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hwrnmnbsolI used to have terrible dreams and waking fantasies when I was a kid. They don’t happen to me nearly as much as an adult, but now my kids have them.
Michael woke up. He didn’t know why he had woken up; he didn’t have to use the toilet and he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. It felt like it was still late at night, and there was no light shining through the window. The light of his Buzz Lightyear night light allowed him to see the entire bedroom – posters, clothes slung over the back of his chair, bookshelves and toy-bins – and find nothing out of place. He shouldn’t have woken up. And yet, he was awake.
It occurred to Michael that something must be different, and his sleeping mind must be more aware of it than his waking mind. This was a rather mature thought for a seven-year-old – but then, Michael was very bright, and he had a very active imagination.
His imagination took hold of him now. As he often did, he found himself wondering whether the monster who lived under his bed was going to take this opportunity to eat him. Of course it only *lived* under the bed; it was perfectly capable of emerging from the cavity below the bed while he slept and hiding someplace else in his room. The closet, for instance, was an inviting place for a bed-monster. Under the desk was another good one. Rarely it might choose the laundry hamper, or it might peek out of the grille for the air conditioning. It was a pretty crafty monster.
Michael’s pulse climbed. Still keeping the covers pulled tightly up to the underside of his chin, he lifted his head to look down to the foot of the bed. When the monster came, it usually came from the foot of the bed. There was a space there about a foot wide between the bed and the wall. The monster far preferred tight corners and gaps to wide open spaces. It liked to push itself up surfaces and slither between cracks.
And then he saw it – a delicate grey paw, with slender groping fingers, reached up through the gap. It felt the covers at the foot of the bed, patting them, feeling for a bulge that might be the same general size and shape as the feet of a boy. Michael reflexively jerked his feet away from the end of the bed. If the monster was really going to get him, it would have to work harder than that.
Michael didn’t scream. He knew perfectly well that his parents couldn’t hear him from their bedroom; they were down one floor and on the other side of the large house. Besides, even if they heard him, it would be the same old story again. They’d come, and they’d point out to him that there was no monster. Of course there was no monster; it would do its disappearing trick and it wouldn’t be there when they looked for it. There would never be a trace of a monster, and perhaps they would be angry, or perhaps they would be kind, but either way they would send him back to bed with a glass of water. He would have to lie in bed trying to fall asleep in a room infested with dangerous, boy-strangling monsters.
The monster had never strangled Michael for some reason, but he felt it was only a matter of time.
The hand seemed almost boneless. It patted a few times blindly, then crept a few inches up the bed and swept across the covers from side to side. Finding nothing, the monster must have decided it needed to put some eyes on the situation. From out of the gap rose a pale dome, hairless, with a slash for a mouth and two empty wells where eye sockets should be. The eye-pools were perfectly black.
The monster and Michael regarded each other. Michael’s breathing was fast and ragged. He clutched the covers with his hands. The monster put its other hand up on the covers but made no effort to grab Michael; it just sat and looked, looming palely out of the near-dark of the room.
“Hi,” the monster finally said. Its voice sounded like that of an adult, with a heavy rasp like Uncle Charlie who smoked cigars all the time. Michael lay frozen and didn’t respond. The monster had pulled all kinds of tricks before, but talking wasn’t one of them.
The monster didn’t blink; Michael doubted that it could. “Uh, did I wake you?” the monster asked.
Michael found his voice. “No,” he said. “I already knew you were there,” he added, feeling it to be important to let the monster know it couldn’t sneak up on him.
The monster chuckled. It was a dry chuckle, the stuff of nightmares. It also smiled, the thin slash of a mouth curving up at the corners. “Yeah, I guess you did,” it said. “Look, I’ve been with you for years but I’ve never introduced myself.” The monster told Michael its name. It sounded weird, something like ‘Betty Anwar’?
Michael licked his lips. “Batey?” He tried.
“Close enough. Batey. Yeah.” Batey nodded, and Michael immediately felt his fear ebb. Monsters with names are not nearly as scary as monsters without names.
