Red Skies at Morning | Clarisse La Rue x OC | Percy Jackson AU

Part 1: I Meet Clifford's Ugly Cousin

By age 7, I had mostly figured out what was considered real and not real. If I saw a big dog that went up to the owner's waist, it was probably real and I could point it out. If I saw a giant lion just walking around with no one else pointing it out, I just decided I wouldn't say anything.

So reality stopped being the world I saw in front of me; it was whatever my teachers, family, and classmates told me it was. I understood that it didn't help to tell my parents what I was seeing and no one ever seemed to get hurt when monsters were nearby, there was no reason to mention them. So I just kept silent, even if being near them made me sick to my stomach and set my nerves on fire with panic.

After a while, it was almost like I couldn't see them either. Yes, I'd still notice something that I thought shouldn't be possible, but they were less frequent, and I could close my eyes or look away. Then, when I looked back, they'd change. Either they would suddenly become more "normal," or their features would blend together in a blurry mess; like they were standing behind translucent glass. But if I looked hard enough, they'd become monstrous again, so I tried not to look for too long.

That tactic worked for two years, until one night. I was home alone, my stepbrother was out with friends and my parents were getting last-minute groceries for dinner.

I heard heavy footsteps climb the steps to the front porch. I peeked out the window and saw something blurry, but definitely not human standing quietly at the door. I ignored it like usual and ignored it again when it rang the doorbell.

After barely a few minutes, it banged its leathery, clawed hand on the door, nearly blowing it off its hinges. It continued to beat and claw at the door as I panickedly grabbed my bike from the garage and wheeled it through the house to the back door.

I held my breath and slid the backdoor open as fast as I could, sprinting next to my bike until I reached the backyard gate.

As soon as I opened the gate, the monster at the door figured out that I wasn't in the house. It chased me for hours that night as I peddled for my life. Most of that night is just a blur of panic and biking until my legs went numb, but somehow I managed to get away.

After giving my legs a rest, I made my way back home to find a police car in my driveway and my parents worried sick. They'd come home to find the door broken in and thought I'd been kidnapped; somehow missing the large scratch marks and various holes that indicated the culprit to be non-human, or at least an animal of some kind.

I saw my parents through the window as I got closer to the house, my dad was holding my stepmom on the living room couch. He had an expression I'd never seen him wear before; the grief, worry, stress, and pain were all on full display.

Seeing him like that made me realize for the first time that he was human. He and my stepmom were both just people. They couldn't have protected me from the monster. They couldn't protect me from any of the monsters. They were in just as much danger as I was, and they couldn't even see it.

That was when I realized that ignoring the monsters wasn't going to work anymore. They weren't passive and they weren't harmless. By ignoring them, I was putting both myself and my family in danger.

I needed to know what exactly I was up against, and how and why the thing had found me that night, so I decided to conduct a few somewhat unconventional experiments.

In one of those experiments, I left dirty clothes hidden around a park and wore a horrid combination of different colognes, perfumes, and air fresheners for a week.

I staked out the park with a pair of binoculars, sneaking out of the house to watch the places where I'd hidden the clothing each night. It was difficult staying there for hours with nothing to do. Originally I was going to set up a camera overnight but for some reason, the battery kept draining before I got to the park.