He was hungry. He was very
hungry. He was so HUNGRY.
The gnawing in his hunger-arm
was a physical pain and had been for some time, he could no longer remember the
last time he’d had a good meal, let alone been full.
The hunger drove him onward,
made it impossible to be still. Loud rumbles from his eating-hands filled the
air as he padded through the darkness of the Dust Bunny Caverns. The air was
heavy and still and reeked of unwashed socks, moldy breadcrumbs (which his
sub-species couldn’t digest), decomposing homework, and the acidic taint of
Atomic Jazz.
Around him his sound-gathering
arms detected the rustles of others of his kind, while his vibration-hairs
detected the soft currents of the subworld’s power grid, the magical energy
that filled his world and made the impossible probable. His seeing-hands could
see nothing now though, because he was too hungry to manipulate light.
Relentlessly he pushed on through the darkness on his walking-arms, searching,
searching for anything that might sustain him for just a little longer.
His skin-shedder no longer
believed in him or anything else that might come through a Door; he’d been
unable to gather sustenance in that way for a very long time now and he was
reduced to trolling through the
dregs of what drifted through Doors opened by others.
As he prowled through the
caverns, BedMonster 1137465893 left his own kind behind, far behind, and moved
into the unknown in his quest for food. This was a danger, for who knew what
lurked within the darkness of the underworld? Who knew what prowled and stalked
and waited for prey? But his kind were hunters, snatchers, and he knew no fear,
being the greatest of his kind… okay, so no one else might have thought he was the greatest, but heck, what did
they know?
BedMonster’s smelling-hands
caught a whiff of something different, something that smelled like fear, and he
was instantly alert. His prowling turned almost into a gallop as he climbed the
cavern wall, running towards a small dark opening high above he wasn’t sure he
was really even seeing. Reaching it, he entered into a low tunnel on his
stalking-hands and began probing ahead with his snatching-arms outstretched,
his long-corded muscles rippling, attesting to the power of his grip, the
expert finality of his snatch.
He’d found something like a Gate
into the Real, yet it was different. Too hungry to make his own light yet, he
nevertheless saw ahead of him a golden glow emanating from a Gate-like
disturbance of air. Gates did not normally glow... perhaps he should be worried
about that he thought suspiciously.
Too late.
As he approached the Gate-thing,
the golden glow suddenly turned dark red, a color that cried danger and the swirling pattern of
disturbance became faster, faster,
while the fear scent turned to one of triumph!
And then the light turned green.
*****
She’d friggin’ found it! Becca had exactly six and a
half minutes left to get dressed, pack her book bag, get to the bus stop, but
she’d found it. No way was she going
to high school without her cell.
“Get your ass moving!” her father bellowed from
downstairs.
Make-up had to be forgotten (damn), clothes (had she worn these
yesterday?) thrown on in abandon, algebra book dispensed with (she’d share
Carlie’s who’d hate that but toughola) and she flew. Passing her father pulling out of the driveway to take Normie
to daycare and himself to work, she raced toward the bus stop.
She missed it.
Shoot, shoot, shoot, she fumed. Rebecca Ann Westin you
are such an idiot! What do I do now?
She walked slowly back to the
empty house, defeated, entering its silence, weighing alternatives. She could
call her Dad (No!) or she could... just stay home? Who would know? That
mattered? She caught a glance of herself in the hall mirror and thought no one’ll probably even notice.
She was not pretty she knew, too
tall, too gangly, with way too curly boring brown hair that refused to do
anything sensible. One consolation, she had gotten rid of those godawful braces
last year. Her teeth were white and straight now and she was going to make darn
sure they stayed that way. (She loved her dentist. She hated her dentist.) Good
teeth or not though, even with her mother’s assurances that her blue eyes were
striking (even when she wore her glasses) and she was going to be beautiful, it hadn’t happened in sixteen years and she
had her doubts.
I can just spend the day at home she moped in resignation. Alone.
And then Becca heard a noise
upstairs.
*****
This is stupid, this is
STOO-PID, she chanted through gritted teeth as she pushed open her bedroom
door. The room was a mess of course (she being a teenager, Mom being away, and
Dad being, well, Dad) and anything could be hiding anywhere. She gripped her
mother’s old golf club and slowly entered the room.
