For 2022, I’ve been wanting to write more ‘creature features’ and generally improve my short story writing. My partner got me a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual for my birthday so I came up with the idea of writing a story every week based on a different creature from that – All There in the (Monster) Manual. Hope you enjoy!

This Week’s Inspiration: Night Hag

HORNY MILFs are in your AREA! HORNY MILFs who want your C*CK! They’re CUMMING RIGHT NOW! They’re only MINUTES AWAY! NOTHING will STOP THEM! You CANNOT ESCAPE!

NSFW, in case, y’know, the goddamn title didn’t give that away.

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Porn categories scrolled down the screen as Lee hunted for something worth watching. Asian, Big Tits and Blowjobs and Butts. Ebony, Fetish, and Footplay, and Granny, Masturbation and Roleplay. Nothing grabbed Lee’s attention and he wondered if he’d picked the wrong site or if he just wasn’t feeling it.

In only boxers, Lee hunched over the laptop in his darkened room. Becoming bored, his eyes drifted to the advertisements running down the side of the page. Flashing, lurid, pornographic, the ads were so ubiquitous to any adult website that they were practically invisible. Amid pills to grow your penis and cartoon games to make you cum, Lee saw a red box with blinking yellow words. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA!’ promised the box, accompanied by a nude photo of an older woman.

“Ugh, gross! Why would you use a photo of her if you actually wanted people to click?” Lee felt some of the sexual desire he’d been slowly stoking wither.

The woman in the picture could have been a hard living forty-something who’d been caught in a particularly bad photo, or in her fifties or sixties, or even older. She had a strange agelessness about her, but whatever she was she was not attractive. The picture seemed to have been taken while she was mid-laugh, her jaw distended, eyes half-closed and silver-blonde hair in disarray. Her body was in motion. Her breasts sagged and looked pendulous. Bending forward, more loose folds of skin hung off her midsection as if she’d recently lost a great deal of weight. Her pearish hips looked too large for her frame and her stomach hung over the thick carpet of her thatch.

“Probably meant to think you genuinely have a chance with her, if you’re desperate enough,” Lee said to himself. “You see a really hot MILF on the ad, it’s like, nah, they’re not really on the site, but if I sign up I could at least fuck an ugly one.”

Something about the advertisement bothered Lee. He hammered the back button, exiting the website and going to another old dependable. Lee skimmed the new site and its categories. On a whim, he clicked ‘Mature’ although it wasn’t usually his preference.

“Oh, what the fuck?”

The same MILF ad dominated the right side of the page as the category loaded. A red rectangle with the nude photo in the middle. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA!’ read the top of the ad, and down the bottom, ‘WANT YOUR COCK!’

Lee went back again but the ad followed him. He tried to avoid looking at the picture and the words ‘WANT YOUR COCK!’ as they flashed. Dark pupils flittered in the slits of the nude woman’s eyes. Her jaw, almost unhinged, exposed too many teeth, peglike and yellow.

Scanning the website, Lee found a video that looked at least worthwhile and clicked on it. In part, he just wanted to get away from the advertisement but it remained on the side of the page. He hit play and expanded the video to fullscreen. To his confusion and annoyance, however, even disgust, the ad didn’t disappear but instead layered itself over the video in the middle of the screen.

“What the hell? Come on!”

‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – TEN MILES from YOUR HOUSE!’ read the new version of the ad. Lee had a weird feeling the picture had subtly changed. He’d tried to avoid looking too closely at the photo but something about it was different. The nude wore that same cackling expression, although it now seemed slightly sinister. Her shoulders hunched forward so her sagging breasts and the folds around her stomach hung loosely. The woman, the ‘MILF’, held something shiny in her right hand partially hidden behind her hip. In that area the snarl of hair covering her pubis had drawn most of the attention before. Maybe some kind of sex toy. It was the background Lee felt had changed, mostly subconsciously, but it was dark behind the woman and lacked detail.

Lee went to click on a small ‘X’ that appeared at the corner of the ad. The video began behind the ad, getting right into the action with the sound of moaning and slapping flesh. When Lee clicked the ‘X’, however, it did nothing.

