The Monster Under the Bed

She rolled over and heard it.

Breathing.

Not again, she thought.

She clamped her eyes shut and pulled the blanket over her head, in a pointless attempt to block out the noise. The sound was harsh, violent, threatening, so and so regular it seemed almost robotic.

But where was it coming from? She checked the room thoroughly, as she did every night, before she had settled down; behind the curtains, in the toy box, under the wardrobe. There had been nothing.

So where was the breathing coming from?

She remembered the stories her older brother liked to tell her; stories of strange, terrible beings that came out only at night, that liked to hunt her kind down. But her parents had insisted they didn’t exist, that he was just trying to scare her.

Sometimes the breathing would stop for a moment and she would know a moment of relief, telling herself that it was only a dream after all or a figment of her wild imagination.

Then it would start again and she would curl up in a ball and shut her eyes, repeating the same mantra over and over again.

There’s no such thing as humans. There’s no such thing as humans.