Nightlord: Shadows (45 page)

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

I drew my sword. I flicked it with a fingernail and it chimed beautifully. The glowing eyes under the bed widened.

“You’re not serious!” it said.

“Have you ever had to fight anything that wasn’t a child?” I asked, coldly.

“You wouldn’t dare!”

I really don’t understand why anyone uses that phrase.

I slid under the bed. It was a lot roomier than I expected; I landed on my feet. It seemed to be a much larger space—like moving through a doorway instead of stepping into a closet. The whole place was shadowy, grey, indistinct, but now I could see. I immediately realized this was a strange space, not just a strange place, and I had crossed a border by sliding under the bed.

This answered some of my ecology questions, but raised several more. How many sub-realms does a magical universe have? How many pocket dimensions? Sub specie spatia? Whatever you want to call them? Are they connected pockets on the primary universe, or independent universes all their own, with bridges connecting to major universes, or to each other? How are they connected? What rules apply in them, and how drastically can those differ from a universe they touch?

If there are other things living in them, is there a Closet Monster, too? Or are they just different locations for the same type of monster in the same continuum? Maybe there’s a Darkened Hallway Monster, and a Wardrobe Monster, a Creepy Basement Monster, and an Attic Monster. Did the Sock Croc lurk in laundry basins, hoping to snatch an unwary sock and drag it down under the soapy water to feed on it?

I had a monster in front of me.

It was about the size of pony, but it looked more like a sea urchin composed entirely of arms, with eyes and mouths everywhere in between. It had insect eyes and mandibles, gleaming cats’ eyes, red wolf eyes, drooling animal mouths, and, of course, a huge variety of ugly arms. Some of the arms were hairy, muscular, almost-human arms; others were more monstrous, including crablike claws, taloned arms, scaly ones, tentacles with suckers, and the whole variety of unpleasant monster hands.

It grabbed at me and I stepped back, thrusting, stabbing holes in three different hands… err, claws… um… three extremities before it could blink. It obviously didn’t face anything but children; it didn’t know how to deal with an actual combatant. Something oozed from the wounds as it jerked back its… well, I’m going to call them “hands.” The ooze was dark brown and smelled a bit like musty socks. It screamed and more of its hands clutched at the bleeding holes in the wounded ones. Distantly, I could hear the kids screaming, too. The monster sounded agonized; the kids sounded scared.

“I mean it,” I began, and it interrupted me by springing at me. I moved aside as though it were in slow motion, grabbed one of the nearer appendages, and added considerably to its momentum. It landed with a heavy thud and rolled, arms flailing everywhere—and when something with that many arms flails, it flails really well.

When it came to rest, one of its eyes looked at the point of my sword at a range of about half an inch. I was aiming at a large, compound eye, so it could see the sword from up close and multiple angles all at once. It froze, staring at the point. A black tendril of my power rippled down the length of the blade, like a blood-groove. I exerted a little effort and it fairly radiated darkness, becoming visible even to normal sight.

While we stood there, I tried to get a grip on myself.

“Now, look,” I told it, “I don’t want to kill you. I don’t even want to be unreasonable. But I cannot allow you to terrorize and eat children in my kingdom. I absolutely will not stand for it, and I
will
kill you.”

“But… but… but I don’t
eat
children,” it whined. That sounded promising. I could see why it sounded so strange; it spoke with multiple mouths at once.

“What, exactly,
do
you eat?”

“Fear, of course! What, you think I actually eat the little twerps?”

“You don’t actually grab children and drag them under the bed to eat them?”

“Of course not!” It sounded offended. “That’s stupid!” It checked itself and added, nervously, eyeing either my blade or the tendril on it. “That is, the idea is stupid. Not you.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“Well, I don’t eat
people
. They wouldn’t be afraid after that, just dead. I gotta scare them. That’s what I
do
.”

“Hmm. You cause people to be afraid, and you feed on them being afraid?”

“Well, yeah. What else would I do?” It shrugged. That’s a lot of shrugging.

“Can you feed on any other emotion?”

“Not really, no.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the way I am. Frustration tastes nice, too, but you can’t live on it.”

“Does it have to be children?”

“They’re the only ones afraid of me.” It seemed more than a little accusatory when it added, “Usually, they’re the only ones who can see me. The frustration is usually from the parents, see?”

“Also hmm. But, if a grown-up was afraid, you could feed on that?”

“Well… yeah, I guess. I don’t see why not. But they can’t see me. They don’t believe in me.”

I lowered my sword. It relaxed a little.

“All right. Are there more of you? Or are you the only one?”

“I’m the only one, so far as I know.” It waved a few hands, airily. “There are other things like me, yeah, but I’m the monster under the bed.”

“Okay. Do you have a name?”

“What for?” it asked.

“If there’s only one of you, I guess that’s a good point. Do you talk to other things, like closet monsters?”

“Not usually. He lives in closets and wardrobes. We don’t really see each other much.”

“Look, I’ll feel better if I can call you something besides the-monster-under-the-bed. That’s a description, not a name.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“How about I call you ‘Fred’? Not because you look like a Fred, but because it’s shorter.”

It shrugged again. It was still impressive.

“Okay by me.”

“So, if you’re the only one, do you appear under lots of beds at once?”

“How? There’s only one of me.”

I didn’t feel like getting into a discussion on bilocation, so I skipped it.

“Silly question. Forget it. So, how many beds will you visit in one night?”

“Six? Ten? Depends.”

