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THE CHILD'S MONSTER
  by Gordon Chapman
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  The child lays still. The silence grows more intense as he
listens, searching for a sound lurking in the quiet. Is it there?
Will it reveal itself? Will there be an accidental scratch of a
claw on the floor? Perhaps he'll hear an unpleasant sound, as if
an invertebrate is attempting to move silently, and accidentally
rubs its carapace against something in the dark. A bead of sweat
forms on the child's forehead.

  He holds a stuffed bear close, hoping for protection, or at 
least comfort in its embrace. He does not breathe normally, but lets
wisps of air ebb and flow as noiselessly as possible into his pillow. 
If it's there, it cannot stay silent forever. The silence stretches 
on longer than he can go without surrendering and greedily inhaling 
a big gulp of air, disturbing the night and revealing his anxiety. 

  Perhaps the monster is not there. Maybe it will wait until he 
is closer to sleep, and he will see it in a sudden muted flash of
light as some errant beam catches the monster and reflects in its
dark eyes. He wonders where it will be, under the bed, in the closet, 
behind the dresser or sneaking up through the heater vents. 

  The anticipation is worse than actually having it there, lurking 
in his room. The monster may not come, and his terror rises, knowing 
that if the monster isn't back tonight, that it will come again soon, 
and be more angry.  

  There is dread in the speculation that the monster may never come
back, and he will lie forever in the bed waiting and listening for 
the monster's hot breath, frozen unendingly in anticipation.

                               *  *  *

  There is a presence that one feels at times. Eyes watching 
from across a room. An ear pressed against a thin wall. Someone 
out there, watching and waiting, for just the right moment. Why is 
it that one notices such a thing? How is it that you can feel the
gaze of eyes that you do not see? 

  Perhaps it is the force of a deep premeditated will that
overpowers the known senses. I feel the hair on the back of my
neck rising.

  "Hi there, remember me?" You burst suddenly from a clutch of
people on the sidewalk with the quick, expert motion of a knife
fighter. 

  It's not as if I could forget you. I'd have loved to have
forgotten, but that just wasn't an option. 

  I really thought I'd handle it better whenever I saw you again.
At one point I was even rehearsing for it, just in case it ever
happened. I had a detailed plan. I'd be aloof and wouldn't show
any sign of emotion, or any clue that I cared. With any luck, I
wouldn't care. I had it all figured out.  

  Your timing is predictably superb, I would swear that you 
somehow plotted this out, like you could read exactly how my 
internal clock would work.  How is it that you know that it has 
been just long enough for me to lose my contrived edge, to forget 
my preparations? It seems a suspicious coincidence that you appear
just now and I try to discount the weird notion that you may have
been stalking me.

  There was a time I'd have given anything to see you again. I'd
have made horrible pacts with the devil if need be. Just to see
you one more time and at least gamble on the long shot that magic
could occur again would have been worth it for me. Some people
never have -- even a taste of that magic, I'd have been willing to
deal with all the pain and misery for just another hint of that
enchantment. 

  That didn't happen, though. You had simply disappeared, having
parachuted into a new order for your life, and acquired a sense
of meaning, however shallow. I must have died a hundred times
hoping for you to somehow show up again, and, ultimately, I'd
lost all hope. Thankfully, I stopped even wanting it to happen,
and, even better, charitable Gods made me feel as if I didn't
care if it ever happened. That was, of course, all it took for
you to reappear.

  I am speechless in your presence, and I flash a large dumb grin.
I know that you can read all the signals, and I'm nothing less
than a huge advertisement for how genuinely thrilled I am to see
you. 

  You touch my arm. "I'd love to see you, could we get together
sometime?" You don't show any signs of the memory of our breakup
way back when. It had seemed like warfare, I don't have to look
far to find scars from all the wounds. Warfare would have been
better, in retrospect.

