Mr. Big Ugly

Little Philip Montrose, aged 7, had a big problem.  His problem was Mr. Big Ugly, the monster in his closet.  Mr. Big Ugly appeared to be a large toad-man, looming at seven feet tall and made of the shadows of his room, a mouth filled with daggers that he loved to put on display for little Philip.  

Mr. Big Ugly was a member of the Uvurum race.  Every Uvurum had a job- being the monsters in children’s closets and under their beds.  This had been their duty since the creation of their race.  Now, Mr. Big Ugly was just that; big, and ugly.  But he, too, had a problem.

Mr. Big Ugly’s problem was not out of the usual, but he had never experienced such a dilemma, and so thought it a tad on the strange side.  Ever since little Philip had entered the second grade, the frail, waif-like boy wasn’t really all that scared of Mr. Big Ugly anymore.  Phil now had bullies to deal with, and they were much more real and hostile toward him.  They pushed him, stole his lunch and his money, and called him names.  Phil’s fear of them was not the kind of fear that Mr. Big Ugly could feed upon.  He needed to be the source of the boy’s fear in order to obtain his sustenance.

The bullies, unbeknownst to Mr. Big Ugly, weren’t Phil’s worst problem.  Since Daddy had gone away to California with his nice secretary friend, Mommy had been having ‘friends’ over.  Phil didn’t understand this much, because most girls he knew didn’t like boys.  His Mommy, however, apparently did.  The newest model was Hank.  Phil didn’t like Hank one bit.  Hank scared little Phil, much more so than did the bullies.  Hank would wait until late at night, and then he would come into Phil’s room, and he would hurt little Phil just like the bullies.  Hank, however, did this in such a manner as not to leave bruises.

As a result, Mr. Big Ugly, who had been assigned to Phil now for two years, now only irked Phil as a pest of sorts.  He could not afford any more fear for Mr. Big Ugly.  That, of course, didn’t stop him from coming out of the closet every night.  Mr. Big Ugly still made it hard for Phil to sleep.  He moaned from inside the closet, scraping the walls with his webbed, clawed hands, chipping away paint and plaster.  The worst part of these theatrics for Phil was that the sounds from the closet often masked Hank’s approach in the dead of night.  

Whenever an adult approaches a child’s room during the night, a warning tingle goes up the assigned Uvurum’s spine.  They then head back to their doorway, be it closet or the underside of the child’s bed, and slip back into the Uvurum world, which is much the same as our own, but populated by these night monsters.  The Uvurum can get in touch with their supervisor by simply reaching a hand back into their world, and often they are advised, just before the parent’s entrance, to leave the child’s chamber for the night.

Mr. Big Ugly was a monster, but he followed the rules of his race to the T.  He had been an orderly monster for centuries.  Fearsome though he was, he had to admit that sometimes, he didn’t enjoy his work, and it often disturbed him to be doing what he was doing.  On this particular night, however, he would be disturbed less by his work than by what he would finally witness.  He would also wonder why, later, he would not be advised to return to his world. 

It would change his long existence forever.


“Time for bed, sweetie,” said Mommy to Phil.  He lounged on the couch with Mommy, his head nestled comfortably in her lap with his body sprawled out on another long cushion.  Mommy, he thought, whom Hank called ‘Martha’.  Phil had found this very strange over the course of the last month, since Hank had started being Mommy’s ‘friend’.  He had always assumed that Mommy was just Mommy, or ‘Ms. Montrose’ as his teachers and friends called her when he was allowed to bring them over.  

Already dressed in pajamas covered with Spiderman designs and patterns, Phil lay watching the credits for Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends roll across the screen.  Phil loved this particular cartoon, because it reminded him of his own imaginary friend, General Bruno.

General Bruno had been a courageous golden retriever in a military dress uniform, like Phil’s Grandpa wore in all of his old pictures.  General Bruno could talk and walk on two legs, just like many of the animated friends of Foster’s.  Phil and the General would pass many hours playing war games with his toys in his room, particularly his large collection of Transformers.  Yes, Phil had loved spending time with his imaginary friend.

