My father used to tell me and my little brother fairytales before bed. He’d tell us about the little mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White. Every night until the day he died.

Now, before you go and say ‘how sweet’, you should know that he wasn’t telling us the Disney version. No singing Mermaids, or fair maidens who were saved my true loves kiss. He told us about how the Big Bad Wolf killed and ate Little Red in her Riding Hood, and her grandmother. Not just them, but the village closest to them. And the closest village after that, and the next, and so on and so forth. He told us about Rapunzel, stuck in her tower, until her prince finds her. Except there’s no happy ending- she’s banished into the woods, pregnant and alone, while the prince throws himself out of the tower, blinded forever without his true love or his children.

Along with these stories came ones of fairies who ate children's fingers as they slept. Trolls who stole human babies, switching them with inhuman monsters. Witches who stole beautiful girl’s youth for themselves, and wolves that could get into your house, no matter any protection you may have, and no matter their size. One of his favorites to tell was of a beautiful woman who would stand in a body of water and sing. Any female she may lure in was treated, though he never told us how. And the men she would entrance with her voice would be drowned, slowly and painfully. An Ancient One, he called her. He spoke of several of these beings: old, very old. And not very big fans of humans. They’d pass through towns- some didn’t care enough to fool with humanity and would leave them be. Others were cruel, dragging women and children out of their beds, or talking some poor sap into doing it for them. One story he told us was of a man, Nicholas, my dad used to call him. His wife had just died, leaving him to care for three children, three years of age, 5 years of age, and 10 years of age. He was poor and desperate to feed his children when the Ancient One came along. The Ancient One promised him more wealth than he’d ever need if he just brought him one thing; a child’s heart. Determined to do anything for his family, he allowed the Ancient One to lead him to a house. He climbed through the window the old being told him to, and in the darkness felt his way to the poor child. He didn’t realize until the deed was done that it was his own middle child he had murdered, his only son.

He kept all of the stories in books in his office. Some were his own, others he’d gathered. Some were well known, others were not. He started telling me these stories before I was even double digits. Awful, huh? For a man to terrify his children with such tales. “It’s to prepare you,” he’d say. “To keep you safe.” I didn’t mind it when it was just me, but when he pulled my brother into it… I started loathing my father for it. I was ‘strong-willed for a girl’, as my father put it, but my brother was squeamish and easily scared. I remember asking my father, so many times, to stop telling his stories to my brother. “I have to keep him safe, too,” he’d say with sad eyes.

He always looked sad around my brother. I used to think it was because he looked like my mom- they both had light brown hair and bright blue eyes. I had my fathers dark hair and gray eyes, and the same seemingly-permanent scowl. I guess that happens when you’re told horror stories every night of your life.

My mother died when I was about 7 and my brother was 4. I don’t remember much about that night. We were all home, in our house in the middle of the woods. Back then, my dad was happy. He used to actually smile back then. We were watching a movie together when my mother noticed my brother was missing. She and my father nearly tore the house apart looking for him. I remember being confused as to their panic, especially when my mother locked eyes with my father, their ocean blue depths wide and darkened with fear.

“He’s outside,” she said.

I don’t remember what her voice sounds like anymore but I remember her tone. Ice cold with terror at the thought of her youngest, her only son, not being in the warm safety of our house. I remember my father shouting after her as she turned to run outside, telling her not to go, to wait inside while he went out for my brother.

I never saw my mother after that.

When my father returned he held my brother tightly in his arms. The long sleeves of his shirt were torn and bloodied, but I couldn’t see any injuries on him. My brother was calm, despite a long cut that went from his temple all the way down to his collarbone. He needed almost 50 stitches, but he didn’t make a sound. He simply giggled as our father carried him inside.

I asked my father where my mother was, but he never answered. He went to his room and when he came out he was wearing a different shirt, all signs of blood gone. He grabbed me and got my brother and I in the car to take him to the hospital. I must’ve asked him every 5 seconds where my mother was, but he stayed utterly silent. I don’t think I heard my father speak a single word for days, and when he did speak his voice was different. Cold. Especially when he spoke to my brother.

That’s when the stories started. He didn’t tell them to my brother at first, he was too young. But every night when my father came into my room to put me to bed he’d tell me a story. I cried for the first couple of months, my sleep riddled with nightmares. I woke up a dozen or so times thinking some sort of creature was in my room; chewing off my fingers, biting my earlobes, trying to drag me off somewhere, or even just sat in the corner to watch me.

It took a few years before he started bringing my brother into it. He was the same age I was when my father started telling me the stories: 7. Too young to hear of such gore. He cried each time for almost a year. It took years for him to not wake me in the middle of the night, asking if he could stay in my room.

That’s about the time I started to really loathe my father.

