I, Monster

by John Spudich

I come out, growing, oozing, turning, expanding, crawling out from the walls of a mote of dust. The mote is one of a grey million under the bed, there in a forgotten carpeted field of old neglected toys. Stacks of board games, primary colors and bubbled fonts, washed out pictures of laughing families throwing dice. There is a red rubber ball that has rolled under long ago and come to the end of its trail of play. A green soldier wriggles next to it through the carpet threads, rifle pointed at the dim. A single card (an excommunicated jack of spades), a kaleidoscope, a snow globe that entombs a sleepy cabin. And some plastic dinosaur left to tar in the shadows. Then there is me, growing from the mote which is my doorway from the place where I am made of light.

But on this plane, I am grey and oily, multi-jointed, warted and horrible. Jagged yellow teeth, huge frog-fat gullet. My single giant prismatic eye furious as a supernova.

I hear the little boy’s quick intake of breath as he catches the hot stink of the predator. I listen upwards with an ear of bubbled flesh at his body where he lies, hardly daring to rustle in his sheets. I reach up with bladed fingers and scrape lightly at the underside of his mattress.

Suddenly, the little boy calls out with a plaintive wail. He calls and calls and, a little later, an older bigger one enters, swift and sure. The roof creaks and depresses above me as he sits down on the edge of the bed. His brown shaggy slippers come to rest in front of my great eye. Vulnerable, the blue tracery of a vein in the hollow just beneath the bony knob. I watch the beat of blood, the little bump of life. He speaks now to the little one. He uses the thought technologies of his world to deny my very existence. He unveils his sonic sheaves of formulae to wrap the fear, to wrap it tight where it trembles.

I can easily at any moment grab his ankles and pull him under, into my rank darkness and my maw, but he is like what his world would call a mummy. All wrapped in his civilization’s answers and desiccated of its questions. The little boy instead is tender and new, and running through the circuit of his system is the delicious stuff of wonder.

I come from an old culture that has survived the rise and fall of many kingdoms on many worlds. We were meat in our dim past, then meat and metal, then wholly metal. And in a great leap forward, we translated. In our energetic forms now, we float the black, swirled and shimmering, intermingling our white light appendages. We converse, or it’s not quite that, but we do cross-create. And yet what we create are endless permutations of what is already there.

The irony is our immortality has locked in a deadness. We have survived by coming to the end of questions. Yet we still hunger, and so seek the succulent things, across many dimensions and many worlds: young blood to revitalize our great and insular sets of known entities.

The big one makes some soothing music. Round murmurs and mellifluous susurrations that aim to guide the child to torpor. The little one cannot be soothed, he makes a high crystalline plea, but only the soporific music answers. And then the big one, immune to the emergency, stands and strides away, flipping off the light. The boy and I are now in darkness, and we both know we are only two.

It is not my choice to come into their world looking like this. My energetic body when translated to this dimension is filtered through their fears and expectations. And I must abide the rules they have imagined while I navigate within this strange meat form. I cannot grab the boy while he lies in bed. I will have to wait until his pale feet tentatively touch the floor. Or maybe a beautiful hand of rose will drop in his hot sleep over the side, and I can hook him and pull him down into the shadows. And feed upon his juvenile mind.

The household will never know where he has gone to, they will find no signs. And his final view will be of the toy graveyard under his bed. Maybe he’ll see on the side of a box the fading image of a happy family, some perfect grandpa and a gleeful clapping child, sitting at a table in a frozen moment of ecstasy and creation.