So To Bed

If she was silent, it was still. Lucy had realised that was how it worked a few weeks ago. It only moved when there was a noise somewhere else in the house loud enough mask the slithering of its movements in the darkness below. That’s why she couldn’t go to sleep. If she lay still, her breathing shallow, sound muffled by the covers, then it was trapped in the shadowy space beneath her bed. If she slept, if she tossed and turned in fevered dreaming, it would slide from beneath and devour her.

She’d known it was there since she was a child. Only seen in flickers of movement, out of the corner of her eye; gone the moment she looked that way. Only heard in strange echoes, disguised sounds; a slithering undertone to the shift of the bedsheets. A feeling of always being watched.

She remembered sitting, nestled into the deep raspberry pile of her bedroom carpet, warmed by sun that streamed in past her floral curtains, through the wide bay of her window. Reading, happily, then feeling the prickle of hostile eyes on the back of her neck. A mounting dread, a knot in her stomach as she wondered was it worse to not know what was there or to turn and find out for certain. A feeling that only left her with the soft chuff of her bedroom door, wafted by a through-draft.

When you are a child and something frightens you, you go to your parents. At 8 years old, Lucy had admitted, over dinner one night, that there was monster under her bed. Her father had watched her with an odd seriousness, an expression she recognised, with hindsight, as guilt. Lucy remembered staring across the table at him, wanting to ask if he knew about the monster, if it was somehow his fault. Her mother had said there were no such things as monsters, were there? And her father had agreed there were not, and they had all gone upstairs and turned her bed upside down to show that there really, really, wasn’t anything there. It hadn’t made a difference, not to the monster; it was still there, just the same. It made a difference to Lucy, though, because if she tried to talk to her parents about it after that, they got impatient and told her to ‘stop being silly’ or to grow up.

The monster hadn’t ventured from underneath until last week. Lucy had woken to the feel of something heavy, pinning down the duvet on one side, something that slid across the surface of the covers as if it was feeling out the shape of her. Becoming rigid, Lucy had held her breath and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Her mother’s voice had called, ‘Dave?’ From the foot of the stairs, Lucy guessed, close but not close enough. Terror had frozen Lucy’s jaw, stolen her voice, left her with nothing but the loud drumming of her heart in her ears. Then suddenly, the flush of the toilet from downstairs, noisy enough to cover the beast as it slipped away. Sucking in a desperate breath, Lucy curled around the sobs that welled in her chest, stifling them to silence. Quiet. Quiet. Don’t make a sound to cover it’s return.

‘You look tired!’ her Mum had said, the next evening. ‘Early night, tonight.’

‘Bet your Mum was asleep before you last night,’ Dad had said, reaching over to ruffle Lucy’s hair. She’d pulled back from a gesture she’d leaned into a thousand times, feeling a surge of anger in her gut. The monster was his fault. His fault!

‘It’s all this overtime. I’m shattered,’ Mum agreed.

Lucy zoned out from their conversation, she had no interest in her Mum’s work problems or her Dad’s obsession with football. There was a monster under her bed, and she needed to do something about it.

At the side of her plate, a steak knife glistened sharply; the serrations holding fibrous strands from her meal. Lucy watched her parents from under her brows as she placed a hand on top of it.

‘Here, let me top you up,’ Dad said, picking up the bottle of wine.

‘Dave, stop! Any more and I will fall asleep again.’ A chink. The glug of liquid in a glass. ‘That’s enough!’ A dull thud. ‘Oh now look what you’ve done!’

Her mother’s chair scraped back as she grabbed a tea towel to stem the flow of the scarlet liquid. Taking advantage of the distraction, Lucy slipped the knife up her sleeve and stood up.

‘Goodnight,’ she murmured, walking quickly to the stairs.

‘Luce?’ Her father’s voice, Lucy turned to face him and saw the same shadow of guilt over his expression, the just too fragile smile.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Alright, love. Sleep tight.’

Lucy nodded, turning her back and tightening her grip on the knife. She knew, somehow, that the monster would be back tonight; but she would be ready and waiting.