The Shadow Monster

Author's Notes:

Each episode in the "An Inhuman Love" series will be a stand-alone novelette, meant to be read and enjoyed in a single sitting. Expect a monster/human pairing in each episode, with all the juicy details included.

WARNING:

This is a monster-on-girl reluctance/non-consent story, with some minor horror themes. Tread carefully.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Beth sighed, and leaned her weight toward the mirror, setting her hands against the tile wall around it. An old bathroom, but functional, and clean. And the mirror still worked, so she gazed at her reflection, and frowned at it.

She was an attractive woman, sure. Tall, pale skin, green eyes, black hair cut to the shoulder, and she was quite thin. Maybe too thin as of late; not eating enough will do that. People at work said she was starting to look like a regular Morticia Addams, minus the boobs. Assholes. But, she didn't have the time, or the energy, to fix herself proper food lately. That was a confounding problem, only getting worse as she refused to take care of herself, and she was sure she'd eventually get past it. For now though, she had work to do.

She walked up the stairs of the old home, and listened to its ancient creaks and how they summoned old memories, before she stepped into the kitchen. The glass door to the patio was modern, but everything else about the kitchen was antique. Green wallpaper with flowers. Good god. Countertops that looked like a child had chewed up stained glass art and vomited it back up. Satan, come rescue her from this ancient monstrosity. And the floor, it was white tile with more flowers, blue this time, in some sort of pattern she could only assume a blind pig had painted with its hooves.

It was horrible, but she couldn't stop herself from loving it.

"Gammy, the fuck am I supposed to do with this place?" She sat down at the kitchen table, a big wooden thing covered in a cloth of, naturally, painted flowers against the white base. Groaning, she reached behind her for a cabinet in the corner, scooped up a picture, and put it on the table in front of her.

Her great grandmother. A beautiful woman, tall and thin like Beth, long black hair, pale skin, subtle curves and all legs. Gammy Bethany took good care of herself until the day she died, two months ago. The picture was of her thirty years ago, when she was almost seventy. Still an amazing looking woman, even that old, big into fitness and healthy eating.

She was also kind of crazy, said she was happy living alone, didn't need anyone to take care of her, and that someone else was handling it. People asked who, because as far as anyone knew, Beth's great grandmother lived alone, and all her friends were just as old as her. You couldn't trust a ninety-year-old to take care of a near one-hundred-year-old.

"Jen says you were taken care of, though. Happy as a clam." Sighing, Beth looked around the place from her seat, before looking back to the picture. Bethany was smiling big in the picture, radiant, joyful. "You moved in here after your husband died, long before I was around. Everyone who knew you said it helped pull you out of your depression, said something about the house made you happy. Well, it's mine, now. Wanna tell me the secret, Gammy?"

Gammy said nothing. Gammy was dead, and Beth was talking to a picture.

Beth sighed, and looked out the glass doors of the patio. Night time. This was going to be her first time sleeping alone in her new house, and she should have been unpacking. But she wasn't. Unpacking had a finality to it, sort of like writing in stone how the people who used to live there, no longer did. Painful.

She'd said her goodbyes, but saying goodbye to a body in a coffin, all dolled up in makeup, didn't have the weight Beth had expected it to.

"It's this house, isn't it?" she said. "I think of you, Gammy, and I think of this house. I think of the way it squeaks when you go up the stairs, and makes different squeaks when you go down. I think of the way it'd randomly boom with a loud thud, settling on the hill; still does." It was a decently sized house, built onto a mountain side with several other nearby houses; nearby being relative, since they were a ten-minute walk away. It'd have growing pains and settling noises until it eventually collapsed, centuries in the future hopefully. "And of course, the smell of liver and onions. You cooked that so much, it's a wonder you didn't overdose on it." Classic old person behavior.

Chuckling, Beth pulled the papers on the kitchen table to her, and glanced them up and down. The typical crap that came with owning a new house, bills, some papers to sign, shit like that. The house had long been paid off, but that didn't mean the city was just going to let her move in for free. Nope, city had to get their fingers a bit wet, when property traded hands. Still, the house was paid off, and it was cheaper to live here, than her apartment.

