Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24694434-20150115043735

Thank you for looking over this. Please feel free to be completely honest. I'm worried this kind of story may have been done many times, considering its topic (the unknown, lurking monster).

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Look behind you! No really, look behind you. There’s someone there, leering at you, no doubt.

I know, I know… There’s no one there.

Did you take a quick peek around, though? If you did, you saw nothing there, right? And if you decide to look around yourself later, I can guarantee you won’t see it

Did you feel that? These creatures often softly touch the people they are around, such as on the corners of their shoulders or the back of their heads. Go ahead and look around. Didn’t see anything, right?

But don’t get too comfortable. It’s been moving its head in sync with yours for the last few seconds. No matter how often you turned your head, it would always stay behind you. In the span of seconds it can change from a paper-thin wafer of watery goop to a size and mass equaling the largest man in the world.

If it grows bored of that, it thinks, “Time to move onto something else,” in an incomprehensible language it came up with in the first year of its miserable, revolting existence.

It may poke you repeatedly on the back of your arm with appendages mutated into sticks, touching so lightly that you don’t notice. Can you feel it? Just take a moment to concentrate on your arms and see if you can tell it’s there. It would hate to know if you could.­­

What you don’t know is that it ''multiplied. ''Did you see that shadow flick out of the corner of your eye? This monster could split into hundreds of itself. These separate entities have crammed into any available space that’s out of humans' eyesight. Hundreds and thousands of them can be smashed together at a time, unmoving. They are in sewers, unused closets, untouched attics, old cloths with many folds, trash dumps, old wells, empty fields, deserts, the center of forests, and basically anywhere people don’t pass by often. If they are near humans, they remain out of sight at all times. They hate people. With each new monster spawned is an encompassing hate for humans only equal to their fear of them. But there are monsters out there who take this hatred to new extremes. They go out alone and seek out humans, studying their simple actions with infallible memory. Every human has at least one of these in their vicinity.

Oh yes, they know you. The monster with you now has been around for a long time. Long enough to experience what must seem like an eternity of never eating, drinking, seeing color, feeling temperature, speaking out loud, sleeping, hearing, feeling the texture of what it touches, and certainly never sharing information. It finds humans horrifyingly fascinating. Is that how you feel about it as well? The monster would probably think this question is demeaning.

By the way, the monster is probably fascinated with your hair. It would be watching with deep intensity as the tiny strands sway away from each of its blue barbs that fluctuate in shape with a single thought. It doesn’t have hair, and can only recreate a fake version. The monster finds nature’s gifts to humans both extremely fascinating and agitating, as though these complex human beings are simply nature’s way of degrading unnatural things like the monsters.

You might want to stop reading now. The creatures know that humans could never discover them, and these silly stories humans like to read are only stories. However, this story is starting touch the truth, and your monster is thinking over what it should now. Better safe than sorry, right?

Lucky for you, it would rather not feel your “disgusting, sensing flesh,“ and avoids doing so.

The idea of “monsters” has been around for thousands of years. Many tales were no doubt the tales of imaginative minds, or extrapolations of little, questionable defects in what was “normal.” A slight flutter from beyond the sight of vision. Maybe a dark shadow visiting in the middle of night. Sometimes what appears to be a person in the distant shadows of a tree turned out to be simply your imagination. But don’t let your imagination fool you. Not all that doesn’t make sense is false.

Do you ever stand in the doorway and look back the way you came? What about the feeling of watching eyes outside of a vehicle in the middle of the night? What about when you were very young, scared of the “monster” that was in your closet, watching you? All these things may simply be nothing more than creations of the mind.

Except at least one monster that was always there, always following and hiding from you, always watching with malice and envy, always waiting for something. A theory about them does exist... The original "thing" may have been a person who long ago disappeared from existence, forever denied with the feelings associated with being alive. Maybe it was a punishment, or an accident.

<p class="MsoNormal">It at least has reflexes that are much faster than a human is capable of, so you won’t catch it by turning around. The best chance of catching sight of it is at night, when you’re pretending to sleep or wake too early. You may just see it in a variety of forms: a ball of light, a human, a monster, a shadow, a butterfly, a table lamp, or anything, really. No matter what the form, they disappear soon after. <ac_metadata title="Your Casual Acquaintance (Unreviewed)"> </ac_metadata>