<pre style="line-height: normal; text-align: start; word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">No one believed him that the monsters were real. His uncle grew frustrated and impatient with the nighttime fears the boy should long have outgrown. His aunt was more sympathetic and well-intentioned, but she dismissed them as being merely nightmares.
Only he knew that, at night, the truths always revealed themselves.
After the lights went out and all was dark, the silence of his room was broken by quiet scratching and moans. He covered his ears against the screeches, but they grew louder and louder until they filled the air, and he could feel them even in his lungs.
Then, when a scream threatened to burst forth from his throat, and he could bear it no longer, there was silence. Not one sound. It was the same disquieting nothingness as in a forest filled with animals that sensed a new predator.
The monsters were still, but he knew they were there.
He uncapped his ears and glanced at his little sister, asleep in the bed next to his. Quiet and undisturbed, she’d slept through it all. He envied her peaceful slumber; she always looked like an angel.
Then, there was another noise. Whispers. “She’s coming,” they said. “She’s coming. She’s coming.”
There was a sudden scurrying of claws, a mass exodus of creatures retreating beneath his bed and back into the world from whence they came.
There was but a moment of silence before a delicate fissure appeared in his wall, dividing it evenly down the middle. The wall began to split but did not break.
It unzipped.
A soft mist escaped the seam, illumined by the pale light that leaked into his room. Then, the crack parted, and a stunning woman stepped through.
She was draped, head to toe, in long, ebony robes, and her tall, sculpted headdress cascaded in a waterfall of fabric down her back. Her skin was powdered geisha white, and the narrow folds of her dark eyes were accentuated with black, feathered lashes. Her lips were painted with the darkest rouge, her teeth a shiny and stylish black.
She was beautiful.
He sat up in bed as she began to glide across the room. “My boy,” she said. “My boy. Did I frighten you?”
He froze in place, neither speaking nor giving any indication of thought, his only movements from his eyes.
“Yes, I can sense it. You are a fearful child. That is why the creatures come,” she said, smiling. “I followed them to you. Now, they are gone, but, still, you are afraid.”
He nodded softly.
“Are you afraid of me, boy?”
Her intoxicating loveliness drew him in, transfixed him. “Yes,” he said, quietly.
“Yes,” she said.
Then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
She rose into the air and began to float towards him, pausing to hover above his sister’s bed. There flashed upon her face, for a moment, what could just have easily been a snarl as a smile.
He could not tell.
She returned her attention to him, descending in a graceful sweep until she stood at the foot of his bed. “Tell me your fears, boy,” she said. “Tell them to me, and I shall take them from you.”
“I-” he began. “I am afraid of the monsters.”
“Good,” she cooed. The scratches began again from under the bed, along with quiet whimpers of pain. “As well you should be. Those creatures are dangerous things.”