“My name’s Michael.” He didn’t extend his hand to shake. It didn’t seem appropriate for the moment.
“Yeah, I know your name,” Batey said. “I’ve known you ever since you were a baby and you got your first bed. That’s when I got here. Your Mom and Dad tucked you into your big-boy bed, and I moved in the same day.” He smiled again. “You’ve gotten so big,” Batey added.
“I’m not scared of you,” Michael said.
“Aw, c’mon,” said Batey, waving one floppy paw dismissively. “Sure you are. That’s why I’m here, kid. You get scared of me, and I feed on that fear. That’s my bread and butter. I can’t live without you being scared of me, Michael. The first day you aren’t scared of me is the day I’ll have to pack it up and move out of here, and maybe find another kid who’s still scared of monsters under the bed.”
Michael frowned. “You mean you don’t really eat kids?” he asked. That had been his main fear all along: that the monster was going to come up and eat him.
Batey chuckled again. “Sure I eat kids! I love eating kids. But, Michael; you’re all I got. You’re the goose that laid the golden eggs. I’d rather twist your neck and suck your blood and gnaw your bones, but I could only do that once and then I’d be looking for another meal ticket. This way I can scare you for years and years. It’s not as good as killing somebody, but it’s a living.” The monster appeared to shrug.
Michael sat up in bed. He looked at the monster some more. It wasn’t actually very big. It couldn’t be very big, he suddenly realized, if it sometimes hid in his laundry hamper. Batey was probably smaller than he was.
“Batey, I’m serious. You’re getting less scary to me all the time.”
“I knew that was a risk, but I had to take it. Michael, we got a problem.” The monster reached out a slender ghostly arm and pointed at the bedroom door.
Michael looked. There was a hint of movement at the crack under the door. It was the kind of thing that was hard for one’s eyes to focus on, especially with the only light in the room coming from a night-light. It was like a roll of cotton, bulging on its own, curling up upon itself….
Smoke.
“Omigosh,” said Michael, swinging his legs out of bed. Batey watched him from the gap behind the bed. Michael padded across the carpet to the door. Near the door the smell of smoke was strong. It smelled terrible, like the time Mom had scorched her hair with the curling iron.
“Don’t go out there, kid,” Batey warned. “Remember the fire safety stuff you learned in cub scouts?”
Michael thought. He touched the knob of the door. It was warm to the touch. He thought he could hear a gentle crackling sound coming from the other side of the door. Through the cracks in the door there were flickers of light filtering in.
“Batey, the whole house is on fire!” Michael said.
“I know, I know.” Batey had slithered back under the bed. He peered out at Michael and patted the carpet next to him. “C’mon down here.”
Michael’s heart jumped. The monster under the bed wanted him to come under the bed with it? That would be crazy. But there was a fire in the house, and his parents weren’t around, and Batey sounded like an adult.
Michael ran across the room, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled under the bed. Batey was pressed up against the back wall, still faintly luminously visible, peering at Michael with his big pool-eyes.
“That’s right, kid,” rasped Batey. “The oxygen is down low on the floor. You hang with me down here for a while and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
Under the bed it was dark and there were lots of dust bunnies. Michael found himself to be more afraid than he had ever been in his life, and his breathing turned to ragged gasps.
“Hey, c’mon, settle down, kid,” soothed Batey. “You’re gonna stroke out like that. We’’ll get you out of here as long as you keep your head. The people who die in fires are usually the people who don’t keep a handle on their fear.”
“I thought you liked it when I was afraid,” sniffed Michael.
“When you’re afraid of ME,” corrected Batey. “That’s good stuff. When you’re afraid of something else, that’s useless. I can’t eat that. No sir, we gotta get you out of this place, get you somewhere safe where you can calm down and sleep regular, and then I can come and scare you again.” Batey reached out and brushed back Michael’s hair with obvious affection.
“You’re all I got, kiddo,” said Batey softly.
“But I can’t get out,” whined Michael. “There’s a fire in the hall. And I can’t get out the window either; it’s two stories up and there’s burglar bars.”