Until just before Daddy left.  One night, as he tried not hearing Mommy and Daddy arguing out in the apartment’s living room, General Bruno decided to pull one of his little chairs over to the side of his bed, and read Phil a bed time story.  The frail, pale little raven-haired boy lay on his bed, tucked in by the stern but loving imaginary friend, and listened intently, watching the General as he made faces and changed his voice to match the characters in his storybook.

All had gone well until about halfway through the familiar story, when Phil’s eyes had expanded to the size of teacup saucers at the sight of the creature looming up behind and over General Bruno.  Mr. Big Ugly, his warped, wobbly toad-man body of shadows and drag olive green flesh, slunk up behind the General, and slowly peeled his lips back from his teeth.  Quaking uncontrollably, Phil found that he could not discover his voice in time to save his imaginary friend.

As slowly and stealthily as an assassin, Mr. Big Ugly parted his massive jaws and stooped down, covering the General’s head and biting it off at the neck.  Arterial blood sprayed the chair and floor of the bedchamber, and General Bruno’s arms flapped and thrashed as his body dumped itself off the boy’s chair.  Phil, unable to even scream, just watched in terror as Mr. Big Ugly grasped the General’s booted feet and dragged him mercilessly back to his closet domain, closing the door behind him as he tossed the body of the imaginary friend haplessly into piles of clothes and toys therein.  Phil remained up for most of the rest of the night, listening to Mr. Big Ugly as he chewed and belched and cackled like an asylum candidate.

Mommy and Daddy hadn’t seen the blood.  In the morning, after sleeping only fitfully, neither did little Phil.  But the General was gone, probably forever, and Phil took some small comfort in watching the cartoon that had just finished up on the television.  “Can I watch one more,” he pleaded, rolling his head and body to stare up into Mommy’s lovely hazel eyes.  Mommy ran a gentle hand through his hair, but shook her head all the while. 

“No, honey, it’s already nine o’clock.  Mommy and Hank want to have some alone time,” said Mommy.  Phil sat up and looked over at Hank, who slumped in the living room recliner.  Dressed in dark blue mechanic’s clothes, covered in spots of grease, Hank struck little Philip Montrose as just the sort of man Daddy didn’t like.  In his right hand he had a beer, of which he reeked.  In his left hand, he held the remote.  In his eyes, Phil saw as they met his own, Hank held a grim promise to Phil.  The little boy shivered inside, and knew that tonight was going to be a bad one.


The bedroom light flicked off, and Mr. Big Ugly, made of the darkness itself, peeled himself from the plaster interior of the closet walls.  As he took his toad-man shape in full, he contemplated his pending performance.  How would he scare the child tonight?  He’d gone weeks without a good amount of the child’s nutritious waves of fear, and he thought that perhaps a change of tactics would do him some good.

The floor of the closet that was his way into Phil’s room was littered with several cardboard boxes full of toys.  One in particular was brimming with the brightly painted and intricately jointed Transformers figures that Phil enjoyed so much.  Perhaps, Mr. Big Ugly thought, I’ll dash a few of them apart against the walls!  That had worked well on his last assignment.  Why not try it again?

Mr. Big Ugly grabbed a pair of the robots in disguise up from Phil’s box, careful to make as little noise as possible, and slowly slid the white painted oak door of the closet open.  Already he could see the small concentric rings of blue force that were Phil’s fears given energy form radiating out from the boy’s chest.  Yet, as had been occurring lately, Mr. Big Ugly found that he could not pull those waves of energy into his own mouth, could not feast upon them.  Phil didn’t even look at him from his bed.  Instead, the little boy’s eyes and thoughts were locked on the door of his bedroom, the door which opened out into the hallway.  

Mr. Big Ugly, infuriated that the boy was paying him no heed, even now that he was purposely hitching his breath and letting his natural, swampy aroma flow throughout the room, hurled the two Transformers against the far wall.  With a loud crack and the clinking of plastic shards colliding in midair as they descended to the carpet, the toys exploded apart.  

