The Things that go Bump at Night...

So, I think I'm going to get back to the monsters for now...so we'll talk about one of the most popular monsters that many adults tend to underestimate. 

Avoiding the Boogie-Man: Strategies for Survival

The boogie-man may be one of history’s best-kept secrets.  Boogie-men cause deaths and disappearances on a daily basis; they killed Napoleon and every other elderly person with a frail heart.  Most children are aware of the dangers of the boogie-man, yet most adults are dangerously ignorant of this nighttime menace.   Because many people over the age of ten have fallen victim to this monster, the following discussion is comprised of valuable information that will help detect, distinguish between, and defeat all types of boogie-man. 

The most important piece of information you need to know is how to fend off the boogie-men.  But even this knowledge is useless if you don’t know what a boogie-man is.  All boogie-men are pale, nocturnal, and careful.  They cannot be seen in direct light because of a biological stealth mechanism that has evolved with their need to survive; any light renders them invisible.  The only flaw in this ability is that when they become invisible, they also become immobile.  To avoid this helplessness, boogie-men never come out of hiding during the day. 

Boogie-men rely almost completely on scent because they are horribly far sighted.  They can unhinge their jaws to swallow people whole, and the only thing left after the digestive process is a human corpse, dead of heart failure.  Of course, to effectively battle the boogie-men, you must understand each of the three types. 

The most common type of boogie-men is the bed-boogie-man.  As with all of his species, he gets his namesake from his hiding spot.  The bed-boogie-man creates his nest in the warm underside of your bed.  He is generally very short and very flat, easily able to both fit and maneuver in the small space.  His weapons are his long arms which he uses to snag your legs as you walk toward the bed, because he has neither the patience to wait for you to fall asleep, nor the muscle structure to reach the top of the bed.  The telltale sign of a bed-boogie-man is an overabundance of dust bunnies, for these are the bed-boogie-man’s feces. 

The most well-known of the boogie-men is the closet-boogie-man.  This breed of boogie-men holes up in the dark corner of your closet and is set apart from other boogie-men by his height, his skinniness, and his flexibility.  Despite his ability to become invisible in the light, the closet-boogie-man prefers to fold his long, stick-like body, concealing himself between hanging articles of clothing.  He feels safest around corduroys, and abhors flannel, so if you stock your closet with flannel, the closet-boogie-man will break out in hives and disintegrate into a minty scented dust. 

The closet-boogie-man’s hunting technique differs greatly from the bed-boogie-man’s.  He is much more patient that the bed-boogie-man and can easily wait until you have fallen asleep before strangling you with his long fingers.  The closet-boogie-man is very difficult to detect because he makes almost no noise, and disposes of his waste by spreading an odd smell through the air.  Therefore, there is only one way to tell if he is there.  Despite his extreme anorexia and lack of muscle, the closet-boogie-man still has both mass and weight, and therefore causes some clothes to fall from their hangers.  If you discover that some of your hanging clothes have been displaced or have fallen, you surely have a closet-boogie-man. 

The final and most rare breed of boogie-men is the window-boogie-man.  This boogie-man has only appeared a few times in history and therefore, all that is known about him is that he has bat like wings.  Despite the lack of information regarding his appearance, his other characteristics are unmistakable because his hunting style is significantly different than the common boogie-mau78n’s.  The window-boogie-man is the only boogie-man that does not actually inhabit your room.  He prefers to roost just outside your window.  He also hibernates.  You will only meet this boogie-man on warm summer nights, when you cannot help but open your window.  Then, he sneaks into your room, and waits for you to open your eyes, at which time he pounces.  The window-boogie-man prefers his victims to be sleepy, and he muffles their screams with his wings.  The window-boogie-man generates a good bit of wind when entering your room, and that wind causes the curtains to flap noisily.  Therefore the only clear warning that will tell you that the window-boogie-man is in your room is the sound of the curtain blowing. 

