Under My Bed

When I was a little girl, I learned that real monsters are people. People with habits and proclivities that would make even the most hardened killer at Riker’s Island cringe. My mother was a foolish woman, who made foolish choices and made me pay foolish prices as a result. Even at the tender age of six, I still remember how she used to bring home strung-out, drunken dirtbags. They would roll around like animals and have sex on the living room floor.  Grunting and making the sounds of wounded creatures, who were long past redemption. Nothing sheltered me or stopped me from watching the parade of losers and hedonists that marched through our home. Some wouldn’t get enough from my mother’s insatiable lust. They’d take our possessions, our money, destroy our home, and sometimes they would beat her for fun. I would catch glimpses and peeks of the heinous misdeeds through the narrow slit in the curtain that served as my bedroom door. Nothing but the thin, cheap cotton fabric to protect me. Often times I ran to my bed and leaped in and over the edge, avoiding letting my feet be near the dark gap between my bed and the floor. I’d throw myself under the blankets and close my eyes as I listened to them beat her, rape her, and destroy our home. The sounds of shrieks and cries like warzone victims screaming as foot soldiers stomped through. Invading the place we, the place that I, should have been the safest.

In the morning, she would be gone. To work or to find another monster to bring home later in the evening. After too many drugs and alcohol, after too much had been decided and promised. My little body stopped trembling from the chaos our home was left in after one of her “mistakes” around the time I turned eight. I regularly spent mornings picking up broken dishes and pulling out knives that had been slammed into walls as threats. No one else would, so I did. Nothing was ever easy, so I wasn’t surprised when shortly after I turned nine, she brought home Brad.

Brad was a scrawny man. He reminded me of a stick figure that had come to life. He had wispy hair that was greying on the top and brown and balding in the back. Too young for it to look right but too old to do anything about it. He was short and wore a frown permanently on his neanderthal forehead. His brows connected, waspishly, in the middle and flared out at the ends. He never wore anything but cut-off jeans, t-shirts with old band names on them, and sandals with sox up to his knees. Brad was a loud, boisterous man, who always had an opinion that was often conflicting with the general consensus in the room. He made enemies as quickly as some people make carbon dioxide and never smiled in all the time I knew him. He always smelled like tobacco and something so sickly sweet it made my stomach churn. He slurred his words and was as articulate as some badly trained parrots. My mother was smitten and often talked of marrying him. Why she wanted to, I’ll never know. 

Brad wasn’t so terrible at first. My mother gravitated around him like a moon around a planet. She waited on him, indulged his outlandish and dangerous beliefs, and was, for the first time in her life, faithful to someone and he seemed content with that. He didn’t pay me much mind at first but as the months dragged on to years he started to show us who he really was. As though the mask he had been wearing could have gotten worse. But it did.

It started slow, arguing with my mother more and more no matter how much she agreed with him. He started to shake her and eventually push her. I knew when I turned eleven that it would only get worse. And it did. One night in a fit of drunken, drug-induced haze, Brad came home in a terrible mood. He’d already taken to breaking stuff and punching my mother when the world didn’t revolve around him the way she did but on this night he had a roaring fire in his eyes. He broke open the door, which wasn’t latched or barred in any way. 

My mother was humming softly to herself, smiling, and doing dishes with earbuds in, so unaware of her fate, when he charged toward her, more bull than man, and he pinned her to a wall. He screamed in her face, spittle flying out of his mouth “You filthy fucking whore! You goddamn slut!” before he started to choke her.

I watched, trembling from my room and gripping my curtains as he started to rip her clothes off and scream incoherent ramblings about how he would “retake” her. His hand never left her windpipe and she turned a deeper shade of purple by the moment. Her hands grasped at his at first but started to move like someone had hit a slow-mo button on the television and eventually they went limp at her sides. By the time he had his pants down, she was a heap in his hand, her petite body dangling by her neck. My heart thudded in my chest, drumming a fearful song that told me to run. So I ran. To the only place that had ever been safe for me. I ran to my bed and leaped over the gap between my bed and the floor and into my covers to tremble. Tears welled in my eyes as I heard him stomping to my room. He was coming for me. 

I let out a cry. Covering my mouth I whispered “Please help me. Please,” as my other hand fell over the edge of the bed. I wasn’t talking to anyone, but someone answered.

