My son’s imaginary friend had legs that bent the wrong way, like the crooked legs of a bird. He said every time his imaginary friend walked, the bones would poke out through the skin- yet he was able to move at inhumanly fast speeds, like a character in a video that has been played on fast-forward. My son had named this creepy friend “Mr. Grim.”

Needless to say, I found his new imaginary friend to be a trifle upsetting. When I told my wife about it, she said that it wasn’t just upsetting, but “absolutely fucking disturbing in every way imaginable.”

“Why do his bones poke out through his skin?” she asked me. “That seems like fairly inappropriate imagery for a five-year-old.”

“Maybe it is some subconscious projection for some accident victim he saw on TV,” I said thoughtfully. She rolled her eyes at this.

“I don’t think they show dead car crash victims with their bones sticking out of their skin on Nickelodeon,” she said sarcastically. But we let it go, and continued on with our lives as normal. Johnny continued to talk about Mr. Grim and the adventures they went on, and we just kind of got used to it. After all, children have vivid imaginations, and I wasn’t the type to read into things too much. As a parent, I knew sometimes you just had to go with the flow and let them develop on their own.

That was before pets started to go missing in our neighborhood. The entire street became covered in “Missing” posters for local cats and dogs. None of their bodies were ever found. I didn’t know what to think about it, so I just didn’t. I just continued to go to work, spend time with my wife and enjoy life as much as I could. I would take Johnny out on weekend outings to amusement parks or nature trails. But one time when we were hiking together, he said something rather disturbing to me.

“Mr. Grim says he knows what happens to the kitties and puppies,” he told me. I looked down at him sharply.

“Johnny, that’s not funny,” I said. “There are some sick people out there, people who kill little animals for no reason. There are people out there who kill kids for no reason. That’s why your mom and I always tell you to avoid strangers and never get in a car with anyone besides your family. And you shouldn’t joke about the missing puppies and kitties.”

“But dad,” he said plaintively, “I wasn’t joking. Mr. Grim said he took the puppies and kitties with him to his playground. He said that I can come with him one day, too. He says that no one hurts puppies or kitties there, or little kids. He said we all live forever with him, and that he never lets us go, because he loves us all too much and wants to be with us forever.” I looked down at his small, serious face, waves of dread rising inside my stomach.

“Johnny, Mr. Grim isn’t real,” I said. “He is just an imaginary friend. That means he comes from your own mind, just like your dreams. They might feel real, but they’re all inside of you.” He just shook his head at this, like he couldn’t believe how slow his old dad was.

“You’ll see soon, daddy,” he said. “Mr. Grim is as real as you and me. Maybe even realer, because he says he has been here a long, long time. He says he remembers the roads before there were any cars on them, back when they were all dirt. He says he remembers when horsies and donkeys were the only way around. He told me about it. It’s pretty weird to think about, daddy, how old he is. I didn’t know people could live that long.”

“Johnny, if Mr. Grim was a real person and what you said was true, he would have to be over 130 years old. No one has ever lived that long. It isn’t possible. Don’t get carried away with this Mr. Grim stuff, because not everyone will understand like your mom and I do. Some people might think it’s… a little weird.” That was the end of the conversation, and we continued hiking in silence. I was deep in thought, wondering about all the strange things my son said.

The next day, kids started disappearing. It started with the Crabtree boy the next street over. From what I heard, he was playing in the backyard, in his sandbox. His mother looked out the window every minute or so while she did the dishes. Then she looked up and he was gone, his toys still in the same position, his little blue baseball cap upside down on the spot where he had been sitting. Mrs. Crabtree sprinted out, looking around frantically and screaming his name, but he was just gone. No sign of any strangers in the neighborhood, no suspicious cars, no random leads caught by stoplight cameras or doorbell cameras so ubiquitous in our little suburban neighborhood. There weren't even any footprints in the sandbox, neither the boy’s nor anyone else’s, except for the tracks that led to the middle of the sandbox where he had been sitting and playing. It was as if he had been raptured up into Heaven in the space of sixty seconds.

The police searched for weeks for that little boy, even using helicopters to search the endless woods that started at the north edge of town. Volunteers from around our county joined in, combing every square inch of woods within miles, diving into local lakes and checking abandoned buildings and sewers near the child’s house. There was not a sign of him anywhere. It was as if he had just vanished in the flash of an eye. After weeks of no news, the attention paid to it slowly started to die down. People forgot about the grieving parents and the missing child, like they always do in these kinds of situations.