“Come on.”

Lee clicked it again but the ‘X’ moved and then disappeared. Instead, the ad opened into a new website. The page was bright red as well, with the words ‘HORNY MILFs WANT YOUR COCK!’ emblazoned across the top. Below that was a form to fill out details like his name, email and address. Getting seriously annoyed, Lee tried to close the page but pop ups kept jumping up to stop him. Eventually he managed to hit the close button but instead the page refreshed.

“What the hell is happening?”

Lee’s eyes widened. The website form now appeared with all of his details filled out. His full name, his phone number and email, and his home address. 16A Vale Ave. It must have been an autofill, drawing his data from somewhere. Lee felt uncomfortable and exposed that this skeezy website had his information. At the bottom of the page was a big button marked ‘SUBMIT’. Lee took great care to avoid clicking on it and moved to close the page again. When it still wouldn’t exit, Lee had no choice but to hit control-alt-delete and bring up the Tasks window where he killed off the web browser entirely. Thankfully, the page finally disappeared. Sounds from the porn still playing in the background cut out instantly.

Relieved, Lee spent a few moments just staring at his computer’s desktop. Silence filled the room. Lee became vaguely aware of normal nighttime, suburban sounds filtering in from outside, birds and cars and distant televisions. Tentatively, Lee opened his web browser again. He no longer felt even slightly horny. He hadn’t really been that interested in the first place, just bored. Not bothering to put on more clothes though, continuing to sit around in his boxers, he opened a tab for Facespace.

Lee had been scrolling through his social feed for about a minute when a familiar red caught his eye. With disbelief, he saw it was the same red box and nude photo with flashing yellow words, ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – FIVE MILES from YOUR HOUSE!’

Algorithms being what they were, Lee could understand if the ad kept reappearing if he’d gone back on a porn site. They probably thought he’d actually clicked it, since he’d ended up on its website. But nude pictures and adult website ads shouldn’t be appearing on Facespace. It had to have slipped through their filters somehow. Lee exited out of the Facespace tab. Nothing stopped him. After a moment, however, the ad jumped back onto his screen. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – FOUR MILES from YOUR HOUSE!’

“Oh, they’re getting closer are they?” Lee laughed, positive the ad had just said ‘FIVE MILES’ and before that ‘TEN’.

Lee tried to click away but again the ad refused to close. He started to think it had to be some kind of virus he must have downloaded. Lee nervously thought of his details appearing on the website. The text refreshed and changed again, ‘HORNY MILFs WANT YOUR COCK – THEY’RE CUMMING!’

Rather than pay much attention to the words, Lee felt like the photo had changed again as well. But the pose was identical, the almost unhinged, laughing mouth, shoulders hunched forward, the woman holding something shiny by her hip. Same empty breasts and folds of flesh. But the lines in her face looked even deeper and uglier. The glint in her eyes somehow even more sinister, jaws yawning even wider. And Lee felt sure the background had shifted. It actually looked like the photo had been taken outside. Lee was sure it was inside before, he thought he would have noticed, but he could see the hazy glow of a streetlight in one corner of the photograph and studying it enough he could make out other details. An obscured street sign, bushes, and houses. The photo was of some kind of exhibitionist jaunt, maybe explaining what a lousy picture it actually was. The woman and all her imperfections caught by the stark flash of the camera while everything else was washed out. Weirdly, Lee got the sense that the background, vague as it was, looked somehow familiar.

“I need to run a scan.”

Lee hit control-alt-delete again, and once again killed the browser. He stared at the screen anxiously, waiting for the ad to pop back up. His heart raced, a total overreaction to the ad or virus or whatever it was but he couldn’t help it. He felt like he was being stalked. Everything fell quiet again and Lee went to run a virus scan.

Before Lee could click on anything, the ad popped up on his desktop. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – ONLY ONE MILE from YOUR HOUSE!’ The same blinking letters, the same nude photo.

“Fuck this! It’s a virus, it’s just some hacker asshole’s idea of a joke!” Lee said. “It must have come from that first website, somehow!”

Lee tried to click on his virus protection software. Instead, the screen refreshed and the ad changed. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – 100m from YOUR HOUSE!’