“Mom and Dad should have made a better fire plan,” Batey agreed grimly. “But there’s another way out. It’ll be scary, maybe dangerous, but you gotta do it because it’s the only way. I believe you can do it.” Batey chucked Michael in the shoulder; it felt like being hit with a sock full of wet sand.
Michael mastered his breathing. “Okay,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
“Good kid!” Batey slithered out from under the bed too fast for Michael to track him. Michael crawled out as well and looked around for the monster.
“In here,” rasped Batey from the partially ajar closet door. Michael saw the pale moon face glimmer at him, and a slender grey arm beckon. Michael crawled into the closet, and Batey closed the door. It was completely dark.
“Okay,” said Batey’s raspy voice. Michael realized he was stuck in a confined, pitch-black space with a monster who had just confessed its love for eating children. His heart started beating faster.
“We got no time for you to be scared of me!” Batey growled. “Now listen. Here in the back of the closet is an access panel that leads to the roof space.”
Michael nodded in the dark. “The plumbers had to crawl in there once when the pipes froze,” he said.
“That’s right. It’s kind of an attic back there, but with no finished floor,” said Batey. “Now, your house joins to the garage with a breezeway, and that has a pitched roof too. It joins to the attic a little ways over. You’ll need to crawl through the attic to the breezeway, crawl down its roof-space to the garage, and get out that way.”
“How do you know all this stuff about the attic?” Michael wanted to know.
“Hey, I’m a monster,” Batey replied. “Lurking in the dark corners is what I do all the time.”
“Won’t it be dark in the attic?” asked Michael. “How will I see?”
“Take a look,” said Batey, pulling the access door open.
The attic space had wooden joists across the bottom, with batts of insulation filling in the gaps. More joists rose diagonally up, with the shakes of the roofing visible behind them. The attic had good lighting, better than the bedroom, because fire was beginning to peek up from the floor below. Here and there little flames were licking up around the spaces where air ducts dropped down to air grilles. There was some smoke at the underside of the roof, but mostly the space was clear.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Batey said. In the clear light of the flames his skin looked glossy-wet and partially translucent, like the skin of a frog. “Keep your hands and knees on the joists; there’s only drywall under the insulation and it won’t hold your weight.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Michael asked.
Batey shook his head. “Too bright out there for a monster,” he said. “Too many lights. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”
“But you’ll die up here!” Michael found himself close to tears again.
“Nah, I’ll be fine,” said Batey. “Don’t worry about me for an instant. Now let’s see what we can do…” Batey rummaged through the closet, yanking shirts and pants off hangers. Batey pulled two short lengths of hanger rod dowel down from the closet.
“Here,” he said, handling the rods to Michael, one in each hand. “Span the joists with these and put your weight on them. There are a few nails sticking out of the joists but this’ll keep you safe. Oh yeah; put on your knee-pads from hockey so your legs will be all right too. Get going!”
The monster slapped Michael on the butt. Michael thrust his upper body through the access opening, laid the dowels down to bridge between two joists, and crawled all the way through. He began making his way arduously through the attic, crawling over ductwork and ducking pipes. Once an overhead nail snagged his PJ’s and he slipped, putting a foot down on some insulation. His foot punched through the ceiling of the floor below, and Michael screamed as he felt a great heat on his bare skin. He yanked his foot up and scrambled several feet away; a tongue of fire was now reaching up through the hole he had just created and was starting to lick the underside of the roof.
Scrambling now, Michael identified the low triangular dark patch in the side of the roof that meant the connection to the breezeway. He crawled over to it, keeping his face low to avoid breathing in the smoke that was beginning to make visibility poor. It was dark in the breezeway. At least that means it’s probably not on fire, Michael thought, and began to feel his way joist over joist.
Then the breezeway ended, and Michael felt the airflow of a great open space beyond and smelled the familiar musty smells of grass clippings and mouse droppings that meant the garage. A little light spilled into the garage through the windows in the garage door; there were flashing lights out there. Michael swung his body out of the breezeway, grabbed the last joist, lowered himself out into space and dropped to the ground. It hurt his ankle when he fell, but he was able to pick himself up and run to the garage side door. Then he was sprinting down the driveway towards the fire trucks shouting “Mom, Mom!”
