The horror under the bed

    No one ever believed her. Not her parents and not even other children. She knew parents everywhere would dismiss it as an overactive childish imagination, but her friends? Her friends should at least listen. They wouldn't be able to help but at least she wouldn't be trapped alone with it anymore. But no one listened. Her parents started laughing it off once they had exhausted all their ideas on how to reassure her. It was easier to think it would pass. And she was alone. And even her first memory was about it. She was only a few years old when it started creeping out from under her bed. Long arms with too many fingers, reaching out.

    She thought they were right at first, after some convincing. She thought she had had a nightmare and never realised she had drifted off. But it kept coming back, almost every night. Enough for her to engage in a losing battle against sleep as soon as she was tucked away. Other kids didn't seem to question their own sanity and she had a gnawing feeling she, as well, was too young to do so.

    She had to be sure, not even that it was real but at least that she wasn't dreaming all of it.

The first time, she stayed under the covers, only allowing herself regular glances at the alarm clock, writing the time in a small notebook. In the morning, she saw the notes had stopped a little after 1am. It hadn't come, and school had been a blur the next day, so she resolved to continue her experiments during the weekends.

    The following friday she tried again, managing to stay awake until 4. Maybe it knew she was searching for it. Maybe she was in fact dreaming it all. But it came back during the school week, sometimes right before she fell asleep, sometimes waking her up by the sounds of scratching on the carpet or the shifting of her sheets.

    The next weekend she managed to steal an energy drink and hide it. She stayed awake the whole night but it didn't come, and she was too tired the next day for her parents not to suspect something was being kept from them. She didn't tell them about the drink, but they now knew she was trying to avoid sleep. They only booked a doctor's appointment. A new one.

    If it decided to only come during the week, she was going to be prepared. She had slipped a flashlight under her pillow and resolved to use it as soon as she would hear anything she deemed frightening. At this point, the whole concept of night and sleep was frightening.

    After two nights spent alone, she was awoken by a sound of friction coming from under her bed. Slowly, so very slowly, she glanced at the side of her mattress. It was there, scratching the carpet as to extricate itself from under her, just dark enough for its shape not to make sense. She swallowed much too loudly for her taste, not sure what it would do once it knew she was searching for it. Knowing that no help would come from the outside, that she was too young to fear her own mind betraying her, she shined the lamp on it. And... it wasn't there. But it still appeared outside the beam. Where the light hit, there was just a bright blue carpet, but on the still dark parts of her room, it was there, scratching. It did nothing. It just kept going. That was her big victory, and it had made no difference. Not for her, and not for the creature. Something needed to burst. She needed to have something but it seemed it had just... won. Years of fear, weeks of experiments, and it had bested her efforts without trying. She was still afraid but this — this nothing was worse, she thought, as she wondered if she should just try to grab one of its limbs. That would at least do something. She would have answers, even if the relief of having them was deemed to be brief. She turned off the light, wondering if it now knew she was trying to catch it, and stayed alone with it, her face silently wet, eyes fixed on the ceiling while the scratchings continued.

    If she fell asleep at some point or not, she wasn't sure, but the fatigue was there the next day.

The next few nights she tried to crawl out of bed to sleep on the couch when it was early enough for it not to be lurking yet, but her parents were still awake and she was only welcomed by the weary, vaguely concerned faces she had learned to recognise as her own isolation. And she went back, as always, tucked with a forehead kiss and the assurance that all was well.

    She tried to accept it, to live with it in the hopes that it would never succeed at reaching any part of her body and... drag her? Maul her?

    But one night, instead of what had become the almost usual scratching sounds on the carpet, she felt her sheets being tugged. When she glanced, she could see the ever too long limbs had reached out far enough to show spikes escaping what was acting as a joint, bent the wrong way. It did something strange to her. It was going to reach her. That was a certainty now. Her only way to put an end to the debilitating helplessness of it all was for it to happen on her own terms.

    So she grabbed and she pulled.

The resistance was surprisingly weak and it had seemed to startle it. Soon a whole shape was in her bedroom.

    It seemed shocked and... polite. It sat itself cross-legged on the bed, visibly uncomfortable, shushing her with a finger hanging at the end of its too long limb pressed on a shape that was trying to be a mouth.

    "First, before you start complaining, you have to realise it's a very demanding job."

    Mouth hanging wide open, she could barely articulate. "A job ? You — you don't live down there?"

    It seemed vexed. "Laura, I have two kids."

    "You've been trying to take me there. Now you can," she said solemnly.

    "Oh, you'd want to see the place?"

    After a long hesitation she surprised herself by nodding.

    "That is... I'm not sure we're allowed visitors... Hang on a second, I'm gonna ask. "

    The creature crawled off, its knees and elbows bent the wrong way. Its head disappeared in the void that lurked underneath her bed, "GREGORY? ARE WE OPEN FOR VISITORS?"

    Its head popped back up. "Sorry, he says you'd need a permit."