“That gives me an idea about how much you need to eat. I think we can work something out, if you’re willing to eat the fears of adults. Can you do that?”

“If it’s scared, I can probably get by,” it agreed, cautiously. “But I already told you, adults don’t see me; they don’t believe in me. They only believe in what they can see, and they don’t see me.”

“Sometimes, that’s even scarier.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s no fear like the fear of the unknown,” I pointed out.

“And if they don’t believe in me, how does that help me?”

“What if you made a noise under an adult’s bed, then weren’t there to be seen? If they
can’t
see you, then they
know
something is there, but they won’t know what it is. How terrifying would it be, for example, if you were to whisper their name, and then they couldn’t see you?”

“Huh.” It thought about it for a minute. “That could work, but how do I manifest under an adult’s bed? They don’t believe in me, remember? Besides, how would I know a name?”

“I’m not just a monster, Fred. I’m also a wizard. I bet we can work out a way for you to find your way under a grownup’s bed. And, since there are people in the world who
deserve
to spend a sleepless night wondering what’s crawling around under there that they can’t see, I bet I can get you names, too.”

“Huh. Okay, let’s say I go for this. What’s in it for you?”

“If I get you a name, you go visit them until I tell you to stop.”

“That’s it?”

“Plus, you don’t terrify children. Ever.”

“I dunno.”

“Please? It’ll save me from having to kill you, which I really don’t want to do.”

“…I could get used to the idea.”

We sat down and hammered out a deal. Well, I sat down; it sort of crouched on the lower arms.

I had no idea whether or not I could trust Fred to keep his end of the bargain. How trustworthy is a monster when you aren’t looking at it? Then again, I like to think I’m trustworthy, so I really had to give him at least the benefit of the doubt. We reached an agreement and I introduced him to the concept of shaking hands; I then had to point out that I didn’t have to shake
all
of them. I wasn’t against it, in principle, but there was no way I was shaking the slime-oozing tentacle.

With our deal sealed, I cast several spells for him—little things, really, but they would help him make his presence felt. Then we generated some suitable banging, thumping, screaming, and a final, gurgling death-cry. Fred was actually quite good at that; he’s heard a lot of terrified screams, and he’s got a whole chorus of mouths to use. Fred went off to find a bed somewhere else, leaving me amid the dust bunnies.

That was interesting. He left, and I was under the bed. I didn’t even have to lie down; I was just oriented properly to fit in the “real” space. Was that a courtesy on his part, or did it have something to do with two masses occupying the same space? Come to that, did the extradimensional space travel with him as a field he generated, or did he move it into contact with this universe? It did seem to act like a pocket universe with him as the sole occupant.

I crawled out from under the bed.

Ha. For a minute there, I was a monster under the bed. Maybe that’s why the kids stared at me with wide eyes.

“No problem,” I told them, standing and dusting myself off. The two youngest believed me instantly. The eldest looked dubious.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “Look under. You’ll be fine. I took care of it.”

He was even more dubious, but the other two laid down over the edge and bent to look; they confirmed the lack of ugly. He looked, then, and seemed amazed.

“Now, which one of you was hoping I’d come and help?” I asked. They all admitted it.

“You’re the protector of children,” the eldest said. He even sang me a bit of song about how children call on me and I rescue them. The other two nodded furiously. “I didn’t know it would
work.
”

Well, they weren’t wrong. And I considered Linnaeus lucky that he was already dead.

“You shouldn’t have another monster under the bed,” I told them. “Now it knows better than to do anything in my kingdom. Now, you three get right to sleep. Okay?”

They agreed and immediately flumphed into the blankets. That’s the technical term for plopping into bed and throwing the blankets over your head, you know.

I stepped out the window and rapidly disappeared into the night, terribly embarrassed. True, I just did a nice thing for a bunch of children, but I expected to have something more along the lines of a demonic monster or something. Not a quasi-imaginary beast.

That’s when I realized my psychicness—another technical term—was getting stronger. I could listen for people thinking at me—okay, okay,
praying
, if that’s what you want to call it—and actually hear them. I had mixed feelings about having such a sixth (or seventh, or eighth…) sense. It might be good for getting a feel for public opinion, granted, but it also meant that I was going to have urges to go out and randomly help people.

I spent a little time in Tort’s lab, just sitting and listening, trying to get a feel for what I was hearing through my ears and what I was hearing… well, any other way. The ears were easy; I could wrap myself in a silence spell better than any earplugs. Whatever else I heard was not, therefore, sound. And, yes, I heard a lot of things, kind of like those background thoughts at night while you’re trying to get to sleep.

A lot of what they wanted was pretty nebulous. Good harvests, good health, long life, happiness, prosperity, all that stuff. I was working on all that stuff already—

Whoa. Hold it.

When I woke up, I pretty much started doing everything I could to make life better around here. Is that why I immediately wanted to help Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar become knights—because that’s what I felt I was supposed to do? Did I start building and enhancing a kingdom because people were sending out psychic waves to encourage it? Did that play on my natural impulses and encourage me to move very quickly into making this little piece of the world a better place? Has it been going on for nearly a century, telling me that I need to make things better?

Once they knew I was really here, did the psychic encouragement increase, since they knew their prayers might get answered?

I sat quietly in Tort’s lab and rubbed my temples. It wasn’t that the people were controlling my mind, or even doing anything invasive. They were just… wanting. And I was hearing it. At worst, I was being my usual, helpful self without the pesky requirement of people actually asking me to help. If I could look at it that way, it wasn’t so bad.