The worst story he told was of a beast. He refused to describe it, despite me asking several times. The beast lived in the woods, was silent as a shadow and as lithe as one too. You’d never see it until it was too late, he told us. It would stalk you through the woods, waiting until you were far enough from anything else to hear you. It was patient, cunning. It would break your mind before your body, making small sounds that alerted you to its presence but not its identity. You’d know something was there, but when you’d stop to look, listen, nothing would be there. After that it would make you hear other things; the screams of the people you love, the screams of children. Always ahead of you, leading you further from civilization so that you’d run farther away to help whoever you heard. Then it would make you see things. Bodies. Bones. Blood. Always of someone you knew. And then, when you mentally and physically could not go on, it would lunge, and you would be no more.

That was the last story my father told us before he died. I’d been the one to find him, in the woods. Well… I found his shirt. The sleeves were torn and bloodied. The bottom hem was completely ripped and covered in blood. The part that’d been ripped off was three feet away, also covered in blood… it was almost like it was being worn when it was ripped…

I never found his body.

Thankfully I was 19 when he died, and was working instead of college (school had never been my forte). The courts let me have guardianship over my brother until he turned 18, seeing as I was already helping my father provide for us. His last year or so hadn’t been good, he struggled to keep jobs for more than a couple of months. He’d finally resorted to the worst paying jobs nobody else wanted to do.

My brother’s life and mine was not peaceful for long.

Wolves were not a regular thing near our house. Bears, foxes, sure. But wolves? It’d been decades since one had been seen. Despite that fact, a week or two after my fathers death, I heard it. The soft baying of a wolf. It started a good distance away from the house, barely loud enough to hear. The next night it was slightly closer. The night after that it was closer. By the next week, it sounded a couple hundred feet away. It didn’t take long for it to reach the backyard.

I told my brother to stay inside at night. I’m sure he hated me for it, seeing as he was at the age where he wanted to go out and have fun with his friends. But somewhere in the back of my head I knew this wolf was not normal. All of our father’s stories circled my thoughts. Wolves were always the bad guys. I never believed any of them, but I knew better than to ignore my gut feeling.

The next night, the wolf was on our back porch. Its voice was deep and rough… and angry.

The thought took me aback. Can an animal just sound angry? The wolf howled again.

I guess so.

The wolf stayed on the porch after that. For days, as soon as the sun had set and the stars and moon were out it would bay, and howl, until the sun started its journey back into the sky.

My brother and I both stayed in my room, like we were 10 and 7 again. We stopped leaving the house after we found bones on the front doorstep. They could’ve been animal bones left by a stray cat. That’s what I told my brother, but they looked suspiciously human. I called the high school to tell them my brother was terribly sick and wouldn’t be back for some time, and I called my work to tell them the same thing. Both were understanding, and wished my brother well.

It was that night that the scratching started. It was soft, at first. I almost thought it was actually a stray cat. Then it became harsher, cutting into the wood of the door. A soft but rough growling started to accompany it.

I held tightly onto my brother. Under normal circumstances he would have pushed me off, fake gagged and gone up to his room. Instead, he let me hold him. I could barely see his eyes through his too long hair- wide, staring at nothing. He had dark circles under his eyes, and I realized neither of us had slept in some time.

It was that realization that led to another- the beast my father told us about. It would break you mentally before physically.

I nearly ran over my brother in my haste to get to our father’s office. He had a massive armoire that took up a whole wall. I skidded to it on my knees, only to stare in disbelief at the heavy duty lock, keeping the thick wooden doors closed.

“He always kept the key on him.”

I turned to see my brother in the doorway. He was thin, I realized, almost haggard. All of this had affected him more than I realized, more than it had me. He stood up straight nonetheless as he padded over to me. He kneeled in front of the monstrous armoire next to me, staring at the lock.

My hope was gone. Utterly gone. The beast story was fathers, no one else’s. No one alive but me and my brother knew it. If anyone had known how to kill it it was our father.

Our now dead father.

I laid back on the gray shag rug, my hands over my face as I cried. I could still hear that damn wolf, scratching and baying, scratching and baying. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live my life. I wanted my brother to live his life. But how would either of those things be possible with that thing hunting us? I knew, in the back of my mind, that even if I managed to get us out of the house, the house we’d lived in our whole lives, the beast would follow us. We’d never be safe. It would always be there.

I hadn’t noticed my brother getting up, or how he paced the office. I did, however, notice him bashing the lock as hard as he could.

Sitting straight up, I was about to ask what he thought he was doing, how he thought that paperweight, though heavy, was going to break the lock when… the lock broke.

Overcome once again with a wild hope, I not-so-gently pushed my brother out of the way to open the doors.

I came face to face with hundreds of books. Hundreds, hell; maybe even a thousand. It sounds insane, a thousand books in this armoire. The armoire, as I said, was huge. And filled to the brim with journals. Some thin, maybe a hundred pages or so inside. Others were thick, like the textbooks I had to lug around in school. Some were old, some were new. Two or three were in such a tattered state it was a wonder they didn’t fall apart at my touch.

