Creep Page 2

  Mom and Dad deplored that they had created a monster. "A cookie monster," quipped Lucas.

  He had no clue that what was ascending the staircase, waddling on fin-like stumps to the barricaded door of his inner sanctum, was none other than his long-lost pet. The door rattled as the creature's snout impatiently nudged. Lucas ignored it, secure in his refuge, feeding his face. Crumbs cascaded onto his chest. The banging grew more aggressive.

  "Get lost!" growled Lucas.

  This incensed the creature and it launched an attack, hurling itself repeatedly at the barrier.

  Suddenly wood splintered, axed by a claw-pointed appendage. The door was torn off its hinges, then smashed to shards as the tentacle flailed to release itself.

  Lucas sat up straight, a cookie dangling from his lips. The Thin Mint descended to his lap.

  With a savage bellow of anguish and spite, a greenish-gray wretch entered the room, tipping the drawers, shambling like a sea lion.

  Eyes narrowed in disbelief, Lucas uttered a single word: "Blinky?" It wasn't that he knew. He somehow intuited that this ungodly beast had been the snake he shunned through indifference. As it scuttled in his direction, their eyes locked and a message was conveyed. That look of sheer loathing for humans, particularly this specimen of inhumanity, seared into the slacker's brain like a red-hot poker. He had been judged and condemned in the space of several blinks, yet the creature's accusative gaze was unwavering.

  Lucas threw boxes of cookies. His sole defense, they harmlessly bounced off.

  The mutant lashed out with its claw and nailed his pillow as he lurched aside. The talon stabbed the mattress, shaking off the pillow. Lucas dropped to the floor and squirmed below his bed. The avenger raised it with several limbs, tossed it wrathfully against a wall, and surged to corner the creep who had been a miserable master — providing dead rats laced with poison, glass fragments, nails and screws. The man had sought to dispose of a nuisance. But Blinky endured, regurgitating the bad.

  Eyeing him malevolently, it cast tentacles to coil or pinch his arms. A second pair of limbs shot out to skewer him with spikes. The agitated creature chopped him down the center, flicking another tentacle. The halves were discarded in gestures of contempt. It was a hollow victory. It didn't change things. Couldn't make a sad life better.

  More than one monster had been slain. The survivor shuffled away . . . to spend the rest of its days in darkness.

  The asylum of the abhorrent soul.