"Cheaper, but good god. I don't think I can handle this... Great Depression decor." She laughed again as she looked around at the horrible wallpaper and ridiculous tiling. "I--"

The lights flickered. She froze, and looked around the kitchen as it went dark, then lit up, then went back to darkness. The silence, combined with darkness, was overwhelming. Every noise the house normally made, was gone, fridge included. The hairs on her arms stood up, and the ones on the back of her neck soon followed.

"Damn it." She blinked a few times, and tried to see in the darkness that buried her. Part of the problem in living in a house on a hillside, with only a few neighbors: not much city lighting nearby, especially with a driveway that was really a long path through woods. There was some light though, a nearby streetlight that lit the winding driveway. With time, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The subtle light cut through her curtains, bounced off some walls, and provided her kitchen with enough light for her to see shapes.

If the street light was working, it probably meant her new home's power was dead, not the area's.

"Thought the realtor said this was fixed." Something about power flickers caused by weather. Well, the weather was nice and quiet, not a cloud in the sky. No excuse for this bullshit. "Just flip the breakers, he said. Yeah, ok." This was the twenty-first century, after all. She knew where the breaker box was, and she knew how to flip a circuit breaker. No handy man needed. Fuck Geoff.

First, flashlight. She got up, started feeling around the counters, and looked for the box that had her miscellaneous bathroom crap. That's where she'd normally put her flashlight, so it had be in the box. Finding the box was a problem though, considering she couldn't read anything in the darkness. And if memory served, she also had a bunch of random other crap in that box, razors and painkillers, shit like that. She'd have to go digging.

Dig she did, once she found the box. Razors, makeup kits, deodorant, tampons, painkillers, and a billion other things she was sure she didn't actually own, but someone had sneaked into the box while she'd been packing. Geoff had said she had a bunch of crap she didn't use in her cupboards. Maybe he was right? No, fuck Geoff. Geoff is never right.

Worse than digging through the box in the nigh complete darkness, was looking around at the darkness while digging. Much as she recognized this place from her childhood, that was a long time ago, and it lacked the intimate familiarity she had with her apartment. Learning to walk around in your new home was something to be done in the light, and learning how to do it in darkness, fresh off the bench, was a mistake waiting to happen.

"Found ya!" She whipped out the flashlight from the box, spilling some of the box's contents as she did, and she jumped as a plastic bottle bounced around on the floor. The only good thing about this situation was she couldn't see the tiling or wallpaper. At least, until she turned on the flashlight, and immediately found herself frowning at the walls.

Better to focus on how much she hated Gammy's sense of decor, over the cold chill running down her spine.

With a gulp, she started for the living room. Gammy's place was big enough for a large family, a four-way split with three bedrooms on the top floor, kitchen and living room on the next, a guest room and family room on the third floor, and big basement. Two bathrooms. Too much for just her to own. Gammy lived here alone for around sixty years, though, and she said it never felt too big. Maybe Beth would grow into it.

Right now, growing could wait. She needed to get the lights working before any growing could happen. Sighing, she stopped for a moment as she shined her light around the living room. Two couches, facing each other, with a big window behind one of them. This was where Gammy would set up her Christmas tree and have people over, lots of relatives, most Beth didn't know. People bred like rabbits back then, and Gammy's long life meant she got to meet a lot of her relatives.

Beth, unlike Bethany, didn't really like meeting a whole bunch of people that were essentially strangers to her. Her parents said it was good to meet family, because blood was thicker than water, but Beth disagreed. Except for her cousin Dorothy. Dorothy was awesome. One time, the little imp knocked over the Christmas tree, and tried to blame it on Johnny, but Marilyn would have none of it. A big fight started between Marilyn and Daniel, and...

Beth sighed, shining the light in the corner of the room, over the shaggy carpet, to where the Christmas tree had always been put. Memories rolled over her like an unexpected ocean wave, the sort that hit you in the legs and sent you toppling. A month ago, a trip down memory lane like this would have sent her straight to the bottom of a wine bottle, crying about her Gammy. In fact, it probably would, but only after she'd fixed the power.

