Night Predator

You're a monster under the bed. Everyone in the house is asleep. You just heard someone break in.

Author Preface: I subscribe to the r/WritingPrompts subreddit, largely just to read some of the interesting prompts and the equally interesting responses people compose from it. I saw this one the other day, and something just came to me. Not quite keeping with the prompt, but that's how the writing process works sometimes. Story below the break.

I don't look like you'd expect. But I do look exactly how you fear.

That's how it works for my kind. Dear sweet Lisa, whose father read him Lewis Carroll at a formative age, looked into eyes of flame and saw jaws that bite and claws that catch. Little Jimmy's older brother let him watch the Walking Dead, and when he peeked under his bed, saw a rotten corpse dragging itself toward him with a gaping hungry maw.

I've fed well off the fear of children for ages.

But with any child, there comes a time when the fear they feed me no longer sustains me. So then I must away and find a new shadow in which to dwell, and a new child to sup from.

Like Davey. He's at that boundary point where he's not quite awake, but not yet asleep, just the right place for his imaginative young mind to conjure up the images that give me form. I let limbs thunk beneath him, hollow and rigid like wood. I reach a hand up just under the edge of the bed frame and drum fingertips there. I scratch my voice into a tinny whisper, "Want to play, Davey...?"

I can hear his breath quickening, his heart beginning to race. This will be a good meal.

The footstep from the hallway draws both of our attention, and I smell his fear change, and so to, do I. A glance into the full-length mirror on the closet door shows me what shape I have taken. Remarkably mundane, just like...

I feed off the fear born of imagination. It is the sweetest, the most nourishing. The shapes and figures you see with your mind are always worse than whatever you see with your eyes.

Davey imagines dolls and mannequins lurking in the shadows, waiting to whisk him away and turn him into one of them, and stop being a real boy. But what he sees coming up to his actual doorway is something he dreads.

I can see him in the mirror. He doesn't see me, as he is looking at the man in the doorway, who stands there with a different sort of hunger in his eyes, and with a different scratch to his voice as he asks, "Want to play, Davey?"

The fear is soured now. Rotten and unfulfilling. I leave to seek a meal somewhere else, melting into the shadows as Davey quietly sobs.

Call me a predator all you want. But I'm not a monster.