**
They had gotten hotel rooms for the night. Mom and Dad had been worried about Michael being in his own room by himself for the night, but Michael reassured them that he would be fine. Both parents had made much of him being so intrepid, so brave during the ordeal.
It was hard to go back to sleep. He was still trying when the first hint of dawn started to come through the window. It was then that he realized Batey was sitting in a chair by the bathroom door.
“This room is terrible,” Batey complained. “There’s no space under the bed and you can’t even fit a suitcase in this stupid closet. Motel 6 is the worst, kid.”
“Batey!” cried Michael. “You made it!”
Batey chuckled. “I told you I would,” he said. “Some things are dangerous to monsters but not to people, and the other way around too.”
Michael considered. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “you could hide inside my big suitcase. Everything is out of it and in the drawers, so there’s lots of room there.”
Batey slinked over to the suitcase lying down atop the luggage stand and peeked inside. “Hey, yeah, kid,” he said, slithering inside. “This is perfect.” He peered out at Michael with his empty pools for eyes. “Thanks.”
“I should thank you,” Michael said. “You saved my life.”
“You know who you should thank?” Batey asked. “The firefighters, that’s who. They climbed all through that deathtrap of a house looking for you.”
“They didn’t need to do that; I got out all by myself,” Michael objected.
“Yeah, but they didn’t know that, see,” said Batey. “One of ‘em didn’t get out alive. Battled his way up to your bedroom, didn’t see you, went looking. He couldn’t get out.”
“Oh no,” said Michael softly.
“Yeah,” replied Batey. “Well, that’ll teach him to go into a closet where a hungry monster is waiting. See, there I was, hiding in the shadows as I usually do, when in steps Mister Fireman in his turnout gear. Then one thin grey hand reached out from around the corner and grabbed his neck…”
As Batey told his story, Michael felt the fear rise in him once more.
Michael woke up. He didn’t know why he had woken up; he didn’t have to use the toilet and he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. It felt like it was still late at night, and there was no light shining through the window. The light of his Buzz Lightyear night light allowed him to see the entire bedroom – posters, clothes slung over the back of his chair, bookshelves and toy-bins – and find nothing out of place. He shouldn’t have woken up. And yet, he was awake.
It occurred to Michael that something must be different, and his sleeping mind must be more aware of it than his waking mind. This was a rather mature thought for a seven-year-old – but then, Michael was very bright, and he had a very active imagination.
His imagination took hold of him now. As he often did, he found himself wondering whether the monster who lived under his bed was going to take this opportunity to eat him. Of course it only *lived* under the bed; it was perfectly capable of emerging from the cavity below the bed while he slept and hiding someplace else in his room. The closet, for instance, was an inviting place for a bed-monster. Under the desk was another good one. Rarely it might choose the laundry hamper, or it might peek out of the grille for the air conditioning. It was a pretty crafty monster.
Michael’s pulse climbed. Still keeping the covers pulled tightly up to the underside of his chin, he lifted his head to look down to the foot of the bed. When the monster came, it usually came from the foot of the bed. There was a space there about a foot wide between the bed and the wall. The monster far preferred tight corners and gaps to wide open spaces. It liked to push itself up surfaces and slither between cracks.
And then he saw it – a delicate grey paw, with slender groping fingers, reached up through the gap. It felt the covers at the foot of the bed, patting them, feeling for a bulge that might be the same general size and shape as the feet of a boy. Michael reflexively jerked his feet away from the end of the bed. If the monster was really going to get him, it would have to work harder than that.