  I'm not a stupid person, at least not normally, certainly not a
rube. But, suddenly, I'm a complete sucker, diving willingly into
the tiny barrel from the high dive platform. Can I have really
lost all the memory of the horror? There's no accounting for
this, can the mere sight of you erase all the pain from the past?
Evidently. 

  Perhaps I'm just conditioned to want to please you. It's
ridiculous, I don't want to see you again, but you ask, and 
some incomprehensible inner force takes over me, over-riding the
person who wants to say,"NO!"

  "That'd be great."

  It's a terrible feeling, like sinking slowly in tropical seas, as
a typhoon wind summons up the big rollers that tease the hatches
open. The sea moves in with a hypnotic undulation, and, with a
warm death embrace, fills up the bulkheads. I'm on the bridge,
frozen in a trance, watching the big wooden wheel spin crazily
while the ship's telegraph howls for attention. 

                               *  *  *

  There's breathing coming from somewhere. There is a low grumble
to it, only just barely discernible to the most alert ear. It is
only revealed at the deepest extent of exhalation when it
produces a small, but definite, growling sound. The monster is
trying to be quiet, breathing with a determination to be silent,
but betrayed by its own intensity and madness. 

  He wonders what form it is in. Perhaps it is a small, rabid
rodent, or a flying bat, with ugly folds of black skin. Could it
be something big, a huge-maned lion looking for a kill? A savage,
howling wolf, drooling and ready to pounce? He peeks above the
covers, over the toys on the bed and towards the closet. Holding
still for just a moment, he has the answer. She is a dragon, and
she watches him always.

  The child pulls the covers up over his head, and quakes. 
  
                               *  *  *

  There was no love like ours. I believe that everyone says that
about one love in their life, but this was nothing that fit into
the life of an Everyman, this was the real thing. We touched each
other on an infinite number of levels, intertwined mentally and
physically in a symphony of crashing crescendos and an ascendant
arpeggio.

  And we made love. We made love on crystalline fall mornings with
air so thin a church bell could be heard from miles away and it
seemed as if time had stopped. We'd walk together afterwards and
not feel the chill, and everyone in the city seemed as if they
spoke in some foreign tongue, we had the whole world to ourselves
and could generate our own heat. We were absorbed in each other
and nothing but each other, all else was diminutive in import. We
were our own galaxy, and for a moment, the stars revolved around
us.

  All this was too brief, far too brief. Like Icarus, we strayed
too close to the sun and spiralled out of control when the wax
that bound the feathers to our wings became too warm and melted.
In the glow of the unguarded comfort of our love, you showed me
your demons, or they escaped from your control. They manifested
themselves in a reign of terror that eclipsed all we had been. We
came down to earth too fast to survive and left huge craters in
the ground with our impact. It was more than I could deal with,
more than I was prepared to cope with. I wanted you to disappear.

  Finally, you obliged me, and left.  In giving me what I wanted,
you hurt me as I'd never been hurt before, and hopefully will
never feel again.

                               *  *  *

  She's hissing. He can feel her warmth as she moves past the 
edge of the bed. He feels a sudden weight on the bed, then, a 
lightening. The child imagines her prowling, wild-eyed, as she 
snatches a stuffed toy with a snap of her jaw. Her jagged teeth
shred the toy, and she shakes it back and forth in her mouth as
if to break its neck, then throws it back onto the bed in a
flutter of stuffing.

  He smells her sulphurous breath. He wants to scream, in protest
to whatever demon of madness has sent her in all her inscrutability. 
His mouth forms to make the sound, but none emerges. Finally, he 
screams. To his surprise, she flees in terror, her naked fear 
jarringly evident.

                               *  *  *

  I couldn't believe that you left. I don't know what I expected,
maybe I wanted you to die for me, as if it would somehow validate
what had seemed to be near perfection and override the savage
flaws which still burned as open wounds. Your leaving rendered
hollow all that had been. The whole episode then was left only in
the purview of questioning demons. There was, of course, no
solution that would have worked for me, save perhaps, the end of
the planet. 

