text: She came every night when I was a child. I was terrified whenever my parents told me it was time to go to bed. I didn’t want to go to bed because she’d be there in the night. *Her.* The Woman in the Red Shoes. I don’t remember when I first saw her, it seems as though she had always watched me sleep. I would beg my parents to not let her get me, and they assured me that she wasn’t real, it was just my imagination and she didn’t exist. She couldn’t hurt me. I believed them because they were my parents and my parents cared about me, they’d never let anything happen to me. Right? Every night after I was put to bed I would lay awake; terrified for hours because I knew she would be coming. It would start with footsteps. Not quiet ones like someone trying to be stealthy, it sounded like high-heels on hardwood floors. Loud clicks like punctuation marks that would slowly travel down our hallway until they reached my bedroom door. That’s when the terror would really set it. I remember the shoes most because that’s what I’d see first, the tip of the red shoes showing just past the frame of the door. They would stand there for a few minutes, I tried to time it but it changed from night tonight. Sometimes I’d just see the shoes and never see the woman. Sometimes she waited a few minutes, sometimes up to an hour. I’m not sure if she did it just to scare me more, but if so, it worked. After the shoes I’d see the hem of her dress twirl into view. It reminded me of one of those old movies in all black and white, like the dress was supposed to be in color, but the shoes took too much energy with their brightness. It was white, with big gray roses on them that I swear I somehow knew were really red. I just knew it. It was fit her legs loosely and then cinched at the waist before form fitting her upper half. I tried not to look at her face, but every night she watched me until I looked her in the eyes. She just needed to know that I saw her, and that I was watching the show she was putting on for me. Her eyes were wide as if she had been surprised, but they had meanness behind them that I could feel radiating at me from the doorway. I remember pulling the blanket up over my head a few times, but the hallway light would illuminate her shadow against the thin blanket I used during the hot summer nights, projecting the horror into my memories. Her mouth was surrounded by dark gray lips, pulled back in a grim smile that never faltered, which I also knew were meant to be red, and the skin was almost the same color as the cloth of the dress, that sickly, just-off white. She would move closer slowly each night until she stood at my bedside, the night after that she’d be kneeling next to my bed. The following night was always the worst. She would slowly kneel at the bedside and lay her head on the bed and stare at me with those wide eyes and terrible smile as I cried silently. This is how it would cycle every few weeks. She would move incrementally slower until I had no choice but to look her in the eyes and she could feed on my fear. She haunted me for years, from a young child up until my senior year of high school. We moved several times during those years and she always found me. When I moved away from my childhood home, the Woman in the Red Shoes left me. I thought perhaps I *had* dreamed her, that she was just a figment of my overactive imagination. My wife says that I talk in my sleep a lot, and sometimes I mention the Woman in Red Shoes. She wants to talk about it, but I just want to let the memories fade away as The Woman did. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night though, I can hear the sound of heels in my hallway. I hear them wander across the doorway of my bedroom and continue until they stop at the room at the end of the hall. I don’t tell my wife about this, it would only upset her, and with the baby coming she can’t deal with any more stress. I just have to silently come to terms with the fact that The Woman in Red Shoes is already standing at the door to the nursery where my son will soon be sleeping and waiting for him.