The Grabber was a fairytale, or so it was said. But if the creature were real, what it’d do is this: come to where you were going in the night, slither or slide or scramble right up to you. Only at night.

If the Grabber were real, it would be the cause of much misery for townsfolk.

Sounds, hard to disguise, of a creaky swing set or an animal dying, following the slightest movements, following a townsperson. Creaky swing set and a dying animal, two sounds that are very similar. Uncomfortable sounds, sounds of being in discomfort. They don’t exist, not in association with the certainly fictional Grabber.

If the Grabber existed, though, you’d hear its strange sounds created by those slight movements and the thoughts you’d think would be enough to reassure you that it was not the Grabber. It was a creaky swing set. That’s what. Not even a dying animal. A swing set. And there was never any reason for fear or to let the imagination, or in actual fact the instinct that compels a human’s flight from danger, to be allowed its running wild. You are pacified by your superior ability to think and to make what is potentially dangerous to your lizard brain into nothing of even the mildest worry.

The worst thing about the Grabber would be its prehensile fingers. Together, its two hands are like ten shaved monkey tails, twisting and curling.

But townsfolk did not need to worry, because it was not a thing that was real.

Nobody believed in the Grabber because it came from the stories they were told as children, about the elves and their egg patch, where elf-sized eggs were grown. Only the elf children were capable of harvesting those eggs. They were the only ones small enough to squeeze their way between them and not crack even a single egg. They were the only ones capable of hauling them off gently enough to ensure their unblemished harvest, without a drop of spilled yoke.

There was a ring around the egg patch, which warned that you go no further, for fear of the Grabber. Brave elf children would dance near its edge, but none dared venture beyond. Even if it was just a story to them, too, even if. Stay among the eggs, where it was safe.

But the story, the tale, the fairy tale within a fairy tale, of the potential for harm the Grabber might wreak, if given the chance, was a scary story.  The Grabber grabbed freely and often. Nobody knew where it had come from, or what had brought it to this place. They only knew that one day, eggs started vanishing faster than any known elf child could harvest them, and the elves soon worried that their most important supply of food and building material (the egg shells were pulverized into a powder used for their own unique and very stalwart mortar) would soon be completely depleted.

Every elf could see but no elf knew where it was. It wasn’t a shapeshifter, per se. It wasn’t a shapeshifter in any way. It hid in plain sight. It hid by being everywhere. It hid occasionally as an idea in a person’s mind. It hid wherever. And the idea of it came out.

Stealing the eggs had merely been a means to an end, the elves soon realized, so that the Grabber could more easily reach the elf children it really wanted, which had been able to hide among the eggs and avoid being grabbed during harvest. They were no longer so able to keep from the Grabber.

The whole thing was solved with an amulet or something, after many, many, many of the youngest and most innocent of the elf children were grabbed. That’s the happy ending, anyway. It didn’t ring true, necessarily. The Grabber had a way of still seeming out there, beyond all fairy tales.

When the human children started disappearing, nobody took it too very seriously. “They’ll come back,” said one old man in town.

He remembered when he was young, a faint memory more like the glimpse of a television show with something traumatic onscreen, something that felt like it had happened to him but couldn’t possibly have. Fiction and fact melding, becoming a new sort of truth. His aunt got grabbed. She was just walking along the river with her parasol, innocently twirling it, when the grabber struck. His aunt had been a saint, a living and now presumed-dead saint. That’s why he had always suspected she’d been grabbed. It fit the Grabber’s m.o. Grab the innocent, cause the innocent to disappear. Probably eat the innocent. Kill the innocent, at least.

That’s why he’d become a cop. That’s why he’d been so enthusiastic about joining the WAATCH-IT Program, initiated to teach kids: What Almost Always Toward Children Has Ignoble Tendencies. A typical lesson would include people and things that might have bad intentions. Sometimes, he’d try to get the teacher to leave the room for maybe a minute. “Take a walk, grab a cigarette. Talk on your phone.” Then he’d ask the children if they’d ever heard or experienced the tell-tale signs of the Grabber, most assuredly the worst of all the people (or probably in this case, things) that had ignoble tendencies. If the kids were young enough, they’d cry openly after Officer Mason raised his questions and less openly if they were older. None had ever heard of the Grabber. The teacher would soon return, becoming immediately disappointed he’d trusted this police officer, Officer Todd Mason, to be a responsible adult.

Sometimes Officer Mason told the kids they could call him Officer Friendly, but he could see by their collective reaction that this was mostly strange and even a little creepy to them. He’d try it again with a different group of kids but their reaction was always pretty much the same. He made himself fairly creepy, after all.

