Page 38 of A Very Monstrous Desire

“I don’t want to think about them right now, not here, not when it is us.”

Baku seemed to sigh at that. He reached out and ran a finger along Theo’s face, carefully caressing along his cheekbone. “Your skin is such a strange colour,” he said. “The other humans I have met were similar and despite being warned in advance it took me some time to become accustomed to it.”

“You look…different to me too,” Theo said. “Your glow…” He leaned into the monster’s caress. “Most people in my world do not glow.”

“The glow has a very specific cause. One I will explain in time.”

Given that the monster felt free to caress him, Theo decided he would do the same. He stroked gently along the monster’s pointed ear. It twitched beneath his touch.

“You feel that, don’t you?” he demanded again and he didn’t mean the touch but the effects of it, the strange feeling that it induced.

“Of course, I do,” the monster replied.

“Then tell me what you were doing in my world,” Theo said as he watched the ear twitch again.

“Preparing to battle the nightmares,” the monster said even as he leaned into Theo’s touch. “But my journeys to your world began only recently. The trip to get from our continent to this one is not easy. Anyone that commits to travelling between the worlds must settle here for the time being.”

“You have to be on this continent to travel over because the rips mirror each other, and this is mainly where they are?”

Baku nodded. “We have mapped all the rips.”

“All of them?” Theo asked in surprise. “I’m not sure we’ve managed that. We have a warning system in place now when they start, but some of the early ones weren’t recorded at all.”

“It is important we know where they are so we know where we must go,” Baku said.

“And where did you go the first time you went over to my dimension?”

“This was some months ago,” Baku said. “And it was much farther south. A small town called Padstowe.”

“In Cornwall?”

“Yes, you have been?” Baku asked.

Theo shook his head. “I rarely leave the city. But I know of the town because a famous chef once lived there. He cooked a lot of fish. This was long before the munching monsters infested it and ate them all. I think he lives up north now.”

“The infestation down there is significant,” Baku growled. “I went to witness it and try to understand what the nightmares are doing there.”

“Eating everything,” Theo said. “That’s what they always do. They arrive through a rip, and they eat everything in sight. The only way to stop them is to kill them all. In the early days the government did try other things,” Theo added. “Talking to them, negotiating with them. It didn’t work.”

“No,” Baku said. “It would not. They are not people in the way that you understand people to be. They can think and they can plan and perhaps they are even slightly sentient, but they operate on instinct and their instinct is to consume. The act allows them to multiply so quickly.”

“Which is what makes them so difficult to kill.”

“Yes.” Baku caressed him again, slower, gentler. “You need to sleep, Theo,” he said. “We both do. Tomorrow is going to be…difficult.”

“I’m a bit worried to close my eyes,” Theo admitted.

“The rages…”

“Yeah.”

“The memory of their cries will fade in time. They will cease to hurt you.”

“And in the meantime.”

“Hear it. Accept it. That is all you can do.” The monster paused for just a moment before saying the next words, and Theo got the impression that he was choosing them carefully. “And perhaps it would be helpful if you came closer to me, if you spent the night physically pressed against me.”

“How would that be helpful?” Theo asked even as his chest seemed to tighten.

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