Prologue: Monsters
Gary loved his son, and he also loved sleep, two loves that seldom went hand in hand. His son Micheal was now 5 years old, a number that Gary routinely found himself marveling at. It still felt like yesterday that his son had come into the world as a bald raisin of adorableness, and now he was going to school and could almost finish picture books all by himself. He was also, unfortunately, at the age where he was being exposed to the gossip and exaggerations of every other child in his neighborhood, and Gary suspected one such instance was to blame for cutting into both of their sleep schedules.
“See,” Gary said as he swung the closet door open. “No monsters.”
Micheal had the covers pulled up to his face, barely daring to take a peek at the dim space filled with clothes he had outgrown and assorted storage containers.
“No monster could even fit in here with all the crap your mother stuffs into it.”
Micheal giggled at that. he was also at the age where any even remotely “bad” word was hilarious.
“But, what about under my bed?” he said as the levity failed to take hold.
Gary groaned. He was a construction worker by trade and not the kind that got to sit in an air-conditioned cabin and operate a piece of heavy machinery. He seemed doomed to forever do the backbreaking labor that was just a little too unimportant, or too expensive, to have a machine trivialize. His back was aching just from standing there and he was all but certain that if he did bend over, he wouldn’t be able to get back up again for a few days.
“Buddy,” he said with exasperation. “Where is this coming from, you never used to worry about this stuff before.”
“Henry said that Oni love eating kids when they start school and I have to make sure there isn’t one hiding in my room before I go to bed.”
“Well, Henry is a doofus,” Gary said in a goofy voice he had carefully cultivated in his half-decade of fatherhood, one that was scientifically proven to get big laughs. Except this time, no humor was going to break through his son’s fear.
“But Dad,” Micheal said. “Henry showed me stuff about Oni taking little kids on his phone.”
“Of course they let a five-year-old have a phone,” Micheal said as he rubbed his face in exhausted annoyance. He had read the same thing many times over the past few months, with reports of Oni-related murders and disappearances occurring in the city slums, but it was all hearsay. Frankly, Aurveil was not a nice place to live with crimes and random disappearances just being a part of life, especially in the harsher areas on the outskirts of town, a place their family had luckily managed to move out of when Micheal was born. He walked over to his son’s bed and sat down, even though he knew standing back up would be a momentous challenge.
“So you know about Oni now?” Gary asked.
Micheal looked down as he fidgeted with his sheets. “Yes,” he said weakly. “Is it bad that I learned about them?”
“No Buddy,” he said as he put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “It’s not bad that you learned about them, you were going to have to eventually. Your Mom and I just decided that telling you about them too early would make you scared for no reason.
“But Dad, what if one wants to eat me?”
“That is not going to happen,” Gary said with all the confidence he could muster. “Its true that Oni are real, but they are super rare. Most people have never seen one even when they are as old as me. I know your grandparents have never seen one and they are super old.”
Gary giggled again.
“Besides,” Micheal said as he went in for a hug. “The Knights are watching and are ready to protect us.”
“But, there are no Knights in our city,” Micheal replied.
“Hmmmmm,” Gary furrowed his brow in an exaggerated manner that always made Micheal laugh. “Then I guess I’ll just have to beat them up myself. Besides, what Oni could be worse than your Grandma.”
Gary expected that to get a hearty laugh out of Micheal, but instead of laughing, Micheal was looking up, beyond Gary’s head with a look of sheer terror on his face. Gary whirled around, the pain not even registering in the face of the horror before him.
Coming out from under the bed has an impossibly long neck that led to a bulbous, engorged head. The head was barely recognizable as human, with eyes several times larger than they should be sporting impossibly small pupils. The eyes had a quality that was hard to explain, but one that every person who had ever come face to face with an Oni and lived had described as “dead”. Below was a mouthful of jagged teeth that formed a smile so stretched out that the skin seemed as though it would snap like an overstretched rubber band. Completing this freakish visage were two small horns jutting out from the thing’s forehead.
The room became deafeningly quiet as Gary and Micheal both learned what it meant to be frozen in fear.
“Why do adults lie?” the Oni said in a disarmingly soft voice. “I have done this so many times, just waiting for a parent to tell a lie to their children, and every single time the adult lies.”
The Oni’s face moved closer, its rancid breath breaking Gary out of his shocked silence and causing his mind to race toward a single goal: getting his son out of this alive.
“Wh…what do you want,” Gary said in a trembling whisper.
“What do you mean what do I want? I already asked the question. Why. do. adults. ALWAYS LIE.” The bile of hatred infused into the Oni’s every word chilled Gary to the bone.
“Well? WHY!” The Oni roared as four bladed appendages sprung out from underneath the bed, all aiming at Gary’s throat.
“Tell the truth and I’ll let you go…promise.”
Gary was just about to wet himself. He was being truthful when he said he had never seen an Oni before. Of course, he had seen them on the news and in videos taken by bystanders, and he had heard the stories of the destruction they could unleash ever since he was a child. He remembered the sleepless nights he spent as a boy terrified that every little creak he heard in his home was a monster coming to devour his whole family. He knew just how powerful these things were, with not even the power armor of Guardians being a match for them. The only thing that could beat an Oni was a Knight, and as Micheal had pointed out, there were none stationed in their city.
His only hope was to answer the Oni’s question and to hope it would keep its word.
“I…I lied to my son because I didn’t want him to be afraid,” Gary stammered out. “Kids shouldn’t have to live in fear.”
The Oni closed its eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “Every time,” it said with genuine disappointment. Its eyes flashed open and it’s dead, tiny pupils suddenly dialed to tremendous size as its mouth closed around Gary’s head.
Bruin Armstrong Writing 