All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Quasit

Trigger Warning: Cruelty to Animals (and, Less Importantly, People)

It started with an ordinary, hard boiled egg. Now every time Wesley feeds the lizard he is rewarded in some mysterious way, money, a new job, women. But every time he does the lizard is also getting bigger, and hungrier.

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“It started with an egg. Not even a weird one, just, like, a regular, hard boiled egg.”

The young journalist shot Wesley a crooked smile as she adjusted the cameras. Both feeds on the screen of her laptop captured slices of the man’s beautifully appointed living room as backdrops. He’d insisted on doing the interview at home, surrounded by white leather furniture, tasteful, mass produced art, and photos of him with various celebrities.

“An egg? I ask you how you went from a total nobody to running your own record label and competing with the top labels in just two years, and you tell me it started with an egg? Yeah, okay, totally.”

As an interviewer, the young woman was self-taught. Her videos, however, conversational sessions with minor celebrities, public figures, even a few politicians, got a great deal more views and engagement than those put out by mainstream media outlets. Preening for the camera, she kept her commentary light and off-the-cuff.

“Well, that’s how it started,” Wesley said. “See, I was kind of on this diet kick at the time. I figured no one wanted to date a fat, bald loser in his mid-thirties, who’d been working the same desk job for ten years and going nowhere. So maybe if I was just a bald loser in my mid-thirties, etcetera, I might have more luck.”

Wesley’s hand drummed the flat, hard plane of his stomach. He looked fit and active and barely thirty at the most. The journalist’s eyes tracked to his full head of hair and wondered how it looked so natural, assuming it was surgically implanted.

“So, I was working from home at the time, and what I would do for lunch is I would have a couple of boiled eggs and a few carrot sticks. And I would go sit on the back porch of the place I was renting, and I’d peel the eggs, and I’d eat them and the carrot sticks, and I’d sit there and think about all the places my life went wrong, and that was lunch.”

“Sounds nutritious.”

“What I would do before I peeled the eggs is I would hit them against the side of the table to crack them open. Anyway, on this day I go to crack the egg and I fumble it like an idiot, and it drops to the ground and rolls across the porch. It ends up next to this big bushy garden right at the edge of the porch. And that’s annoying and whatever, so I get up to go over and get it. Before I do though, this little hand snakes out of the garden and grabs the egg, and it pulls it back into the bushes where I can’t see. It kind of looked like a monkey hand, except it was all green and scaly like a lizard.”

“A monkey-lizard hand stole your lunch, and-, and-,”

“Well, that’s it, this monkey-lizard hand took the egg and I could hear it rustling around in there and eating it. And the thing was, I saw it clear as day, and I knew right away it wasn’t normal. You know, you could tell yourself, oh, it was a snake. Oh, it was a normal kind of lizard and you just imagined it looking like a hand. But I knew, I knew, that it wasn’t like that. You seen E.T.?”

“Entertainment Tonight?”

“E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the movie.”

“That super old movie with the wrinkled ballbag alien? No, I haven’t seen it.” 

The young journalist smirked into the camera. She strained to keep her eyes off her laptop and the feeds from both her camera and the one pointed at her interviewee.

“God, you’ve never seen E.T.? How old are you? Nevermind, there’s a scene in it where the kid feeds E.T., I think it’s a bunch of Reese’s Pieces, and you see him coming out for the first time to make friends. But, you know, when it’s an adult in the movie it never works out like that. The grownup seeing something weird and going to investigate, they always get their face ripped off or something. So, I didn’t know what to do. I just sat back down and ate my carrot sticks and stared, and I went back to work. And you know what I found there?”

“I have no idea where this story is going anymore.”

“Twenty dollars, I found twenty dollars wedged into the seat of my desk chair like it had fallen out of my pocket or something. But I knew, I knew, I didn’t have any money in my pocket, and I knew somehow it came from the lizard.”

“Twenty dollars is pretty good for one egg.”

