Author's note: originally, there was a picture of a snake in this header, but it freaked me out too much. For my own sanity, I had to censor it. Hey, I'm not as tough as Selina Sardi, sorry 🤷‍♀️ So, I'm going to leave the beasties up to my words and your imagination. After all, beauty or horror, it is all in the eye—or mind—of the beholder, mwahaha.

She had forgotten how much she hated snakes, but as the creature slithered under her bedsheets, the sensation of an invisible fist closing around her throat nearly crippled her. Nearly.

With great effort and survival instinct kicking in, she managed to push up on her hands and scoot back across the bed, away from the twisting body which was one, no two, no three snakes? She desperately searched for heads as if that would make it better, as if locating the heads would make her apt to survive a multiple serpent attack. In any case, it would be a fucking start. Where were the fucking heads?

As she neared the other side of the bed, another snake plopped over the side and another one on the foot end. The snakes were coming at her from all sides. There was nowhere left to go.

"Mom?"

The room careened and in the beam of moonlight coming down from the skylight as from a spaceship in a sci-fi movie stood Lowie. No, no, no... This could not be happening. Lowie could not be here.  Coils of snakes dotted the space between her and her boy.

Adrenaline surged through the blockage of her throat and she crawled up on all fours, desperate to ignore her own peril for the sake of her child. She scrambled across the bed, trying to avoid the coiling bodies as much as she could, but they got to her anyway, scales glimmering silver brown and fluorescent green in the night.

"Mom?" Lowie squealed. An all yellow boa constrictor had reached his feet and circled around him while rearing its ugly head at her.

"No!" She screamed, held down to the bed by hissing bodies snaking around her wrists and legs, the sensation of their skin rubbing hers not slippery as she had expected but gruff and deadly cold. The fist around her neck pressed tighter.

The snake around Lowie whirled higher and tighter, its gaze now transfixed on Lowie's, paralyzing him with its lethal magic. The fear in Lowie's eyes overwhelmed her. The coiling body reached Lowie's chest and wound tighter till the boy gasped. His breath hitched. Again and again, longer this time, too long. Lowie was going to die.

"Nooooooo!" Again, she tried to reach him, but the snakes snagged her down by the wrists. Fangs cut through the thin skin of the insides of her arms and sharp stings assaulted her shins and ankles. Venom trickled up her bloodstream, hot and tantalizing like electric shocks, but it was Lowie's terror-stricken face that hurt her the most.

"Mom?"

The constrictor had now reached his neck. All that was left free, was his face, but that too was being gobbled up rapidly, his beautiful tanned face and his floppy golden curls, her golden boy and his petrified eyes screaming at her, "Make it stop!"

"I'm coming," she cried, not making any progress at all.

"Make it stop! Selina, you can make it stop! Make it stop!"

The voice changed.

The eyes changed.

Only the snakes kept hissing the same terrifying rhapsody.

She blinked a few times and then stared in the icy eyes of the bogeyman. "Make it stop, Selina! You can make it stop. The boy is not here. You know that. You took him somewhere safe. It's only your imagination that dragged him in here. Breathe and remember where you left him."

"He's in the beam of the skylight," she rasped, "inside the snake."

"Breathe!" the bogeyman commanded, "Remember! Where have you left him?"

"He's right there." She wanted to cry, she wanted everything to come to an end so badly. "Kill me, not him," she begged.

"He's not here, Selina. Remember! Breathe!"

"I can't," she said, "I can't breathe."

For a moment, the blue eyes in front of her softened, and the grip on her throat loosened. She gasped, then drew a deep, desperate breath. She searched the room for Lowie, but her vision was blurred. Her view consisted entirely of snakes and the crystal eyes of the bogeyman. She clawed at him. "What have you done? Where is he?"

"You know where. He's where you left him. You only need to remember."

A hazy image imposed on her brain. Lowie's chubby hands, dotted with crumbs, dipping into a cookie tin. A square cookie tin with a vintage illustration. A waft of fresh basil and garlic entered her nose and she remembered. She had left Lowie with her friends. Lowie was safe, far away from this bogeyman and his snakes. They could kill her for all she cared, but they wouldn't get to Lowie. "I'm not telling you where my son is."

"But you remember," he crooned, "that's enough."

She said nothing. Bastard. Effing, stinking bastard, she thought.

"You know he's not here. He's safe. But you ..." His sharp nail traced along her jawline till her whole body shuddered. His eyes were mesmerizingly beautiful. Cold and hard again, gone was the soft touch she had seen a glimpse of, in that moment when he allowed her to breathe. They were all cruel, vile beauty now. "You are here. You, me, and the snakes. Don't you just love it?"

His dark breath clouded her vision for an instant and when it touched her face she couldn't say whether it was hot or cold, it was only terrifyingly real and present. It was her, the snakes, and the bogeyman, and there was no escape.

The invisible fist was no longer invisible. It was his paw on her skin. Paw or claw? She couldn't decide. It had her by the throat and that was all that mattered. It dragged her under into a sea of serpents and with Lowie out of the equation, the will to fight them was gone. She cried, screamed, and shivered, as the snakes slithered under, over, around her.

Until the next moment, they were all gone.

All that was left was the star-spangled room and Buzz Lightyear on the sheets. The bogeyman had retreated to a corner on the opposite side of the room.

He looked healthier than yesterday. His cheeks had filled out and his eyes gleamed with a sort of tranquil satisfaction, his breathing regular and relaxed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and covered it with the scarf around his neck before she could take a proper look at it. His other paw pressed to the side of his neck where she had wounded him the other night. When he lifted it to look at it, tiny mares seeped from his punctured skin, not as much as yesterday, and definitely slower. He sighed contently. She supposed that meant he was healing. And she supposed she had survived another night. "Are you done?" she asked.

"For tonight."

"Two out of seven."

"Two out of seven. Sorry about the boy. I know I agreed to keep him out of this, but he snuck up on us somehow. I removed him as fast as I could."

"You removed him?"

"Technically you did ... after I told you to. It's all happening in your head. You see that now, don't you?"

"You're not, are you? Are you in my head?"

He grinned sadly. "Whatever makes you sleep better."

"So if Lowie was not really here, he doesn't know about this? He didn't suffer anything? Not even a nightmare? Can you swear to me?"

He grinned again. "Would you believe me?"

She rubbed her arms, the memory of fangs cutting her skin and injecting torturous poison into her veins was still vibrant, but her skin was untouched. No real harm had come to her. If one didn't count emotional trauma as real harm that was. Fucking monster.

"Thank you," he whispered, his hushed voice having a slow drawl that for a moment made him endearing somehow, which was as shocking as the words he spoke.

"What?"

"Thank you for feeding me. I needed that." His eyes drifted shut and his body relaxed. "Get some sleep. Tonight, you have nothing to fear from me anymore."

"You're so kind."

Fucking monster.

WC 1347 words
TWC 8591 words