You are seven. Perhaps nine, or even thirteen.

In the earliest hours of a sleepless night-turned-morning, a figure you cannot see (but you can feel, their very existence heavy on your skin and you do not have to see, your bones howl that you are not alone) leans low, low, low over your bed.

The two of you are kissing-distance when it asks, Do you still believe?

Yes, is all you can manage and maybe you don’t say the word for fear the figure will reach its long fingers into your mouth, maybe you only think it very loudly. But that is enough. You’ve answered true and the figure slinks away, content for now it still has you in its grasp.

And you do believe—at seven or nine or even thirteen—because you cannot imagine not believing. Because you’ve seen the proof. It’s everywhere if you only know where to look for it, how to see.

You believe because you’ve met what lives under your bed. It doesn’t matter that your bed is too near the floor for anything larger than a cat to crawl. Or, perhaps, it doesn’t matter that your bed is on stilts, and that you know that during the day a chair and a bookshelf and a pile of discarded clothes take up all the space where something might hide. At night it is just the right size, as big or small or endless as it needs to be. You have felt the claw of what lives there—just one broken, sharp claw but it is enough—scrape the tender sole of your foot, the foot you stupidly allowed to drift out from the protection of the covers. You snatched your foot under the blankets just in time and promised yourself you would never be so reckless again. But you will. Of course you will. And the claw—always just one, but one is always enough—will be waiting.

You believe because you’ve been in the basement where it is always night. Where the shadows reign and are so deep you must be careful not to stumble and fall into them because then you would be dragged away by so many hands and gnashed by so many teeth. Or, perhaps, you must be careful not to stumble and fall into them because then you might never stop falling and you would fall so deep and so far your screams would fade away and you would never be found. You have heard the muttering of what lives there, in the forever-night of the basement, almost masked by the grumbling of the furnace. Almost, but not quite.

And in that muttering is a warning. You do not belong there, under the earth with the dirt and the worms and the skittering things grown pale in all that dark. You do not belong there because it is a place for the quiet dead, not for skinned knees and sunburns and a heart that beats fiercely, defiantly in your narrow chest. When you run back up the stairs—because you creep down those stairs but always, always run back up them—you know the muttering beast is at your heels and it is only when you reach the top step and blessed daylight or lamplight that you dare to turn around. The muttering thing is gone, but only because you were just fast enough. This time. Your luck, you’re sure, will eventually run out.

You believe because you’ve seen the trees at night, the very trees you climb and hide behind during the day. Those trees grow tall in the dark, taller than any trees should be. And the hiding, that can’t be ignored. Because if you, you who are all noise and movement and bright, mismatched clothes, can hide behind the trunks in the daylight, how can you doubt there are things that hide there in the dark when there is no yellow sun to reveal them? Maybe those things are always there but you don’t think so. They crawl out of the dirt or the trees themselves or maybe even from the very fabric of the night, and while they are only temporary and will be banished by the rising sun, they are fast and wicked and not to be taunted. You avoid the trees at night, respectful of what waits there.

You believe because you pass the house down the street every day on your way to and from school. The one with broken-window eyes and a hungry mouth of a door. The house is too old and too big for the neighborhood and is abandoned but not empty. Not empty at all. You have—in the waning daylight and on a dare but never, ever alone and never at night because that would be foolish and you are not a fool—parked your bike on the sidewalk and rushed up the crumbling steps to a porch that may not hold your weight next time. You have pressed your palm against the cold flesh of that door and waited one heartbeat . . . two . . . three . . . before fleeing to the safety of the sidewalk and your laughing friends. You touched that door but did not knock because knocking is a request for the door to open, for you to be invited in. And once that request is made, you’re not so sure it can be retracted. In those moments, those three heartbeats, as your skin touched the door, something was touching the other side. The air was thick with a presence, made up of patience and appetite, held back by only an inch or two of rotting wood. You could taste its breath like pennies on your tongue, smell it like the rotting squirrel you found in the park. You never tell your friends those things, you don’t have to. They believe, too, and for one wild and wonderful evening you are celebrated, the hero who risked their life to touch a door.

You believe for all these reasons and a thousand, thousand more—some of them shared with every child who came before you and every child to follow. Some of them, the truest reasons of all, are trapped in your bones and your veins and they have no names or faces but they don’t need those trappings to be real.

One day you discover a book at the library and learn, to your great relief, that not only are there adults who still believe but they have written down their stories. They have fought the night and survived to share their secrets with you. You read the book more than once and each time you are both terrified by the confirmation—Real! It’s all real and I knew it was but here it is in a book, indisputable evidence!—and comforted by it because the book also tells you the night things can be beaten, outwitted, outrun. Sometimes even reasoned with (but that seems to fail as often as it succeeds).

You read the book over and again until your own only-sometimes-washed hands add to the grey and the grime at the edges of each page—you are not the first child to read this book, its lessons shared with others before you, and that, too, brings a comfort. More proof you are not alone.

You read the book and find there are others like it and then more after that. To each new monster in each new book you say, Yes, thank you, I know. How do I defeat you? You take copious notes if only in your mind and, over time, those lessons become armor against not only those things you fear in the night but the bold and unabashed terrors of the daylight world, too. Because if you are strong and fast and smart enough to defeat the things that creep and stalk and feed in the dark, you are enough to face what a Regular Tuesday or even an Especially Bad Day lay at your feet.

And, if over days and months and years those monsters grow quiet and the lights get brighter and the trees shorter and the house at the end of the block merely lonely, unloved, you still know. Even if that knowing—that believing—is buried somewhere deep under all the worries and wonders of growing up. Because time doesn’t change the truth—you ran up those stairs and touched the door and read the stories and learned the lessons. You know how to defeat what lives in the cellar, how to escape what lives in the corners and seams of the night.

Even now, taller and burdened with responsibilities and cynicism you never wanted but collected all the same—in the earliest hours of sleepless mornings, before the sun and before the birds, if a figure you cannot see (but you can feel, their very existence heavy on your skin and you do not have to see) but know in your bones is there, were to lean low, low, low over your bed until the two of you are kissing-distance and ask, Do you still believe? you would only be able to tell the truth.

Yes. Yes, of course I do. Of course I still believe.