She didn't visit Gammy much in her adult years, but she still talked to her all time, usually by phone, but once they got Gammy updated on the wonders of internet and smartphones, they did video calls. Gammy had been wonderful, a solid rock of stability for Beth to lean on, and an unending river of happiness for Beth to drink from. It hurt to not hear her voice anymore. It hurt like hell.

Down the stairs, the carpet was thinner, and led to the family room. The play room, really. While it only had a couple couches and a TV, it often had toys on the floor when family visited. Beth spent many youthful days with her doll house, setting up the perfect honeymoon for Barbie and Ken. Which of course, transfered over to The Sims when she hit puberty, where she made sure her avatar had the perfect man to romantic-but-kinky fuck every night. But, before then, play time with visiting relatives was here. The boys usually hooked up some sort of console to the TV, and she played those sometimes too. Movie time, too, with the family.

She drew on those memories as best she could, used the mental map, and turned left at the bottom of the stairs. Two doors, straight ahead to the bathroom she'd just been in minutes before, and another left turn to follow the stairway down again, to the basement. Sighing, she opened the door to the basement, and went down.

No carpet down here, and a dehumidifier ran, an old thing that didn't do a good job of keeping the basement from getting a bit damp. Which, to her horror as a kid, meant the occasional centipede scurried across her path. Not a threat to her, sleeping upstairs on the top floor, but right now, in her socks, she didn't much enjoy the thought of one crawling up her leg.

"Lot of boxes," she said, frowning as she walked around a metal support beam. The walls down here were concrete, and the ceiling showed the beams and floor boards of the kitchen and living room above. Gammy's stuff sat in boxes piled high, some reaching the ceiling, and they were filled with a million memories. A chest freezer was down here too, but the room was always known as the 'storage' room, and the ball room, when the kids wanted to kick around a rubber ball or something.

One of the boxes was open, and she shined a light down on it as she walked toward the breaker box. Rubber snakes, plastic crocodile on wheels, dinosaurs, cap guns, lot of silly boy toys. She had a boy phase, when she was maybe five or six, and enjoyed playing with her cousins. As she got older, she grew less interested in emulating violence with toys, and grew more interested in playing house, pretending to drink tea, dressing up like Mom, or more often, dressing up like Bethany, stuff like that. But memories were memories, and she smiled down at the toys as she past them.

By the chest freezer, a little space sat between it and a wall of wooden shelves, and upon the wall was the breaker box. She rolled her eyes as she smiled at the freezer, and memories sneaked their way out of the large, innocent white box. She developed an addiction to sweets because of this big, cold, white box. And because of the shelf next to her! Boxes of crackers, cookies, pasta. A house of carbs, good god.

When she was older, she asked her Gammy how she stayed in such good shape and ate healthy, despite having a basement full of temptations; visitors ate most of it, not her. Gammy said she had a healthy sex life to distract her, and it counted as exercise, too. Her husband had long been dead by then, and no one knew of any other man in her life, so Beth, a teen at the time, naturally assumed her Gammy was quite the horny creature prowling for man meat, and kept her nightly hunts secret. It was also the first time someone had put the idea into her head that sex, frequent sex, burned calories and kept you fit and healthy. And that had been the first step toward an interesting sex life for Beth.

Beth froze, and goosebumps crawled up her spine, as she heard a quiet noise that sounded way too much like a growl. She spun around and shined her light around, up along the boxes, the walls, and to the small stairway that led back up to the family room. No movement.

"Rat?... Coyote?" The region did have coyotes, but she couldn't imagine one had managed to sneak into the house. It could have been a rat though, a very large, angry, bite-her-toes-off rat!

No screaming! No squealing! She was a grown woman, and she wasn't afraid of a rat. Spiders, yes, but not rats. Spiders and their creepy crawly hairy legs would forever be her bane, while rats were vermin to be exterminated; by a professional, not her.

She reached for the breaker box, and a shuffling sound chilled her to her core. Her heart stopped, and she slowly moved the light around as she looked for the source. Had a box moved? Didn't look like it. There were maybe twenty cardboard boxes around, and a few plastic tubs, decades of memories tucked away. She shined the light on the shelves, and looked for any signs of a rat, but there were none. If there was a rat or mouse, they would have taken a bite out of some of the boxes of crackers and whatnot lying around, but they were untouched.

