Vindication

When Mike was four, he told his mother that he needed to sleep in a different room, because there was a monster under his bed. His mother knelt beside the bed and peered beneath it, before announcing that there was no monster there. She asked Mike to look with her, but the monster went away during the day and was only present at night, so that was a waste of time.

That night, Mike’s mother came into his room with a flashlight and shone it all around the room and then under the bed. She told Mike there was no monster and that anyway, there was no other room he could sleep in.

When Mike was nine years old, he asked his teacher if he could be moved to a different class because the creature in the stationery cupboard kept trying to grab his ankles when he went to fetch a new pencil. His teacher wasn’t the sort to tolerate flights of fancy, and Mike found himself missing break time every day for a whole week and also being made stationery monitor for the rest of the term.

When he was fifteen, Mike’s first girlfriend dumped him when he refused to take her to see the most recent rom-com at the local cinema. She laughed at him when he explained about the slimy green bugs that crawled around, munching on dropped popcorn and nachos, and occasionally nibbling at the shoelaces and trouser-legs of cinemagoers.

When he was twenty-three, Mike was charged with wasting police time after repeatedly reporting attempted break-ins at his home, by a werewolf disguised as a postman.

At twenty-seven, Mike was yelled and sworn at by two drivers who had collided while trying to avoid him when he ran into the road. His explanation about attempting to escape the long, snake-like arm reaching out from a nearby drain only enraged them further, and he went home with a black eye.

When Mike was thirty-two, he was finally vindicated. He watched his neighbours run screaming from the relentless onslaught of the monsters, as they crawled from beneath beds, inside wardrobes and behind doors, rose from sewers, emerged from cellars, shook off their disguises and gnawed their way through every living thing they came across.

With the screams from the outside world ringing in his ears, Mike watched as the banshee drifted slowly towards him from the top of the wardrobe and the bogeyman detached itself from the coat-rack, where it had been disguised as a raincoat.

Mike died laughing.