“Samuel Abbott, you must want to get shot.”

Samuel couldn’t help but smile wildly at the absurdity of the situation. He saw Brian Glover, school jock, his prestige made obvious by the letterman jacket bearing his name. He was looking at Samuel, holding a crossbow.

To Brian’s right was Anton. Anton wasn’t unknown throughout the school, often thought of as a shady character, but the layman of Kennett High School would never imagine Brian and Anton together. 

Samuel, Brian, and Anton were standing together in Kennett High School. It was deathly quiet. Kennett High was the biggest school around, stoic in its architecture, and cold in the summer. It smelled like cleaning supplies.

Sam had gotten the jump on the duo, not that it ended up making a difference, because Anton’s first reaction was to put him in a chokehold.

“So, Abbott,” Anton spoke with an empowered cadence, “We’ve got quite the situation here.” Anton’s voice was notoriously deep, its tone scaring Samuel’s smile off his face. Sam began a scrambled explanation, his voice meek next to Anton’s.

“I’m just here for a story Anton!” Sam’s voice cracking an octave higher while pointing towards his faux reporter’s hat, “You had to know someone was going to notice you sneaking into the school after midnight!”

Anton and Brian had a silent conversation, looking at each other in the darkness of the dormant school, the only flashlight they had pointed at Samuel. Anton sighed, he wasn’t one to yell, but these were extenuating circumstances. 

“Two years I’ve been keeping this sh*t a secret, and Peter Jennings over here comes along and wrecks it all!”

Sam was terrified. He hadn’t expected to get caught. He really didn’t think he’d actually find anyone in the school.

“Listen!” Sam exclaimed, getting the pair's attention, “I don’t know anything about what’s going on here, I don’t even know why you’re here!”

“All I’m asking” Sam continued, speaking quickly, “Is if I could go home. I forget what I saw, ‘poof’, gone! I walk away, no one gets-” Sam is cut off as a crash came from down the hall. The three high schoolers were made acutely aware of their surroundings, an intersection in the middle of the school, branching out into four directions. Brian spoke for the first time.

“Sam! Take this card!” Brian threw Abbott a card from his pocket, which miraculously, the non dexterous Samuel caught. “You’re coming with us, we can’t have you by yourself.”

Anton glared at Brian, but then his gaze softened.

Sam sat there, stunned, he waited for the two of them to start laughing. He looked at Brian, who motioned towards the sound of the crash, and said, “What are you waiting for?”

Sam looked at the two of them. He’d been fooled before with popular kids playing tricks.

“What do you need me for?” Sam questioned suspiciously.

“We could use an extra pair of hands, plus we can’t have you by yourself for this.” Anton said matter-of-factly.

“For what! Are you trying to tag the school?” Samuel was angry he was being dragged into this, he could not get in trouble with the police and by extension, his mother. 

Anton looked exasperated, but he spoke firmly, “Me and Brian are monster hunters, that card lets you see them-”

“Woah woah woah woah woah woah. I would’ve stopped you earlier, but it took me a second to process all that bulls**t, now you’re telling me that-.”

Brian cut off Samuel, cutting off Anton, and said, “We need to get moving, now! Listen, Sam, I like you, and if you don’t believe us, that’s fine, but right now, you’re outmanned. Follow us, and help when we find it.”

Sam realized his earlier brashness might have been misplaced, considering the circumstances.

“Find what?”

Brian responded.

“The monster of the month.”

“The WHAT?”

“Let’s get going!”

Sam bit the bullet, and the three started running towards the sound in the North hallway. He lagged slightly behind the other two, just in case his opportunity to escape showed itself. 

Suddenly, silence. They couldn’t hear their breathing, their footsteps, the dim noise of their flashlights. They turned towards each other, and began to speak, but the words they heard didn’t match their lips.

This terrified Samuel, but Glover and Anton seemed unfazed.

Sam looked at Brian and Anton’s lips, reading this conversation. They communicated that this was a “mimic”. The words they mouthed didn’t match what Sam heard. Sam listened to the two of them berate him, telling him he wasn’t enough, mixed with screams of agony coming from rooms around them. 