A fresh wave of fear, this one slightly tinged with a crimson mist here and there, exploded out from Phil as he glared at the monster from his closet.  Mr. Big Ugly waited anxiously as the wave came near him, beads of shiny, briny sweat rolling down his bumpy forehead toward his toad lips.  Yet when he attempted to pull the energy into himself, he once again could not.  He looked up at Phil from the passing wave, and the Uvurum saw not fear in the child’s twisted face, but anger.  

“What are you doing,” Phil rasped through the darkness, which was relieved only by moonlight spilling in through the uncovered window behind his bed.  “If Hank steps on one of those it’ll be worse!”  Unaware of what the boy was talking about, amazed by the lack of fear in the boy for him, Mr. Big Ugly’s shoulders sagged and he slumped over to the edge of the bed.  Looming hugely over the child, the monster from the closet took a deep breath, and shook his head, confused.  

“Aren’t you afraid of me,” asked Mr. Big Ugly, his voice booming despite his attempt to whisper.  It was the sort of voice that came up from the depths of the ocean, the sort of sound that the Greeks would attach to a mythological figure like Poseidon.  The diminutive figure in the Spiderman jammies trembled as he looked over at the plastic shards of his ruined Transformers.  The debris would hurt like hell when Hank stepped on it.  

“Not so much.  Not since Hank started sleeping over,” whispered Phil to the monster, looking up into his deep, shadowy eyes.  “I never get to have a sleepover.  Mommy lets Hank sleep over a lot.”  While Mr. Big Ugly was a monster, and not entirely in tune to the affairs of the human world, he had his own suspicions about the ‘sleepovers’ of this Hank fellow Phil mentioned.  It wasn’t his place to try to explain it to the boy, though he felt the urge to.  

“You don’t like Hank much I take it,” Mr. Big Ugly said, gently lowering his semi-ethereal body onto the edge of Phil’s bed.  He felt strange to himself, awkward, like he had two years ago when his last assignment, a boy named Aaron of twelve, had finally stood up to him.  Aaron had told Mr. Big Ugly that he wasn’t real, and the Uvurum had been sucked by an invisible force back into Aaron’s closet, forever cast out of his bedroom.

In all of his long years of life, the children to whom he was assigned had never confronted Mr. Big Ugly.  When a child ceased to believe, usually, Mr. Big Ugly’s supervisor became aware of the fact, and would give him a couple of nights off.  After the time off, he would be given a new assignment.  Now, here he sat with a boy who did believe, but who was for some reason or other unafraid.  

The approach of an adult sent the familiar tingling sensation up Mr. Big Ugly’s spine, and he floated swiftly back to the closet and shut the door most of the way.  For some reason, however, he felt compelled to keep the door open a crack and keep an eye on what was about to occur.  He reached one of his hands into the shadows along the wall, and concentrated on contacting his supervisor.  However, he felt no reply, no other Uvurum hand grasping his own.  Where was his supervisor?

The door to Phil’s room opened with a short creak, and silhouetted against the dim hallway light stood the man Mr. Big Ugly assumed was Hank.  Hank appeared to be a typical adult specimen.  He wore no shirt over his slab-like chest, which was covered in curly black hair.  A cold sweat dribbled down his flat, ogre-like forehead and sides from his armpits, and he stood leering viciously at the little boy on his bed.

Mr. Big Ugly recognized that sort of grin.  Seeing it on a human sent his stomach into a churning frenzy.  The Uvurum knew not how a human adult could strike him with such a reaction, but he did have a theory about that.  In Hank’s left hand hung a thick, green wool sock. Something bulky appeared to be tucked inside of it, giving it the appearance of heft that might make it a decent makeshift weapon.  Did Hank know about Mr. Big Ugly?  Had he come to do what Phil’s Daddy sometimes promised he’d do when he tucked the boy under his covers in the dark?  Phil’s Daddy had often promised to barge into the room one night and destroy the monster, a promise that, luckily, the man never kept.