If you believe that you are being targeted by a boogie-man, your first priority is to conduct a thorough search for the telltale signs of invasion.  Because of their stealth mechanism, using your eyes to search is nearly useless, but rather you should use your other senses; specifically, your ears.  The easiest and most common method of check your bedroom for infestation is to lie on your bed at night, and listen very carefully for odd sounds that you wouldn’t hear during the day.  One of the easiest sounds to recognize is the characteristic moaning made by boogie-men when they sense prey is near.  Another sound to listen for is more of a creaking noise.  Boogie-men, because of their hiding places, do not get to move around much, for moving would alert their targets.  The creaking is caused by them slow movement of their arms and legs in preparation for their attack.

If you notice any signs that point to the presence of a boogie-man, precautionary measures must be taken.  Your first step is to place a working flashlight within grabbing distance.   The next defense you must put in place is to arrange a circle of fierce-looking toys around your bed, for boogie-men cannot discern that these toys are inanimate, and they will flee at the slightest sign of a fight.  Finally, you must dress in pajamas that will allow you to move quickly because boogie-men can be quite swift; wearing cumbersome clothing will do absolutely nothing to help you.  It is imperative that you put all the precautionary measures into place while the light is on.  If the light is off, you are a sitting duck for an opportunistic boogie-man. 

Now, you must reach the bed.  If you do not have a light switch within arm’s length of your bed, you must be extremely careful.  The bed-boogie-man is exceedingly skilled at grabbing legs when you are walking to your bed, so you must be sure not to come within his reach.  Of course, the only sure way to do this is to take a running leap onto your bed.  Not only will you have gotten past the first danger of the night, but you will have startled any other boogie-men enough to give yourself an hour or two of safety. 

Most bed-boogie-men are not able to reach you when you are in your bed; they are not nearly as flexible as their closeted cousins.  In fact, their arms are not physically able to lift more than a few inches off the ground.  So, if you have cleared this hurdle, then you have taken care of the bed-boogie-man for the night.  Now the danger rests in the closet- and window-boogie-men.

If you are a light sleeper, you are guarded against most closet-boogie-men because they are incredibly fearful of confrontation and will not attack you if you are either awake or are likely to wake.  However, there are a few brazen closet-boogie-men who will emerge from their hiding places to feed, even if you are moving around.  The safest way to block these boogie-men, brazen or not, is to shut your closet door.  Because of the lack of anything besides skin and bones, closet-boogie-men, as a whole, are extremely weak.  They can barely lift themselves off the ground to attack, let alone open a door.  If your closet doesn’t have a door, then you must create another semicircle of toys around the doorway. 

The flip side of the coin is that if you are a light sleeper, you are much more susceptible to the window-boogie-man.  As you may recall, the window-boogie-man waits for you to open your eyes to eat you.  If you believe that a window-boogie-man has entered your room, then the first thing you must do is squeeze your eyes shut.  Under no circumstances should you open your eyes.  If you open your eyes, even just a crack, the window-boogie-man will notice.  This is where the flashlight comes in handy.  If you have prepared correctly, you will have placed a flashlight within grabbing distance.  Now, without opening you eyes, you will grab the flashlight, click the light on, and shine the beam directly at the foot of the bed.  The window-boogie-man will always wait at the foot, never at your side, because he only moves in large swoops, and the foot of the bed is the perfect distance for him.  Once you have focused the flashlight on the foot of the bed, you must flick it off for a brief moment, then back on, and wave it around. 

The first beam of light focused on the window-boogie-man shocks and immobilizes him, the moment of darkness gives him the chance to move out of killing range, and the wild slashing of the light frightens him out of your room.  Only after you have waved the flashlight for a good minute may you open your eyes.  Give your room one cursory look.  Check to see if there has been any activity by the closet- or bed-boogie-man, then turn the flashlight off and go back to sleep. 

If you follow these guidelines to the letter, your chances for surviving the night are markedly increased.  Just remember that boogie-men have almost no reason in their minds, are completely driven by instinct, and that nothing is completely guaranteed to fend them off. Trusting your intuition and playing it safe will be your best option.  

Undead Monkeys

Not that long ago, I decided that I wanted an undead monkey for a pet.  A lot like the monkey from Pirates of the Caribbean.  But these guys are hell to get, because there's only one island in the middle of the Pacific that exports them.  Normally, it'd be easy to get a monkey from this island, but it's in the middle of a civil war, and each side created an embargo for the other.  

