A/N: This story is based on a prompt I found a while ago on a creative writing blog. I Googled it but can't find the site again which is a shame because it was an incredibly creative site with really good prompts.

Prompt: When he was little, he could swear there was a monster under his bed-but no one believed him. On the eve of his 30th birthday, he hears noises coming from under his bed once again. The monster is back and has an important message to deliver.

Our story begins on a searing-hot afternoon in Las Vegas.

Spencer Reid, aged six, sat in the old living room, which was currently serving as his mother's "study." Stacks of books and literary journals rose from the red plush carpet towards the ceiling in skyscraping towers. A thin blue notebook lay open before him, and he held his mother's favorite ballpoint pen in his hand. Most of the pages of the notebook were full of childish drawings and stories about his life in the dysfunctional household. There was one page left, a broad white plain broken regularly by thin transparent blue lines, and Spencer was intending on writing his final story on that page.

But, the words to describe the thing that had happened escaped him. Covertly, he stuck his head from behind the tower of literature that shielded him from the only doorway to the room. His mother was somewhere in the house; he could hear her laughing darkly to herself. He was afraid that she would catch him using this pen – her pen – and punish him for it, but he felt compelled to write this last story in the dark blue ink that covered the thousands of pages that surrounded him.

Listening to the laughter and discerning that it was moving away from him, most likely toward the back staircase of the house to the dimly-lit room at the top that his mother spent most of her drug-induced hours in, Spencer bent over the notebook. He held the pen tightly in his hand as he wrote the first words on the page:

The Monster

Spencer paused after that and looked at the ink glaring from the page back at him. He listened for his mother, but detecting no sounds from her, he continued writing on the page. It was less than a few minutes before he finished his work. On the inside back cover of the notebook, he drew a stick-figure bed with a small boy asleep under the covers and large eyes glowing in the darkness beneath. Underneath his picture, he wrote one last word in the journal:

ME