Parents are the ultimate weapon against the Uvurum.  Armed with nothing more than a flashlight, adults of the human race had, over the centuries, destroyed countless closet and bed monsters.  Only parents could do it, however.  Babysitters and older siblings did not possess the essential force of protective energy required.  The only benefit of this was that after the deed was done, parents could not remember their encounter with the monsters.  

The gravely sound of Hank’s voice brought Mr. Big Ugly out of his reflective reverie.  “Hey, kiddo,” Hank said quietly to Phil, his makeshift tool trundling back and forth in a lazy arc.  Hank crept toward the bed, sock circling faster now.  His bare left foot landed squarely on a Transformer’s broken leg, and he flinched, hopping back and pulling the piece of robot from his callused heel.  “Thought I heard something break in here a few minutes ago.  Looks like I was right,” Hank said, his grin spreading ever wider, his eyes aglow with hostility and cruel mirth.  

“I, I’m sorry,” Phil quavered, his voice tiny and weak.  Hank shook his head and made a small ‘tut-tut’ noise through his teeth, approaching Phil still.  Mr. Big Ugly, his stomach a raging inferno and his mind reeling at what he was seeing, took his eyes off of this display just long enough to duck his head through the shadows and look around the loading area of his workplace.

The Uvurum world, as has been stated, is much like the human world.  Mr. Big Ugly worked with a host of other monsters, but when he poked his head back into the loading area, he found no supervisor, and none of his coworkers on the concrete dock.  There was no call to come back from further off in the working area.  Nobody came out of their office and told him to end his shift early.  Curious.

Mr. Big Ugly heard something then, back in Phil’s room, that snagged his attention and sent his heart jackhammering along in his slightly yellowed, mottled toad skin chest.  A thump, and a rather heavy one, followed by a muffled cry of physical pain.  Mr. Big Ugly ripped himself back to the closet door of Phil’s room, and listened and watched.  He’d heard thumps and cries of pain before, of course.  Kids trying to flee their bedrooms and tripping, or running headlong into doors or walls.  

However, Mr. Big Ugly never directly caused physical harm.  That was the first and foremost law of the Uvurum.  No closet or bed monster was allowed to bring physical harm to a child, only terrify and horrify them.  If a monster ever did raise a hand against a child, and a few had, they would immediately be destroyed upon their return to the Uvurum world.  Such actions were not tolerated.  Mr. Big Ugly knew that as an essential law of his continued existence.  

Yet as Mr. Big Ugly stood hunched by the closet door, he watched helplessly as Hank did just that to little Phil with a padded bar of soap, lashing the boy about the arms and head.  He thumped Phil over and over, working on the child’s back as Phil turned and buried himself in his pillow and bed, trying not to cry out too loudly.  Hank finally stopped and left the room, softly closing the door behind him.

As soon as the adult was gone down the hallway, Mr. Big Ugly slid the closet door open and floated over to the bed, reducing his overall size and settling on the edge of the child’s bed.  Phil lay crying and holding his sore, beaten arms to himself, vulnerable in a way that Mr. Big Ugly had never encountered.  There existed no protocol for handling this sort of situation, or the alien emotions flooding his heart like a river whose dam has been blown apart.

“Phil,” the monster said, laying a webbed, black hand on the child’s shoulder and rolling him over with little effort, trying to be as soft as possible.  Mr. Big Ugly wasn’t sure why, but he thought that perhaps he could help Phil in some way, maybe ease some of his pain.  The slip of a boy sat up, staring through sheets of tears at the monster as Mr. Big Ugly wrung his hands uncomfortably.  “Um, you know, I never really hurt General Bruno,” he finally offered, feeling rather lame.

Imaginary friends, it should be noted, cannot actually die.  If a child thinks them gone forever, they simply fade away and take a new form elsewhere, with a different child.  They are much like the Uvurum, with a few key exceptions.  Firstly, imaginary friends can follow their child anywhere the child goes.  Secondly, they cannot be truly harmed.  Lastly, imaginary friends are eternal, whereas the Uvurum are only long-lived.  

