Little Billy Henicke went to bed one night, and woke up different. Changed. How? He couldn't tell. His parents couldn't tell. The kids around him couldn't tell. But he knew. Oh yes, he knew. For a while, almost a whole week, nothing happened. He just knew. But after that first week, there was...something else.

It started off as a couple of bruises, two on each side by his ribcage. The bruises got darker, bigger, and that was when he told his parents. They didn't know what to say. Billy's dad, a doctor, checked him out. He didn't find anything. Maybe you just fell down on something, they told him.

But that wasn't all that happened. Billy started to get hungry. Hungry for meat, and the hamburger helper his parents made didn't do the trick. It wasn't even another full week before the hunger drove Billy to sneak out at night.

Two weeks after Billy first began to feel strange, the bruises began to change. His skin flexed out, forming a small, tough knob in four places, one under each armpit, and another about six inches down. It wasn't long before the knobs began to grow longer. His hunger grew.  He began to do things, terrible things that no kid should ever do. He began to eat stray cats at night, when he snuck out of his house. And still, he hungered for more.

One day, Billy didn't come back from one of his midnight adventures. His parents called the cops, but they couldnt find anything. They had other things on their minds though. A young girl had just been murdered in the town. She had been partially eaten. The whole town was afraid for Billy, afraid that he was the next victim. Little did they know.

Billy was gone for three days before the next victim was attacked. A little boy was walking home from school when something jumped out of the alley at him. About the size of a twelve year old boy, he told the police, the thing crawled on it's hands and knees with a strange quickness. There was something else, too. The Thing had four extra arms, one under each armpit, and one a little lower. And then, if that werent strange enough, when the boy ran, the Thing ran down a storm drain.

A storm drain? The cops asked, is that even possible?

The boy began to cry. Said the awful Thing flattened itself, like a cartoon, and scuttled down into the sewer. The police didn't know what to do.

"And there he waits," Andrew, the big kid on the bus said, "Billy Henicke waits down in the sewers to...GET YOU!" He jumps at the little kids on the bus, and they all shrink back.  He's been telling this story for weeks now, ever since Billy and that girl disappeared.

Andrew's stop is the last stop for the bus. He walks the last couple blocks down the street to his house, when it catches his eye: the storm drain. He laughs nervously at it, until he see something. A little red trail, leading down into the drain. Something like a large spider leg sticking out.

But he's not scared, no, he's Andrew, the big kid. And he knows its all a story. Those kids arent really missing. So Andrew, in all his bravery, walks a little closer to the drain. No, there's no spider leg, that must've just been his imagination. But there IS a terrible smell comin' fom there. There IS red stuff around the drain. He doesn't recognize it.

He steps closer to the drain, and is never seen again.

But that's just a story, isn't it?

Ask Andrew.