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.
If there was a rat in his room, Amadeus was going to lose every single shred of his self control.
The apartment over his massage studio was quite nice, colloquially described as ‘the best money could buy,’ and Amadeus didn’t live in such a manner that would promote an invasion. He was clean, he was above the ground floor, and he didn’t live any of Destiny City’s shady armpit of a neighborhood. There had better. not. be anything besides him living in his home.
So what on Earth was that horrible scratching noise? It was so nearby, nothing he could dismiss as being outside, and it was incessant, loud, as if the sound could permeate the entirety of his living quarters. Amadeus could ignore certain notes as ‘the pipes,’ or something from the street below, or just the general creaking of his studio, but not this. It was inside. Here. With him. And that was so immediately unacceptable that he absolutely could not think of anything else.
What if it really was some rodent? And it chewed through his clothes, his shoes, his collectibles?
Amadeus had been sitting on his bed, delicately arranging a new set of Magic: The Gathering cards while listening to a YouTube video regarding ‘fun’ ways to include more kale in his diet (cards which he did not purchase often, and he did not play some stupid card game, and he did not treat a pile of cardboard with any degree of reverence). But dinner and games would have to wait because this matter of eradication was urgent.
He snatched his phone from the blankets, flicked the flashlight on, and threw his head over the side of the bed, moving as quickly and as smoothly as he possibly could, so that he could at least glimpse whatever it was once the light was on it- And as soon as he knew what creature he was dealing with, he would make a plan. Let there be a rat so unwise and unfortunate as to have scurried into his room. It would regret whatever compulsion had brought it here.
But Amadeus peered into the gap between his bed and floor and saw… nothing.
Literally nothing.
Despite the lights being on in his room and the bright shine of the flashlight, under the bed was uncannily dark. And if he’d worried about scaring the rat away, he shouldn’t have, because despite seeing nothing, the scratching grew louder, louder, all around him, like something scrabbling through the floor, tearing up his plush rug and the sleek wooden floorboards underneath. Something was in here. It must be.
Amadeus pulled himself from the bed, landing his whole body quietly on the ground. He pressed up on his mattress from below, trying to get more light to shine into the darkness, to see, but nothing helped, there was nothing here. Just shadows, and a cool rush of air like a breath. …’Like a breath.’ That was an odd thing to think, wasn’t it? It almost sounded like a horror! And Amadeus was horrified, all right; horrified that he couldn’t see and didn’t know what was making this god-awful sound!
A broom. He’d fetch a broom and knock whatever it was out so he could see it. Could a rat really be so loud…? Amadeus moved to stand, but he’d only barely lifted his head from the floor when a pressure grabbed him by the arm, something cold and tight, and- and with fingers. A hand from under his bed had grabbed him.
Amadeus sucked in a breath, body tense and resistant as his free hand swiped between the mattress and baseboard, quickly unearthing a small but perfectly sharp and serviceable switchblade. The angle was bizarrely awkward, hard to slash at anything even when he tucked his head back down to floor level- and he still didn’t see anything, even though he felt the pressure of a hand around his arm, of something dragging him into the gap between floor and bed with a force that certainly no rat possessed. It had to be a person, a human, who’d broken into his house to either steal from him or kill Kitty.
And no reasonably intelligent thief would go so out of the way to make themselves known.
So the other option, then.
Fine. That suited him. Kitty could handle any other person. His Pen was never far and pulling on Senshi power was no more difficult than breathing. But it mattered little when there was nothing to fight. The dragging force was pulling him down, down- but there was no one to punch, no one to command with his magic, nothing here besides darkness and wind whistling by his ears and the sensation of being plunged from a great height, and this was under his bed?
When the jolt of an abrupt stop caught him, he woke with a gasp as Kitty, in a disheveled bed and clutching his Henshin Pen instead of the knife he’d gone under with.
He was in his room, with the lights still on, cards splayed out on crumpled sheets. It was quiet, with only the sounds of the city around his apartment. No scratching. Kitty looked to the clock, kept on a little night side table, only to see that it wasn’t even late. The sky was dark, but he’d hardly kept himself awake for an egregiously long time. So he’d just… fallen asleep there, in his bed.
…And grabbed his Pen and powered up, which was interesting in that he had literally never done that before. He powered down, back to Amadeus because if he’d had the thought that ‘someone was there to kill Kitty,’ he’d probably have it a lot worse if he went about broadcasting his aura from his own home- stupid. Interesting, but stupid. The knife was still beneath the mattress as though he’d never grabbed for it; Amadeus checked.
And besides a few painfully bent cards, nothing seemed out of sorts…
So just... a peculiar dream, then? He didn't even remember falling asleep.
[WC: 1010]