My heart stopped and the tears dried immediately when I felt a smooth, soft hand slide from under the bed into mine. My eyes snapped open and I suppressed the scream. I tried to take my hand away but it held tight. A voice that echoed softly with different voices, the sounds of a belfry responded. “Don’t be afraid, little one. No one will hurt you again.” 

I said nothing, but as the steps thudded dangerously closer to my unbarred, curtained door, I gave myself over to whatever was under there. It was better than the monster I’d just watched kill my mother. Anything, anyone was. 

I gripped the hand under my bed, looking out from under the covers with wide eyes full of visions of hell in them, as Brad ripped down the curtain and stumbled into my room and toward my bed. Wearing a shirt with a stupid band name and nothing below the waist. 

It happened so fast, I’m still not sure I remember it properly. Something dark and inky suddenly burst from under my bed frame, making it tremble, and the hand holding mine left as it did. In the darkness, all I saw was Brad’s slack-jawed, wide-eyed look of disbelief reflected faintly in the moonbeams through my window. The shadow rose up and descended upon him, engulfing him whole.

I threw myself under the covers once more and trembled for hours until I fell into an uneasy sleep. Sometime around dawn, the police arrived, pronounced my mother dead, sent me to a group home, and put out an APB on Brad. But they never found him and only I knew why.

I suppose the apple never falls far from the tree because as I grew I made choices more and more like my mother would have. I chose partners that were toxic. Their presence like a narcotic acid in my veins. Though I kept my wits about me. I never forgot the lessons that had been taught to me the night Brad had met his fate. Eventually, my wild years faded and I moved on with my life as a contributing member of society. But my taste in men was pathological and hereditary.

Jason wasn’t the worse person at first either, but they never are in the beginning. He surprised me with presents and spontaneous visits for lunch at work. He wanted to spend all his time with me. It wasn’t until I had had our second child that I realized he was keeping tabs on me, and when he couldn’t he would often accuse me of hiding something. In the back of my mind, false allegations from another life echoed in my subconscious, but I ignored them. 

I was twenty-eight, my two daughters were six and eight when Jason finally snapped. I had taken the kids to the park and stayed late into the evening talking with a few other parents. I hadn’t been watching the time and my phone had been dead from hours of keeping a six-year-old occupied with Angry Birds. I felt a sinking feeling hit the pit of my stomach when another mother mentioned how late it was getting. That feeling turned into a sour knot in my sternum when I checked my watch to see that it was 8:30 pm. Jason always got hissy if I wasn’t home by five when he was. He always got hissy if I wasn’t home period, but I had learned from my mother to not be controlled by anyone. All the same, I packed up the kids and started the long walk through the brownstone neighborhood, preparing myself for the tongue lashing I’d receive when I got home.

When I made our way up the steps and opened the door, my hand dropped from the handle and reached around to hold my eight-year-old behind me, while my other arm clutched my six-year-old to my form on my hip and turned her away. The place looked like we had been robbed, but the door hadn’t been broken down.

I called out in a strong voice, that I could hear very faint trembles in “Jason?”

The answer back was course and harsh “Been out fucking around on me huh? And with our kids with you… You disgust me. I destroy what disgusts me, Paige.” 

Again the echo of words from my childhood sounded in my head and I set my jaw in place. I had put up with his temper because I had thought he was harmless. But the boyish face and Fabio charm had worn off after years of delusion that I had been stepping out on him. As though I had had the time raising two little ones.

I squared my shoulders and let a sneer touch my lips. I wasn’t afraid this time, I was angry. Infuriated that he thought he could do this, he thought he could hurt me because of ghosts in his head. I answered back in a hard voice, the voice of a woman I didn’t know. Maybe it was the voice of the little girl that had seen a monster destroy a monster and had remembered a promise made long ago.

“No Jason. I haven’t. And if you don’t leave right now, you will regret it.” I warned him. I remind myself of that every day.

A sudden snap of a chair hitting the linoleum hard sounded down the hall and marching steps of a beast sounded our way. His voice spat out a venomous retort of “Don’t you tell me what to do you whore!”

Those words made my eyes narrow. I clutched my children to me, one at my back and one on my hip, and looked around. Leaving would do no good, we had nowhere to go and no money to do it with. I stared at my bedroom door until my eyes grew hazy and old memories of shadows flooded me.