  It still seemed important enough for a planet to die for, and I 
don't know that I would ever have been prepared to declare it all 
finished until the centre of the earth squeezed itself out into the 
vacuum. I always hoped that the one I loved would return, bursting 
through a wall of screaming dervishes and imps, defeating the dark 
side for something that was too important to lose.  

  "So, how have you been all this time?"

  I don't know what you want. You speak of inconsequential things,
yet your eyes speak of more. But what? 

  It's that same sense of feeling someone's secret gaze, but
stronger. The power of your need pushes over me like an untamed
spring wind. I sense desperation, major hopelessness of the
proportion of crashed markets, lost wars, burning hulls rolling
over in seas alight with flaming oil, and the wail and shrieking
of mourning piercing the air.

  This is a desperation that I've seen before. I should have seen
it in you long ago, when we first met. Our love wasn't perfect at
all, it was just a myth created for my benefit because you couldn't 
be alone for even one night. Your sorcery wove a fiction of 
perfection for me, but, I didn't realize the cloth was made of your 
fears. In fact, it hid them from me. I should thank you for your 
deception, it was a construct I'll never see duplicated, and I played 
my part with intensity and was rewarded with an all too short sense 
of satisfaction.

  But, it was all just a well-managed illusion, all of it. There
was no love, there was no magic, no perfection. When your fears
rose to the surface, you couldn't control them. You left, going
directly to a new lover, the first one you could find, a shabby
and pitiful replacement valued only for immediacy. When you
arrived in my life, you had left one, too. I wonder what spell
you wove for the successor, if you used the same code words,
flashed your eyes the same way, laughed at the same things.

  I'll credit you for engineering the mirage of perfection, but
I'll always remember you as the pathetic creature I saw when the
illusion collapsed, slinking away with the demeanour of a drenched 
rodent caught in the rain, climbing into another bed in an attempt 
to whore yourself away from your own demons.

  "Things are going all right, well, as well as they could be."

  This is a clue. You never did say what you meant openly,
everything was always cryptic, with a hint imbedded strategically
here and there. Nothing has changed, obviously.

  Then I realize why you're here, and what's brought you. You're
looking for a place to land, like some vulture searching for a
corpse. You stand in front of me, as if begging naked and
shivering in the cold rain, willing to do anything, be anyone,
weave any magic to come into the warm. 

  You must have spiralled into the ground again. You must hope that
just maybe I'd strap on the wings again and help you fly away
from your madness. 
 
  You never recognized that I really loved you. It was just another
convenience to you, any measure of love that you feel can only be 
felt in context of providing you safekeeping from your devils. Having 
had that revelation, I shouldn't care about you. And, I don't. It's 
more than pleasant to find out that I genuinely don't care, other 
than to feel a twinge of pity. Sharing a street corner conversation 
is as much as I care to have to do with you.

  I don't care, and I won't fly with you again. 

  I say goodbye to you, and walk away, and I don't look back. There
was a time I'd have worried. I'd have checked the obituaries. I'd
have called or would have had someone call. But, I really don't
care, and I won't have the least bit of trouble sleeping tonight.

                               *  *  *

  In revealing her fear, she has lost her power. The sound of her
breath becomes more audible, and she stumbles clumsily and
noisily. Her veils are falling, and suddenly it is she that feels
unprotected and naked in the face of the child's indifference.

  Her tears fall, glistening on her black scales, then fade away to
nothing. Even her tears have no power. She must go, unheeded into
the night, into a purgatory of her own making, and never return.

  The child cares not if the monster comes again. The child sleeps,
and dreams of other things. 

                               {DREAM}
                               
Copyright 1994 Gordon Chapman, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Gordon is a Canadian writer who makes his living as a journalist and 
communications executive. He has a weakness for motorcycles, good 
scotch, and fiction. His stories, from very short to novella length, 
have appeared in a variety of Canadian publications as well as in the 
U.S.A.
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