Michael didn’t scream. He knew perfectly well that his parents couldn’t hear him from their bedroom; they were down one floor and on the other side of the large house. Besides, even if they heard him, it would be the same old story again. They’d come, and they’d point out to him that there was no monster. Of course there was no monster; it would do its disappearing trick and it wouldn’t be there when they looked for it. There would never be a trace of a monster, and perhaps they would be angry, or perhaps they would be kind, but either way they would send him back to bed with a glass of water. He would have to lie in bed trying to fall asleep in a room infested with dangerous, boy-strangling monsters.
The monster had never strangled Michael for some reason, but he felt it was only a matter of time.
The hand seemed almost boneless. It patted a few times blindly, then crept a few inches up the bed and swept across the covers from side to side. Finding nothing, the monster must have decided it needed to put some eyes on the situation. From out of the gap rose a pale dome, hairless, with a slash for a mouth and two empty wells where eye sockets should be. The eye-pools were perfectly black.
The monster and Michael regarded each other. Michael’s breathing was fast and ragged. He clutched the covers with his hands. The monster put its other hand up on the covers but made no effort to grab Michael; it just sat and looked, looming palely out of the near-dark of the room.
“Hi,” the monster finally said. Its voice sounded like that of an adult, with a heavy rasp like Uncle Charlie who smoked cigars all the time. Michael lay frozen and didn’t respond. The monster had pulled all kinds of tricks before, but talking wasn’t one of them.
The monster didn’t blink; Michael doubted that it could. “Uh, did I wake you?” the monster asked.
Michael found his voice. “No,” he said. “I already knew you were there,” he added, feeling it to be important to let the monster know it couldn’t sneak up on him.
The monster chuckled. It was a dry chuckle, the stuff of nightmares. It also smiled, the thin slash of a mouth curving up at the corners. “Yeah, I guess you did,” it said. “Look, I’ve been with you for years but I’ve never introduced myself.” The monster told Michael its name. It sounded weird, something like ‘Betty Anwar’?
Michael licked his lips. “Batey?” He tried.
“Close enough. Batey. Yeah.” Batey nodded, and Michael immediately felt his fear ebb. Monsters with names are not nearly as scary as monsters without names.
“My name’s Michael.” He didn’t extend his hand to shake. It didn’t seem appropriate for the moment.
“Yeah, I know your name,” Batey said. “I’ve known you ever since you were a baby and you got your first bed. That’s when I got here. Your Mom and Dad tucked you into your big-boy bed, and I moved in the same day.” He smiled again. “You’ve gotten so big,” Batey added.
“I’m not scared of you,” Michael said.
“Aw, c’mon,” said Batey, waving one floppy paw dismissively. “Sure you are. That’s why I’m here, kid. You get scared of me, and I feed on that fear. That’s my bread and butter. I can’t live without you being scared of me, Michael. The first day you aren’t scared of me is the day I’ll have to pack it up and move out of here, and maybe find another kid who’s still scared of monsters under the bed.”
Michael frowned. “You mean you don’t really eat kids?” he asked. That had been his main fear all along: that the monster was going to come up and eat him.
Batey chuckled again. “Sure I eat kids! I love eating kids. But, Michael; you’re all I got. You’re the goose that laid the golden eggs. I’d rather twist your neck and suck your blood and gnaw your bones, but I could only do that once and then I’d be looking for another meal ticket. This way I can scare you for years and years. It’s not as good as killing somebody, but it’s a living.” The monster appeared to shrug.
Michael sat up in bed. He looked at the monster some more. It wasn’t actually very big. It couldn’t be very big, he suddenly realized, if it sometimes hid in his laundry hamper. Batey was probably smaller than he was.
“Batey, I’m serious. You’re getting less scary to me all the time.”
“I knew that was a risk, but I had to take it. Michael, we got a problem.” The monster reached out a slender ghostly arm and pointed at the bedroom door.
Michael looked. There was a hint of movement at the crack under the door. It was the kind of thing that was hard for one’s eyes to focus on, especially with the only light in the room coming from a night-light. It was like a roll of cotton, bulging on its own, curling up upon itself….
Smoke.
“Omigosh,” said Michael, swinging his legs out of bed. Batey watched him from the gap behind the bed. Michael padded across the carpet to the door. Near the door the smell of smoke was strong. It smelled terrible, like the time Mom had scorched her hair with the curling iron.