A soft rustling and quiet
thumping came from under the bed, its unmade sheets dangling onto the floor
obscuring her view underneath.
Oh crap, she cringed, some
rabid, chittering, gibbering (or worse, salivating) thing is gonna shoot right
outta there and go straight for my ankles. I should call someone, but... I’m
skipping school, they’re not exactly gonna be sympathetic.
From as far away as she could
manage, Becca thrust out the club and gingerly lifted the fabric.
Okay, breathe now... get down on one knee and just look.
Nothing was there unless you
counted massive dust bunnies and small mounds of discarded pantyhose... oh, so that’s where those went.
And then... at the very back,
against the wall, something stirred. A hiss, something uncoiling in the
shadows.
“DON’T KILL ME!” Becca shrieked.
The hiss and the movement ceased abruptly, leaving her unsure whether she had
actually even heard them in the first place.
Then something moved, maybe
even... glittered?
There’s definitely something there, she decided grimly, it’s suspended off the floor and it’s
swaying in the breeze from the air vent. And you know there’s only one way
you’re gonna find out what that something is. I am so dead, I am so dead, I
am... stop that, you are a big girl.
Carefully, slowly, Becca slid
the golf club toward the glimmering darkness. The club met a soft resistance.
GIANT FREAKIN’ COBWEBS! FROM
GIANT FREAKIN’ SPIDERS!
Don’t be a moron.
Becca started swishing the club
back and forth and found herself getting angry.
Oh show yourself you—
Instantaneously a sparkle of
soft golden light appeared and whirled around Becca’s golf club. A sinewy arm
shot out of the faintly glittering light, sporting a purplish-gray six-fingered
hand that clamped down on the club and pulled. Becca screamed so loudly that
her vocal cords nearly ripped, and as she was yanked under the bed the thought
that ricocheted through her horror-struck brain was I’m gonna die FOR CUTTING SCHOOL?
Another followed dimly on its
heels: Does this mean I can skip the
lecture for not making my bed?
*****
The light enwrapped him, melding
against his body like a coating of paint, which was not normal for any usual
Gate, certainly nothing like a Door. It seeped along his hair coating his
hands, his arms, grasping him firmly, carrying him along. BedMonster sensed
fear, knew he approached prey, but that prey seemed oddly angered and confused
as well. He couldn’t process what was happening to him. A vague shape appeared
in the distance and BedMonster 1137465893 reached out to it, heard a scream, a
scream that vibrated throughout the small world that was his Gate-like
encompassment. He grasped that dark shape and pulled, felt it drag against the
palm of one of his snatching-hands trying to get away, trying to leave him
behind. He knew that would lead to his dissolution so immediately he twisted,
slowly birthing into a small dark space.
The scream echoed around him and
he reached out with all his senses, contacting the prey, bounding towards it
eagerly. He was under a bed, his natural striking place, and he knew exactly
what to do. He careened into the human, hands snaking around and grasping
firmly, finding all those places he liked to strike, and scooped up great
globules of his sustenance as the prey screamed and struggled beneath him. He
had not fed this well in years.
But something was wrong.
Something was very wrong.
It was Day, in the Real.
Bedmonsters didn’t do Day.
BedMonster whimpered and fled.
*****
The overlarge hand seemed
vaguely gorilla-like, gray-tinged, with purple embedded deeply in the tissue,
and six large fingers almost human but for their immense size and strength. The
hand clamped onto the golf club and pulled. Becca’s head and shoulders were
yanked under the bed as she screamed.
HELL NO I AM NOT GOING UNDER
THERE NO WAY! Slamming back on the club with all her might, Becca experienced a
weird tingle surge down the back of her spine, across her shoulders and into
her arms. The sensation streamed across her hands leaving a faint trace of heat
and a metallic taste in the back of her throat. Something seemed to undulate
down her arm, jump to the golf club, travel its shaft and flow into the golden
light under the bed. The light changed to green, an emerald color like deep
ocean, not a safe, soft green, but a dark, scary green, and a part of Becca’s
mind whispered green means go, green
means open.