“Exactly! That’s exactly what I thought, well, at first I tried not to think about it too much at all. But the next day, I boiled an extra egg with my lunch and as soon as I went outside I put it down, and you know what? It happened again, I mean, I saw this scaly, green arm take the egg and this time I saw these big, yellow eyes and kind of a face, kind of a monkey face, but more like a lizard. It ate the egg, and you know what?”

“Another twenty bucks?”

“No, but that night around dinner time a delivery guy dropped off my favourite meal right on the doorstep. I was kind of disappointed that I hadn’t gotten more money so I’d started thinking it was just a coincidence, and I didn’t really put it together at first. But no one came to claim the food back, and when I opened it up it was still hot and perfect, and I realised it was the lizard again.”

The young woman stopped just shy of rolling her eyes at the camera. “Twenty dollars and a free meal, wow.”

“For another week after that, I kept feeding the lizard boiled eggs because, I figured, it liked them, right? And each time I got rewarded in some weird way. Mostly I found more money, but the amounts got less and less. By the end of the week I just found some loose change on the kitchen floor that probably wasn’t even worth as much as the egg. I realised, maybe the lizard wants some variety, right? So I got some lunch meat and I tried feeding it that instead, and bam! Just like that, a couple thousand dollars got randomly transferred into my bank account. I rang the bank in case it was a mistake and they told me something went wrong with their system but I could keep the money. I started experimenting with different things, and good things kept happening! The lizard only ate meat and stuff like eggs, no fruit and vegetables. When I fed it, my work would be done for me, I’d find random money or gifts would be sent to me, stuff like that. Women started hitting on me! I got laid for the first time in ages, can you believe that? And I realised I was feeling healthier. I’d kind of forgotten about the diet I was meant to be on but I was losing weight anyway, and my hair started growing back, can you believe it?”

“Can I believe a magic lizard got you laid and grew your hair back? I mean-,”

“I’d started small for some reason, but the first time I got the lizard a whole roast chicken I wound up finding this lottery ticket I’d never bought in my pocket, and I won twenty thousand dollars! Not crazy money, but I quit my job anyway. It was then that I realised how much bigger the lizard had gotten though. Like, it was somehow really good at staying hidden in the bushes, it had gotten so big it should have been kind of impossible, but I still hadn’t seen the whole thing. But when it grabbed that chicken, I realised it wasn’t really the size of a monkey anymore, it was more like a chimp. Like three or four times bigger than when I started feeding it.”

“Sure, sure.”

“After that, I started to run out of ideas. I mean, there was plenty of stuff I hadn’t tried but if it didn’t want something it wouldn’t touch it, and the rewards just weren’t as good when I fed it the same kinds of things. I started to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have quit my job for this. And I started getting a little scared, you know? I mean, the lizard was getting bigger and I could feel how hungry it was every time I went out there. I started to worry, you know, that it might get hungry enough to attack me. It was about the size of a chimpanzee at this point, with hands and feet, and claws, and teeth, it had skin kind of like an iguana and these huge, yellow eyes, big, like baseball-sized, that’s what I could see of it anyway. It was kind of scary. But it was kind of obvious what it wanted, right? It wanted fresh meat. It didn’t want all this grocery market stuff, it wanted fresh. And there was this stray cat I always saw wandering around the neighbourhood-,”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, it was this real skinny thing, sad. People would leave food out for it but it didn’t like to go near them. It wasn’t that hard to catch. I bought a cat carrier and put some food inside, and put it down where I saw the cat go. I hid and watched, and when the cat went inside I trapped it in there. I actually planned to kill it myself, but I couldn’t do it. I left it out there on the porch alive instead. I think it turned out that was the right thing to do anyway but, oh man, the sounds. I went back inside but the sounds were so horrible, I thought I was going to be sick! But you know what? The second the noises stopped, I got a phone call from a record label I’d always liked offering me a dream job in talent acquisition, salary through the roof, company car, all the perks. I’d never even applied for anything with them! They had no reason to have ever heard of me, but there it was.”

