Probably Sort-of Safe

The story so far:

Chapter 1: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-126ea5d30926#.adn6rnua1

Chapter 2: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-953fdf006e2b#.8ajf8763d

Chapter 3: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-beba9889c810#.8h84bodwq

Chapter 4: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-f650f93955c5#.4toslzdxn

Chapter 5: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-38f373218b40#.i332clgw0

Chapter 6: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-1c985512552d#.ivgspvn6i

Chapter 7: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-d813bce6c813#.6o1m73xwi

Chapter 8: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-9ad3fdd9f772#.ku04dket6

Chapter 9: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/the-story-so-far-b4ab0b7aa69c#.hnsqx2lhm

Chapter 10: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-a2ed39b7cccb#.h6tspayyy

And now…Chapter 11

The Thing under Chowdah’s Bed

It should go without saying by this point that there are many kinds of monsters. Not just in size and shape, but in temper and intelligence.

Some were like the creatures which packed Lim’s room each night. They may have been freakish, and they may have been scary but they were in no way malicious or cruel. They simply did the duty that had been set before them, and did so in a professional manner.

Then there were the wild monsters which Lim and his friends had been swapping with. Being wild gave them certain troubling characteristics. Were they were dangerous? Yes. And violent? Oh quite. But they were not wicked. They lived as they had been made to live and caused no more or less harm than nature allowed.

But then there was the third kind of creature. Some ancient writings have referred to these beasts as “Lurkers”. Other sects and cults have created other names over the years, but “Lurkers” should do fine. These monsters, you see, were every bit as vicious and wild as the second type, and with all the intelligence of the first.

Lurkers crept in the windows of sleeping children and made nests beneath beds and in closets. Their appetite was for fear and misery, which they would extract little by little, night by night. A monster of this type, with a reliable source of food, could stay planted in one bedroom for years.

Every night the poor child would feel a slight chill, followed by a gust of musty air. In the dark, all sound in the room would be amplified, but divorced from their true meaning. A closet door’s creak was the waking groan of a monster, and every slip of breeze that passed was a whisper of ill-intent. And every quake and shiver and desperate thought poured into the hungry Lurker.

It was a miserable, lonely thing to have such a monster in your life.

Chowdah had such a monster in her life.

Her friends spotted it not long after the Lurker had set up residence beneath her bed. Circles began to appear beneath her eyes, and the small girl seemed to shrink even further into her baggy winter clothing.

The boys watched from across the playground as Melissa spoke with Chowdah. Melissa held Chow’s hands in her own while the smaller girl spoke with increasing speed and emotion.

“Should we…do we…?” Lim began.

“Bad idea,” said Clark. “Mostly we let Melissa take care of Chowdah’s, uh, emotional moments. Girls, you know?”

Lim could see the logic in this. He tried to imagine what he could have possibly said to a crying girl to make her stop. He came up blank.

An awful thought struck him.

“What do we do when Melissa has an emotional moment?”

The apocalypse, when it arrives, will be announced by the same cacophonous silence which greeted this idea.

Over on the other side of the playground, Melissa sat quietly while Chowdah vented all of her fears and frustrations. When she was done and had wiped her eyes, Melissa decided it was time to speak.

She said, “How can we help?”

“I don’t know,” said Chowdah, miserable. “What can anyone do? It’s not like we can just throw a grenade under my bed.” Her eyes widened. “Unless-”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“For starters, we don’t have any grenades.”

“Like it’d be that hard to get one.”

“For two, if we threw a grenade under your bed, your bed would be destroyed. Not to mention all your sheets.”

“But this is the week when Mommy lets me use all the Princess ones!”

“Exactly.”

“Fine,” came the sullen response. “No explosives. Ruin all my good ideas.”

Later, Melissa informed the boys about what was happening.

“So what do we do?” they asked.

“What can we do?” replied Melissa.

They split up from school, all of them deep in contemplation.

Lim took the question to his monsters. An ominous mood formed when they heard about the Lurker.

“Probably it sensed all the strangeness you lot have been up to,” said The Green Un-Death, “and latched on to that poor little girl. Lurkers tend to be drawn towards people what are encountering strangeness and uncertainty.”

“Nasty, ugly things,” said the dripping skeleton.

“What do they look like?” Lim inquired.