Imaginary friends and the Uvurum generally have an understanding, though they do sometimes butt heads.  As such, Mr. Big Ugly felt a little hesitant to tell Phil what he wanted to tell the boy.  Considering what he’d just witnessed, however, he thought that perhaps dealing with General Bruno would be worth it.  “Really,” Phil whispered, thinking back to that horrible night when he’d seen the General’s head bitten off by the monster before him.  

“Really,” Mr. Big Ugly said with a grin full of blade-like teeth, patting the boy easily on the shoulder.  “Just bring him back, Phil.  You only have to imagine him here in the room with us, and he’ll come back.”  Phil scrunched his eyes shut, his forehead wrinkling as he concentrated on summoning up General Bruno from the void.  Mr. Big Ugly heard a slow, rhythmic pulse beating out from the center of the floor space, and he turned his attention from the boy to that spot.  With a flash of white light and a puff of gray smoke, the uniformed canine appeared walking into the room from the place that held his kind.

“General Bruno,” Phil exclaimed, bounding off of the bed and throwing himself up at the imaginary friend, who embraced him warmly and with a smile.  He patted Phil’s head, and cast a hateful glare at the monster a few feet away.  Phil took a step back when the General growled, a throaty, rumbling noise from down in his stomach.  “General, this is Mr. Big Ugly,” the boy said.  Every child knows their monster’s name.

“I know,” groused the military pooch, folding his hands behind his back tightly.  “We’ve met.  You,” the General said, pointing one fur-covered finger at the monster.  “You should leave,” the General warned, narrowing his eyes and baring his teeth.

“Wait,” rasped Mr. Big Ugly, holding up his webbed hands in entreaty.  “We have a bigger problem, you and I and Phil,” the monster said, reducing his overall size once more so that he and the imaginary friend stood eye-to-eye.  He lowered his hands to his sides, and then hooked a thumb over his shoulder.  “Have you met Hank?”


The two spirits sat on Phil’s bedroom floor in the darkness, sipping coffee from mugs the General kept in his imaginary foot locker at the foot of Phil’s bed.  Much to Mr. Big Ugly’s surprise, he felt relieved to hear the soft susurrations indicating Phil was asleep.  The General sighed and shook his head, having finished listening to the monster’s account of what he’d witnessed earlier in the night.  

“I had no idea,” said the General, lowering his eyes to his coffee.  “And the worst part of it is, I can’t do anything about it.  Humans can be such retched creatures.”

“So I’ve discovered,” replied Mr. Big Ugly, trying once more to sip his coffee.  The stuff tasted like strong sludge, but he didn’t want to offend the imaginary friend.  They were, for the moment, in the same boat together.  

“I mean, Hank’s real, and I’m not.  You,” the General said, waving his mug in the monster’s direction.  “You’re only half real.”

“I’m real enough,” spat Mr. Big Ugly, a plan forming slowly in his ancient mind.  “You know I’d never bring harm to a child.  We are not allowed, and the very idea is, frankly, rather revolting now that I’ve seen it first-hand.”

“I know,” said the General.  “The Uvurum do not harm children, I know.  What of it?”

“Hank isn’t a child,” Mr. Big Ugly said casually, revealing his teeth in a carefully paced smile to the canine soldier.  “I have a plan, but I’ll need your help, good General.  If things go as I hope, Phil will never have to deal with Hank or myself ever again.  Will you help me?”  The imaginary friend looked hard at Mr. Big Ugly, trying to get a gauge of the monster’s sincerity in all of this.  Finally, he nodded, but had to ask one question before he would hear the monster’s idea out.

“Whatever you have in mind, you’re saying you’d leave Phil alone ever after?”  Mr. Big Ugly lowered his eyes and closed his lips, and nodded, peering down into his coffee.  “Why?”

“Because,” the monster said, handing his empty cup back to the General.  “Phil doesn’t need a monster of any kind anymore.  Not after Hank.”