In other words, no monkey.  

I was trying to figure out a way to get a monkey, because I really want one, and a friend reminded me that this guy owes me from a thing with a Chinese woman and an elephant.  Because this story was a large part of my past (hell, it's the reason I have this name and face and life), I decided it was important to share.  

I was in Albania (doing work with cars for the Mafia) about three years ago, with my dad.  He wasn’t as much into the physical stuff, he preferred hacking, but the Mafia didn’t really trust a thirteen year old.  Anyway, we were driving through Albania, having just delivered a truckload of cars, when we pull over to get a bite to eat in Tirana, the capital of Albania.  This guy comes up to us while we’re eating, looking really nervous, and asks if he can sit down with us, just for a few minutes.  We were in a good mood, considering we’d just been paid a good deal of money, so we said sure, why not?  I mean really, this guy looked harmless.  What could possibly go wrong? 

So, it turns out that this guy jacked the shipment of cars we’d just delivered for another Mafia family.  He was running, having hidden the cars somewhere, he never told us where.  He assumed that an upstanding gentleman like my father with a cute, albeit odd, daughter such as myself would never be involved with the Mafia.  So, when we told him that those had been our cars, he started to freak out.  Before the police were called, we calmed him down, because we didn’t care what happened to the cars, now that we had been paid.  We asked this guy why he needed to steal those cars in the first place.  He said that he needed a good way to smuggle some cargo into another country. 

At this point, my dad was sort of out of his depth.  He mostly stole things, and changed deliveries.  The smuggling was more my area, so he left.  Now, it was just me and this guy, who said his name was John Smith.  Riiiiiight.  So, I told him my name was Sam Eyeam.  Yea, not that original, but whatever.  It got the job done.  I asked him what he was trying to smuggle and where. 

Smith said that he was smuggling papers.  Official documents, passports and the like, in and out of Korea.  Yea, Korea.  The north one.  Pretty big business.  So, me, having been in and out of Korea a few times, decided to help him out.  He brought me one of the cars, along with the pile of documents he had made. 

So, getting into Korea was no problem (it’s a lot easier than everyone makes it out to be…or at least, the way I take is) but somehow, the Mafia that I had been working for found out that I was helping Smith, so they were now gunning for the both of us.  Anyway, we get into North Korea, and it turns out that he had done this job to help pay for these passports and stuff to get a bunch of families OUT of North Korea.  So, we got them out (boy, was that fun) but now we’re on the run from the Mafia.  So Smith and I hightail it to France.  I spoke French pretty well, so it’s not like we were fumbling around with no way to survive.  Actually, we joined a circus.  THAT was fun.  I worked with animals, and Smith was a clown. 

THAT’s how I met the elephant.  Her name was Tiffy, the nicest elephant you’ll ever meet.  I got her to do tricks for the crowd, mostly standing up on various legs, but the really cool thing she could do was juggle with me.  Oh, the crowd loved it.  But she wasn’t treated very well backstage.  None of the animals were. 

I get word that there’s this guy in India that can help Tiffy, and I decide to steal her.  Smith comes with me, I said that he owed me because of the whole North Korea thing, and we steal Tiffy’s trailer.  Now we’ve got the Mafia and the French police after us.  Fun, right?  And the Mafia have a wide reach, so we needed to get Tiffy to India without being found.

We get a boat.  I load it with food for us and Tiffy, and we decide to sail around France (we were on the Northern side), around Spain, into the Mediterranean, and into the Black Sea, and drive from there to the Persian Gulf, avoiding any major war zones whenever possible.  So, we drove through Georgia and Azerbajain, and into Iran. Then, we went down to the Persian Gulf, and onto another boat. 

As it turns out, Tiffy had been pregnant.  I didn’t know this until the vet we had hired told me that she was giving birth.  A couple of hours later, we had a baby elephant. 

This presented a problem.  The guy in India said that he could take care of Tiffy, but not her baby.  Eventually, Smith got him to take the baby, who we named Sebastian.  