Officer Mason hadn’t entirely become a sponsor of the WAATCH-IT Program by choice. He’d had a habit while a beat cop of harassing anyone he could with questions pertaining to the Grabber. He wanted to know what had happened to his aunt. The Grabber was a long shot, last ditch best hope. That said, he tried to be careful and not get grabbed himself. He walked a fine line. Until it got back to his superiors and he was asked to work in the schools, where if he was so concerned about the danger of people who grab people, he could be of service teaching the youngest people what to do should they find themselves in danger of being grabbed. He was the only one who referred to these bad interactions with “grab” as the verb. The other police officers, his superiors, they all said things like, “force” and “molest” and “accost” and “assault” and so on.

Officer Mason’s only friend on the force was Officer Thad Johnson. He didn’t mind that Mason always came into work bedraggled and ornery, because he’d been up all night searching for the Grabber, up all night believing in the existence of the Grabber. He thought of Officer Mason as the kid brother that he never had but still felt a strange need to protect. As a kid, Officer Johnson would point at empty spaces, voids, spots in which no one was present, and say that that was no empty space, that was his brother, and he’d die to protect his imagined brother. This last remark was a bit worrying to his parents, who otherwise let him think and do what he wanted. He was an only child.

Officer Johnson also buddied up with Officer Mason because the two men weren’t terribly different, and people—police as well as everyone else—didn’t exactly look at either man without concern or, more often, contempt. Plainly, Officer Johnson was weird, too. He’d explained his imagined brother to one too many of his colleagues over the years, apparently. He didn’t tell any of them he’d sort of adopted Officer Mason, but they figured it out, anyway.

They overheard him say things like, “I don’t want you to worry, Toddy-boy. I’m here to look after you, now. We’ll find the Grabber one of these days, if we work together. As long as the two of us are together, there’s no end to what we can do.”

Officer Mason was immediately pleased. “No one else has ever believed me,” he said, sounding almost awestruck.

“Now somebody does. Me. I hope you don’t mind if I sometimes accidentally refer to you as brother, though. It’s a bad habit, Bro,” Officer Johnson said, pointing at Officer Mason because he’d become accustomed to pointing at his imagined brother and now Mason filled that void. “You’re everything I wanted him to be,” he mumbled, and Officer Mason didn’t hear this last remark, which was good because even Mason might have been made a little uncomfortable by the remark, even Officer Friendly himself.

After both their shifts had ended, they were in street clothes and heading toward Officer Mason’s car, inside of which Officer Mason had a rather elaborate map indicating all the possible, likely or definite points of attack by the Grabber. “Survivors said they heard squeaky swing sets, something possibly chilling but easy to ignore. That was it. They couldn’t describe the experience of being grabbed. So we don’t know what happened, but I have every reason to suspect the Grabber. I wish other people would, too,” Officer Mason said, holding the map tightly, reading it like a cryptic ancient text that only his years of study and hard-learned experience could decode. What have I missed? he thought.

“The Grabber just grabs. That’s all we know,” Officer Mason told Officer Johnson. “It doesn’t need a reason, just as we don’t need a reason to want to find it,” Mason said, quickly realizing that he should add, “But we do have one. We want to end its menace. I don’t think that surprises you much, Thad, but we want to end its menace. By saving it from itself. The only way we know how. But you’re already aware. You already know. We both know. Mmmhmm.” Officer Mason was nodding conspiratorially and had on his face a very slight grin.

No, Officer Johnson hadn’t the faintest idea what Officer Mason was referring to. He’d have to pretend, so as to better encourage his newfound brother along the path to the Grabber. Officer Mason really was the brotherly sort, brimming with brotherly love to be unlocked. He really cared, Officer Johnson could see, and he only wanted to help.

“Your aunt would be proud of you, Bro,” Officer Johnson said. He wanted to encourage Officer Mason and simultaneously begin sowing the seeds of association—tying Mason’s actual familial relationships to his own phantasm of brotherhood.

“Because you know what we have to do. I understand,” Officer Mason said and Officer Johnson perfunctorily agreed.

The night that night was a cold one, even for the season, which was a cold season. They were near the river, the very river his aunt had disappeared next to so many years earlier, if Officer Mason’s memory was to be believed. “I’ve run into a lot of transients down here. A lot of trash cans in flames. Not the Grabber, though. Not yet. We don’t know how many transients might have been grabbed. Too hard to keep track of them.” Officer Mason was waxing nostalgic. He rarely had an audience to whom he could present his inner monologue, one he’d rehearsed for years inside of his own mind.

Then Officer Mason went off script, knelt and plucked at the ground with his thumb and index finger. He brought it up to eye level. “Dirt indentation, freshly grabbed. You can tell by the finger marks, long and thicker than normal fingers, but this is the Grabber, no question. Couldn’t be anything else. I’ll tell you one thing. The Grabber sure is strong to grab dirt like that so easily. Frozen solid, this dirt.”