I was extremely busy at work, doing research into quantum entanglement and quantum computers at our state university. My wife had left to go spend time with her father, who had dementia and cancer and very suddenly took a turn for the worse, so I ended up having to take Johnny to work. I didn’t really mind, as he was a good boy who listened and very rarely got in trouble. The “Mr. Grim” thing was the only weird part of his young personality, but other than that, he was a fast learner, respectful, and acted in many ways like a child much older than himself.

We entered the quantum research laboratory, his little hand holding mine tightly as he stared around with wide, blue eyes. It smelled like cleaning chemicals and burning metal throughout the entire chamber, emanating even out into the hallways of the university building. My son wrinkled his tiny nose, making a comically cute face as he did so. I handed him a pair of safety glasses, putting one on myself, before he started up with his usual, child-like questioning.

“Daddy, why does it smell like that?” he asked me. I shrugged.

“It’s a lot of machines that consume huge amounts of power,” I explained simply to him. “This single building can consume as much power as hundreds of houses like ours. Some of this stuff-” I indicated with a wave of my hand, showing the gleaming circular vats, the massive metal tubes, the dozens of computer monitors, the tables with entire arrays of green lasers focused on tiny chips, “-is so cutting edge that we haven’t found a way to make it use less electricity yet. It can entangle physical particles or make computers that can do certain processes millions of times faster than conventional computers.” Most young children would not be able to comprehend the depth of statements like that, but Johnny was not a usual kid. His mind worked incredibly fast, and his vocabulary seemed much more developed than a normal five-year-olds’.

“OK,” Johnny said simply, letting go of my hand so I could go hang up our coats and put a little plastic bag of food in the fridge. It was late, past dinner time on a Friday, and so the entire lab was already deserted. I was one of the few physicists who did much of his work at night, when all the equipment was open and I had the entire building to myself. On nights like this, I could play classical music on its highest volume and just be myself. I started playing an MP3 of Shostakovich on one of the many monitors around the lab, then began to move around and switch all the equipment on. My son sat in the corner, using colored pencils to draw while I worked.

Tonight I was using AI to try to increase quantum entanglement from just a few particles to a small diamond. Having turned all the cameras and monitoring equipment on, I activated the processor and watched all the lasers move in unison on the nearby laboratory table, now pointing at the diamond I had set in the middle of the setup. Johnny looked up as the computers all grew louder. I motioned for him to come close, to show him the most interesting part of the entire experiment. A humming, vibrating noise began to spread throughout the floor as the argon lasers became too bright to look at. I put an arm around Johnny, reassuring him.

Suddenly, something began to go terribly wrong. The humming vibrations, which had been wave-like and measured, now began to come in chaotic pulsing waves, knocking equipment off the tables. The argon lasers began to falter and move out of position, burning holes in the tables and walls. An enormous crash of rending metal and glass came from behind me, and I quickly jumped on Johnny, tackling him to the floor and protecting him with my own body until it would all be over.

As another computer station fell over, sending shards of glass flying that sliced into my left arm, leaving large droplets of blood on the floor next to us, the power finally went out, and we were submerged in blackness. All I could hear now was Johnny’s heavy breathing mixing with my own. Then, suddenly, I heard the skittering footsteps of something large coming from my right.

“Is it over?” Johnny asked in a trembling voice.

“I think so, kiddo,” I said reassuringly, getting off of him and slowly standing up in the pitch dark. I fumbled in my pockets for my cell phone, turning on the flashlight app and shining it around.

At first, I saw only destruction- smashed monitors, smoking computers, massive holes everywhere. I thought to myself how lucky we were that the whole place hadn’t gone up in flames. As I kept turning, though, I saw something far more horrific.

A small boy stood in the corner with black, stringy hair. His skin looked drained of blood, white as a vampire’s, and blood constantly bubbled out of his mouth, sliding down his chin in red streaks. He wore the ragged remains of what might have been a plaid shirt and jean shorts, but they were so bloody and torn that it was impossible to tell. His bare legs were bent the wrong way, and he started to walk towards me slowly like a bird, his knees bending backwards. The bone stuck out through his shins, calves and thighs, and as he walked, a nauseating cracking sound echoed around the room, like bone loudly crushing and breaking against other pieces of itself.

“Hiya there,” he said in a deep, gurgling speech. “My name, as you surely know, is Mr. Grim. I am a friend of your son’s, and I hope soon, a friend of yours.” I stood there, speechless, shining my light on this abomination. He bowed slightly and waved his thin, bony arm around the room. “Sorry for the destruction, but I had to take any means to materialize, and the massive amounts of energy in this room was able to give me the physical form I needed. I couldn’t keep on as some minor… poltergeist!” He laughed at this, spraying tiny droplets of blood on the floor in front of him as he did so. I didn’t see the humor in it.

