The Boy on The Bed

“Mummy no, please don’t go. The Monster will come out”. The little boy curled up in his bed, appealing to the sliver of light where his mother stands.

“Carl please –”

“But he will come. I know it” His voice rose hysterically, and his body tightened as the door closed a fraction of an inch.

“Carl please, just go to sleep”

She sighed, running a hand over her worn face. “I’ll be right next door if you need me.” With that the door shut, and the light disappeared.

The little boy began to shake, he blinked furiously at the matte blackness that encircled him. Lightning flashed and he jumped slightly. He felt the shadows reach out to him, crawl across the furniture, they came closer and closer. His eyes darted from the ominous science textbooks on his shelves to the distorted heap of laundry on his floor. His grip tightened as footsteps echoed from outside, and then…the fragment of light under the door was blotted out.

The room was silent.

The boy on the bed, he felt it. He knew what was coming. Another flash and for an instant the room is illuminated, and his fears are washed away. But the shadows returned, dripping menacingly down his windowsill, they crept across the stained carpet.

They slid out from under the bed.

His pitiful cries rose into the dark night. He pushed up his large glasses shakily. Fear swelled in waves, overflowing as he watches a talon slither out of its cocoon, up the bed side. The blanket twisted as the boy pressed against the bed frame, his eyes squeezing shut as he swung his head in a refusal of reality.

“Leave me alone.” His timeworn plea spilt out in a rush of odorous cowardice. The bed shuddered as a talon dragged out the rest of its body. My body. I rose up, my shadow slinked across the quaking form. His fear is a delectable morsel on my tongue, every night a different flavour.

“Hello Carl.”

“Please” He shrunk away from me. Thunder rattled the windowpane, and the lightning crackled its own chaotic laugh, fusing into Carl’s snivelling sobs until all that graces my ears is his undiluted terror.

“Feeling lonely, again are we?” I crooned, raking my claws down his bedframe. He shook his head feverishly. The boy repulses me, his cowardice a concept I am unable to understand. Two years I have made my residence under his bed, I have tasted his fear, I have listened to his cries. I have seen all his inner-most snivelling thoughts, splayed out in a feast for me to gorge myself. His memories I consume for entertainment, endless loops of amusement for me to enjoy. I see it all. His appointments with Dr. Gretchen, his mother’s slow decline, the distinct hole in their family and his own inherent inadequacy. But it fills me not, rather, making me more ravenous.

“Please just go away” Carl whimpered, his hands contorting the blanket into knot just as I had contorted his soul.

“And you lose your only company?” I crawled across to him. He winced at the sight of my snarl.

“I am… I am not, not alone.” He stuttered, and recoiled under the blanket, the one thing he thought could protect him. His suit of armour against me. In my youthful folly I had once tried to harm him, failing to comprehend the connection between us. Now, the blanket might as well be impenetrable, a physical protection against the terrors of the night.

“You are always alone”

“No…No I’m not. I’m not.”

Carl shuddered under my direct gaze.

“Of course, you have mummy.”

I run a claw down the faded photograph on his bedside.

“Well, mummy doesn’t understand does she?” The boy shivered as the rain begun to pound against the roof.

“Stop…leave me, leave me alone.” He lifted his head out from the blanket to stare at me, his eyes alight with dread. He unsteadily re-centred his bulky glasses.

“I don’t – don’t want to talk to you”

“No, you only talk to Dr. Gretchen.”

I smiled, wide enough to show him the hideousness of my teeth. He sobbed, his body heaving under the coverlet.

“Go away.”

His eyes reached mine, his glasses blinding in the unyielding fractures of lightning. I laughed, my voice reverberating around the darkened room. My eyes caught on the battered Yearbook lying carelessly next to an edition of Frankenstein.

“Do they still talk to you?”

I asked, lifting a dark talon towards the Yearbook.

“Or did they leave you too?”

“I – I, I don’t understand.”

He pushed his glasses up his slippery nose and glanced at the bookshelf in the gloom.

“I think you do”

He shied away from my sneer and held up his hands in defence of truths he had yet to accept. It was a repulsive sight; his mouth trembled underneath the river of fluid that dripped out of his gleaming nose, while his red-rimmed eyes blinked at me, harbouring precariously poised teardrops. His weaknesses, common to all his kind, disgusted me. His torment audible, a hypnotic chant in my ears. Two years I have relished in his anguish, his isolation, his anxiety and his own incompetence. His mind is no longer a foreign world; but it is my personal playground to manipulate as I wish.

“I just…just want –”

He faltered as a thunder crack cleaved through the night, his eyes darted away from mine, landing on the torn image on his bedside table, framed in scratched, hand carved wood.

“I want to know why?”

He murmured it so faintly I almost missed it. I tilted my head and watched him curiously. His eyes clear and bright and now as his hands steadily pushed up his glasses, I sensed my control slipping into the darkness. The thunder staggered; I have seen the worst of his life; in his darkest moment I feasted on his anguish. I had inhaled his fear, a violent and chaotic ecstasy for my senses. Just a child that night, curled up in a ball that quivered helplessly under his quilt. His mother had returned with the stench of alcohol pervading her body and begun wildly smashing glass framed memories in a frenzy of humiliated pain. At each crash six-year-old Carl had flinched and pulled the quilt reflexively over his body. That night, two years ago, I was born. A product of fear and desertion, his mental torment. He crafted me; he knitted my threads of terror into his desolate reality. He formed me, a monstrous tapestry of his childlike perspective, stored in the realm of monsters under his bed. In all this time, his guiding light of intellect had been switched off, replaced by a nightmare born of adversity.

The light switched on. My form was thrown into relief as footsteps resounded in the hallway. The doorknob twisted and my eyes locked with Carl’s. He blinked and looked at me under now determined brows. In that instant I felt myself wither and slip down the side of the bed. I was cast aside, shoved into the gloom. The door opened and light flooded the room. Carl’s mother entered, her simple, fatigued nightdress hanging loosely over her frame.

“Carl…what’s wrong? I heard you crying…” At the balm of his mother’s concern, Carl trepidations tumbled out of him in a medley of anguish and misery. He slumped into a sanctuary of motherly love and sobbed. The rain trickled in unison with the tears and glistened against the illuminated window. Under the bed, I recoiled further into my dark prison, away from the harshness of the light. I was a captive, locked under the bed, my influence draining away with his fear.

He wept in anguish, but I remain. I wait. Despite all his intellect, he failed to comprehend the permanency of his fear.

Little does he know,

that the more he cries

the bigger I grow.