Single mom Selina Sardi would do anything for her 6-year-old son. Eager to turn their new house into a real home for him, she's devastated when she discovers that the monster under his bed is not a figment of his imagination but the real deal.
Elia...
Author's note: originally, there was a picture of a snake in this header, but it freaked me out too much. For my own sanity, I had to censor it. Hey, I'm not as tough as Selina Sardi, sorry 🤷♀️ So, I'm going to leave the beasties up to my words and your imagination. After all, beauty or horror, it is all in the eye—or mind—of the beholder, mwahaha.
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She had forgotten how much she hated snakes, but as the creature slithered under her bedsheets, the sensation of an invisible fist closing around her throat nearly crippled her. Nearly.
With great effort and survival instinct kicking in, she managed to push up on her hands and scoot back across the bed, away from the twisting body which was one, no two, no three snakes? She desperately searched for heads as if that would make it better, as if locating the heads would make her apt to survive a multiple serpent attack. In any case, it would be a fucking start. Where were the fucking heads?
As she neared the other side of the bed, another snake plopped over the side and another one on the foot end. The snakes were coming at her from all sides. There was nowhere left to go.
"Mom?"
The room careened and in the beam of moonlight coming down from the skylight as from a spaceship in a sci-fi movie stood Lowie. No, no, no... This could not be happening. Lowie could not be here. Coils of snakes dotted the space between her and her boy.
Adrenaline surged through the blockage of her throat and she crawled up on all fours, desperate to ignore her own peril for the sake of her child. She scrambled across the bed, trying to avoid the coiling bodies as much as she could, but they got to her anyway, scales glimmering silver brown and fluorescent green in the night.
"Mom?" Lowie squealed. An all yellow boa constrictor had reached his feet and circled around him while rearing its ugly head at her.
"No!" She screamed, held down to the bed by hissing bodies snaking around her wrists and legs, the sensation of their skin rubbing hers not slippery as she had expected but gruff and deadly cold. The fist around her neck pressed tighter.
The snake around Lowie whirled higher and tighter, its gaze now transfixed on Lowie's, paralyzing him with its lethal magic. The fear in Lowie's eyes overwhelmed her. The coiling body reached Lowie's chest and wound tighter till the boy gasped. His breath hitched. Again and again, longer this time, too long. Lowie was going to die.
"Nooooooo!" Again, she tried to reach him, but the snakes snagged her down by the wrists. Fangs cut through the thin skin of the insides of her arms and sharp stings assaulted her shins and ankles. Venom trickled up her bloodstream, hot and tantalizing like electric shocks, but it was Lowie's terror-stricken face that hurt her the most.
"Mom?"
The constrictor had now reached his neck. All that was left free, was his face, but that too was being gobbled up rapidly, his beautiful tanned face and his floppy golden curls, her golden boy and his petrified eyes screaming at her, "Make it stop!"
