What Lurks Beneath

When I was seven, I believed in monsters.

Not the kind that wear fangs and capes or lurch in forests with chainsaws. Mine lived under my bed. And unlike the storybooks, mine didn’t go away when the lights came on.

He had no name, not really. Just a sound—like creaking wood and long fingernails dragging across stone. He didn’t talk. He just stared. Yellow eyes glowing in the dark. A grin full of jagged teeth. Hands too long, too thin, too pale. Limbs that coiled like broken wire hangers. And a smell—sour milk and wet earth.

I told my parents. They said I was imagining things. I was “creative.”
They placed a nightlight by my bed and gave me a stuffed bear. I tried sleeping with music on. With the door cracked open. I even tried talking to it once.

It only smiled wider.

Eventually, I stopped complaining. Not because he went away, but because adults stop believing children after a certain number of sleepless nights. I learned to live with him. I learned not to dangle my feet. Not to look down. I would wake up and stare at the ceiling, heart racing, too afraid to breathe.

But I grew up. As we all do. I moved to a dorm room, then an apartment, then a house with thick carpets and a partner who snored gently beside me.

And for a while, I thought he was gone.

Then came the layoffs.

Then the isolation.

Then the nights that stretched too long, too quiet, with my mind folding in on itself.

And one evening, lying awake while my wife slept soundly beside me, I heard it again. That soft creak. The sigh of something shifting its weight. From under the bed.

My chest tightened. A laugh rose in my throat—because I was a grown man. Thirty-four. A mortgage, a car payment, and cholesterol medication. But still, I couldn't make myself move.

My foot, accidentally exposed, felt colder than the room allowed.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, while brushing my teeth, I looked down and found four scratch marks on my ankle. Thin, but deep enough to burn.

Rationality fled. I ripped the sheets off the bed. Looked underneath.

Nothing but dust and a missing sock.

But that night, the creak returned.

And the night after that, a whisper.




I started sleeping on the floor.

I don’t know why. It felt safer. He never came from beneath the floor, only the bed. I pressed myself flat against the hardwood, arms spread, heart steady. I could feel the pulse of the planet beneath me. Solid. Cold. Honest.

The floor never lied to me. The floor never grinned.

And when I couldn’t stop the panic, when my thoughts spiraled like toilet water, I’d close my eyes and press my cheek to the ground.

The floor is your friend, I would whisper.

I didn’t know where I’d heard it. A therapy quote? A poem? A child’s rhyme?

Did it matter?

Every night, I returned to it like prayer.

The floor is your friend.

And slowly, the whispering stopped.

The eyes didn’t glow quite so brightly.




People ask why we don’t have a bed frame. Why the mattress is on the floor like college kids. I laugh. Blame my back. Or feng shui. Or minimalism.

No one needs to know the real reason.

No one needs to know I still glance at the underside of furniture with held breath.

That I sometimes sleep with one palm pressed flat to the floorboards, anchoring myself like a sailor on rough seas.

That I still carry the echo of those yellow eyes with me.

Maybe everyone has something under their bed. A fear. A memory. A shadow they named and then tried to forget.

But me?

I remember.




Author’s Note:
Some monsters don’t leave when childhood ends. But sometimes, the simplest things—a breath, a prayer, the feel of solid ground—can save us when no one else can.