“No one knows,” admitted the skeleton. “But still, how ugly does something have to be to never ever show its face?”

“I say,” protested a Dread Owl, “that is a most unfair line of reason. Perhaps the fellow under the bed is only shy? What with people going around calling it ‘ugly’ without any proof, you can imagine a sensitive sort deciding to hide away.”

“Do you think it might be reasonable enough for us to convince it to leave without a fight?” Lim asked hopefully.

“Oh no,” said the owl.

“No chance.”

“You’ll have to kill it.”

“Like…with fire.”

Lim reported back to his friends.

Chowdah’s misery grew worse and worse. It began to infect the others.When they saw her, saw that an extra bit of sickness had snuck into her system or that she had grown just that tiny smidge smaller, it was enough to make the taste of sweet food die on their tongues and place a knife-blade of cold into even the warmest air.

“Let’s use the door,” someone suggested, at long last.

“Yeah!” Grub said. “We can be, like, five huge monsters and, you know, give or take a monkey-freak that’d be enough to trounce any nasty thing under Chowdah’s bed. ’Cause, you know, there’d be more of us.”

“But-”

“Because five is, you know, more than one.”

“Bang-up math skills, Grub,” said Derek. “But it doesn’t work. We can’t have all of us running around with creature-brains in our, uh, brains. We’d need two people to stick around to tie the other up and throw our bodies back through the door if need be.”

“Not it!” yelled Grub.

“And it would have to be at night,” said Melissa. “Chowdah says that the thing under her bed hides in the morning and she doesn’t know where it goes. So we’d have to sneak out into the woods at night to get this done.”

“The woods,” muttered Clark, small enough that no one heard him, “the woods…at night…”

Derek thought it over. “It’s…doable,” he said. “If we did it on a weekend night, and we all told our parents we were staying over someone else’s house and then went to the door, we could get it done with no one knowing.”

Clark fidgeted in his seat.

“But…the woods…at night…I mean, we could get lost.”

“I can get us to the door and back again,” said Lim.

There must have been something extra in his voice, for no sooner did he finish speaking then every voice stopped and every head turned to regard him with curiosity. He felt the old shyness, which he had done so well in pretending away. He hung his head.

“If…if you want, that is, I mean.”

They immediately resumed planning. And Lim would have been willing to sit quietly and let the others do all the planning, never mentioning the other new skill he had developed. And situations might very well have progressed differently if he had remained silent. Certain tragedies may have been bypassed, others may have been caused. There can be no way of knowing which fate we are bound to until we are caught up in it.

But Derek noticed that Lim was being awfully silent.

Derek said, “I think Lim has something else to say, you guys.”

The others fell silent again. Blood rose to Lim’s cheeks.

“It’s just…I think…that, I mean…I may have found a way for us to choose what monsters we get switched over with.”

“You…you what?”

“You see the, the last couple of times that I’ve gone through, I’ve concentrated really hard on the bat-thing that I was on the first day. Like, focusing on remembering what it felt like to be that shape, that size, to be in the air and moving and all that. And the last couple of times, I’ve wound up being that creature. So that might, you know, come in handy at some point.”

They were gaping at him. Fires lit on the sides of his face. His brain began to load up the suitcase, plane tickets printed. He’d grow a mustache and start an ice cream company.

“That’s amazing,” said Melissa.

“R-really?”

“You’ll have to teach us,” said Derek. “When we get this done, you’ll have to teach us.”

“O…OK.”

“And since you can choose to be a monster that you know and are really comfortable with, you should probably be definitely on the ‘Kick Chowdah’s Monster’s Butt Team’. Now the only question is who’s going to go with?”

“I already called it,” said Grub.

“But you-”

“Look,” said Grub, and all were taken aback by the strength in his voice, “I know that I’m a weird, gross spaz. But I’m good at being a monster, no matter what size or shape. And this thing is hurting Chowdah.” He set his face. “Let me help.”

Lim did not say a word. He simply stuck out his hand. With visible relief, Grub shook.

“We can probably manage one more person-” Derek began.

“I’m going,” said Melissa.

“But you-”

Melissa stared.

Derek stopped.

“So, Friday night we do this? Get it over with?” Clark said, still clearly unhappy with the prospect of the woods at night.

“Friday night,” said the others.

TO BE CONTINUED