As a kid, I had a really, really vivid imagination. Usually, this meant good times, long, elaborate daydreams, and fantastical imaginative play, but then I also had this habit of scaring myself shitless by imagining all manner of wicked monsters so vividly that it didn’t matter if they weren’t real. They were always chasing me around when there were no other people nearby, and in such circumstances I would try to walk with my back against the wall so nothing could sneak up behind me. I don’t have a great grasp on the extent to which I believed they were real vs. was simply overwhelmed by the fear circuits in my brain going haywire, but the point was that they felt real, and the fear was definitely real.

The monsters included both specific recurring characters with jobs and personalities and an amorphous horde. When everyone was chasing me, they looked how drawings of large crowds often do: the front rows of faces are distinct and fully rendered, the next few rows are somewhat detailed but less well-defined, and then the back rows become an indistinct mass of blobs. The monsters on my heels were well-defined, the ones behind them fading into a writhing, carnivorous mass.

The thing is though, these monsters were organized. They had a whole society. It was really very political. Their leader was The Spider of Doom, an eight foot wide tarantula whom I met for the first time in a nightmare at age 3. That was how I described him back then, anyway, when I had no real sense of "eight feet" as a measurement. Now I can more confidently say he was about five feet wide. He usually had eight literal feet, though. But he sometimes took on the form of a tall, floating figure draped in a pale gray hooded cloak with no face underneath. Just an empty void. Silent and ever-present.

Anyway, The Spider of Doom was their leader, and he organized the monsters around the basic principle of killing and eating children. He was not democratically elected, but he was still somewhat beholden to the will of his constituents, and he benefitted from this unifying philosophy. The monsters’ main lair was, of course, under my bed (the bed itself being a safe zone protected by the magic of Santa Claus) and I could sometimes hear them at night discussing how to divide up my flesh equitably to meet the needs of both the adult monsters and their children, who needed less sustenance and could live off of my fingers and such. Scary business! 

The thing is, though, I never actually talked to the monsters myself, and so somewhere around the age of five I figured that maybe I shouldn’t assume malicious intent. Not that I had the words “malicious intent” in my vocabulary at age five, but that’s the principle I was getting at. Maybe they just wanted to be friends and didn't know how to express that. Maybe the screaming horde of ravenous creatures just had subpar social skills. I extended an olive branch to the monsters by teaching them the alphabet.

This move caused a great Schism. In one camp, we had the monsters who really had just wanted to be friends all along. In another, much smaller camp, we had the extremist monsters who found the idea of friendship abhorrent and were firmly in favor of killing and eating children. Finally, there was the ambivalent camp, which consisted of monsters who either hadn't quite made up their minds, or who aspired to friendship but were liable to give in to the child-eating instinct at any moment and therefore had to be kept at arm's length.

Most monsters were either pro-friendship or ambivalent. The Spider of Doom was in the ambivalent camp in theory, but quite frankly, he would have preferred to go back to the days of monsters single-mindedly trying to kill and eat me. He could read the room, though, and he knew that most of his underlings were into this whole friendship concept, and if he wanted to retain his position of power, he would have to go with it for now. He couldn't be trusted, though. He was always waiting for the tide to turn, always subtly coaxing it to do so. I saw him giving me the side-eye, and we understood each other. I couldn’t risk alienating my base of support by outright rejecting him any more than he could alienate his base of support by outright rejecting me.

Under this new system, though, I had a loyal group of monster friends who would protect me from the extremist child eaters. At the worst of times, they would also protect me from any turncoat ambivalent monsters, and at the best of times I had both the friendship camp and the ambivalent camp protecting me. It was a great coping mechanism. The Spider of Doom did not get his way, and he faded into obscurity.

William showed up long after this truce and subsequent Schism. When I was maybe 8, some kid brought a trailcam image of an emaciated humanoid figure with three sharp fingers to school. They said his name was Three-Fingered Willy and he was Real and he was In The Woods and he was gonna get you. And oh man, I was fucking scared. By this age I knew the monsters weren’t real and I had nearly tamed the evil part of my vivid imagination, but I remember standing in front of the bathroom sink that night, looking at the floor beside me, and imagining that he was there. Prolonged, intense eye contact. Bloody teeth. Dark, empty eyes. Unnatural breathing. I knew he wasn't real, but I was paralyzed by fear, and I'm pretty sure I ended up having to shout for my parents because I couldn't move. 

Upon trying to communicate with him, though, he turned out to be very open to friendship, and ended up becoming my most stalwart defender. Much more reliable than Harold from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I ended up calling him William instead of Three-Fingered Willy, which felt unkind and diminutive. I still had other monsters defending me, of course, and also very many wolves by this point in my childhood, but he ended up being the most defined face in the crowd. If I was feeling a little spooked in a dark room, I would just imagine his emaciated, bloody little figure there beside me and I would feel okay.

Admittedly, I still do this sometimes if I'm sitting in the dark feeling unsettled. Like right now while I write this post in a dark room. Ha ha oops. This rarely happens in my adult life, but it can be nice to be able to lean on an old friend from time to time. Anyway, here's to William and the security that this fucked up little guy provided me as a child who was way too prone to freaking myself out by imagining stuff too strongly.