The two, having understood each other’s actual meaning, turned towards their third, and Sam kept his composure, giving a thumbs up that he understood what they said.

They all advanced down the hall, weapons in hand, except Sam, who had his arms up like a featherweight boxer. They heard noises all around them now, most notably that of clinking, like someone was about to give a toast. They heard random noises all around, car horns, doors slamming, themselves talking, muffled, as though in another room. 

The trio swept each room they passed, checked for anything unusual, and moved on. Sam mostly pretended to be searching, while looking for a way out.

Anton acting as the lead, they entered room 152. 

Anton walked into the room, made it past the doorway, and was lifted into the air. Six inky appendages grabbed him by the arms and legs, and held him parallel with the floor. A seventh began to wrap its ‘tentacles’ around his throat.

Sam began to back up, preparing to follow his planned escape route, but he felt Brian’s yell. Even though he couldn’t hear it, as he rushed in. First firing with his crossbow, then jumping off a desk to reach the amalgamate on the ceiling. 

Samuel gathered his courage. His eyes followed where Brian ran in and saw a spider-like monstrosity with a large body, anglerfish-like, with it’s mouth facing the ground. The arms extruding from its body came out along its side, with eight in total. The strength of the beast  was so it could carry itself with one of its extremities.

Samuel ran into the room and clung desperately to one of the monster's limbs, trying to free Anton. Using his weight, he pulled on the tentacle grabbing Anton’s left arm.

The scariest thing about this monster wasn’t the way its arms moved, or its inky exterior, it was the silence. Cold, unforgiving silence. Sam couldn’t hear Anton’s yells, or even the monster’s yelps of pain that its toothy maw pantomimed. Sometimes in movies, you’ll see an intense scene, and the director will cut the sound to add a ‘dramatic flair’, the difference here? It was real. 

The only light in the room, the flashlight Anton’s incapacitated arms dropped, did little in their fight, Brian swinging almost blindly, with Samuel jumping up and grabbing hold onto one of its arms to try and pull it free from Anton.

Brian jumped off a nearby desk, sending it flying, and sliced alongside the length of the oval body of the monster with his knife. 

Spontaneously, all but two of the monster’s limbs turned liquid, allowing Anton to slip out and onto the floor. The remaining limbs allowed it to, for its size and proportions, gracefully swing across the ceiling and towards the window faster than they could have reacted. It pushed off the wall of the outside of the history room, and landed on the other side of the square courtyard. Samuel saw it climb up to the roof, and sound returned to the room.

Anton reached for his throat and coughed. Where the monster's limbs held onto him, a thin layer of jelly-like material remained, almost translucent yet black as night. The arms that detached and fell to the ground had splattered, completely losing their shape as they hit the ground, leaving a coating of liquidy gunk on the floor.

Samuel, who was hanging onto the limb attached to Anton’s left arm, fell on his feet

“God.” Anton paused to take a breath between each word, “F**king! Dammit!”

“Do you need help?” Brian offered, with Samuel also reaching out his hand.

Anton answered, yelling while wheezing, “We need to kill that f**king thing!”

Anton pushed off the floor, wiping his hands on his shirt. Sam began to straighten himself out and then lost his bearings. He’d spent the past thirty seconds in a state of total dissociation, not processing anything around him, but still acting. Without the threat, his mind began to catch up to his body.

“What the f**k!” Sam began to speak, “What the hell was that?” Sam stated, as a question, but one that's already been answered. 

“This is our job, we hunt monsters,” Anton said, his voice twinged with annoyance.

“What the hell was that thing? How’d you know it was going to be here?” Sam said, panicked. 

“Hey a**holes, we can talk about that on the way to the roof,” Brian spoke quickly and assertively, “but right now, we have to beat the living hell out of that thing.”

Anton and Samuel nodded, and began to walk out of the room, towards the stairwell. 

