"THE GIRL BENEATH THE BED"

The Girl Beneath the Bed

by [Aamir muhammad]

Genre: Psychological Horror/Supernatural Word Count

Ray had always hated the sound of lullabies. Not the kind sung gently by loving parents, but the eerie kind; out of tune, whispered through walls, vibrated like teeth on glass. He remembered them from childhood, the same words, the same melody, seeping through the floorboards in the middle of the night, "Lay your head, no need to cry... soon you'll sleep beneath the sky..." He would scream, which would cause his parents to race into his room, only to find nothing beneath his bed. I'ts just your imagination Holy Cow, Ray's father would say, more annoyed than concerned, "No more stories." Ray knew what he heard. What he saw. The girl. She lived under his bed. He could never quite describe her, only that her hair was always wet, sticking to her pale face like wet moss and her eyes... they never blinked. Just stared. Ray was thirty when he returned, after both parents passed away. In their will they left the house to him, a shabby suburban two-story home with peeling yellow paint and a lawn that was already dying. The memories were stale but still somewhat manageable. He decided he would sell the house quickly and just move on. The first night back he didn't sleep. It wasn't so much the quiet that was keeping him up and nervous, it was the feeling; a kind of anxiety like someone was under the bed again, watching. He laughed it off. Too many memories. Too much dust. Until heheard the lullaby. Soft, like a breath blowing through years of tired pipes. He froze. No TV. No radio. No noise but the sound. “Lay your head, no need to cry…” said the sweet, soft lullaby. His therapist, Dr. Marsh, says it's unresolved trauma. "You were a sensitive child, Ray," she said in a Zoom session earlier that week. "Sometimes traumas come back up when we begin to experience an environment similar to the source. Your brain can start projecting the old days into today." He wished he could accept that as the explanation. But he also knew one other thing: the humming only started after the clock read midnight, and only after he had turned off all the lights. On the fourth night, things escalated. After drifting off, he woke up to fresh scratch marks on the wood floor, just under the bed. Not on the bed frame, on the wood. Four, relatively parallel lines. Fresh. Fingernail scratches, maybe. But there are no fingernails left unclipped in this house. By the next night, Ray did not sleep. He sat up in his bed, watching the wall across the room closely, his phone ready. At 3:17 AM, the humming came back. “Soon, you’ll sleep beneath the sky.” He flipped the lighting to bright. Nothing. He sunk down to the floor, full of adrenaline, slowly pulled the edge of the blanket up high, and looked under the bed. Nothing. And then— Drip. Drip. Drip. Wet. The floor boards were wet. Not saturated. Not water-logged, soaked to the rim. Just... wet. Like there was something breathing wet air through an opening in the wood, breathing moisture from some dark place that was softer than the ceiling above his head or the walls around the bed. Enough, he said to himself over and over. "You have had enough." The next day, Ray turned to the attic. I must find something, he thought. Dust attacked his lungs. He dug past dusty boxes full of old toys, old tax files filled with paper beyond paper, the boxes wedged between the rafters, away from the tan rubbery tape that always sealed the attic door.he scrambled across his bedroom floor and began even further away from the bed as possible. The door to his bedroom was open, he wanted to run to the hallway.

"Ray!"

As soon as the voice called, he could feel hot air brushing against his arms and back. He restrained himself from looking back.

"Ray!" The voice persisted, a gravelly shriek. The heat was getting hotter.

Ray jumped to the hall.

"Ray! You should have never left me!"

He didn't know who was behind him so he raced down the stairs and to the right and running into the living room. To his right was the front door. He was going to run outside for safety.

As he grabbed the door handle, it jiggled as it slipped from his grasp and into the hands of the figure behind him whispering sweetly,

"Ray..."

Ray turned around and threw open the door. The prangles ripped but he dared not look first. "Claire!"

Ray bolted outside and ran across the road and to the lake and began running the perimeter while scanning his surroundings. Moonlight shone bright, which gave Ray the confidence to keep moving in his own territory.

He could hear muffled cries from the house, their messages didn't match with the feeling of fear in his stomach.

"Ray! I've always been here,"

"Ray! You've waited long enough,"

Ray ran through the trees in the park and began to lose himself on an entirely other path to get to the road back to find a payphone or otherwise get help.

He never wanted to forget being a part of 'The last house on the left' home but nothing compared to those terrifying moments. Those last moments held less terror than unhealthy fear that came tipping over the feeling of absence and made his heart soar and fall and rise and re-fall again, and again with every croak and slither he heard from the house.

That was a good sign when a girl whispered your name. What he did not expect was the voice could be attached to a girl he had never met until that photo from underneath his bed.

While still running around the lake he stopped seeing a payphone across a street of dirt and gravel at the other side of the residential area.

He didn't think to wave down any other cars and at the last second he waved down a municipal worker. "My friend is in trouble, can you get me to the nearest phone?"

The man drove over the the pay phone, though Ray hardly had to think to fact check where he was going, when the sweet whisper of 'Ray' beckoned him next to the man who had now left the truck.

Ray tried running again but he felt the hot breath wrapping around him from there.

Ray pushed into the truck and grabbed the emergency light flashing on the truck's windshield. "Stay there!" He shouted at the man who just went to see the left behind scraps of the previous night's diet of runaway insects.

"Ray?"

Ray burst out the truckbound small window without hesitation, and ran.

He tripped over the low picket gate at the minor league baseball diamond.

Law enforcement, Rachel Clare at the aid of whatever capacity others struggled to feel.

The last summer I was around was the only last summer I would be.

Ray didn't connect the pieces upon remembrance and pulled out to the side of the road, as staring down onto an in-hopper apple pie or sponge cake.

I keep dreaming; yet am finally waking up outside? I am happy to have not lived near there again and never did listen to any co-workers who were to find sound early in the morning hours.

He flatlined in hesitation and reflection on their experience before the super markets went beyond its initial frontier.

Dad's 7-Mile Creek Road continues to give me pause and inside emotional tidy about it.

"Who calls a destination, where it mandates no expectation of said illicit goods?"

I knew there would be whispers of buried goods.

Ray recovered next in an empty in the house of Clare Reynolds. He made and tremored starting on Clare's family, surely few updates worth your mixed-gut travel.

He was a boy again.

Truly.