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The Monster Under the Bed (5) : There’s a faint scratching under your bed. Maybe you’ve heard it in the nights leading up to now, or maybe it’s just started, but the scurrying noise is starting to drive you mad. What is it? A bug? A creature? Your imagination? If you try to ignore the noise, it grows louder and louder and louder, until it’s practically all you can hear. You can try to ignore it but sleep is impossible. If you’re hoping to get any rest, you’re going to have to investigate–but you’re not going to like what you find. A flashlight under the bed yields nothingness–a darkness so deep that it seems to swallow up all light. The noise is worse but you can’t see anything. But you’re already in its trap. If you try to reach into the darkness, something grabs your wrist; if you try to walk away, your ankle. Its grip is icy and sharp, like being grabbed by knives, and it pulls. No matter how hard you fight against it, it’s stronger–and it drags you into the darkness. You fall, for what feels like an eternity–and then you jerk awake, violently. Maybe it was just a bad dream. But it doesn’t explain the fading red marks from where it grabbed you. When you look again, it’s just your bed–but you have the distinct feeling that something is missing.
Losing all patience with the weird scurrying noise coming from under the bed, Bryn got up from her desk and grabbed her phone for the flashlight feature. She’d been hearing scratching for a couple of days now, but tonight it was loud and insistent and absolutely maddening. She did her best to keep her area clean, but had she dropped some crumbs to attract bugs? Or had a mouse or roof rat gotten in and become trapped? That shouldn’t have been possible given the abundance of cats in the house, but weirder things had happened!
All Bryn knew was that she was tired and she’d never be able to sleep until she got the noise sorted out. Though she really hoped it wasn’t bugs or rats. The very thought was enough to send shivers down her spine.
She’d just peek and try to see the problem and work from there. If it was vermin then she’d scream, grab a few pairs of underwear and vacate the room until an exterminator could come out. Easy as that. Grunting slightly as she got on her hands and knees, Bryn shone the flashlight into the darkness under her bed and frowned. She should have been able to see the floor or opposite wall. Instead, it was nothing but inky black.
To quote the Spongebob, this was Advanced Darkness. Very noisy advanced darkness at that.
Unable to see a source for the noise, Bryn was ready to chalk everything up to an overheated imagination. But it was very weird that she couldn’t see anything. Even in worse lighting than this, she should have been able to see the vague outlines of the storage box she kept under there. Shifting and twisting slightly, she switched her phone to her other hand and then reached out with her now free hand, groping blindly, trying to find her stuff. But she couldn’t feel the rounded plastic edges of the box.
What she did feel was something icy cold and sharp suddenly seize her wrist and pull. Yanking back, it felt almost like a circle of knives had her. She couldn’t free herself and before she could scream, she felt herself dragged into the inky black darkness under her bed.
Bryn did scream then, though the sound was absorbed by the dark. Struggling and fighting, she felt a pervasive cold and as if she was endlessly falling. This was it. This was how she was going to die and her family would never even know. Flailing her limbs and hoping to find something to halt her fall, Bryn felt nothing except cold and the occasional sharpness along her wrist as she floated in the darkness.
She couldn’t say how long she was there. It felt like ages and ages of nothing but icy cold and inky black. There was nothing to feel or grab onto. She was just... floating in nothingness forever and always.
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The sunlight hit her eyes as Bryn roared and clawed her way up out of sleep. One flailing arm thwacked against the night stand enough hurt and she lay in her bed in a gasping, tangled mess. Half rolling, half falling from the bed, she scuttled to peer underneath, seeing only the storage box and opposite wall, along with a corner of blanket that hung down limply. A dream then? It was like no dream she’d ever had before. Not even the worst nightmare she’d ever experienced had made her feel this unnerved.
Breathing hard, Bryn sat on the floor, back against her bed. Just a dream. A creepy, painful dream. And she would have believed that too, had her eyes not fallen on the odd, red marks on her wrist that were fading even as she stared, wide-eyed.
Not a dream. Not a dream at all.
Throwing herself to the floor, she laid on her back, peering under the bed. It looked so normal. But it felt wrong. Weird. Like something was missing, though she had no idea what.
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