Phil did everything the General calmly asked him to throughout the next day, and by bedtime, the young boy knew what the General had in mind for the evening.  They were going to play a little game of war out in the living room, after Mommy had gone to bed.  They would have to wait until Hank came into the bedroom, but that wouldn’t be a problem.  The General had suggested that Phil sling some of his mashed potatoes at the man during dinner.  “He’ll be in to see you tonight after that, I’m certain,” the General said as he handed Phil his soap while the boy showered.

Phil didn’t understand why he was asked to do some of the things the General told him to, but if it meant getting to play war with his Transformers after bedtime, and in the living room no less, he would follow the General’s every word.  Of course, Mr. Big Ugly had told the General the overall plan the night before, letting the imaginary canine figure out the fine details along the way.  

As the monster hugged the corner of the room that would be hidden when the door to Phil’s room opened later in the night, the General gave him his report.  “Our Philip performed his duties marvelously.  Now, I don’t intend to ask you all of the details, but I assume you’ll make certain that Hank never comes back after tonight,” asked the General, trembling a little before the Uvurum.  He still remembered the pain of having his head torn off by the monster a year before, the agony of being systematically eaten and then vanishing from Phil’s imagination space.  

“Don’t worry about Hank,” said Mr. Big Ugly.  “You leave him to me, and play your games out in the living room.  Now remember, you’ll want to be as loud as you can be, but try not to wake Mommy.”

“Won’t be a problem,” said the General, hands behind his back.  Before either creature could say anything more, they heard Mommy’s bedroom door open down the hall, and the light in the corridor flicked on.  The General hustled over to Phil, who had a plastic bag filled with nearly a dozen Transformers.  The canine soldier lead the boy over next to the door, and there they all waited, listening to the methodical footfalls of the approaching adult.  

The door opened wide to Phil’s room, and the General darted past the human with Phil behind.  Phil turned, and as the General had instructed him, planted both of his small hands on Hank’s back and shoved him into his room.  “Hey you little,” Hank said, and before Phil’s eyes the door slammed shut.  The General led him by the hand out to the living room then, where they started playing war and forgot about Hank and Mr. Big Ugly.

The human spun back toward the door as it shut, and saw something looming in the corner of the room that made his alcohol-drenched mind start to clear up rapidly.  His nostrils flared up at the scent of swampland that drifted from the looming figure before him.  His ears picked up the wet, smacking sounds of its branch-thick legs as they moved on three-toed, webbed feet toward him a few paces.  Finally, he could taste the acrid smoke that had filtered into the room from the closet, a smell like something burning.  “What the hell,” he squeaked as Mr. Big Ugly bent down toward him, flashing his dozens of dagger teeth.  

“Hello, Hank,” boomed the monster from the closet.  “We have to have a little talk.”


The General had been quite thorough.  After escaping the bedroom, the General had instructed Phil to grab a towel from the bathroom and stuff it in the crack under the door of Mommy’s room.  He had a feeling that Hank would not be returning to that particular bedchamber, or any other one, again.  Prior to dinner, again by the General’s instruction, Phil had placed one of Mommy’s sleepy pills in her potatoes at the table.  

Unable to hear anything in the nearby living room, Mommy would be sound asleep.  General Bruno played loud war games with Phil, ensuring that the boy would not notice anything coming from the hallway or back from his room.  The General assumed that that would be best.  Mr. Big Ugly had made it very clear that he didn’t want Phil to return to his bedroom for a good while that night, and the General would distract the boy in every way Phil wished to be distracted, so long as it didn’t involve his bedroom.

As such, Phil didn’t hear Hank’s muffled cries of pain or terror.  He never saw the bits of Hank’s face that Mr. Big Ugly tore from his head with his frenzied, webbed claws.  He never smelled the feces with which Hank filled his own trousers.  He never saw Mr. Big Ugly dragging Hank into the closet and dumping him off into the Uvurum world.  He never watched or listened as Mr. Big Ugly cleaned all of the blood with supplies from his home world, including the eyeball that had landed on Phil’s pillow.  

Best of all, Phil never saw or heard from Hank or Mr. Big Ugly ever again.