Unspeakable Horror!

"Waterbed Wonderland" originally appeared in The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror. 

Billy pedals his dirtbike past the Grand Opening rainbow banners
of Waterbed Wonderland.

Inside the gymnasium-sized showroom,
the televisions demonstrate the new technology of these amazing beds,
which contain a miraculous mystery substance
the scientific creators have named Plazma.
A heavenly sleep experience.
Add water only once.
They never leak.
Stick a butcher knife in there,
the CEO-infomercial salesman demonstrates;
it mends overnight.
And that's right they never leak.

Billy rides across the fresh asphalt streets of The Village Green, the new housing development adjacent to Waterbed Wonderland. At the perimeter, Billy walks his bike through a hole in the fence and into the rundown trailerpark.

He drops the bike in front of the mossy trailer with gigantic bushes attacking the side like squid on a submarine.

Billy's old man dozes in the lazyboy, drunk on Jack in front of the TV with a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

During lunch in the school cafeteria, all of Billy's new friends from The Village Green talk about their new waterbeds. The Homeowner's Association made a special deal with Waterbed Wonderland for all the new families moving into the neighborhood.

Billy hopes his new friends don't find out where he lives.
He'll never get one of those beds.

But Billy's old man buys one for himself. A special financing offer he says.

At least a waterbed doesn't burn if he passes out drunk with a cigarette, thinks Billy.

At the sleepover, Billy shares the new waterbed with Johnny who falls asleep early while Billy reads the alien-invasion comic with a flashlight.

Billy feels the movement beneath in the Plazma.
He shakes Johnny to awaken him.
Instead Billy pushes Johnny off the blood-sucking spine that penetrates Johnny's stomach. The shiny black spine protrudes from the mattress, leaking a spot of blood on the sheets before retracting. Billy feels the waterbed creature wiggle to another spot in its warm jelly nest.

It's true the mattress doesn't leak.

No one in the house awakens when Billy screams.
They're all in some kind of coma. Billy calls 911.

The Village Green security team assures Billy
it was only a bad dream.
Johnny's parents assure Billy
the red bump on Johnny's stomach is from a mosquito,
not a waterbed parasite.
Johnny's parents assure Billy that they do not have similar bumps.

Billy returns home the next morning to find his trailer in smoldering ruins.

They remove his father's charred body.
The old man fell asleep with a cigarette in bed, they tell Billy.
The melted Plazma covers the floor of the bedroom.
It can leak after all.
Billy finds the egg pods
and a burned dead thing
that looks like a cross between a manta ray and a bullfrog,
its back covered with the feeding spines.

Fortunately
the CEO of Waterbed Wonderland
hears of Billy's plight
and welcomes the orphan to live with him
and his fourteen children
in the mansion at the center of The Village Green.
The family has plenty of room.
There's an extra upstairs bedroom with a deluxe Plazma Twin Wonderbed
just for a Billy,
and a new dirtbike,
and everything to make a boy's dreams come true.

And yes they do burn, thinks Billy.