“Sam, I know this is a lot to understand at once, but this thing we’re hunting, it’s called a Mimic. It controls sound, messes with your mind so you can’t hear anything it doesn’t want you to. They’re not the smartest, but they’re dangerous.” Brian spoke in hushed tones, even as they were running.

“Have you. . . Killed, one of those things before?” Samuel realized he might be in over his head, not for the first time tonight.

“Once, yes. It was gruelling, but this time we know what we’re up against.” Brian was cold, he didn’t want to lie, and he didn’t want to scare Sam off before he could at least help. 

“Oh. Okay.” Sam tried to sound confident in his ‘Okay’, but instead there was a voice crack.

They climbed up to the 3rd floor and stopped. Silence fell over them again, and then the same cacophonous symphony as they heard before began. They looked at each other for reassurance, then headed up the maintenance stairs to the roof. 

They stood at the door to the roof, and then, they rushed out.

They paused for just a moment as they got outside, a sound appeared to their left, they all instinctively looked, and Samuel was tackled from their right, to the floor of the roof, the skin on his left shoulder ripping, taking the brunt of the blow. 

Sam screamed silently, as Anton and Brian brandished their knives. The monster only had two arms, but it was still deadly up close. As the monster’s maw was above Abbott, seemingly having grown stilts out of its body, making a tripod. The stilts were shrinking, lowering the mouth closer to Samuel’s chest.

The two arms focused on holding Brian’s right hand, which held the knife, and pummeling him to the ground. Two strong hits from the monster, and Brian was on the ground.  Every second that passed the stilts on the monster grew shorter, bringing the sharklike mouth closer to Samuel’s chest, and despite his efforts, he wasn’t strong enough to push it off.

As soon as the beast went in to hit Brian while he was on the ground, Anton rushed onto it, knocking it off Sam, and stabbed it right above its mouth. The arms wrapped around Anton’s back but went slack immediately after. Samuel began to hear a sizzling, and suddenly all sound returned as the monster’s form began to jellify, making Anton fall through the now liquefied form he was on top of, covering himself in its jelly.

“F**k yeah!” Anton yelled, despite it being around 1 AM and being covered in goo, “That’s what you get you, commie b*****d!”

Samuel and Brian looked at each other and laughed in relief. 

“It’s dead!” Sam exclaimed, “You f**king killed it!”

Anton and Brian sat down. Sam couldn’t relax, his hands were shaking, and his legs kept pacing despite his lethargy.

“So, that’s 26 down,” Anton spoke, stoically.

“So, are we gonna talk about what the hell that thing was?” Sam’s tone was scared. This is the stuff he read about in Lovecraft, not what you see on summer break.

“Listen, we do this once a month, at the full moon,” Anton began, “It’s like clockwork. I found a part of a journal in Cedarcroft-” 

“Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, slow down,” Samuel began, “the hell is Cedarcroft?”

“It’s Bayard Taylor’s home,” Anton said this and saw Samuel’s next question begin to form, “before you ask, he was an American poet. He was born in 1825, died in ‘78, and he was a monster hunter.”

“You’re joking. You’re telling me they named the library after a monster hunter?” 

“Unfortunately, no.”

Sam and Anton had a pseudo staring contest, testing the other. Brian interrupted.

“Listen, Sam, I know this is. . . a lot to take in, but I can explain it all tomorrow. All we ask of you is that you don’t say a word about this, to anyone. Take this radio, and we’ll contact you in the morning. It’ll make more sense then. Now, take a shower, and try to get some sleep.” Brian talked like he was defusing a bomb.

“Okay. Alright, we can talk tomorrow, but I need a full explanation.” Sam said, somewhat dejected, “Talk to you tomorrow, then?”

“Sounds good, sleep well, and. . . Take this knife,” Anton handed him the blade, pulled from his bookbag, hilt first, “it suits you,” Anton said.

“Wish you had thought to give me that before,” Samuel said, taking the knife.

“Thought you might try to stab me.”

They had a small laugh together.

They shared a final meeting with their eyes, and Samuel walked through the maintenance door to the third floor. 

“G****mn, what are we gonna do now?” Anton spoke for both of them.