Officer Mason wiped his hand off on his coat as he stood. He turned to Officer Johnson, who was gone. He searched around, calling out to Officer Johnson. A transient appeared, poking his head up from some trash and overgrowth. He didn’t stand, remained clinging to the ground on all fours, and asked if Officer Mason were talking to him? “No,” Officer Mason said. “I’m calling for a friend who’s gotta be here somewhere. Unless the Grabber got him, grabbed him away.”

“They call me the Grabber, some of the times. Because I like to drink,” the transient said. “I get grabby.”

“Probably not as grabby as the Grabber, though,” Officer Mason said.

The transient said he hadn’t drank that much this evening, so it was impossible for him to be sure. He apologized to Officer Mason for not being sure. He asked if maybe Officer Mason would buy him a drink, maybe that drink would be the one to help him remember. Drinks jogged his memory on occasion, he claimed, although he was pretty sure this wasn’t true.

Officer Mason was too busy with worry to consider the transient’s ramblings. It could have helped, though, at least to have heard the man out. But it’s also understandable that Officer Mason, purposely or not, wasn’t listening. It’s probable that Officer Mason would have gone into the enchanted forest to pursue his partner even if he had been aware of the transient’s warning, that nobody ever returns from inside there, the forest that might be enchanted.

The transient shook his head, laughing a little in a knowing way. He then stood on his rusty metal legs and followed after Officer Mason, pulling his big hands and especially long fingers behind him. In the dark of the trees he didn’t look like a transient anymore. He looked like something else.

Officer Mason moved through the brush and found an exit to a place where the trees didn’t grow. It was a clearing, and he was soon taken with the glow of the orbs he found there, at the center. No, eggs, they were shaped like eggs, translucent eggs. He remembered the fairytale and began to understand what he’d come upon. The eggs the elf children harvested. It was then he realized that the Grabber was all around him. The Grabber hides in plain sight. The Grabber will never just go away, and if it must, it will step out of reality and back into fiction where it cannot be believed in, not seriously. Except by men like Officer Mason, evidently, who will pursue it to the very end of the earth and, as evidenced by his present circumstances, beyond.

Hands that grab to harvest innocence. That much was fact. The question was why? Wasn’t it? Strong things take innocent things because they’re the easiest things to take. That was a sound answer. It made sense. It explained the motive. But really, the Grabber could take anything.

“Where do you take them, Grabber? Where’s Officer Johnson?” Officer Mason growled, removing his gun and firing it into the air. He was aware of how little effect it was likely to have on a paranormal being like the Grabber. He could at least use it to punctuate his questions properly.

Out stumbled Officer Johnson, as if on cue. “Officer Mason, you won’t believe this, but I’m going to tell you: I never existed, not really. Not as anything other than a part of you.” Officer Johnson said. “I’m with the Grabber now. Here to tell you to stay away. Stop searching for certain truths.”

“I don’t believe it, any of it. The Grabber has you in a trance. I’m getting you out of here now,” Officer Mason said, very determined still.

“No,” Officer Johnson shook his head. “The Grabber doesn’t want you. You’re what’s left. You’re the vileness that’s left, and you know it. You’re what children ought to fear. A monster. You’re the part that remembers what really happened to our aunt, when we were split. When you threw a rock and didn’t tell anyone. When they found the body later, and it was too late. You’re one who grabs, too stale and blackened for anything else. Take an egg, if you please. But leave this place.”

Officer Mason wanted to respond, even though he realized what had been said was true. The pictures of his memory returned in great clarity. Officer Johnson was surrounded by the hands of the Grabber, giant and strong. He screamed and was vanished, taken to wherever the Grabber took things.

Officer Mason no longer had his other half, his brother, to protect him. But he had tried to save his brother. He was pretty sure he wasn’t a monster. He just had a monster inside him. There had to be something he could still do.

The next day Officer Mason arrived at the first school he was to teach the next WAATCH-IT lesson at, and he had an important one this day. “The only thing you have to WAATCH-IT for is the Grabber, kids.” (He’d been warned to stop mentioning the Grabber, but he knew that was what the Grabber wanted and he wouldn’t allow it.) “This is an egg from the elves’ egg patch. The eggs are laid by elves, then the eggs are harvested from the patch. And so they cannibalize their younger generations. I learned this recently. Very few elf elders are innocent. Most know the awful truth behind this practice but take part in it anyway. But even among the ones that actively participate, not all elves are bad! And you’ll find this in the world of people, too. The only thing you can do is be true to yourself, and get rid of the inner Grabber, by grabbing.

“Like this,” he said.

Officer Mason reached into the back of his mouth. His throat widened, looking from the outside like a rubber sack. The children watched in stunned silence, their teacher fainting. Officer Mason pulled and pulled, until finally, out came two really enormous hands, right out of his mouth with more of something else right behind them.