Pulling hard, Becca struggled
backwards and managed to rock herself back onto her haunches. Without warning
the golf club was released and Becca found herself launched, flying across the
bedroom landing on her rump, hearing the ominous crunch of her cell phone in
her jeans pocket. And then the thing was upon her.
It was a ravenous beast, all
hands, hot moist breath, powerful arms, and fur, fur everywhere as it pressed
itself against her. Atop her. Pressing her down beneath its weight. It was rummaging she realized in stark
petrified terror, it was looking for that perfect place to grip and tear.
And then it was gone.
The beast retreated with a soft
cry, leaving Becca disheveled, trembling, but (to her bleak amazement) intact.
Under the bed something moved and the light faded. Whatever had pounced on her
was huddled under the foot of her bed trembling and whimpering. Becca squatted and edged nearer to gawp at the
creature.
The thing under Rebecca Ann
Westin’s bed was clearly some kind of animal; it had too many limbs (at least
eight she could see) and was furred, about the size of a large dog. For one
ridiculous moment Becca thought of her father’s Australian Terrier, Melvin, but
this is no dog. The beast had
orange-brown fur, oversized six-fingered hands ending in blunt fingernails
something like a man’s but much bigger, and most certainly much stronger. Becca
was sure the creature could have torn her to pieces if something hadn’t caused
its hasty retreat back under the bed.
Becca stared directly at the
monster’s eyes –it had two– both perfectly round, each rimmed in gold, but with
centers the exact same blue as her own set
into the palms of two hands!
BedMonster stared right back.
“What are you?” Becca croaked.
“What are you?” came the sneering response. Its voice was small, afraid,
somewhat human, but decidedly not.
“You talk!” As the thing had no
head, no clear front or back, this astonished Becca.
“Of course I talk! I’m a
bedmonster! Now what are you?” it
sniffled, its bravado seemed to be wavering, as if it were in pain.
“Bedmonster? As in nightmare-under-the-bed? But those are fairy
stories, ghosts and goblins!”
“Bedmonsters are nothing like fairies, and certainly not like any smelly old
goblin, and there are no such things as ghosts. Bedmonsters are the great
hunters, the stealthy snatchers, we go where others fear to tread!”
Becca wanted to point out that
the bedmonster was currently cowering and whimpering under her bed but that
seemed somewhat impolite so she said instead, “You speak English.”
“And modern Greek, some
provincial backwoods French, and Latin. Fluently. What’s your point?”
Now the thing was petulant.
“But what are you? I’m sorry, but I still don’t know what a bedmonster really
is.”
“A bedmonster obviously is the thing you fear in the
dark, the thing that creeps under your bed at night, so when you feel that
silent shift of air and know there is a malevolence beneath you, you lie still
and quiver and hope that my kind do not come for you.”
It sounded like it was quoting
something, or someone, else. “Now again, what are you?” the beast demanded.
“I’m... a girl. My name’s
Becca.”
The light about BedMonster
seemed to flicker just for a moment, almost in excitement, when Becca said her
name.
“Yessss,” it hissed. “You are. Well you are a nasty girl, a naughty girl, fearing me under your bed in Day, opening some weird-assed Gateish
thing, drawing me here. Don’t you know bedmonsters shrivel up and die in
sunlight?” The bedmonster now sounded aggrieved, and blinked its watery blue
eyes once.
“Me? I didn’t bring you here.” It was then that Becca noticed BedMonster
was slowly creeping toward her, staying well away from the slant of sunlight
streaming in from her mullioned window. “What do you eat?” she demanded
suspiciously.
“Human flesh. Specifically, when
I can get it, yours.”
“ME?!!”
“Not you, the stuff that sloughs
off you. Bedmonsters exist in an
asymptomatic-symbiotic relationship with people.”
A whatsit now?
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” a voice
demanded from behind Becca who jumped up so fast she actually whirled in
midair.
“Aunt Andrea!”
“What were you doing down
there?”
Becca was speechless, her eyes
darted back to the bed but its sheets were once again dangling onto the floor.
