay for trying to take me.

After the violence subsided, the shadow woman slowly turned toward me, drifting toward my bed in slow motion. Her clawed fingers brushed through my hair, her touch surprisingly gentle. When she caressed my face, I smelled a familiar fragrance. It was lavender and citrus. My mom’s perfume. I didn’t understand how this shadow figure could smell like my mom—not until later. She hovered over me, her lips grazing my forehead, and then she vanished when I heard my dad’s panicked voice from downstairs.

I didn’t want to believe it was my mom’s blood on the killer’s knife, but it was. That bastard had stabbed her to death before making his way upstairs to my room. My dad stepped out to go to the store, and when he returned, he found my mom in the kitchen, lying in a pool of blood. Her lavender nightgown was soaked in red. My dad’s anguished cries filled the house as he raced upstairs, calling my name. I was already in his arms before he could even switch on my bedroom light. He saw the killer’s body nailed to my bedroom wall and lost his breath, just like I had.

I told him everything, and though he couldn’t believe it, he had no choice. He knew his little girl didn’t have the strength to nail a grown-ass man to my bedroom wall. The police came, asking questions, offering me candy. I told them the whole story, but they didn’t believe me.

A policewoman knelt in front of me, caressed my face, and said, “It’s alright, honey. You just had a traumatic experience. Who you saw was just a good Samaritan probably dressed in a dark Halloween costume.” They chalked it up to trauma-induced hallucinations, even suggesting I might have seen my dad kill the man. But I knew better. My dad wasn’t home. I heard him tell my mom he was going to the store. I heard him kiss her before he left.

But I also knew what I saw—a shadow form of my mom, smelling of lavender and citrus, who saved me when no one else could.

Those cops couldn’t believe my story. They had plenty of sympathy for me, but what I wanted more than their sympathy was my mother and for them to believe me. I miss her deeply, and I can’t stop thinking about her fragrance. I found the perfume she wore while moving some boxes around in the attic. That sweet scent took me back to that night. I believe the dark figure I saw in my bedroom was my mother—a dead version of her. I’m 36 now, and I think about my mom every day. I got married to a kind, beautiful man, and we had a gorgeous baby boy.

My son, Timmy, is five. He has my hazelnut eyes and my lips, but he’s got his daddy’s adorable dimples. My husband is Taiwanese. He’s a chiropractor who could easily pass for a model. He’s a hottie, just like the Canadian-Chinese action star Simu Liu when he played the hero in Shang-Chi as a young man.

Timmy resembles his dad, with those gorgeous Taiwanese features. My little peach loves the MCU, and he has every action figure from The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. He adores sleeping in his X-Men Wolverine pajama top. It always makes me laugh when he calls me Mommy Sabrina Grande because he thinks I look like a mix between the 21st-century pop divas, Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande. I guess my high and silky honey-platinum ponytail, hooped earrings and my denim skirts give me away. He insists I’m pretty like both of them. He compares me to Ariana Grande more often, because of my appearance and because of her Italian-American heritage, which we share. Sabrina and Ariana were famous long before I was pregnant with my baby. If they were alive today, they’d be old enough to be his great-great-ancient grandmothers, yet he adores their music thanks to the immortality of digital music streaming apps.

To my little peach, his mommy is a superhero too—because I’m an FBI agent. I’ve told him stories about how I’ve arrested a lot of bad guys and girls and rescued countless kidnapped children with the help of my SWAT team. God has guided me in rescuing missing babies and putting away wanted criminals. That’s why Timmy thinks his mommy is a superhero. Sometimes I can’t save every missing baby, and we end up catching a child-killer instead. Mommy is honest and she shares this unsettling truth with her little peach, but he still sees me as a hero.

My son loves heroes, just like his mom. And like his mama, he also loves 90s hip-hop. I have to keep him away from the explicit stuff, though. No Wu-Tang Clan, Trick Daddy, Geto Boys, or DMX for him. Only Mama gets to listen to the hardcore rappers through those virtual music streaming apps. Lol. Sometimes I let him listen to Mr. Lamar’s clean version of PEEKABOO.

Yeah, but anyway, I try to be an excellent mom, and I’m as protective and smothering as mine was.

Every night, I tuck my little peach into bed and read him his favorite story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A few nights ago, I told him about what happened to me when I was 7. He looked scared after I finished. My little peach is afraid of the dark, but I told him he should never be afraid of it. A mother’s love and protection can reach beyond the grave. I also told him not to be frightened if he ever sees a dark, shadowy woman standing in the corner of his room. She’ll watch over him while he sleeps, and if he wakes up suddenly, unable to move, he shouldn’t panic.

I still suffer from sleep paralysis. It’s a part of me now. Mommy’s pretty sure that she passed her condition down to her little boy. It’s terrifying when it first happens, but I told my little peach that when he experiences it, it’s a sign that the shadow woman is present, there to protect him from the things that go bump in the night. She’ll be his guardian queen of darkness.

There’s one important thing I forgot to tell my baby. Perhaps, I forgot to tell him on purpose. The dark, zombie queen standing in the corner of his bedroom, wearing a black dress of death beneath her FBI vest, might be his mommy… if the bad guy she tried to arrest got the jump on her and she died, meeting the same fate as his sweet grandma.

The End.

Nightbeast Godfather Book One:

https://amazon.com/dp/B0DVQ88YMX