How were we supposed to find the right one?

I asked my brother that question, and his response was to sigh and start reaching for the books.

“Hell if I know,” he muttered, “but I’m not fucking dying to this thing.”

I admired him for the bravery. He wasn’t the same scared little kid he used to be. I don’t think I’d ever witnessed him grow out of it. While I’d been crying, accepting my fate, he did something about the situation. While I stood and gawked at the tons of journals, only one of which possibly possessing the answer we needed, he did something.

“You’ve grown,” I marveled.

He took time to give me a small smirk before continuing his search.

I joined him, begging to whoever, or whatever, would listen that we would find it in time. I knew the beast wouldn’t stay outside for long.

We stayed up all night, leafing through books. My father’s handwriting was difficult to read, especially in his later years as his mind began to wear down.

It wasn’t until the sun started to rise and the wolf went silent that I saw the words we had been searching for:

The Beast is an awful creature. As silent and agile as a shadow, as vicious as the devil itself. Some claim the beast to be a hellhound. I find this theory plausible. I don’t know if it’s possible to kill this thing, or what would kill it.

“It’s not a story,” I whispered.

My brother scooted over and read beside me. “It’s research,” he confirmed, taking the book from me to read aloud.

“‘The beast will only come in the dark. It’s not intent to keep hidden once its prey knows its intention, but will do what it takes to kill its prey. It will, eventually, become desperate and act out in unusual ways to get what it wants. If it gets desperate enough to come out of the woods, beware.’”

My brother and I looked at each other. Yes, our house was in the middle of the woods, but it was in a very large clearing, a couple hundred yards from the treeline.

“‘The Beast typically will hunt a whole line down to the end. It will not stop until the bloodline is 100% gone.’”

I cursed, loudly, just as the thought hit me. This thing killed our mother. Tried to kill my brother when he was only 4. I asked him if he remembered that night, at all. Brows furrowed, he thought.

No, he finally admitted. He remembered nothing.

I continued to read, feeling hopeless again. If my father hadn’t found a way to kill it, how was I supposed to? Then I saw the last few lines.

‘The knife. My grandfather’s knife, my father found it by his body, a trail of black blood. The knife hurt it.’

This time, it was my brother who bolted. I followed quickly, tripping over my feet. He ran to our parents’ old room and started tearing into the bedside table on my father’s side. When he turned to me, he was holding a large tanto knife with a gleaming black blade, and a hilt that looked suspiciously like bone. My brother’s eyes were wide and bright in a way they hadn’t been in quite some time.

“How did you know that was here?” I asked, both impressed and incredulous.

He shrugged. “I got mad at dad one day and went through his shit,” he said, like that was supposed to be a logical thing to do.

I took the knife from him, gently running my fingers along the side of the blade. After a second I looked up at my brother. “Ready…?” I prompted. He nodded, lips pursed and his face drawn in acceptance. Whatever happens happens.

We waited until about half an hour before the sun was to disappear. I hugged my brother tightly, forcing the tears back that threatened to spill.

“We’ve got this,” he murmured, rubbing my back.

I pulled away to look him in the eye.

“I’ve always got you,” I told him.

He smiled at me. “I know,” he replied.

We turned to face the trees, both of us tense as the sun fell below the treeline. The outdoor lights turned on, engulfing the yard in a soft light.

Nothing happened.

“It’s usually here by now,” my brother muttered, obviously uneasy.

“Maybe it’s be-”

I couldn’t finish the sentence before I was pushed harshly to the side. I landed heavily on the porch, my head hitting the wood. My vision was fuzzy, and I watched as the huge black shape went at my brother. He had the knife in his hand and slashed at the beast, hitting its shoulder, its muzzle. The beast snarled, lashing at my brother just as brutally. I cried out as he caught my brother’s shoulder, knocking him to the ground. I tried to crawl closer to help him, distract the beast, anything, but I’d hit my head hard and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. My vision grew dark, and my eyes closed as the beast closed in on my brother.

I’m turning 21 in a month. I moved away from my hometown in Maine. I live in Nashville, Tennessee now. I’ve tried moving on from what happened, but it’s hard when you don’t know exactly what did happen.

The beast and my brother were both gone by the time I woke up. I haven’t seen either since. I searched the woods for weeks after, but it was no use. I knew I’d never see my brother again.

I was sitting in my new house, reading as my fiance sat with me, my feet over his lap. The sun dipped under the horizon, and I dropped my book. It was gentle, soft, barely noticeable.

The baying of a wolf.

I got up, telling my fiance to hold on as he asked me what was wrong. I went to the window and carefully pulled back the curtains. It was jet black outside, no moon or stars to be seen. All I saw were two orbs, a couple hundred yards away.

And they were bright blue.