Jason rounded the corner, red in the face with his fists balled up. He came at me and swung hard but I ducked and kept my children tight to my body. He cursed incoherently as his hand hit the wall with a thwap that sounded around us. I shouldered him in the gut and against the wall with the arm not clinging to my youngest. Then I pulled my crying eight-year-old down the hall and into my bedroom. Quickly I tossed them both in bed and under the covers, dropping to my knees as the thud, thud, thud of Jason breaking down the door in the background sounded. 

My children started to cry, turning into trembling messes that reminded me of another scared little girl long ago. I looked up at them, peeking under the blanket and forcing a smile, I whispered “Nothing will hurt you, little ones. Just close your eyes.” They did as they were told and hid under the covers. I smiled to myself, a wicked smile of a woman who was fed up with the people in her life disappointing her, the deranged smile of a woman who had snapped herself.

I snaked my hand under my bed, closed my eyes, and whispered “I need help. Please help us.” And as I did I felt a familiar, smooth, and silky hand slide into mine. 

My children went quiet when the belfry voice echoed softly to me, to them. “Nothing will hurt you, little ones.” It repeated just as I had and my smile increased like a predator.

This time I didn’t cower under the covers, I released the hand and stood before my bed. I clicked out the light and waited as the door began to splinter. If I was deluded and imagined it all in my traumatized state, then I was prepared to die fighting for them.

Jason burst in, his face red and his hand holding something. It glinted in the light that beamed in from the hallway and I could tell it was a gun. I stared level-eyed with him though. So certain of my reality. 

I repeated to him a final warning “Leave or you’ll regret it,” I put my arms out across the bed to guard our girls. He raised the gun and pointed it at me.

His finger shuddered on the trigger as tears streamed down his face and he repeated over and over again “I loved you! I loved you and you threw it away, you dirty whore!”

The bed trembled when his finger did and my lips curled into a twisted smile as I watched this time. A large, angry shadow came bursting from beneath the bed where I laid my head every night. The girls screamed under the covers but went silent when they heard Jason shout. 

The inky darkness was nothing more than a blob. A shapeless creature that hazily seemed to fade outward. It came upon Jason like a witch in a gingerbread house. A mouth opening from some orifice it concealed. My eyes grew bright and my smile intensified as I watched it open wider and wider with layers of teeth receding all the way down its throat. It then thrust itself forward and engulfed him whole. 

My smile twitched and I said to the being “Thank you, for a second time.” It laughed in its bell-sounding tones and turned to vapor, slowly sinking back under the bed.

The police were never called, the children thought it was a bad dream. I told them their father had left and as far as everyone was concerned, the story tracked with his personality. For years I would drape my hand over the edge of the bed, searching for the hand. But I didn’t find it till I was much, much older myself. 

I laid in a hospital bed, in a white ward with white walls and people wearing white uniforms. The soft beep, beep, beep of the monitors reminded me that my aching body was still going at ninety. My children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren had come to visit me. But I knew that they had grown tired of it, tired of watching me slowly die in a hospital. They came two days before and told me they loved me, stayed as long as they could stomach before leaving. I didn’t blame them.

In the late hours of the night, one evening, I laid my withered, ancient hand over the edge of the bed and slowly dangled it as though trying to lure a fish with a hook. I smiled and laughed at the darkness.

My voice croaked but stayed steady “You never told me what I could do for you,” I said, perhaps to a ghost or demon or spirit. Or maybe something that was always in my head.

As though on cue, the gentle, marble textured hand reached out into mine. The belfry sounds of its voice resounded softly up at me “You’re hired then,” before I slipped into a deep sleep I didn’t wake in my living body from.

The next thing I remember is darkness and the cries of a little boy. Shaking the bed above me with his shuddering, fearful fury.

His voice cried out as bam, bam, bam filled the room and his door burst open. His tiny hand came into view and he cried to no one “Help me, please help me.” 

I spoke in a belfry voice as my hand wrapped around his. My skin not feeling like skin anymore. Feeling instead like vapor. “Don’t be afraid, little one. No one will hurt you again.” The boy froze, just as I had.

The face of his mother will forever be etched into my head. Her hands had been holding a leather belt, stained with blood when I took her. She was slack-jawed and shocked. That was many guardianships ago, but you never forget the first time you destroy a real monster.