“Okay, this is-, what are we doing here? I thought we were just doing an interview about your label and the artists you’re representing. Like, this is dumb, what kind of crazy story is this?”

“It’s the story, it’s what happened, don’t you want to hear it?”

The young woman sat back. This was obviously some sort of breakdown. She should stop fighting it, she thought. Go with it, record it, edit it, put it out there, and maybe the whole thing was so nutty it would go viral.

“Okay, okay, sorry, yes, continue. From the dead cat.”

“Okay, well, the lizard was getting so big that I think even it was having trouble staying hidden. And those noises, I was worried someone would come and find it, so I opened up the doors into the house and the basement. It took me up on the offer and moved down there. I still didn’t get a real good look at it. After that, I started visiting animal shelters, you know? Different ones so they wouldn’t notice I kept getting more animals. And I’d get them off people on Facebook and things. Dogs and cats and birds, guinea pigs, rabbits. And good things kept happening! I got in shape, my hair came back, my new job practically ran itself. I stopped paying rent just to see what would happen and nothing came of it. And there were women, oh yeah, women just falling all over me! But it was the same as before too, as I kept feeding it, it wanted some variety, and if I didn’t mix things up and give it something new then the rewards would be less and less. And it was getting bigger, much bigger. It started being less about me finding it new things to eat because I wanted something, and more because I knew I had to. I knew I had to because it was big and it kept getting hungry.”

“Uh-huh, okay, sure.”

“I mean, you can see where this is going, right? People, I had to start giving it people.”

The interviewer, who hadn’t cared enough to even wonder about where this lunatic story was headed, suddenly leaned forward. Maybe this was bigger than a breakdown. Maybe this was more like some kind of confession. The confession of an insane murderer who’d been capturing people to feed to his imaginary friend. This could be totally viral.

“Go on.”

“First guy, I thought he was just a waste of space anyway. Some junkie I found at the bus station, so stupid he didn’t even question it when I offered him a hundred dollars to clean my basement. I felt like some kind of serial killer like you see on TV. But it worked, suddenly I inherited a new house, this house, from some guy I’d never even heard of before. The lizard was happy for a few days but then it started scratching at the roof of the basement and I knew it was hungry again. I fed it again, and again, homeless people, junkies, but it started getting sick of them, you know?”

“Of course it did.”

“The fourth guy, it left his head at the top of the basement steps like a kind of warning or something. The fifth guy, actually it wasn’t a guy, it was a woman, this homeless old bag lady, it wouldn’t even touch her. But she saw the lizard when I led her down there and she started freaking out anyway, and I had to-, I had to do her myself.”

“You buried them all in the basement?”

“I buried her in the basement, yeah, actually. And the head. The others I didn’t have to bury because it ate them bones and all. It was getting so big.”

“Of course, sure, continue.”

“I moved out to the new house, this house, but I knew I had to keep going back and feeding it or it was going to find me. I didn’t really know what else to feed it so I thought maybe it just wanted a better class of people, not just junkies. So I did the same thing with some Mexican guys, offered them money to clean the basement, and it worked a couple of times. Then, I started using hookup apps, inviting girls, and guys, over, and that worked really well. I got my landlord to come over, it was like he’d forgotten he even had a house I was renting, but he came over and I fed him to it. Same with a couple of plumbers, a couple of electricians. It wasn’t really about a class of person, actually, I don’t think, it was just about a variety of people. A couple of times, I misjudged what it wanted and I had to do them myself, but I got kind of good at it. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, the rewards kept coming! I’ve got way more money than I know what to do with now. At a certain point, I didn’t need the record label anymore and I just started my own. People flooded to it. I got a private plane, out of nowhere, it just got given to me. I felt healthier and looked better than ever, than ever, and the women kept coming, and apart from this thing, this little thing I had to take care of, it was all so good, right?”

