So they took to the streets, to the foot-beaten paths, to the unmarked trails and abandoned in-roads. They shimmied over playgrounds and sprinted down dust-encrusted corridors of the library. Lim had to ask the librarians not to refer to him by name in front of the others.

Darkness came quickly.

The moon was full, silver, and close.

The children crept across the twilight world, their steps echoing against the blackened houses. The snow caught the moonlight and reflected it back, covering the ground in a pale glow.

Soon they reached Lim’s house and hurried across his lawn.

He paused for a moment to look into his bedroom window. His room was dark and empty.

He felt strange, wrong. Like a thief in his own life.

‘Maybe I’m not me,’ he thought. The midnight feeling of unreality had swept over him, caught him up in a wave of imagining. ‘Maybe the real Lim is still somewhere in this house, doing the usual things that make up his usual life. And I’m a mistake. I’m a dream of a life that was too odd, too good, to ever really be real. I’m the Lim that never was and never can be.’

His friends called to him from the mouth of the forest. Their figures were small and bright against the titanic black of the sleeping trees.

Lim jogged after them.

‘If I’m a dream, then so be it,’ he decided. ‘It’s a fine thing, this dream-life. A fine thing indeed.’

The sky was even stranger when he saw it up close.

He flapped his frost-tipped wings, needing the extra boost in the heavy, frozen air. The stars were so clear and so full that he felt as if he could pluck them from the sky and store them under his bed in a shoe box. Bright beams of light radiated out from the moon, re-making the world as something strange and dream-remembered.

‘I’ve been here before,’ Lim thought, ‘but everything is completely different. How can one place be two totally different things?’

Beneath the moon all was silent, all was still.

The bat-creature began to flap towards the others.

A dragon and an ogre were waiting on the front lawn of Chowdah’s house when Lim touched down. The ogre had a tree trunk over one shoulder.

“Lim! Look! I can smash the thing with this! Like WHAM! and CRASH! and SMASH!”

“Uh, nice job, Grub. But how are you going to get it through her window?”

The ogre thought this over.

“Oh well,” he said, and let the trunk roll off his shoulder onto the ground.

“You guys ready?” Melissa hissed with her forked tongue.

They nodded.

“Let’s get this done.”

Chowdah’s house had just the one floor, so finding her room was simple. The moonlight revealed a small bed with a small lump located at dead center beneath the blankets. Every inch of floor was taken up by broken pieces of plastic toys. The Barbies in particular had been singled out for dismemberment and destruction.

The window was already unlocked. The trio climbed in as quietly as they could.

WHAM!

CRASH!

SMASH!

In the annals of baseball, few things hold a place of reverence as high as an authentic Louisville slugger. To observe, to hold, to use in a baseball game, to admire, these are activities which express the treasured position that an authentic Louisville slugger holds in the American mindset. It is a wonderful, lovely thing, is a baseball bat.

That is, of course, unless it is being swung mightily in the direction of your chest and/or head.

The bat got Lim in the head, Grub in the chest, and was taking a line-drive arc towards Melissa’s face before she snagged it in her claws.

Melissa yanked the bat up and its wielder came with it.

Chowdah’s little legs kicked at the air as she left the floor. She stopped tugging at the bat for a moment and saw the intruders for the first time.

“Oh!” she said, and released the bat. The rage-strength had vanished as though it had never existed. She switched on her lamp. “Hi guys! Melissa, I love your scales.”

Both Lim and The Grub could do little more than roll on the ground, groaning in pain.

“Oh,” Chowdah said, “are you guys OK?”

“Yeah, Chow, we’re great,” snarled Grub.

“Really? ’Cause you just got hit by a baseball bat.”

“Yeah, we noticed.”

“It seems like that should hurt.”

“It did!” roared The Grub.

Chowdah blinked. “OK, I’m missing something.”

“Chowdah,” Melissa said, cutting the conversation off, “Chowdah, we came here to take care of the thing under your bed.”