“Don’t go out there, kid,” Batey warned. “Remember the fire safety stuff you learned in cub scouts?”
Michael thought. He touched the knob of the door. It was warm to the touch. He thought he could hear a gentle crackling sound coming from the other side of the door. Through the cracks in the door there were flickers of light filtering in.
“Batey, the whole house is on fire!” Michael said.
“I know, I know.” Batey had slithered back under the bed. He peered out at Michael and patted the carpet next to him. “C’mon down here.”
Michael’s heart jumped. The monster under the bed wanted him to come under the bed with it? That would be crazy. But there was a fire in the house, and his parents weren’t around, and Batey sounded like an adult.
Michael ran across the room, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled under the bed. Batey was pressed up against the back wall, still faintly luminously visible, peering at Michael with his big pool-eyes.
“That’s right, kid,” rasped Batey. “The oxygen is down low on the floor. You hang with me down here for a while and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
Under the bed it was dark and there were lots of dust bunnies. Michael found himself to be more afraid than he had ever been in his life, and his breathing turned to ragged gasps.
“Hey, c’mon, settle down, kid,” soothed Batey. “You’re gonna stroke out like that. We’’ll get you out of here as long as you keep your head. The people who die in fires are usually the people who don’t keep a handle on their fear.”
“I thought you liked it when I was afraid,” sniffed Michael.
“When you’re afraid of ME,” corrected Batey. “That’s good stuff. When you’re afraid of something else, that’s useless. I can’t eat that. No sir, we gotta get you out of this place, get you somewhere safe where you can calm down and sleep regular, and then I can come and scare you again.” Batey reached out and brushed back Michael’s hair with obvious affection.
“You’re all I got, kiddo,” said Batey softly.
“But I can’t get out,” whined Michael. “There’s a fire in the hall. And I can’t get out the window either; it’s two stories up and there’s burglar bars.”
“Mom and Dad should have made a better fire plan,” Batey agreed grimly. “But there’s another way out. It’ll be scary, maybe dangerous, but you gotta do it because it’s the only way. I believe you can do it.” Batey chucked Michael in the shoulder; it felt like being hit with a sock full of wet sand.
Michael mastered his breathing. “Okay,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
“Good kid!” Batey slithered out from under the bed too fast for Michael to track him. Michael crawled out as well and looked around for the monster.
“In here,” rasped Batey from the partially ajar closet door. Michael saw the pale moon face glimmer at him, and a slender grey arm beckon. Michael crawled into the closet, and Batey closed the door. It was completely dark.
“Okay,” said Batey’s raspy voice. Michael realized he was stuck in a confined, pitch-black space with a monster who had just confessed its love for eating children. His heart started beating faster.
“We got no time for you to be scared of me!” Batey growled. “Now listen. Here in the back of the closet is an access panel that leads to the roof space.”
Michael nodded in the dark. “The plumbers had to crawl in there once when the pipes froze,” he said.
“That’s right. It’s kind of an attic back there, but with no finished floor,” said Batey. “Now, your house joins to the garage with a breezeway, and that has a pitched roof too. It joins to the attic a little ways over. You’ll need to crawl through the attic to the breezeway, crawl down its roof-space to the garage, and get out that way.”
“How do you know all this stuff about the attic?” Michael wanted to know.
“Hey, I’m a monster,” Batey replied. “Lurking in the dark corners is what I do all the time.”
“Won’t it be dark in the attic?” asked Michael. “How will I see?”
“Take a look,” said Batey, pulling the access door open.
The attic space had wooden joists across the bottom, with batts of insulation filling in the gaps. More joists rose diagonally up, with the shakes of the roofing visible behind them. The attic had good lighting, better than the bedroom, because fire was beginning to peek up from the floor below. Here and there little flames were licking up around the spaces where air ducts dropped down to air grilles. There was some smoke at the underside of the roof, but mostly the space was clear.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Batey said. In the clear light of the flames his skin looked glossy-wet and partially translucent, like the skin of a frog. “Keep your hands and knees on the joists; there’s only drywall under the insulation and it won’t hold your weight.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Michael asked.