“Nobody wondered where all these people were going? The homeless and the Mexicans? Your landlord, and the hookups and stuff?”

“I guess that was part of it, no, no one ever came looking for them.”

“Am I the first person you’ve told?”

“The first and only.” Wesley let out a small, bitter laugh and rubbed his face in his hands. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep going like this but I’ve got access now. Access to people, rich folk, celebrities, you know, real high class people. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

The young woman laughed as well. “And you think that no one will notice that? When important people, celebrities, your clients, start to go missing?”

“Well, I figured I can start small and work my way up. Like, some influencer, with a little interview show that she does between makeup tutorials and swimsuit videos.”

It took a few moments, but realisation dawned across the interviewer’s face. Her eyes widened. Behind her, she heard a door clatter open. Something started across the room with heavy steps, claws clicking on the tile, but she didn’t dare look over her shoulder.

“You can’t be for real,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I swear! I’m not a bad guy, I just know, I just know, that when I run out of options it’s going to come for me! I just know it!”

The young woman saw something enter the frame of her laptop screen, on her camera feed. A huge, shambling, gorilla-shaped thing, hunched over and yet so tall it nearly brushed the ceiling. Green skin and headlamps for eyes. Turning in her chair, she began to scream. Talons stretched toward her face. Rows of teeth. Yellow eyes.

Wesley retreated across the room, unable to tear his eyes away. He couldn’t stop himself watching anymore, taking it all in, imagining, waiting, but he clamped his hands over his ears. The sounds. In the end, none of them sounded all that different from that first stray cat. Eventually, he knew neither would he. Eventually.

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Sean: As was pointed out to me on Instagram, I have a tendency, some might even say a pathology, to include some rather horrible treatment of animals in my stories. And you might think I’m some kind of sociopath that revels in that sort of thing but it couldn’t be further from the truth! If anything I am overly sensitive to animals being hurt even in fiction. This is embarrassing but I was recently rereading one of my favourite novels, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and there are sections regarding ‘Rat Thing’ Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit B-782, or Fido, that genuinely had me fighting back tears. I am a sucker for animals, especially my own snuggly snookums precious little guy Cain who was, not so long ago, a street cat like the one featured in this story.

So why all the animal cruelty? Precisely because I believe it has a more visceral impact than writing about the same thing happening to a human being and I love hammering that button. My wife, before she became my wife, before we were even dating, read a copy of my first book, Wave of Mutilation. And there’s a scene in there with a dog which she told me, when she reached it she had to put the book down for a while before picking it back up and that’s one of the best compliments I’ve gotten. And she still dated me, so what’s that say about her? I’m totally immune to my own writing by the way, but reading the same things from someone else would have me cringing hard.

Here’s a much sweeter story about a (dead) dog, if you need a cleanser.

As I’m sure you already know, the name of today’s story is borrowed from the title track of the debut album of punk rock classics The Dead Milkmen, ‘Big Lizard in My Backyard’.

Big lizard in my backyard,

Can’t afford to feed him anymore.

I mentioned at Christmas I’d tossed around a couple of ideas for another series of short stories instead of All There in the (Monster) Manual. A much, much older idea I had, back when I was writing mostly crime fiction actually, was ‘Mixtape’, short stories based on the titles of songs. Music is a huge inspiration to me even if I don’t talk about it that much, I mean, as I just mentioned, I titled my first book Wave of Mutilation for fuck’s sake, one of my all-time favourite songs. So consider this story an unofficial first entry in that series, if I was to do that, as well as fitting into All There in the (Monster) Manual. Have I named any other short stories after songs? It wouldn’t surprise me if I’m forgetting one or two.

Shit, this is a long note, real stream of consciousness today. One more shout out to myself, and an older story The Monkey in the Cornfield. There’s a throwaway line in that one about an imaginary lizard that lived in the narrator’s basement when he was a child, that he fed his leftovers to, and I always thought there was something more to that, so maybe I finally got around to completing that thought.

Thanks for reading!