Try as you might, you just can’t stay awake any longer. Your eyelids
begin to close all by themselves and the text on the page grows fuzzy.
When you realize you’ve read over an entire sentence and remember not a
word of it, you decide it’s time for bed.
The usual routines go like clockwork. Wash the hands, brush the teeth
(lazily, to preserve that sleepy haze in your brain), swish with
mouthwash. Fifteen seconds instead of thirty, like the label says. You
don’t care. You’re tired. Spit once, twice. Seems like mouthwash always
wants to stay for good. Three times. One last pee before lights out.
Into the bedroom. You dig out your best PJ’s, and clean underwear for
sleeping. It’s been really hot all day and the ones you’re wearing have
that disgusting moistness to them.
Mom pokes her head in to remind you it’s bedtime, lets out a
surprised “Oh” when she sees you’re way ahead of her for once. She gives
you a kiss and bids you good night before disappearing down the hall,
turning out the bathroom light that you forgot to turn out, yourself.
Dad’s already in bed. Leno delivers his opening monologue from the TV
in the folks’ room. He usually konks out before the first commercial
break, then the TV will go off and the house will be silent for the
night.
All the lights in the house are off except in your bedroom. The
street light outside burned out over a year ago and no one’s bothered to
fix it, so the neighborhood seems to have vanished into a black void.
Somehow it makes the house’s shadows thicker than they ought to be as
they creep up the hallway toward your bedroom. You find yourself
noticing every night now.
You turn to your bed, eyes instinctively dropping to the dark slit
underneath. Except for that blackness, the entire room always looks
deceptively cheerful when the light is on. Funny how you used to be
scared of the closet when you were five. Dad used to tell you all the
time that there was nothing hiding in the closet, and he was right.
You reach for the light switch by the door, eyes still locked on the underside of the bed. Somehow it stares back.
Your hand stops. Better not just yet. You turn on the bedside lamp
first, then walk back across the room and flip the light switch. The
room dims, but a safe yellow aura envelops the bed.
It’s only three feet to the mattress. Last summer Mom insisted on
rearranging the entire house, including your room. The bed used to be
tucked snugly in the corner; now it rests near the center of the room,
with only the headboard leaning against a wall. Sleeping in it makes you
feel exposed. Stepping near the shadow under the bed fills you with the
sensation of teetering on the edge of a steep cliff or stepping too
close to a lagoon filled with crocodiles. When it was in the corner you
could get a full running start and dive under the covers.
You take a step toward the bed, diverting your eyes to the pillows.
Don’t acknowledge it. It’s nothing to be afraid of. A figment of your
over-active imagination. That’s all.
You clear the next two feet with a graceful bound, landing square on
the center of the mattress. Climb under the comforter, tuck the bottom
under your feet so there’s no way to reach in. Wrap yourself like a
burrito. Nice and cozy. Except now you’re wide awake.
The hum of the air conditioner is a slight comfort. It’s deep and
gentle, almost animal-like, and hopefully the only sound you’ll hear
tonight. Soothing ambience always helps you get to sleep better.
You have to pee again. Not a lot, but just enough to keep you from
falling asleep straight away. It always happens after all the lights are
out and you’re neatly tucked into bed, but hours before your eyes have
had time to adjust to the darkness.
You could probably leap clear of the bed and make it to the bathroom
with little incident, but then you’d have to hope it didn’t decide to
follow you. And sometimes it’s not under the bed. Sometimes it’s
somewhere else in the house. You hear it wandering around out there on
rare occasions, when everyone else is asleep. You almost bumped into it
on the way to the kitchen late one night. Since then you’ve never set
foot outside the room after bedtime for fear of being ambushed.
You decide to tough it out. You don’t have to pee that bad. Pulling
the comforter up to your cheeks, you close your eyes and try to focus on
the hum of the air conditioner.
Then it shuts off. The hum dies with a deep sigh and a dull “kathunk”. Silence.
Outside not a single leaf rustles. Your ears don’t even ring from the
day’s noise. You start to wish for a car alarm, or a catfight, or the
distant blare of a passing train. The house is dead calm. All you can do
is lie there, wrapped in the comforter ever-tighter, and try to focus
on the darkness behind your eyelids until you pass out.
Maybe you won’t hear it speak if you go to sleep quickly enough. The
few times it spoke, it called you by name — it’s known your name from
the beginning — and when it was sure you were listening intently, it
giggled. Then it was quiet the rest of the night.
It doesn’t stir often enough for you to get used to it. Once or twice
every other month. Usually you just hear its voice somewhere in your
room, laughing quietly to itself — a soft voice, almost a whisper but
not quite. It always sounds like it’s coming from the entire room, but
you know its origin is under there, in the shadows. The worst part is
its unbearably motherly tone, like its desire to do unspeakable things
to you has escalated to adoration.