“You…you did?”

They nodded.

Her smile was slow to start. It grew, tiny bit by tiny bit, until the girl seemed close to exploding with joy.

“You did!”

And she did her best to wrap her arms around all three of them, a feat that would have been difficult enough for her even without the current monstrous features of her friends.

“Alright, Chowdah, back off just a little, will you?” Melissa shooed the girl into a corner. “OK, you stay there while we get this done.”

“How exactly do you think we should go about doing that?” Lim asked. He rubbed his chest in pain.

“Why don’t…why don’t you two get on either side of the bed.”

They did so.

“And each of you grab a side.”

They did so.

“And when I say ‘Go’, you lift up the bed and I’ll blast this thing with my dragon fire.”

“And you wouldn’t let me use grenades,” accused Chowdah.

“Grenades were an option?” Grub was outraged.

“No. And Chowdah, this is different.”

“How?”

“For one thing, you didn’t actually have any grenades. But you do have a dragon, which means you have dragon fire.”

We could’ve made-”

“And second,” she plowed through, “second, there’s no controlling something like a grenade. My fire-breath only burns up what I want it to.”

“Says who?”

“Says…says…says FACTS, that’s who.”

“Oh, like those count for all that much.”

“Chowdah, stand in that corner quietly while we destroy the horrible monster. Now, are you boys ready? When I say ‘Go’-”

“Are you going to do a countdown to saying ‘Go’?” asked The Grub.

“Do you need one?”

“No.

“…OK then. I say ‘Go’, you two lift bed, I kill thing, we go home. Sound alright?”

“Alright!” they chorused.

Everyone in the room paused for a final moment. Deep breaths were drawn. Chowdah pushed deeper into the corner.

Melissa inhaled once, twice, and then she was ready. She said, “Go!”

Up went the bed.

Before moving onwards to the concluding movement of this particular bend in the road, there are two important facts that must be established.

The first important fact is that, unlike the other creatures which we have and will encounter, the Lurkers have no fixed physical form. They are not tall, but neither are they small. They are neither thin nor thick. They move like shades, flicking from one spot just out of the corner to another. Depending on how much or how little they have recently eaten, they can press their bodies so small and so tight as to slip through a needle, only to then expand until they encompass your entire room or your entire house.

When enough fear is in the air, there is no limit to how big a Lurker can become. There are abandoned towns all across the globe where only stepping over the boundary-line is enough to send a chill hurtling down your spine. These are the places where the Lurkers have swallowed up every house and street corner, the places where they make their nests and lie in wait for some fresh meat that they might share with their hatchlings.

The second important fact about Lurkers is that they are fire proof.

The bed went up as intended.

The fire was lit and spewed as planned.

And right after that, things went wrong.

The green fire struck the creature dead-center, and for a moment the children thought their triumph was near at hand. Then the room was filled with a colossal sucking sound and the flames spun into a vortex, pulled into the dark space that was the Lurker.

Melissa put the rest of her strength into a final, mighty burst and then could stand no more. She sputtered out.

The dark mass quivered.

The shadow tensed. A thousand red veins of flame pulsed over the outline in a lattice work pattern. The flames submerged into the dark.

A small flap opened up, revealing a mouth full of crooked teeth of irregular length and angle.

It began to giggle. The creature launched itself around the room, pausing for only a second after landing before darting off to another spot.

“Get it!” they cried and the three monsters went after the hideous thing.

But it would not stand still. It would not stop giggling.

Suddenly the Lurker darted forward and began to smack and slap and punch and hurl the children across the room.

And all the while it was giggling.

It yanked Melissa’s tail and stomped Lim’s toes and poked The Grub’s eyes. They cried and gnashed and tried to strike back but the shade contorted around their fists and danced a merry step to just beyond their reach.

The giggle was the sound of two sheets of rusty metal scraping against each other.

