"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Unknown

My heart raced against my breastbone as images of creatures tearing the flesh of the pathetic human leaped into my battered mind. It was Michael. His tousled hair indicated he'd dozed off at some point while I was gone. I stood, and tried to laugh off my over-reaction.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you," he said. "I just saw that you'd been out here awhile and wanted to make sure you were OK."

I forced a little smile that I'm certain was far from convincing. "I'm fine. I was just talking to Raziel about what to expect next."

Michael glanced past me. "Uhm, is he still here?"

''What?" I asked. "Of course he's..." I was alone. "Not." I hid my shaking hands in my pockets. "Obviously he's gone now."

My husband was kind to make an issue of my odd behavior. "OK, then. Ready to come inside?"

I nodded. "Yes. Here I come." He held the door for me, and followed me through.

"What did he say?" He asked

"I'll tell you later. I'm not ready to give it all words yet."

He accepted that and shared, "Something's up with Donny. He's upstairs. I was hoping you'd talk with him."

"Is he sick?" I asked.

"No. He's just upset. He had an accident in the kitchen. He was looking for batteries in the big junk drawer, and somehow he pulled it out too far. It fell, and spilled everywhere, and he just..." Michael leaned against the edge of the table. "Snapped or something. He flew off the handle, cursing, and screaming and crying. It was totally out of proportion to what happened. I have a feeling there's something more going on. After I sent him to his room and he calmed down a bit, I tried talking to him, but he's doing a great imitation of a clam. I thought maybe you could get through to him."

I went upstairs, tapped on the door, and opened it. "May I come in?" I asked. There was no answer; just muted sniffling from the direction of the pile of blankets on the bed. I sat next to him and, eventually, he quieted.

"Do you hear them all the time, too?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

My son emerged from his little burrow, looking younger and more vulnerable than I had seen him in a long time. I had his attention now. He stared at me, wide eyed.

"I was even younger than you, about Ike's age, when I started hearing their voices. Of course, I had no idea who they were back then. I had a little group of them I played with. I called my favorite Mrs. Brightly, because of the light that shined whenever she was nearby, and she seemed to think that was the funniest thing in the world.

"They never go away," he whispered. "They're just there. All the time. They won't leave me alone! Sometimes they tease me, and pick on me, and it makes me so angry, but there's nothing I can do. I can't fight them--they're invisible. I can't tell on them. Nobody would believe me."

"I believe you," I said.

He wiped his face and sat up straighter. "You really hear them all the time, too?"

I listened while I smoothed his dark hair back from his stormy red-rimmed eyes. "Right now there are about four or five close by. They sound like kids, about your age, though the truth is they are much, much older than you. They are teasing you; laughing at you. They think it's funny you lost your temper when the drawer spilled. They made that happen, you know, just to see how you would react."

If I'd told him I was a Martian he couldn't have looked any more surprised. It was past time to come clean to my kid.

"Donovan, there's something your father and I have kept from you. We felt you were too little to know. It seemed like we should let you just be a kid for as long as we could. But I think you are growing up faster than we realized, and I believe you are mature enough to understand what is going on. The world is changing fast, and maybe grown-ups need to start putting a little more faith in the ability of kids to handle life's big stuff."

"Please tell me!" he begged. "They tease me about not knowing things. They call me stupid and blind."

My heart ached. How could I know so much about what was happening in the world, and turn a blind eye to what was happening with my own son? Why didn't I hear them tormenting him? I thought I was the one with the great gift of hearing everything. I had suspected for a very long time, even before Raziel and Freyja that he could hear, but I had no idea that he was dealing with supernatural bullies. Could they have been hiding themselves from me?

I put the thought aside. At that moment, I needed to focus on my son. "When I was little I played with them like imaginary friends," I said, "but when I got older I began to realize that other kids couldn't hear them, and I thought I was going crazy. I even wondered if I was demon-possessed. When I was a young woman things got bad. I remember being so tired. I was tired of hearing them and tired of feeling different, and just tired. Sometimes they kept me up with their constant chattering."

He nodded enthusiastically. His entire posture relaxed with the relief of having his secret in the open.

"I decided to kill myself," I said.

A shadow passed across his face and I realized, with great horror, that the thought had crossed his mind at some point. "But you didn't," he said.

"No. Your father stopped me. Or at least, he slowed me down enough to see the good things in the world worth living for." I busied myself tidying up the clutter that had spread across his bedroom floor to give him a moment's space before going on. "Your dad helped me learn how to focus my thoughts on the here and now--on what was right in front of me. That helped a lot. It wasn't until these past several weeks that I had a hard time again."

"Me too."

I nodded. "I could tell. I knew that you had a sense of something happening, too, but I didn't know that you were hearing things so clearly. Or maybe I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want you to have to deal with this, so I pretended like it wasn't happening." I sat down again. "I'm sorry, Donny. I'm so sorry I let it go this long. I should have talked to you about this sooner. I should have said something."

He shrugged and looked away. "I don't think I was ready to talk about it until now."

"Still," Hot tears stung my eyes, "I'm sorry." I sighed. Save the universes? I couldn't even manage what was going on in my own household. "The voices are real, you know. There are other dimensions, like in Star Trek, right? You're hearing the beings over there. Freyja is one of them. There is another, who has been nearby, talking with me. He even talked with your Dad, in the flesh. You know, like, for real. In this world."

"I know what 'in the flesh' means, Mom."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, yes. You're a genius. I forget." I got a tiny grin for that. Progress! "He told me that some crazy things are happening. The others, the ones that we can hear, they want to change things. They want to reveal themselves to the humans. He showed me how it is on the other side, at least some of it."

"He showed you another dimension?" His voice was full of astonishment.

"Something like that. Pieces of it, anyway. It was hard for me to see. Or... maybe just hard to understand. It's so different that I didn't have any frame of reference for what I was looking at. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so," he said.

"He told me that there are big changes coming, and he told me that I have a part in it."

"What part?"

A tiny half-smile touched my lips. It seemed almost too silly to say out loud, even after everything I'd experienced. "He told me I'm supposed to save the universes. All of them."

My boy's face grew very serious, and he stared down at his hands. "They tell me I'll be just like them some day. That I'll be hungry to drink the blood of men, and I'll never get my fill. It's what they tease me about, more than anything. They tell me there's darkness and death inside me."

I had no words. I swear I could feel the seconds pass as I just sat there. Nothing I'd seen or heard--not even the things Raziel had shown me--had shocked and terrified me like my own child's words. My blood was ice, running through my body in a blaze of stinging pain. I think the worst part was that, on some level, deep inside, I too saw a dark craving within this child, and I had no idea what to do about it.

"Can you save me?" he asked in a whisper.

I pulled him into my arms, and held him against my chest. The tears that had threatened escaped my eyes and poured down my cheeks. I could make no promises. I was nothing against the immensity of what threatened my family, my species. I was helpless in the face of my son's terror.

Finally, I said, "The ones that have come to me are good, Donny. They love people, and they want to help us, and they are so powerful, more powerful than you could ever imagine. They tell me that it is not possible for anyone other than God Himself to know the future. Everyone has free will and the choices we make determine our destiny."

"I'm pretty scared, Mom," my oldest son admitted.

"Me too, buddy," I said.