Batey shook his head. “Too bright out there for a monster,” he said. “Too many lights. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”
“But you’ll die up here!” Michael found himself close to tears again.
“Nah, I’ll be fine,” said Batey. “Don’t worry about me for an instant. Now let’s see what we can do…” Batey rummaged through the closet, yanking shirts and pants off hangers. Batey pulled two short lengths of hanger rod dowel down from the closet.
“Here,” he said, handling the rods to Michael, one in each hand. “Span the joists with these and put your weight on them. There are a few nails sticking out of the joists but this’ll keep you safe. Oh yeah; put on your knee-pads from hockey so your legs will be all right too. Get going!”
The monster slapped Michael on the butt. Michael thrust his upper body through the access opening, laid the dowels down to bridge between two joists, and crawled all the way through. He began making his way arduously through the attic, crawling over ductwork and ducking pipes. Once an overhead nail snagged his PJ’s and he slipped, putting a foot down on some insulation. His foot punched through the ceiling of the floor below, and Michael screamed as he felt a great heat on his bare skin. He yanked his foot up and scrambled several feet away; a tongue of fire was now reaching up through the hole he had just created and was starting to lick the underside of the roof.
Scrambling now, Michael identified the low triangular dark patch in the side of the roof that meant the connection to the breezeway. He crawled over to it, keeping his face low to avoid breathing in the smoke that was beginning to make visibility poor. It was dark in the breezeway. At least that means it’s probably not on fire, Michael thought, and began to feel his way joist over joist.
Then the breezeway ended, and Michael felt the airflow of a great open space beyond and smelled the familiar musty smells of grass clippings and mouse droppings that meant the garage. A little light spilled into the garage through the windows in the garage door; there were flashing lights out there. Michael swung his body out of the breezeway, grabbed the last joist, lowered himself out into space and dropped to the ground. It hurt his ankle when he fell, but he was able to pick himself up and run to the garage side door. Then he was sprinting down the driveway towards the fire trucks shouting “Mom, Mom!”
**
They had gotten hotel rooms for the night. Mom and Dad had been worried about Michael being in his own room by himself for the night, but Michael reassured them that he would be fine. Both parents had made much of him being so intrepid, so brave during the ordeal.
It was hard to go back to sleep. He was still trying when the first hint of dawn started to come through the window. It was then that he realized Batey was sitting in a chair by the bathroom door.
“This room is terrible,” Batey complained. “There’s no space under the bed and you can’t even fit a suitcase in this stupid closet. Motel 6 is the worst, kid.”
“Batey!” cried Michael. “You made it!”
Batey chuckled. “I told you I would,” he said. “Some things are dangerous to monsters but not to people, and the other way around too.”
Michael considered. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “you could hide inside my big suitcase. Everything is out of it and in the drawers, so there’s lots of room there.”
Batey slinked over to the suitcase lying down atop the luggage stand and peeked inside. “Hey, yeah, kid,” he said, slithering inside. “This is perfect.” He peered out at Michael with his empty pools for eyes. “Thanks.”
“I should thank you,” Michael said. “You saved my life.”
“You know who you should thank?” Batey asked. “The firefighters, that’s who. They climbed all through that deathtrap of a house looking for you.”
“They didn’t need to do that; I got out all by myself,” Michael objected.
“Yeah, but they didn’t know that, see,” said Batey. “One of ‘em didn’t get out alive. Battled his way up to your bedroom, didn’t see you, went looking. He couldn’t get out.”
“Oh no,” said Michael softly.
“Yeah,” replied Batey. “Well, that’ll teach him to go into a closet where a hungry monster is waiting. See, there I was, hiding in the shadows as I usually do, when in steps Mister Fireman in his turnout gear. Then one thin grey hand reached out from around the corner and grabbed his neck…”
As Batey told his story, Michael felt the fear rise in him once more.
