Moving cities and working nights had pretty much destroyed your social life. Every week, you spent your days off sitting around the house in your pyjamas eating copious amounts of beige snack food whilst watching hour after hour of elaborate cooking videos on YouTube. It wasn’t the life of glitz and glamour you’d imagined when you moved, but it was certainly comfortable. Plus, working nights was actually paying you well enough to live on your own, which was a luxury you relished in your every waking moment. You loved the peace of living by yourself; you loved putting something down and knowing exactly where to find it the next day, undisturbed, untidied, just waiting for you.
You were frozen in horror as the huge dark creature emerged the wardrobe and turned its flat face towards you, piercing white eyes fixed on the glowing phone in your trembling hands.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” The operator called out to you, but you knew it was already too late for help.
The thing seemed to absorb any light which touched it, all you could make out in the darkened room was a silhouette and that was bad enough. It was tall and lithe, it had a mane around its head and shoulders, and curved horns like a ram. The only thing which pierced its darkness was its bright white blank eyes. It had six… limbs? And seemed to be standing on two of them. Its proportions were all wrong.
Surprisingly, it was shaping up to be the best week of your life. Immediately after you’d completed the task of lugging Friday’s gift back from the hotel to your home (seven trips, with two suitcases), you’d curled up on the sofa and set about penning your resignation email with some gusto. After five drafts with an increasingly pithy and resentful tone and about an hour basking in the glow of your screen, you deleted everything you’d written and settled on:
“Apologies for the short notice, but due to dire family circumstances I must resign effective immediately. Reviewing my latest signed contract, I am not obliged to give a notice period, though I would have preferred to do so. Best of luck in the future.”
Monsters and Villains 