The house was settling. That's all it was, just the house settling on the hill.

Another slow, dragging, rustling sound. She flicked her light around faster, heart beating against her chest, eyes wide as she looked for the source. The sound sent more chills up through her socks and into her legs, and she licked her lips nervously as she looked around. Memories hit her, and this time, it was some bad ones. Her cousins were mean sometimes, kids being kids, and on one occasion they'd turned off the light and closed the basement door on her.

Being a little kid, in a basement, surrounded by boxes and stuff, where she knew the occasional centipede wandered, in pitch black? Yeah, she'd screamed and cried, and ever since then, darkness and basements were very low on her list of things she wanted to be in. The little girl in her head, summoned from the past, started screaming at her. Get out, get out now.

She pulled open the breaker box, and flipped back the one circuit that was flipped in, hopefully, the off direction. Bam. Done. A gentle hum kicked in, of the freezer cooling, the dehumidifier turning on, and the fridge upstairs, too. Success.

She scampered over to the stairs and flicked on the light switch. Light, sweet, blessed light. And--

And it went off again. It, and all the power in the house.

"What the fuck." She threw up her hands, flipped the useless light switch back down, and marched back down the stairs.

Movement in the corner of her eye made her jump, and she squealed as she stepped back up the few stairs out of the basement. Another low, quiet growl came from the darkness, and with the power off, the dead silence amplified it. She could hear the rumble in something's throat, and she could hear the hunger in it, too. It was so quiet though, so damn quiet, that the growl was no louder than the minor tinnitus she could hear kick in, now that her new house had grown wholly silent without power again. It had to be her imagination playing tricks on her.

She half walked, half ran to the breaker box, and flipped the power back on again. "Stay on!" She raised her voice louder than she needed to. It was a good way to fight the darkness, or at least fight the growing fear she recognized filling her, the cold chill tingling along her skin until it almost stung like ice. Her heart beat so damn fast, it hurt, and every inch of her skin crawled, like bugs were on her.

No half walking this time, she ran to the stairs and got out of the basement. No massive, hairy hand with big claws grabbed her. No gigantic spiderweb ensnared her. Home free, in her new home.

She reached to turn on the family room light again, and didn't. Maybe if she flipped the switch, the circuit would trip again, and she'd have to go through this shit again. What to do, what to do.

"Time to get old school." And she knew just how to do it. She marched back up to the kitchen where the light was still on thanks to the power in the house being on again, though she kept her flashlight on her. It wouldn't last forever, so she turned it off once the saving grace of her kitchen light enveloped her.

Prepare yourself for me.

She froze, staring at her hands where they'd been reaching for one of her cupboards, high up over the fridge. On her toes, she blinked several times, before slowly turning her head and looking around.

"Um..." Did someone say something? No, the only person in her house was her, and the doors were locked. She hadn't heard anything, but at the same time, she knew she'd heard someone. It wasn't the same as down in the basement, where her imagination had been playing tricks on her. She knew she heard something. Maybe someone outside driving by, with the radio set really loud?

Her damn heart wouldn't slow down! Every noise was making her scared, and that had to stop.

"Something's up with the power, and your mind's just taking advantage. It's an old house. Call an electrician tomorrow." She nodded with the statement, solidifying it. Her fear was dumb! The power was being finicky, and that was all. And she had the perfect cure to deal with darkness, the ultimate tool any self respecting woman carried in ample supply.

Candles. Gammy's old candles.

She grabbed a few of the big, fat blue candles, and a pack of matches from a drawer. The candles were the kind stored inside glass jars, perfect for providing a long lasting, tiny light in the darkness. With them at her side, darkness held no power over her! Plus, they smelled nice.

She slid the flashlight into her pocket, lit one of the candles, and held it in front of her with her right hand while she scooped up two more with her left arm.

"Nothing to do now but sleep and wait for tomorrow. Call that electrician, and get this shit figured out. Kinda need to be able to turn lights on and off." Sighing, she began the trek upstairs, and into the darkness awaiting her. Tempted, so very tempted to flip a light switch, but she wouldn't dare. If she accidentally tripped the breaker again, she was not going back down into that basement. For now, she'd leave the kitchen light on, but that was the only light she'd risk.