In truth she had remembered him. He was her old soccer coach that didn’t get along with her mom. What she couldn’t understand was why his face had appeared in her recurring dream. No one else had ever been there before. Just her and her mom holding each other while her mom whispered those words. “Let mommy make it all better.” She wondered for the hundredth time why words that should have been soothing made her feel the pressure of the black vines reaching around her throat and chest. Usually that’s when she’d wake, gasping and crawling at her neck for air.
Instead of her nightmare ending there, her vision had gone black and she had reappeared in the bathtub. Then the monster, with long black tentacles for hands, had appeared in the doorway wearing her old soccer coaches face, and he was weeping.