Trust me when I say I didn’t want to. I really, really didn’t want to. But you see, I had to after I breached the orphanage’s defenses. Once inside, there was no turning back for me. I shut the window behind me. I skulked through the halls like a phantom.
     One with the shadows, my presence was undetected.. save for the panicked beating of my heart.
     I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always a monster. My life on the streets wasn’t always the best, but I made my way. Some might have considered me a pest. Some, just another nondescript beggar.
     But no matter how I paved my way through life, I never considered myself a monster.
     Never. Not until now.
     Surrounded by children. Sweet, delectable little children. Harmless children. Easy prey. Sleeping so soundly in their beds.
     Untouched by the taint of the world; so blissfully unaware of their demise.
     I wondered, as I placed my hand around the cold steel knob to their bedroom door: did they frolic, how I once frolicked, through magical gumdrop kingdoms with chocolate money and candy cane skies? Did they marvel in the sun’s golden warmth the way that I once marveled in its golden glow?
     Surely, their world was a brighter world. I wanted to believe their world was considerably brighter, whether in dream or in reality.
     I wanted to believe that they would never reach out with broken fingertips to a darkened sky and feel disconnected the way that I did every night thereon upon my awful becoming. I wanted so badly to believe that the stars would never be out of their reach the way that they were ripped from mine--my dreams, just a tragic memory, buried forevermore with the ashes of my name.
     The world I lived in now was a hollowed world. A gray void ruled by a harsh white noise. A noise that crushed constantly at my sanity, warped my humanity--where ironically enough, that particular white noise convinced me in my darkest that I wanted to wallow in this proverbial nightmare forever.
     A broken world where all the tiny pieces never seemed to fit anymore.
     Such a monster, was I.
     And yet, I still tried to make sense of things. Though I can’t believe I ever had a reason to begin to try.
     No, it was just in my nature that I would steal their dreams the way that my dreams were stolen from me. I would take their lives, as surely, my life was taken from me. For this is what I had become. This is what I was.
     And at the apex of my terrible choices, there I stood. Frozen. Numb. Dead. Children amidst dozens of four-poster beds--such torment, and yet, delectable little meals beneath each cover--all for the taking.
     Hovering over one bed in particular, I anxiously revealed my first victim of the night.
     As if a tiny porcelain doll, she had curling, bleached hair, a buttoned nose, and petal-soft lips that, had I been able to talk to her as a friend in life, she would have only whispered such sweet things to me.
     I wanted so badly to trace her lips with my thumb, to kiss her cheek and tell her how sorry I was for what I was about to do. But I knew all too well that if I did, the dreams she delighted in would end in a scream loud enough to wake the dead.
     I must have made a noise despite myself, some sort of halfhearted laugh, because it was not long thereafter that I watched those dreamy lips come to life.
     “You speak to me?” I said. But all I could hear was that deafening white noise. My vision clouded and her angelic face was lost to me. Just another faded image to float ceaselessly on that proverbial edge of time.
     “Boogieman!” she shrieked, to which I immediately placed my trembling hand to her throat. How it pained me to have to touch her this way.
     “No, darling, just a devil passing through,” I humbly whispered, and she looked at me with such an earnest gaze. Even in the dark, I could see the color of her eyes. Burning. Piercing. Blue. Just blue..
     “Sir,” she strained to say, “devil’s do not cry.”
     Before tonight, I thought I had proven to myself otherwise.
     “I am afraid, my dear, that this one does.”
     Every night of my undead life.