“Look,” I said, putting my hands up, as if I were dealing with a rabid dog, “I’m sorry for any misunderstanding, but you need to go back to where you came from. This is not OK. My son and I cannot have a…. a….” What was he, exactly? A monster? A demon? Mr. Grim waved away my objections with a flick of his hand.

“That is not up to you, Jack,” he said congenially. “You cannot send me back, and if you try to stop me, I will kill your son in front of you, and then I will kill you too.” My son’s little hand tightened on me. I felt him trembling behind me.

“Daddy, I’m scared,” he whispered to me in a low voice. “I want to go home.”

“I know, Johnny,” I said quietly. “I do too.” But what could I do? I had no gun, and I wasn’t sure if this thing could even be killed anyway.

At that moment, the backup generators kicked on, and the laboratory was filled with the glow of red emergency lights.

“Alright,” I said, reaching a decision. “My son and I are leaving. Do not follow us.” I had decided to call 911 and let the professionals deal with this. Maybe they could call in the National Guard, I thought with a small smile. They could fill this thing full of enough full-auto weapons fire to leave him looking like Swiss cheese.

“Ah,” Mr. Grim said congenially, “I am sorry, but I need your son.” He smiled at me, an eerie ear-to-ear grin that showed all of his bloody teeth and the countless sores on his blackened gums. “I used a lot of energy materializing, and I need food. I will let you live, however, Jack.” His smile widened, as if he were offering me some kind of present. “Just leave the boy, get in your car and drive home, and you can live a full life.” As he spoke, I got an idea. We were much closer to the door than Mr. Grim.

I quickly dropped my phone in my pocket, picked up a large computer and hurled it at Mr. Grim’s broken legs. I heard a demonic cry of pain, his voice sounding like dozens of voices crying at once in a disharmonious shriek. Ignoring it, I picked up Johnny and ran outside the lab.

The door had a number pad on it. I pressed the top button and began rotating the thumb turn away from the hinges, locking the thick wooden door just as something heavy crashed into it on the other side. The knob turned furiously, but it wouldn’t budge without the correct numerical code.

“OK, that should buy us some time,” I said quietly, grabbing Johnny’s hand and running out through the blood-red emergency lights. The laboratory began erupting in a cacophony of breaking equipment as I called 911, informing them of an intruder and telling them the man was likely armed and dangerous. Then I got Johnny to my car and we sped out of there, my adrenaline still high, my heart beating hard in my chest.

The police ended up finding the laboratory destroyed but empty. As the days went on, I wondered if the entire thing was some sort of shared delusion. But then kids started disappearing from our town and the surrounding towns at an alarming rate. I bought a gun for protection, and my neighbors and I began to do a local neighborhood watch.

One time while I was out patrolling in the middle of the night, I saw that thing again- Mr. Grim. I could tell it was him instantly from the way he walked, the crunching of shattered bones and the superhuman speed as he disappeared into the backyard of a nearby house. I followed him quietly, checking that the safety on my gun was off.

I saw a child exiting the backdoor of his house as Mr. Grim crept in the bushes. The child looked hypnotized, his eyes totally blank. Mr. Grim waved his hands and clicked his tongue, and a small spark of light in the middle of the backyard expanded to show a massive, brightly-colored playground. Even though it was night here, on the playground it was daytime, and I saw countless kids in it. Some of them were hung in nooses by their necks from the monkeybars, others were buried alive up to their heads in the sandbox. He had even crucified a few on the wooden beams of the playset, nailing their hands and feet together as rivulets of blood dripped into the sandbox below. They all had their mouths opened in a shared and silent scream as the hypnotized child walked quietly towards the vision.

“No, stop!” I said, raising my gun to point it directly at Mr. Grim’s head. He snarled like a rabid dog at me, beginning to run at me with a superhuman speed, his bent legs snapping and popping, and I fired. His head exploded in a shower of black, rotted flesh and maggots, the smell of decomposing meat filling the air. Behind him, the vision slowly closed back into a pinprick of light, then went out entirely.

I called the police, telling them the truth, keeping an eye on the strange, demonic body of Mr. Grim as I did so. It wasn’t the police that ended up showing up, but some secretive federal agency that quickly took possession of the body and swore me to secrecy, giving me a check for $100,000 in exchange for signing an NDA that stated I would never tell anyone about the supernatural events that had occurred in the last few weeks. I gladly took the check and signed the document.

After all, who would believe me?