Don’t ask.

 

Now, I owed Smith a favor.  He put me in touch with a friend of his, another smuggler, and told me to solve his problem.  So, this guy lived in Japan, and his name was, weirdly enough, also John Smith!  Him, I call Smithy, because I like him better than the original Smith.  So, Smithy was having some trouble delivering some gems to a buyer, in Thailand.  I told him to put them into a bag, and shove the bag inside a melon, and get an elephant to eat the melon.  I’d been hanging around Tiffy long enough to know that she loved melons. 

Smithy didn’t exactly have an elephant on hand, so…yep, you guessed it.  He borrowed TIffy.  And when I say he borrowed Tiffy, I mean that he convinced me to take Tiffy to Thailand, and then meet him once nature had taken its course, and the gems were out of Tiffy’s digestive system.  It seriously didn’t take much time at all to get Tiffy to Japan, get her to eat the gems, and to get to Thailand. But that’s when I met this girl.  Nah, girl’s not the right word.  Woman.  She was travelling to Thailand to visit family, but she was originally from China.  She bonded with Tiffy immediately, and decided to stick with us on the way to our buyer, and then go to her family.  We got to where we were going, Tiffy delivered the goods, and we met Smithy.  

He fell in love with Piun Dao, and she him.  I’m not kidding.  Head over heels, bad romance movie, Romeo and Juliet with a happier ending in love.  They ended up getting married. 

So, summarizing, the guy who owes me is Smithy, and he owes me for introducing him to his wife and for lending him Tiffy to finish the job to let him go straight. 

As for the Mafia, they caught up with Smith, who pointed the finger at me and Smithy, and now him an Piun Dao are on the run.  I came here two and a half years ago, took over this identity, and have been Tegan  ever since.  I still get letters from Smithy every once in a while; he still thinks my name is Sam.  It’s actually really amusing.

Vampires in the Basement!

When I was young, I had very few nightmares.  I would have a number of scary thoughts, mostly because of a book my fourth grade teacher read to us about witches in America turning kids into pheasants or hot dogs and having out parents eat us.  I had a particularly vivid imagination, so I had a perfect picture of my abductor in my mind.  I slept in a loft bed (think a bunk bed without the bottom bed) and I would hear creepy noises, and I thought it was someone sneaking into my room to kill me with a knife.

I was kinda paranoid.

Anyway, one of the few nightmares I had was about vampires.  I wasn't scared of vampires.  I didn't even believe in vampires.  I didn't even watch or read much about vampires.  My dad showed me two episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that was about the extent of my contact with vampires.

So, one night, I was laying there, thinking about how a witch would kidnap me and try to turn me into a bird, but I would kick her in the face and run away with her wig.  I didn't really take into account that while I was flexible, and could kick quite high and quite hard, my legs weren't long enough to reach a full-grown woman's face.  Nor did I remember that witches don't take kids from their bedrooms, but hey, that's just details.  So, there I was, planning my defense, until I fell asleep.

Most of my dreams involved either flying or running around underground with my friends.  I particularly enjoy the flying ones.  But no, this one was much more malevolent.  I had to go downstairs into my basement, which if you remember, is quite creepy.  My dream basement was even creepier.  It looked the exact same, but there was this woman there.  She looked regular, but then she grew fangs.  And not the regular fangs that you usually see on vampires, but her teeth turned into freaking drill bits.  You know, the long thin kind that are all twirly and look like they should be on a Christmas tree?  Or is that just me?  But, that kind.  And they were three feet long!  Scary...

Then I died.  Or, woke up.

It was only hours after that, after I'd gone back to sleep and woken up again, that I realized that I should have just grown four feet taller, and sprout my own Christmas-tree-ornament-drillbit-fangs, twice as long as her.  Alas, if only I'd thought of this before the vampire woman killed me.

Anyway, since then, I've been extremely hesitant to go into my basement, and I realized that my basement is host to a variety of creatures.  Now that I'm older, taller, and able to sprout fangs of my own do I dare venture down there alone.

Also, I keep a stake on me at all times.