Just the thought of hearing it talk sends chills up your spine. You
pull the comforter over your head, curling into a fetal position, eyes
tightly shut.
You’re not sure how long you’ve been lying there, curled into a
pitiful and slightly painful little ball. Your joints ache. Has an hour
passed? A few minutes? Will daylight never come? You want to peek out of
your haven to check the time, but the fear of seeing the thing staring
back at you freezes every joint in your body. But if it were standing at
the side of the bed just now, watching you, it makes no sense that it
would only wait until you’d seen it to pounce on you, and a lot of good
the comforter would do for protection.
The house is so deathly silent…maybe a little peek won’t hurt…
Your eyes have fully adjusted to the dark. Peering through a small
hole between the covers and the mattress, you can discern every piece of
furniture in your room, and every poster on the wall.
The bedside clock reads…eleven-oh-oh. Less than an hour has passed
since you went to bed, but it appears you dozed off at some point. The
house is just as unnervingly still as it was when you slipped away.
Maybe the stillness, itself, jarred you to waking.
No. No, that isn’t it. That isn’t it at all. The house isn’t
completely still. Though the floor of your room is draped in blackness
as far out as the hallway, you swear you spot a twitch of movement.
Sudden and swift, like something darting out of view to avoid detection.
The voice whispers your name. You’re not sure you heard it at first —
not because it’s so quiet, but because part of your mind is trying so
desperately to shut it out. Your throat seals up. You feel all the blood
drain from your face as you pinpoint the source at the foot of the bed.
“The hunger’s too much to bear,” it whispers.
Resistance is beyond you now: terror has taken control of your body. You stare down the comforter toward your feet.
It’s looking at you. Peering over the lumps in the sheets, staring
with two sightless slits in a dry, shriveled, hairless head. Its mouth
stretches into an insane grin, like those found on the embalmed faces
behind museum glass. How long has it been watching you?
You want to scream and pull your feet back from the thing’s horrible
face, but your legs ignore the command again and again, even as those
ghastly fingers slither onto the mattress and take hold of the right
foot. Even as it pulls your foot closer and stuffs it, still wrapped in
the comforter, into that gaping, grinning mouth. It has no teeth. It has
no teeth but its nails are like razor chisels. It has no teeth so it
minces its food by hand.
With a horrified cry you break free of your trance and reel your legs
in, ducking under the comforter. You scream again and again, calling
for help, but all that comes out is sobbing incoherence. It’s climbing
onto the bed now, clawing at the covers, its bony arms reaching inside,
searching for something to grab a hold of. It’s going to drag you onto
the floor, and from there you daren’t think. You swat its hands away
frantically, screaming at the feel of its leathery skin, gagging at the
smell of its cold, rancid breath as it whispers in your ears through the
comforter, madly repeating with awful glee, “It’s too much to bear!
It’s too much to bear!”
Light floods the room. Still sobbing and kicking, you suddenly
realize you’re alone on the bed. At the door, Dad stands with his hand
on the light switch and a concerned look on his face. He speaks, but
what you hear is unintelligible at first.
Your eyes jump from one end of the room to the other. It’s nowhere to
be found. Your skin still shudders from its touch, and that graveyard
stench still lingers in your nostrils, but the moment you acknowledge
either sensation it vanishes.
Dad’s voice draws your attention back to the door. Now Mom is there,
too, asking about the noise. The moment Dad mentions bad dreams she’s
sitting on the bed with her arms around you, kissing you gently on the
head and asking if you’re all right.
You want more than anything to throw your arms around them both and
cry. Instead, with a nod and a sniffle you play along, admitting your
dreams haven’t shaken you up this badly in a while, but swearing that
you’re okay now. Confident they’ve chased the demons off once again, Mom
and Dad kiss you goodnight and plunge you back into darkness.
Monsters are never real to adults. They always find an explanation.
Something you ate. Reading scary stories or watching scary movies before
bed. Your overactive imagination. The solution is always attention or
medication or visits to a psychiatrist. They’re never real.
Maybe it’ll get you someday, and it’ll be the grown-ups’ fault. Mom
and Dad will come into their “imaginative” child’s room one day and find
it mysteriously empty, or perhaps they’ll turn on the lights and find
the thing there instead, sitting on the bed with a bloated belly and
that horrible eyeless grin.
They may come up with an explanation for that, too.
You curl up under the comforter again, eyes closed, mind struggling
to shut out the unnerving silence. Sleep may yet find you if your
thoughts remain on mundane subjects, like school. Mom suggested it once
when you were seven, and it always seemed to work. But now you may never
sleep again.
The thing giggles.
You open your eyes partway to scan the floor for movement, but it’ll
be hours before they adjust to the darkness again. Pulling the covers
over your head like before, you curl into a ball and wait.
The room is silent the rest of the night.