Once upon a time, in a stark white hotel at the top of the world, a girl lay on a narrow cot, thinking of her mother. It had been nineteen days now that she had not come to visit, had not called, had not sent a letter or a note. The girl wondered if her mother had found another little girl to read her stories to. One who always went to bed when she was supposed to, who never talked back or broke things or was noisy when she was supposed to be quiet. These past nineteen days, the girl had gotten very good at being quiet. She wondered if it would make her mother love her again.
As the girl lay wondering, a shadow whispered across the hotel’s lobby, though there was nothing there to cast it. It slipped underneath the apartment door, rustling and crackling and snickering as it crawled. Then it began to grow and grow and grow until it was a scaly serpent with twisted horns and glowing yellow eyes set in a face that looked almost like a man’s. With a gasp, the girl threw her thin blanket over her head and tucked herself into a tight ball.
The lindworm slithered to the cot and snuck its head under the blanket. With cold breath that smelled like rotting meat and, somehow, her mother, it whispered.
“She doesn’t love you anymore.”
“Go away,” the girl said in the firmest voice she could muster, praying that if she could just be strong enough, the creature would leave.
“I crawled inside her heart last night.” The lindworm’s cold tongue slid across the girl’s hair. “It was rotten and wretched, and there was nothing in there for you.”
“Stop it.” The girl’s voice began to crack.
The creature rubbed its horrible, slick cheek against hers. “You should have tried harder to behave, little one. Mothers only love their good children. The rest they give to me.”
The girl shook so hard the bed wobbled, but she couldn’t let herself cry. “I did try.”
But maybe she didn’t, not hard enough.
“I’ll crawl inside your heart too, and I’ll turn it black,” said the creature. “Soon, little one, soon.”
The girl shrieked, the first sound she’d made in nineteen days. But no one came to help, even when she kept on screaming. Once the girl had screamed her voice away, the lindworm let out a poison laugh and curled up at the foot of her bed. It began to snore. All night long, the girl sat watching it, too petrified to move, too frightened to wake this grotesque thing, this awful reminder. Finally, dawn crept in through her little window and the creature faded and disappeared.
But she knew it wasn’t really gone.