Aurora Magazine 2019

M-A-K-A-N-I-M-I-T, in blue crayon on the inside back cover of a kids’ encyclopedia, along with an illustration of what I must’ve thought he looked like. Trust me, you don’t want to see that illus - tration. I’m afraid to even look at it. If I were to give him an entry in D&D’s Monster Manual, it might go something like this: Makanimit is a demon that takes many forms, most commonly a dog or a wolf that climbs onto the back of a victim to make his pres- ence known then feed on the resulting terror. It often appears as a being of pure darkness with a vague outline like the stealth armor of the alien in the Predator movies. This demon tends to bond to one individual and terrorize them for many years, starting in childhood then appearing intermittently throughout their whole life, finally showing its true form at the mo- ment of the victim’s death. My first experience with this entity was when I was six. I was visiting my grandmother in Oklahoma and had terrorized my little brother by chasing him around with my father’s belt. As punishment, I was sent to the garage, which had been converted into my uncle’s bedroom, to sit in the dark and think about what I had done. The bed was a strange but cool canopy style with dark blue spaceship sheets and curtains my uncle kept closed so he wouldn’t have to make his bed. As I pouted on the edge of it and cursed my lot, I distinctly remember a very soft, not-quite-hu - man, but certainly evil voice in a low whisper say, You’re a bad boy, Michael. You know where bad boys go, don’t you? They go to hell. That’s where I’m taking you… after I eat you. And suddenly there it was. Right behind those closed curtains. I could feel displacement of air and material as it slowly worked its way towards me. And then the awful feeling set in of the fact that it knew that I knew that it knew I knew it was there. It sounds goofy when you read or say it, like some bad Abbot & Costello bit, but apply it to the most horrific thing you can imag -

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