Lee felt sick. He was sure the photo had changed again, only subtly. The woman’s body twisted sideways just a little, swinging her breasts and gut and folds of flesh. Lee could see a little more of the object hidden beside her hip but not enough to make out what it was. But it was the background that concerned Lee. The woman was still outside but the location had changed. He knew it, it was his own street. Details were vague but Lee could tell the intersection behind the woman was the intersection at the end of his street, where he stopped and turned to leave almost every single day. The street sign behind her was no longer obscured, but clearly read ‘VALE AVE’.

“What is this? A joke? A joke?” Panic bubbled up inside Lee’s brain, making it impossible to think.

Lee looked around the room as if for cameras but it was hard to believe this was all some elaborate prank. Lee didn’t know what it was, maybe there wasn’t any word for what was happening. He now felt threat radiating from his screen.

As Lee watched, the ad refreshed and changed again. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – INSIDE YOUR HOUSE!’ blinked the yellow words. The change in the photo was undeniable. The woman’s pose was identical but the lighting had completely changed, as had the background. Lee recognised his own front door, seen from the front hallway, behind the MILF’s shoulder, as well as other details of his home’s entryway.

Lee turned quickly, and listened. His bedroom door was closed. Nothing moved in the hallway outside or throughout the rest of the house, at least not that he could hear. He felt he should get up and check, or lock the door, or grab his phone and call the police, but fear paralysed him. He couldn’t even force his hands to let go of the armrests of his chair.

With a sense of inevitability, Lee turned back around in his chair. The ad dominated his laptop’s screen, still open on his desktop. It refreshed, the text and picture changing. ‘HORNY MILFs in your AREA – THEY’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!’ The photo was dark, the room lit only by the glow of a laptop screen off to the side. His bedroom, the naked MILF posed with his door and shelves behind her. The foot of Lee’s unmade bed protruded into one side of the picture and in another corner, difficult to make out from so close, the dark curves of the side of someone’s head and ear. The side of Lee’s head and ear, the photo taken from an impossible angle. An angle that could not have been achieved without him seeing the camera.

Lee whipped around and let out a strangled cry. Entirely naked, the haggish woman from the photo loomed behind him. Lower jaw unhinged, shoulders hunched forward so her breasts swung pendulously away from her chest. Lee shoved himself backward, crashing into his desk. Dark eyes, glittering with undeniable malice now, turned on Lee. Breaking loose from her pose, she moved toward him. He’d heard nothing. His door remained closed and Lee hadn’t heard it open or shut, but the woman was undeniably there and undeniably real.

“Where? What are you? What do you want?” Lee gasped.

The MILF, who Lee most definitely did not want to F, gave Lee a sickly smile. She seemed to have too many teeth, small and yellow like bits of corn, Her mouth was too wide and too full of them.

“I think you know,” the woman, the creature, cooed in a voice like a dying cat.

Lee looked down at himself, in his boxers. “You want-, you want, fuck, sex? You want sex?”

Finally, the MILF produced the object she’d been hiding behind her flabby right hip. It caught the light from Lee’s laptop. A blade, a filleting knife, long and curved like a rib, brittle but extremely sharp.

“No, that’s not what the ad said, now is it?”

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Sean: Fear to me is about anticipation, not the violence actually being perpetrated. The trend might be over now but I really didn’t get that tendency for horror movies a few years ago to be more focused on the gore, tortureporn stuff. I’m not opposed to gore in horror, certainly, but the movies that focused on it above all else always seemed more gross than scary to me and I’m not into being grossed out.

What’s scary to me, is what the ghost or the masked killer or the shark with the two-note theme song could do to you. Once they’re actually in the act of doing it then it’s no longer about fear, it’s about survival. So this one ends at that moment of anticipation, kind of like another Monster Manual story that I was really pleased with. I could always write what I believe happens next to these characters, but is it ever really as bad as what could happen? Either you impale the masked killer on something or you feed the shark an oxygen tank, or you die, horribly, but you’re done, move on.

Keep your eyes on my website for more in this series, and for more updates you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.

Next Week’s Inspiration: Yeti