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The day that Randall moved out of the ROR housing, he took down his winds of change poster from the wall and looked at it for a long time. College had been supposed to mean change, mean that things would be different, mean that Randy Boggs wasn't going to be such a loser. Apparently, that hadn't worked out.
He swapped it out for a different poster instead. Pitch Black. Something so old that the monsters didn't even have a word for it, powerful enough that he had taught the monster race to collect the screams of children to power their machines and their world. While humans had struggled with wood or coal or steam, monsters had already had the glorious elegance of scream power to provide for them.
Nobody remembered, any more, what he looked like, but there were artists' impressions. Sleek as shadows, dressed all in grey, with sparks of gold in his eyes and teeth like a shark's. Somehow those were the stories that slipped down through the years. Randall hung the poster above his bed, where it loomed over the room like a promise or a threat, and felt a shiver of pleasure run down his spine at the sight.
His family had not traditionally been scarers. Some of them, with better control of their colours, had taken on the dangerous role of researching the fears of children, but most had never had anything to do with the career. And then here was Randall Boggs, first in his family to go to university, determined to be the first to be a Scarer.
They had said that Pitch Black was able to disappear into the shadows.
Pitch Black was a hero to monsters. He helped to nurture their society, away from the cruel whims of humans, away from their toxic touch. The words of Pitch Black whispered down through the years, and told them how to take back in screams what the humans had culled from them.
Sometimes it was frustrating. He was still Randy Boggs, the monster who lost the Scare Games for the RORs - because they couldn't stand the thought that OK had done well, no, it had to be someone letting them down, and that someone had to be Randall - no matter how many tests he aced or classes he came top in. Most of the other frats pretended that he didn't exist. The OKs offered to let him join, and somehow that was just more humiliating. They'd lost their coach, they said, and they knew that he and Mike had been friends once.
He pointed out the past tense, and they skittered away.
He was scary. He was scary, he knew it; creeping in the shadows, invisible; a sound, a shadow, a flash of teeth in the darkness that vanish again in the blink of an eye. It was not just that he could scare, Randall told himself. Doing and being were very different things. Even his roommate looked at him nervously, although that may have been because he was a Monster Literature major and didn't know what to make of the heavy textbooks, the hissing and snarling from the bathroom when Randall was practicing his growls, the fact that all too often he would come back of an evening to find Randall faded to the walls, the posters, anything in the room, just to learn to get that fine control of his patterns.
One night, Randall's roommate was foolish enough to try to bring home a friend. Randall faded into the poster of Pitch Black, finding the teeth a nice match for his own, and watched and waited as the friend became more and more disturbed by the poster which must have looked, to him, a little too three-dimensional.
Finally, when his roommate left for a few moments and the friend's back was turned, Randall crept down. He slithered up behind the stranger, his tail a whisper on the wooden floor, then drew himself up to his full height, all in shades of grey and black.
"Boo," he hissed.
The monster screamed, jumped so badly he almost fell over, and fled the room as fast as his legs could carry him. Randall threw his head back and laughed, not caring even when his roommate requested a change of rooms the following day.
"Maybe you're watching out for me, bogeyman," he said to the poster, that night when he had the room to himself.
He wished that he could have been there when the first scare was made, the first scream not only torn from humans but used. Turning their fear and horror into something useful, instead of just a condemnation. What had it been like, the rush of the first deliberate scares? Had Pitch Black lingered long enough to give the monsters tips on their burgeoning skills? Had they spoken to him?
Had they seen him?
Or perhaps he had been a part of the shadows. A slip of darkness, a gleam of eyes and teeth in the gloom, a whispered word and a deepening of the darkness that might have represented a touch. He rather preferred the thought of it being the latter, of shadows feeling like something solid against his scales, of the darkness embracing him wholly and running over his skin, guiding his silent feet, dark against the white of his teeth. A hiss, a rattling of his tongue in his mouth, and the power of Pitch Black would be there with him.
"Scream," Pitch Black would whisper, his voice all night and threatened promises, and tendrilled shadowed fingers would trail over Randall's scales. "Scream for me," and those flashing teeth would touch against his skin, nails would scrape down his belly, shadows would wrap around him. "Scream loud."