Anger soon gave way to exhaustion which then gave way to desperation. The harder it was to move, the faster the Lurker went. The more unbearable the pain, the harder it hit.

Grub cried out as the Lurker sprang forward and grasped him by the ears.

CRASH!

It head-butted him right between the eyes. Grub collapsed to the floor.

The Lurker spun to face the other two as they cowered away. Its smile grew wider and the giggle was just beginning to resurge when-

“No more.”

It faltered. There was a flash of confusion.

Her voice was unsteady. The bat shook in her hands.

“No more,” the little girl said.

The Lurker hissed. It furrowed, turning its body into a spiked hide of a million black needles.

Chowdah swung the bat. The Lurker howled in pain. She swung again and again. With each swing, the Lurker screeched and moaned. It flitted about the room in a state of panic. It bristled up and clawed at the air, but none of it deterred the little girl as she kept swinging the bat.

She never actually connected. The bat never so much as scraped the freak’s skin. But still. The Lurker recoiled in fear, unsure of what to make of this frail-seeming girl who no longer gave off even the slightest whiff of fear.

The Lurker mis-stepped. It tripped over a rolling Barbie head and went tumbling end-over-end before crashing into the corner of the bedroom.

Chowdah began to laugh. It started as a small chuckle, but it grew and grew until it had overtaken her entire body and it was all she could do not to collapse to the floor with the laughter. The bat fell limp from her hands.

It was a strange sight: a small girl standing in a ruined bedroom, laughing harder than she ever had before, while meanwhile her boogeyman curled up in the corner and a crowd of other monsters watched, befuddled.

Pained grins morphed into broad smiles and soon the laughter had them as well and all the children were barking with the joy of it.

The Lurker pressed closer and closer into the corner. Each fresh wave of happiness cut it just that little extra bit, shrink away even more. It lashed out, forming a phantom-claw and swiping at the air with it.

The swing was mis-judged, and so all it succeeded in doing was spin in a complete circle and then slam, mouth first, into the same corner.

The children laughed so hard they fell to the floor.

The Lurker shrank. Soon it was no bigger than a child, then a dog, and still it shrank until it was little more than a skittering bug. With a tiny, high-pitched whine, the bug popped into nothingness.

Chowdah surveyed the blasted remnants of her bedroom.

“Well,” she said, “that went OK!”

“Chowdah!” Lim picked her up and hugged her. She was small and she was alive and she gave him a hug right back. “How did you know to do that?”

“Do what?”

“That. Getting rid of it by standing up to it and laughing and all that. How did you know that that would work?”

Chowdah seemed confused. “I don’t know. I just saw it being mean to my friends and then all of a sudden I wasn’t scared of it anymore. I was just angry at it. And then it fell over on one of my Barbies,” she said. “That was funny! Did you see? Hey, can you guys put my bed back? It’s past my bedtime and I should be asleep.”

“So, how’d it go?” Derek asked.

Everyone was back where they belonged. Lim watched his bat-monster fly away, the silver dollar moon wrapping the creature in light until it dwindled out of his vision.

They explained it as best they could while they struggled to get out of the woods unharmed. Clark in particular seemed to jump at every broken tree branch.

None of the others heard him mutter, “This is where they wait. Where they hunt.”

They cleared the forest. The feeling of accomplishment, of a job well-done, was wonderful to feel on that cold winter night. Up until the cold winter night aspect began to assert itself and they realized that they had nowhere to go.

A quick phone call was placed to Chowdah. She promised to keep the window unlocked and to not hit them with the bat this time.

The children stole across the sleeping town.

For the second time that night, Lim climbed up into Chowdah’s bedroom window. It was more difficult now that he was himself.

Chowdah nearly dislodged his head with the bat, but they soon got it away from her and she calmed down.

Melissa was permitted into the bed with Chowdah, while the boys found comfortable spots on the floor to let themselves drop.

And there in Chowdah’s room, together, they slept.

Probably Sort-of Safe

Written by Brendan Foley